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Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 06:31 AM CDT

Luxuria

Health

K.Page Nolker : Exalting the Erotic

What DO women want, anyway? It’s all chemical, baby - and complicated. K. Page Nolker pokes about in the left side of the gray matter and sees what’s what.


Love, Wanting and Arousal: The Left Brain Lusts for Knowledge

Lefties

What do Freud, Joni Mitchell and the scientific community share in common? They really don’t know love at all—much less desire. While physicists grope for a unifying theory of everything, sexologists, psychologists, anthropologists and neurobiologists mount their own search for the equally ineffable, grinding data in hopes of comprehending the brain’s role in both our physical and emotional experiences of love, lust and arousal.

Male desire presents a straightforward case, but the erotic intricacies of what a woman craves lay bare more questions than answers. Conducting broad online surveys and exhaustive intimate interviews, while hooking men and women up to genital plethysmographs, functional MRI brain scans, and goggles that track ogling, researchers agree, all hard conclusions appear premature. Nearly a century later, Freud’s failure to ascertain what a woman wants still pricks the minds of many.

Clinical conjecture and inconclusive data: why do you and I care? Let’s start with the joy and merits of sex. From Glamour and GQ to Forbes and Newsweek, the general consensus agrees safe sex not only feels good, it’s good for you. A quick Google search and you’ll learn about benefits ranging from the more obvious cardio fitness and stress reduction, to migraine relief, (correct, the headache no longer suffices as a valid excuse), immune enhancement, anti-aging skin benefits, improved sense of smell and a personal favorite, prevention of tooth decay. What better reason to engage in more sex than fewer trips to the dentist?

Health incentives aside, consider the vagina precedent. Once an uncharted black hole, plumbing its mysteries revealed a treasure trove of potential that launched a revolution and empowered women of all ages to seek satisfaction. Now imagine the possibilities inherent in knowing our own minds.

Weighing in as the largest sex organ in the body, and undoubtedly the most influential, our brain is of two minds. The left-brain, the hemisphere that obsesses over structure and reason, dominates the field of science, and provocatively both flames desire and erects our discussion. Expecting complexities, contradictions and only half the story, let us then plunge ahead with a left-leaning look at how science toys with the concepts of arousal, lust, attraction and attachment.

Shooting Blanks: Science Fails to Arouse Desire

After their rousing success with male impotence, Pfizer, makers of Viagra, turned their attention to the second sex. Estimating—and by some accounts inflating—that some 30% of women complain of deficient desire, the company spent nearly a decade testing thousands of women only to conclude that sparking arousal does not start a fire.

Cut to titillating scenes of bonobo pornography—eager apes getting it on dubbed with the more enthusiastic sound effects of randy chimpanzee. In a study designed to measure the relationship between genital sexual response and self-reported arousal, psychologist and sexologist Dr. Meredith Chivers discovered that men, both straight and gay, on average responded predictably, with their minds and genitals in agreement, and neither aroused by boning baboons. Women, on the other hand, regardless of their sexual orientation showed strong and swift genital arousal to the full spectrum of video images: heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, an attractive woman doing calisthenics in the buff and a chiseled hunk strolling naked along a beach. Rating their conscious desire on a keypad, the disconnect between women’s objective and subjective responses concurs with the Pfizer findings that female arousal and desire appear to constitute two distinct—if not discordant—systems.

Scrutinizing the same body-mind split demonstrated, to one degree or another, in 130 studies by other scientists, Chivers theorizes that evolution may explain women’s reflexive sexual readiness. In automatically lubricating to any hint of sex in her surroundings, the ancient female protected her vagina from potential injury. Influencing her theory of two distinct systems, Chivers cites a body of evidence reporting that many assault victims note lubrication, with some claiming orgasm, despite the unwanted nature of their physical attack. Certainly, one may assume that women correctly know their own minds when they claim an absence of lust in response to viewing amorous apes, and yet their physiological reaction to the bonobos spiked slightly stronger and faster than to the Adonis beach walker, suggesting yet another possible site line for understanding the gulf between body and mind. Lacking an erection, the man on the beach offered no visual clues of sexual intent.

The answer, Chivers postulates, may be as simple as anatomy. The male body produces visible, external proof of its mood, while the erotic messages of a woman’s genitals, due to architecture and perhaps cultural conditioning, go largely undetected. As clinical psychologist and sexologist Dr. Marta Meana points out, a woman’s body appears virtually the same whether aroused or not. Less attuned to body changes in heart rate and the physiological effect of neurotransmitters firing in the brain, some research suggests women depend more on situational clues to define their emotional state.

Love’s Addiction

Talk of neural networks, pounding hearts and sweaty palms invariably leads to biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, the mind behind the online dating service Chemistry.com, and best known for her scientific analysis of love.

