Category: Articles

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Infidelity is a Biological Thing

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Current studies of American couples indicate that 20 to 40% of heterosexual married men and 20 to 25% of heterosexual married women will also have an extramarital affair during their lifetime.

So states Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, Chief Scientific Advisor for the dating site Match.com and author of five books on love, sex and relationships, in a TED talk/article entitled 10 Facts About Infidelity.

Infidelity, she asserts, is part of our ancestry as prehistoric men and women found reproductive and supportive need for it–a kind of hedging your bets strategy to insure sexual procreation and survival of infancy past the first year.

A lesser known but more intriguing fact in my mind, however, it is part of human biology. The brain, she explains, is a three-part system controlling sex drive, romantic love and “partner attachment” that makes it “possible to express deep feelings of attachment for one partner, while one feels intense romantic love for another individual, while one feels the sex drive for even more extra-dyadic partners.”

In fact, a particular gene may be responsible for infidelity, a widespread phenomenon across time and cultures:

Men carrying the 334 vasopressin allele in a specific region of the vasopressin system scored significantly lower on the Partner Bonding Scale, indicating less feelings of attachment to their spouse. Moreover, their scores were dose dependent: those carrying two of these genes showed the lowest scores, followed by those carrying only one allele. Men carrying the 334 gene also experienced more marital crisis (including threat of divorce) during the past year, and men with two copies of this gene were approximately twice as likely to have had a marital crisis than those who had inherited either one or no copies of this allele.

It is always a bit disconcerting to me to read studies that nail specific behaviors ordinarily regarded as complex, affected by so many variables of time, physiology and history, to a gene. We often indulge science a great deal, affording it unquestioned authority in our everyday absorption of internet tidbits but without the benefit of perspective found in further reading on a given subject.

This article claims a gene governs the likelihood of cheating behavior, but, of course, it does not cite competing genes or other sources that govern ethics or cultural mores that influence a specific decision in any given moment. The author discusses ten facts in a bite-sized article, but are there other facts that would color the conclusions she makes?

However, for those interested in the subject, this article does reference many sources at the end of each of the “ten facts,” and for that reason and the get-out-of-fault-for-cheating free card it offers, in essence, it is a worthwhile read–food for thought anyhow.

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Why We Do What We Do Sometimes: Compartmentalization and Fantasy

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There are many reasons for infidelity, such as revenge, boredom, the thrill of sexual novelty, sexual addiction. But experts say that a large majority of the time, motivations differ by gender, with men searching for more sex or attention, and women looking to fill an emotional void…. Women tend to have an emotional connection with their lover and are more likely to have an affair because of loneliness.

I googled random words that popped into my head yesterday, only a few that I recall now that I have wandered far from my original search–crisis, conscience, fidelity, causes–and found the above webmd answer to the inquiry, “Why do women (and men) cheat?” Having researched infidelity endlessly in the last six months, I was pretty sure I knew the answers. Yet, as each new search yields slightly different results, I keep returning to the inexhaustible topic.

Paraphrasing here, despite feeling guilty and regardless of how “the other woman” compares to their wives, men cheat when emotionally dissatisfied, i.e., feeling under appreciated or unloved, according to Dr. Gary Newman’s study of 200 avowed strayers. The proposed solution: Wife, get out of yourself and pay attention.

The article teases out the commonplace and dresses it up with officialdom in a reader-friendly version of the study findings. There are few details of the subjects, questions or demographics. But do we need a study to come to the banal conclusion that marriage breeds contemptuous familiarity, human nature tends toward the unconscious and ungrateful, and daily presence and gratitude is the answer to so many of the questions?

Presence:

How can I be kind to my husband and show him how much he means to me with the daily do’s grinding me into the ground: work, kids, parents and the myriad other balls I juggle to keep it all going, each taking huge chunks out of my time, patience and happiness on most days?

Simple, I remark to myself. Stop, breathe and re-set. Do the enormous work of superhuman strength to take ten minutes out of the day for a gratitude inventory: people who care deeply for my wellbeing, who would suffer horribly if I died or fell gravely ill, even if it doesn’t seem like that most days. So that when I mindlessly knee-jerk react to my husband’s insignificant screw up, I can at least apologize and salve the wound. And just maybe avoid the knife altogether next time. It takes practice.

