Couple had sex in MRI scan machine to reveal what happens to your body during sex

If you're thinking of spicing up your relationship in 2026, it might take more than flicking through a copy of the Karma Sutra. Some couples looking to try new things might want to get more adventurous by taking their love-making out of the bedroom and to new places (quite literally).

We'd like to caveat that we can't take the blame if you find yourselves in cuffs for indecent exposure, but with the likes of 50 Shades encouraging us to expand our horizons, you'd be surprised by some of the weird and wonderful places that people will admit to having sex.

Playing doctors and nurses, one couple even had sex in an MRI machine. Before you go decrying their actions, it's important to note that this was all in the name of science. Sure, that's what they all say.

The other thing is that this experiment happened all the way back in 1991, with Ida Sabelis and her boyfriend Jupp getting busy under the watchful eye of Menko Victor ‘Pek’ van Andel. The Dutch scientist wanted to look closer at what happens to your body during sex, so called on his friends to 'knock boots' in the piece of medical equipment.

The images have become the stuff of legend (British Medical Journal)

Results were published in a 1999 British Medical Journal entry, with the photographs becoming something of an iconic collection in the medical world.

Don't expect any reverse cowgirls here, as the confines of the machine meant even the standard missionary position was impossible to pull off. Instead, Ida and Jupp opted for a spooning position for sex and had their coitus captured for the world to see.

Decades later, Sabelis spoke to the What Was It Like podcast about her unexpected fame and how it helped advance our knowledge of women's bodies.

Explaining how things came to be, Sabelis said: "This was one of the first MRI machines ever, so taking the photos took some time.

“There was a command from the control room to keep in position for, I don’t know, a minute."

Referring to the whole experience as 'hilarious', Ida said how the plan for missionary had to be changed when they realized that they couldn't fit: "Jupp and I wriggled into that machine and started doing our thing.

“It wasn’t romantic, it was more like an act of love and a performance."

Now a professor of Organisational Anthropology at Amsterdam’s Vrije University, Sabelis looks back at the whole thing fondly. While it might not be for everyone, Sabelis reiterated: "Thankfully we didn’t get claustrophobic.”

Their story was also recently shared by Vice on TikTok, fascinating people all over again. Notably, van Andel's groundbreaking work proved that the vaginal canal was curved at a time when people didn't yet know it.

While the likes of a famous Leonardo da Vinci picture from 1492 depicted the vagina as a straight cylinder, the MRI showed the penis is the "shape of a boomerang," allowing it to bend to the shape of a woman's vagina without causing the man any pain.

This led to a formal study that ran until 1999 and was published in the BMJ.

All's well that ends well, as the experiment was also something of a love story. Even all these years later, Ida and Jupp are still together.

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