Fisher’s research includes studying marriage and divorce in 58 societies, adultery in 42 cultures, patterns of monogamy and desertion in birds and mammals, gender differences in the brain and behavior, biological personality typing, and the brain circuitry of infatuation and rejection. Beyond emotion, romantic love, according to Fisher, operates as a biologically based addiction with an agenda. Involuntary, tenacious, exceedingly difficult to control, and obsessively focused on a single reward, intense romantic love outstrips even the most robust sex drive as a primary motivation system.

Humans, according to Fisher and her colleagues, exhibit three distinct brain systems, circuitry evolved over millions of years designed to choreograph our mate selection and reproduction. Kicking into gear first, our libido propels us out into the world to canvas a wide range of potential partners. Filtering according to looks, socioeconomic background, intelligence, religious values, humor, social goals and even scent, once we narrow in on our target, chemistry takes over and reason gets sidelined. Characterized by a burning, all-consuming passion, brain system two—attraction—evolved to facilitate and focus our courtship time and energy on a specific someone.

Performing functional MRI brain scans on 39 people—17 newly in love, 15 recently dumped, and 17 claiming to be still in love after an average 21 years of marriage—Fisher and her colleagues confirmed their hypothesis that the universal experience of romantic love activates neural mechanisms in regions of the brain rich in dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. Physiologically functioning like an addiction, the attraction system creates a homeostatic imbalance, distorting reality and increasing our tolerance for risk in the pursuit of our prize. Operating well below our cognitive and emotional processes, this goal-directed circuitry, unfortunately for the unrequited, revs into overdrive and goes for broke when thwarted.

Then again, “there are two great disappointments in life: not getting what you want—and getting it.” Never truer than in love, biology evolved our third brain circuitry—attachment—to fire into action as the ardor of courtship cools with conquest. Triggering a new region of the brain, the attachment system stimulates increased production of oxytocin and vasopressin, hormones associated with deep emotional intimacy, calm and security, qualities that enhance relationship stability and, Fisher conjectures, motivate couples to continue tolerating one another for the sake of parenting.

Craving and Intimacy: A Sticky Wicket

Arriving at attachment, we flow full circle to the original conundrum of desire and the maelstrom of debate surrounding the interplay of arousal, lust and love. Sexologist and professor of psychology and gender studies Dr. Lisa Diamond ardently believes that flexibility, what she terms sexual fluidity, exists as an innate characteristic of feminine desire. Pointing to a who’s who of notable women, including Anne Heche and Julie Cypher, Diamond argues that the concept of a fixed sexual orientation belongs to a male paradigm, and intimates that deep emotional connection packs enough oomph to shift a woman’s position. Diamond, whose 10-year research study tracks the erotic lives of 100 women outside the traditional heterosexual dyad, links the role of oxytocin to a woman’s erotic latitude, noting its extensive presence in the female brain due to its bond with estrogen.

Dr. Meana disagrees. In Meana’s view of the complex and idiosyncratic nature of lust, intimacy frequently douses desire. Researching and working directly with women who suffer dyspareunia—vaginal pain associated with intercourse—Meana sees a pattern of women in long-term relationships losing interest in sex sooner than their male partners. According to Meana, the desire to be desired penetrates the truth of a woman’s pleasure—the narcissistic yearning to be the object of her partner’s erotic drive and sexual need. In the context of a long-term relationship, choice becomes assumed, and the passion stoked by pursuit diminishes. Augmenting her theory, Meana’s studies of visual attention found that while men ogle their gender of choice, women gaze equally at both sexes, processing the facial expressions of the male lover while studying the female body for clues of what makes her alluring to her partner. What a woman wants, according to Meana, involves being wanted.

Meana’s assertion fits with Chivers’ more recent findings that women—subjectively—appear more turned on by audio scenarios of sex with strangers, than with friends or long-term partners. In addition, both Chivers and Meana cautiously discuss the prevalence and significance of submission fantasies, with research showing that between one-third and one-half of all women report entertaining the imagined thrill of being ravished. While supporting the theory of narcissism, both women stress the difference between the real terrors of aggression and the private domain of fantasy.

When even celebrity sex icon Madonna makes tabloid headlines with her flagging sexual relations, it seems hard to dispute the gulf between lust and love. Coined “bed death,” sexless relationships appear epidemic, popping up everywhere, from Madonna and Guy to The L Word. Could Meana’s theory be right, without the stimulus of pursuit we prefer to cuddle and tuck in? Dr. Pam Spurr takes a different view of the situation, and holds both parties responsible. In a sample of more than 400 respondents gathered over a three year period, Spurr found that once the erotically-charged honeymoon phase ends—what Dr. Fisher would likely term the obsessively-focused attraction system—couples resume their former activities, such as exercising and socializing, and fail to find balance. Spurr observed that 90% of couples discontinue experimenting or incorporating any new sexual experiences into their repertoire around the one year mark, and past what she calls the “two year turnoff” abandon erotic exploration entirely. Routine and uninspiring, motivation dwindles, dopamine dips, and the sexual relationship flounders.