So the next time he goes out to get 2% milk and gets nonfat instead without an inkling that his kids would never drink that, I refrain from laying into him, complaining how clueless and checked out he is. No one wants to feel dumb. No one reacts well to unkindness. I marvel at how I give strangers on the street more kindness than I give my people sometimes. Just unjust.

But kindness is not a panacea and presence is not easy. Some cheat even if they feel good about and are well-treated by their spouses–to what degree I have no idea, but articles abound with studies attesting to infidelity even among avowed happy homers. People stray for as many reasons as there are people, my weak math brain speculates, as each individual comes to a relationship with his or her own nature and nurture.

Compartmentalization:

The human mind copes with conflict in unseen ways. Mindfulness–a condition for catching self-deception in action–is tricky when it comes to danger triggers and survival mechanisms. I have observed that clandestine relationships survive largely on compartmentalization, which is only one tool in the human arsenal of coping skills.

We parcelize ourselves in order to make sense of what we do. For instance, I have been known to be an overly conscientious mother and daughter but a neglectful wife, at times, and I rationalize that deficit by focusing on the surplus.

Likewise, a man in a strained or dying marriage may justify an affair by weighing his acclaimed superior fathering and provider skills against the undeniably less superior husband skills attested to by his wife and his own admission. But since he is a good father and provider, he believes he compensates for the few failings as his wife’s lover, friend or supporter. She gets her due, so he should get his.

That is just one example of guilt-alleviating separation that keeps folks moving along through their days and in their marriages until either or both terminate. But it’s not just for cheaters. Many sites I consulted on the subject such as Psychology Today and Webmd, cite professions that necessitate compartmentalization. Soldiers, for example, seal up the killing to survive the mental anguish.

Compartmentalization is often survival, no doubt, especially for those with high powered jobs widely responsible for others’ safety like police officers, doctors and lawyers. A doctor could not work without burying the constant threat of lives lost at her hands.

To a lesser or greater extent, we survive emotional infidelity by splitting ourselves into bad and good, justified and unjustified. This disassociation answers the question of how she could fuck her lover each afternoon and then spoon her husband to sleep each night. But is she aware of the division?

Fantasy:

We all come to situations as we are. No kidding. Some of us are, and I do include myself, if not outright addicted then highly reliant upon fantasy to prop us up through hard times or as the go-to coping mechanism. I know I dealt with teenage loneliness in fantasy. It gave me the endorphin boost I was later addicted to in distance running.

If I imagined that someone to whom I was attracted also found me attractive as THE object of desire, I smoked those elaborate imagined scenarios with that special someone who found me irresistibly witty and charming, and so, so deep. I would inject the role of lover in love songs, succumbing to the bitter-sweet surrender of being someone else, somewhere else for a while. It was release.

Some people use love to obtain that high even into adulthood. While life sped up for me so much that I lost the luxury of hours mulling in my imagination–school, work, real relationships that were not so ideal and took a lot of rolled-up-sleeves ugly work–I still had spells of disappointment or a generalized ennui that was relieved by lapsing into fantasy.

Specifically, when I found myself in a restricted relationship by borders of time, emotional commitment and opportunity–mistressing, for example–fantasy played a huge part for me and my partner. It sustained the relationship and certainly heightened the sex.

Intention:

There is an interesting thing about daydreaming and fantasy: Sometimes it works to manifest what you want in life, and other times it keeps you stuck in your life. What makes the difference?

The difference has to do with your intent. Are you consciously imagining what you want from a place of inner connection and joy, or are you using daydreaming and fantasy to avoid your feelings and avoid reality?

When you consciously and joyously imagine what you want, you are participating in creating what you want. However, when you use fantasy and daydreaming as a way of avoiding your feelings and avoiding the reality of a situation, you are using them addictively.

So says Margaret Paul, PhD in “Addiction to Fantasy and Daydreaming.” I agree. Intention is everything–almost. Fantasy spans the poles of medicine to poison.

When abseiling the steep slopes of rocky terrain–deep, existential loneliness or disappointed dissatisfaction in a life partner choice–unhealed lovers or spouses find respite in the life-supporting ropes of daydreams or fantasies of another’s possible meaning or potential in some improbable space and time of the imagination.

