CAlvin Coolidge wasn’t the first American president to have his name attached to anything remotely sexual (and, ahem, he certainly wasn’t the last). On the other hand, he was the only one who gave his name to a scientifically proven sexual phenomenon, a biological manifestation of male sexual greed that continues to be the object of research to this day.
It all starts with an apocryphal anecdote that apparently started out as a joke made almost seventy years ago during a speech at a university conference by Richard Whalen, a sex researcher who has been forgotten by history. This is the legendary form of the origin of the “Coolidge effect”. In the 1920s…