The Long and Short of What a Woman Wants

It seems transparent enough, despite the tangle of data, that a woman wants it all, and why shouldn’t she? Mutual sexual gratification, not reproduction, according to British zoologist Desmond Morris in his seminal 1967 book The Naked Ape, explains our wild urge to copulate. Given that modern intimacy both stimulates and diminishes longing, and arousal too often fails to get its message through, how do we harmonize the yen and yang of our bodies and minds? Instead of asking what a woman wants, let’s get down to business and uncover how we get it.



Capital Bliss: The Other Mind Rights the Story

Buying the Cow

If the sum of the parts equaled the whole, no one would buy the cow, or as Andy Rooney rephrased it, take the whole pig when all you’re hankering for is a bit of sausage. Humans—men and women, gay and straight, old and young, mainstream and extreme—crave love with our sex and sex with our love. As Pfizer discovered, biology and psychology need one another. Like the strings of Kahlil Gibran’s lute, though they exist as independent systems, love, lust and arousal quiver with the same music.

While our left brain jones for logic and method, the right hemisphere intuitively knows something is happening here—and not just a mass of neurons firing functional mandates to cellular robots. Highly creative and inclined to holistic ruminating, it bears mentioning that the right brain tends to express most freely in the feminine form. Flirting with presumption, perhaps the real reason exposing feminine desire demands multiple approaches and extra effort suggests we open the relationship to a third party—the sacred. Three’s company, and the ultimate ménage à trois marries body, mind and spirit, so why not dilate our probe and dip into the sublime.

Yes, taught abs and firm cheeks constitute nice incidentals, but what if sex and the holy trilogy of love, lust and arousal actually concealed an erotic passage to a higher state of mind and a stronger inner core. From Plato and the Kama Sutra to Buddha and the Virgin Mary, sufficient evidence suggests sex involves a lot more than breeding.

Though she numbers among the sexologists attempting to scientifically model desire, psychologist Meredith Chivers leads the discussion into tempting new territory when she raises the question why so many cultures, for so many millennia, found, and continue to find it necessary to govern and restrain female sexuality given its seemingly passive nature. What if history dampened female desire, and repression and shame explained today’s biological mystery? Traveling east of Eden for a different perspective, it’s worth noting that kundalini and tantric teachings personify mankind’s erotic energy as the divine feminine—a supreme cosmic force responsible for creation, and the agent of all change. Did Adam view Eve as a threat to his manhood?

Anthropologist Helen Fisher suggests that ten thousand, even a million years ago, women enjoyed equal status with men, and that the current rise of female sexual expression and the worldwide flow of women into the job market represents a return to the truth of our ancient potential—a potential that profits both genders. Genetically evolved to be distinct yet compatible, men and women, like two feet, claims Fisher, need one another to get ahead. Bearing that in mind, let us wade together into the carnal unconscious, a place where science submits to something bigger than itself and our right brain plays investigator.

Love Teases Longing

Shakespeare proclaimed: “Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares.” Inspiring extremes from euphoria to despair, Fisher reminds us that people kill for love, they die for love and around the world and throughout history they create songs, poems, myths, novels, sculptures and paintings evoking love. The telltale signs of eros, according to Fisher, pervade every society ever discovered and studied by anthropologists.

In the context of the divine, Fisher’s chemical explanation of our most powerful brain system begets the question, why? A ubiquitous force to be reckoned with, to what end does passion propel us plunging toward? Most of us want intimacy and depth with our sexual relations, and yet, according to the startling statistics of sexless relationships, once our brain circuitry switches from shots of dopamine to the oxytocin with vasopressin blend, all bets called off, love ceases to be a guaranteed aphrodisiac or to fulfill on its promise of endless bliss.

Certainly, Keats knew when he immortalized, not love’s consummation, but its chase, in his Ode to a Grecian Urn. Plato claimed the God of Love lives in a state of need. And for the Buddha, our perpetual predicament of discontent reflects an ultimate truth: desire never consummates longing. What’s really going on here?

Probing Desire

In his book Open to Desire, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Mark Epstein sheds light on the Buddha’s left-handed path—the path less taken—where desire exists, not as a weakness or vexing frustration, but as passage to a purer state of pleasure. Slipping into the gap between promise and anticlimax, we meet our own emotional and spiritual need to be whole—a transcendent longing to embrace our selves and our lovers as fully realized and independent subjects, not objects of ego clinging. When we find and embody our own internal truth, Epstein explains, our need for external validation dissolves, and we release the conditional expectations we impose on our relationships. Prompting us to probe our personal history of longing and nonfulfillment, desire guides the willing into fertile new territory.