This human tendency, whether for avoidance or enhancement, as addiction or inspiration, no matter how dilatory to healing a relationship or the self, was certainly pronounced in those who made me mistress. That is one of the things all lovers had in common: being in love with feeling love and their projected ideal–in me. And I did the same for them.

My illicit loves were all drenched in rich fantasy, which has made each relationship both an irresistible draw and a resounding alarm. While I heard all I desired, all the tailored words and acts calculated to keep me–or my image–I placed a padded, porous cotton circle of safety around my heart.

Because in time I knew that I knew. Looking at myself from the outside as if in a metafictional moment, an actor slow turning away from the scene to wink at the unseen, unknown audience, I broke the fourth wall. I toggled the strutting and fretting between falling in and out of my heart’s desire in dangerous liaisons, which accounted for my enjoyment and sanity within them.

Of course, there is living in the moment and then there is all the rest. When I was with my lover–in that room or car or restaurant–looking into the eyes of the object of my reciprocated desire at that precise moment, there was only the thickness of amniotic warmth, need and desire in perfect balance.

And the other pole–fear, longing, insecurity, conscience, dissatisfaction–drifted in and out of the majority of hours spent without my lover, sometimes striking me with a punch and other times with contemplative concern.

Most times, however, I just went through my days attending to what was directly in sight. I still do. And hope that sleep, my most beloved and ardent lover of all, returns a new day with answers, insight, solution or simply more of the same as all the other yesterdays–practice.

Presence, intention and study are disciplines that enable me to dip into the copiousness of heart pumping inflow and outpouring. Some days it is easier than others to see myself and others with incisive clarity. Others, I fog over.

However, the intention is always there. Struggling with the practice, sweating the line of possibility and decency, creation and destruction, I awaken each day resolved to do the best I can even as I want to do better than that. And so I get up, falter in a slight sway, and get on with the business of another first step to somewhere.

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First and Lasting Love

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Social Science Says Lasting Relationships Come Down to 2 Basic Traits, one of today’s The Mind Unleashed selections gave me a warm feel-good flicker of recognition in resonating truth, though so simple and time-worn as to appear trite. The article”s review of a study on long-term marriages concludes:

In most marriages, levels of satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together. But among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.

Sure, kindness and generosity make the world go round, so this makes sense. Now, I cannot say that I have always remembered this prescript in my own lengthy marriage, but the daily practice is important to better the odds of not forgetting.

If I were to give my daughters advice on choosing a life partner, I would tell them to love someone kind and generous–to them as well as others. Hopefully, my daughters won’t need such advice in earnest for a while, though they inch along nearing that precipice of desire.

My soon-to-be-19 year old daughter is falling in love, probably for the first time. I assume both in light of her uncharacteristic giddiness over today’s “date” and the missing catalyst to such annoying behavior previously. Unlike her mother, she is starting out on her love life journey later. She is probably better off for that.

The challenge for me, for any mother, is what to say when. Does today’s second date provide the opportunity to donate wisdom, the benefit of my years? Unsolicited, yes, but shouldn’t a mother do that for her charges, give without being asked or even being appreciated for the offering? So many hats a mother wears, teacher is certainly one of them. A teacher instructs and shares, gracing her students with the benefit of her education, training and life experience, whether the course is English or Accounting and whether the education is received and utilized.

I took the chance, risked rebuff and spoke. An “in” presented itself after a simple line of questioning of plans and whereabouts.
She answered, “I told him I like surprises, so he is picking me up and taking me somewhere. He hasn’t said where.”
“So, he seems interested in you, since he paid attention to what you said you liked.”
“Yeah, I can’t figure out why he does,” she shrugged with a cynical but glowing smile.

I bristled at her statement and wondered why it had to be this way for young women, skepticism and self-doubt, insecurity. Was she being coy or humble? Considering her audience, she didn’t need to make a showing of such virtues or strategies. The mother bear in me overreacted immediately.

“Don’t say that. It’s demeaning to someone I love.”

