your mind in sex life..may be dirty
Picking up Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships,
an overview of developments in "the neuroscience of love" by journalist
and science writer Kayt Sukel, jogged a fond memory. Part of my early
initiation as the lone male-mascot editor at ELLE, it turned out, took
place at a story meeting in which the subject of libido came up. I
offered that I saw it more or less as just one of the primal appetites,
like hunger—not much more complicated, given a certain passage of
time, than "Shall we hit the rib joint tonight, darling, or go Thai?"
Er...no?
I was gently given to understand, to the accompaniment of a few sighs
and giggles, that the maintenance of the habit of intimacy was, in the
eyes of my colleagues, a good deal more complicated than that. Emotional
mind-set, relationship psychology, the barometric pressure of the
domestic atmosphere, maybe the hormonal readings on a given day, and
perhaps less effable elements besides—all entered into what could never
be reduced to any kind of simple Newtonian equation. Ah, said I, with a
dawning recognition of familiar, if seemingly impenetrable,
complications. It's all so much more...conditional than the
average fellow would have it be. I lean away from theories about how men
and women are different in essential, hardwired ways, but now and then,
there's really nothing else to say but vive la différence.
In Dirty Minds,
it was the cotton-top tamarin monkeys that did it for me. I distrust
the reverse anthropomorphism that animal experiments easily lead us
into. But really, how perfect is this: We know that cuddling and mating
release the neurotransmitter oxytocin in a whole range of mammalian
brains, including ours, and that this chemical cascade in turn
fosters pair-bonding. A 2010 study of tamarin couples looked further
into this phenomenon and, Sukel reports, established that "snuggling
and grooming were behind the [oxytocin] variance in females, while for
men it came down to how much sex they were having." In the tamarin duos
that showed high oxytocin levels, "males initiated the cuddling their
mate wanted, and females solicited the sex their mate was after." Go
ahead, call me reductive, but this passage put me right back in that
story meeting.
Sukel's book fairly bristles with such causes to reflect on our erotic complexity, via data from animal and human experiments, genetics and epigenetics, endocrinology, and neuroimaging. But Chapter 12, "My Adventures with the O-Team," is the high point of the whole enterprise: The author consented to have herself strapped into an fMRI machine in a Jason-esque mesh mask to render her head immobile and to bring herself to orgasm while her brain was being scanned by the clanking machine enveloping her. After the short shudder of one demure climax that she thought did the trick came the request from the tech guy: Uh, fail better? So she rose womanfully to the challenge and really rode one home. Tech guy: "It was really, really great." Her reward? A 16-slice scan, reproduced in the book, of her brain on orgasm, lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. Serving the advancement of science can't get much better than that.