By spotlighting narcissism as the erotic grail of what a woman wants, psychologist and sexologist Dr. Marta Meana in essence offers another way to approach what Epstein refers to as desire’s enlightening potential. In acknowledging our longing to be objectified and craved by another as proof of our inherent self worth and power, we recognize the true need to esteem and value ourselves.

Even Chivers’ insight into submission fantasies as a wish to traverse beyond will and conscious thought, hints at a primordial craving to surrender our egos through a transcendent state to something larger than ourselves.

Indulging Your Mind for Pleasure

In his cross-cultural atlas mapping the interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit, Paul Hougham draws a continuum between those civilizations and traditions that view sexuality as a base, but necessary, condition of humanity, and their opposite in number and attitude, that normalize sexuality as essential to physical and psychological health, celebrating it as a path to self awareness and awakening. Dr. Caroline Myss, in her book Anatomy of the Spirit, defines erotic pleasure as a vital mystical force that both liberates and bonds. Orgasm delivers us—body, mind and spirit—fully into the present moment; the much sought and equally elusive eternal now, a time zone beyond the borders of our ego intrigues. Our system momentarily flooded with high voltage energy, we experience profound release physically and emotionally, and, given the right conditions, meld into a current of ecstatic union with our lover, and even the rapture of divinity.

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor travels the country on behalf of Harvard’s Brain Bank recounting the exceptional experience of studying her own stroke. Only 37 years old, Taylor suffered a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. On the morning of her stroke, Taylor’s conscious awareness switched back and forth between her left hemisphere’s calculating intelligence and alarm, and her right hemisphere’s total immersion in the bliss of the present moment—the orgasmic state on freeze frame. Taylor explains that while our left brain categorizes and organizes our present into relationship with the past and future, the right brain dissolves all boundaries between a sense of separateness and what Taylor encountered as the life force power of the universe. In what she refers to as her stroke of insight, Taylor discovered that by consciously choosing to step to the right of our left hemisphere we possess the ability in any moment to connect with a universal presence of nirvana—a choice she urges us to make.

Educated as a biochemist, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, known as the “happiest man in the world,” brings Taylor’s message home when he advises us to take seriously the importance of training our minds. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, redirecting our thoughts and altering our actions stimulate the brain’s lifelong ability to both structurally and functionally reorganize neural pathways, which in turn affect our experience. Concerned with well-being—an internal condition he describes as a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment unaffected by temporal sensations or destabilizing emotions—Ricard believes that achieving happiness demands the same focused effort and commitment as any serious pursuit.

Given that our mind ultimately determines the quality of our reality—not to mention, directs, stars in and produces our erotic adventures—keeping it fit seems an obvious imperative. Ricard may be addressing general happiness, but as Epstein points out, the spiritual and the sexual entwine in the pursuit of the same end. A robust erotic life nourishes our well-being, while well-being fuels and shapes our erotic vitality.

Pain and Desire: The Way of Wanting

Winding our way back to the path of desire, we stumble upon yet another paradox. Desire beckons us to pursue the orgasm: to dissolve our physical and emotional boundaries in a spiritual union with the perfect present. It coaxes us to embrace our selves and our lovers as one; two souls fused in an uncensored euphoria. But while tantalizing us with its promise of nirvana, desire plays the dominatrix, forcing us to accept pain with our pleasure.

Desire, as the Buddha implied with his famous lotus sermon, should be held lightly. When we release longing as a destination, an objectified craving, and open to its instruction, we discover that the love relentlessly summoning us is a love for ourselves. Surrendering to our own current of constant craving, we flow along an individualized trajectory of continual transformation, journeying deep into the heart of our own darkness, an inner space fertile with opportunity to emancipate our minds and bodies from the calcifying fears of our ego insecurities.

Playwright and activist Eve Ensler wrote the global theater phenomenon The Vagina Monologues after interviewing more than 200 women on the subject of their bodies. The production’s astounding success lead her to found V-Day, a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls. In Ensler’s vision of the future we share the goal to become connected and healed through our vulnerability. She argues that striving for security makes us insecure. When we cling, with Taylor’s left hemisphere to what Ensler calls, hard matter identity, we close our minds to new ideas, new experiences, new people and ways of being. For Ensler, happiness exists in action, in sharing our truth and in giving away what we want most.

Love and erotic fulfillment? From Dr. Pam Spurr’s advice that we continue to experiment and explore our erotic needs, to the collective counsel of Epstein, Taylor and Ricard that we earnestly apply ourselves to the ongoing endeavor of training our brains—all paths point to Shangri-La. Lucky for us, the very term “training” implies imperfection and a need to practice. Even Napoleon Hill, in his famous study of success, noted a strong correlation between achievement and the highly sexed. Like anything worth wanting, wanting is worth working for.

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