But then, backing off, I monologued a bit, and she was gracious to listen. I pondered before her attentive eyes: Is it possible for us to develop a healthy love at all with what we are fed by our parents, our culture? I explained to her what my mother told me about sex: Don’t do it until you’re married, boys are only after one thing, and your life will be ruined if you get pregnant. Did I communicate that same defensive posture to her?

I told her the early impression of sex I inherited, one I wrote about on this blog before: women are fortresses and men the invading armies. While the aim of it–precaution–is sensible, especially to young girls of little reference or information from ages 10 to 17, the attitude engendered is one of suspicion and so sex and love are regarded as dangerous.

“The trick is somehow to balance self-preservation and good sense with wonder and openness to some of the best of what life offers. That takes believing in your own worth and risking hurt in exchange for an opportunity to experience euphoric connection with another.”

That was the best I could offer. Fortunately, she is a solidly emerging woman, smart and selective. She has often chosen to be alone rather than be with others who add too little to her life or too much, those toxic relations. But this is new territory, one that tests the mettle of anyone’s constitution to keep one’s head and heart in proper alignment. Generally it takes the burns and bruises of time to calibrate the right give and take, how much and what to sacrifice in exchange for what is gained: the typical cost-benefit analysis applied to almost everything.

She is embarking on this heart adventure much older than I entered the love arena. I was always ready to jump into love and sensuality often and early. My first kiss was in first grade by Artie with the big ears, and even then I felt special. By fourth grade, I developed breasts and the teasing attention of boys. By sixth grade, I longed for the attention of the popular girls who had boys’ silly antics surrounding them and landed my first kiss with a spin the bottle birthday party.

The melt into soft fleshy lips and the scent of another’s closeness, was all it was cracked up to be in my imagination infused with popular lore and far too many books.

By 7th grade, I was going steady with a French kisser and it wasn’t long after that sex entered my life–as both war and weapon. A painful void of information with which to frame a comfortable sexual identity invaded my vision of love up to that time, one concocted from my parents, television, books, songs and neighbors, and fractured it.

Desire and the lure of divinely natural impulses battled fear of heartbreak, exploitation and pregnancy. Sex and love became divorced. And I think it stayed that way for far too many years until I navigated enough relationships to negotiate a re-integration–refashioned and reformulated.

I found that sex and love could be a continuum and an extension of one another. But, ultimately, all winds back to me, my understanding of self in conjunction with others. And not just self-love=ability to love others. That formula glosses over the details, the delicate balance of a hundred or more moving parts, only a few of the major ones being acceptance of humans as largely immutable, education through books and life experience to understand the human condition through behaviors and underlying motivations, and a brave belief in and awe of mystery.

With that in mind, I gave her my best advice–leap, but look both ways before doing so and keep your eyes and ears open. Whether that means something to her or not, I may never know. I still think, however, she has a leg up on me in having waited longer, farther down the life timeline for more brain, body and heart growth. She will have had a longer time living with herself and so a better sense to deal with inevitable disappointment and hurt.

But today will be about exploring and the exhilaration of learning about another–and herself. There will be assessments, inventory taking, chuckling, maybe hard laughs, anxiety and curiosity. There will be self-doubt toying with confidence. The heart will burn apace in the heat of desire and the speed of wonder. And possibly the deep surrender to the womb of the unknown.

It makes me hold my breath and bite my nails for the possibility of the story’s unfolding. I know for certain I will be there for the fallout, great or small. Such is a mother’s love of a daughter, which is nothing if not a devoted practice of kindness and generosity.

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Writing Your LIfe

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During the early 2000s, I taught a course called “Writing Your Life” at a few senior citizen centers in Riverside County, California. I was an English Composition instructor at the local community college when the call for a teacher came up through the community education division. I was happy to embark on something unknown–teaching folks much older than I how to write their life stories.

After a few rough starts, including a crabby ex-English teacher rolling her eyes at me, I got into the rhythm of helping my students tell their stories, rich in textures from worlds I imagined only through history texts, like hopping a train or tears for receiving a sandwich from a stranger during the Great Depression. There were some talented writers among the group, but most were there to listen and write to share their joys and sorrows–to be heard and seen. It was therapy.

Freud and those that came before him knew that talking about one’s life is therapeutic healing. Narrating the self gives the speaker the opportunity to frame her life with a beginning, middle and end for others to understand the point of the story, the meaning of one’s life in specific scenes or on the whole.

Writing has the same therapeutic qualities according to an article in The New York Times entitled Writing Your Way to Happiness. The article examines a study documenting the effects of students who wrote and re-wrote versions of themselves with respect to school performance and other aspects of their lives. The results were interesting, reflecting the importance of controlling perceptions–of others and of self. Students who re-framed their stories improved their performance in school.

“The idea here is getting people to come to terms with who they are, where they want to go,” said Dr. Pennebaker. “I think of expressive writing as a life course correction.”

I agree. The creative urge is the same in writing and living–insight and projection.

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Sex Through the Ages

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This week I came upon two features that spanned the age spectrum of the sex timeline. One was by an older teenager complaining, My Boyfriend Broke up with me Because I Wanted to Have Sex in The Huffington Post and the other a podcast by Senior Sexpert (Don’t you just love that jargony term?) Joan Price on polyweekly.com.

The obvious draw to the first title is its immediate incongruence. Isn’t it usually the other way around–girl breaks up with boyfriend because HE wants sex? That is the stereotype of sexual lore in American culture anyhow. But the writer, Nadia, has this to say about stereotyping:

Let me start my rant by saying stereotypes suck. We all know it, but we still take part in it, even parents. Mine told me to be careful when I started dating and not to feel pressured by all the sex-crazy boys. Little did they know, the very things they told me to make me feel “not pressured” fueled the fire of inappropriate generalizations and damaged concepts in society.

She is referring here to the pressure her boyfriend felt from peers and his brother to “go for it”, which caused the break up; he felt he was not ready.

This passage in particular struck me not so much for the irony as much as my own position sandwiched between caretaker of two teenage daughters, one of whom is 18, and of aging parents, one of whom told me the same about pressure and boys from early on in my youth. If my daughters were amenable to a frank discussion about sex (they are not–“Mom, please, no”), I often think what I would tell them. And I yearn to tell them.

I have so much insight to offer them from my own experience as someone who explored sex in my teens despite hearing the age old warnings and typecasting that all boys want is to get in your pants. While that may be true for most teenage boys, saying so is merely a dismissive attempt at preventing pregnancy, a parent doing the minimum to safeguard her daughter.

Posturing boys and girls as enemies or boys as invading armies and girls as defenders of the fortress, sex is framed from a vacuum of reliable information that is only later legitimately informed through actual intimate experience, and therefore distorted. Sex in this opaque light then becomes more a vehicle for rebelliousness than to satiate curiosity and hormonal insistence. It is fraught with youthful daring, irresistible attraction and yet unrealized trepidation.

My mother’s intention was to protect me, shortcutted without giving me the entire picture of sex, through an acquired perspective that comes with time and growth in love and familiarity. Looking now at her frail remnants of a former warrior woman and wife, I realize she did not have the information herself, having married knocked up at 16 by the first or second boy she ever knew. What could she offer her four daughters about sex?

To add to my mother’s advice to fend off the boys and save it for marriage, I grew up in the heat of Second Wave Feminism when of necessity women were also framing sex and womanhood against men and their patriarchy. Capitulating to sex seemed to me like ceding the war. And at the same time, the 70s of my teen years were also a time of free love and sex, a hangover from the 60s revolution.

The cluster of contradictions did nothing for my sex life. I rebelled, had sex young, had lousy sex, felt lousy about sex, like I had unwittingly given up something valuable of myself to the undeserving, all of which led me to the conclusion Nadia came to:

Sex is just sex. It’s an act we perform. Whether this performance is considered sacred or fun, whether you wait until marriage or do it every night, whether you do it as a profession or some kind of proclamation to God doesn’t matter. If it’s your body, your mind, it’s your choice. No one else matters. So if you’re confused about this subject or worried about the choices you make, I’m on your side. Regardless of how you decide, if you make the best decision for you, I’m proud of that. You should be proud of that as well.

While the obvious is true–sex is just sex–the obvious is also not true. Sex is an act, but it is also so much more. It is a reflection of self, an identity, a connection, an oasis, a weapon, a tool, a livelihood, a happiness, an expression, a biological urge, and much, much more. To say that no one else matters in your choice is to deny that we all grow up with voices in our head that become us, parentally and culturally derived. Our attitudes about sex–a force so powerfully destructive or healing–are derived from a variety of sources and so are complex and not wholly our own until fermented experience kicks in to weed out the garbage.

And it changes in time. Sex at 18 is far different from sex at 68. Take it from Joan Price, who enjoys sex in her 70s and is comfortable with herself–her body, her ability to love and her age. The benefit of good physical and mental health cannot be undervalued. Sexual enjoyment is holistically entwined with physical and mental health. I know that once I felt at ease with and knowledgeable about my body correspondingly with accepting others as theirs, I enjoyed sex a whole lot more than in the confusion of unsorted out slogans and untested values of others.

If I could give my teens advice they would listen to, I would tell them to learn their own bodies so well that they do not have to rely on anyone else to figure out how to pleasure them. In that way, they could be both informed and empowered as well as compassionate by helping their partners. Bodies do come with instruction manuals–owners’. Sex, at its best, is sharing in the heights of intimate pleasure.

I would also teach them to consider their own boundaries, where they end and the next person begins, so as not to lose themselves within the borders of someone else’s need and expectation. Sex is a meeting of minds and bodies in mutual satisfaction. Though sometimes, it is a purely giving act even as it is sometimes a pure taking, both fine in the trust between people performing loving acts, or, at minimum, in mutual understanding of those acts.

Sometimes sex is just sex. For me, whose history is largely long-term monogamy, it is release. If I want to use it to cry or scream or slap, I express and decompress upon the foundation of commitment and mutual caring–for that time, that day, that decade or lifetime, whomever the case may be. Even the same person shows up to the act differently day to day.

Cultural expectations particularly of marriage and monogamy, stress the painted picture of procured bliss through intensely connected oneness and love, a romantic notion that puts a lot of pressure on the act, specifically for youth. And sometimes it is that bliss while at other times it is sacrifice and uneventful working out the strategy of keeping things going, in peace. Sex is part and parcel of being, multifarious as hell. All I know is, it is not what I was told it was.

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The Formula to Falling in Love?

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A lovely essay, Mandy Len Catron writes with reverie in The New York Times about how she fell in love with someone by testing out somewhat cynically and curiously Dr. Arthur Aron’s laboratory formulated prescription for falling love.

Arthur took two strangers who answered 36 questions (which can be found through Catron’s link in the last pages of Aron’s long study narrative) and then stared into each others’ eyes for four minutes. After that, they fell in love.

Arthur’s questions range from philosophical and reflective to revealing. Catron describes them as probing:

They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”

But they quickly became probing.

In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”

Now if you want to know the formula to falling out of love, then read Susanna Wolff’s amusing, snarky rebuttal in The New Yorker.

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“Women Orgasm While Reading…For the Sake of Art, Of Course (NSFW)”

The Huffington Post exposé of this “art” exhibit is all in the title. The installation is called “Hysterical Literature,” by artist Clayton Cubitt who will show this piece next month in Mass MoCA’s “Bibliotecaphilia.” The article features videos of five women who read while, unbeknownst to the audience, being stimulated to orgasm. Interesting results that bring a new meaning to bibliophilia. What more could I add?  See for yourself.

 

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A Woman’s Soul is in Her Vagina

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A woman’s soul is in her vagina. That’s what Naomi Wolf intimates in her book Vagina, a New Biography, according to Maria Popova’s review in Brain Pickings’ “The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness.” The article is a pastiche of excerpts underscoring the salient points: the vagina and brain are interconnected in complex and delicate ways in women, which connection can lead to healthy, happy, sexual experience and overall contentment or, under bad stress, can lead to lasting biological and psycho-emotional changes that debilitate a woman’s ability to experience joy.

To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but is also, essentially, part of the female soul.

A woman’s “confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence” is contained in this continuum that is the vagina to the brain, Wolf claims.

Popova explains the essential science behind that brain-vagina connection: the pelvic nerve governs sexual response as it connects the brain to the cervix not in a direct linear way but in a mazy labyrinth. Its construction is unique to each woman so that arousal sources vary from woman to woman. The structure of the male is far more focused and concentric from the central point of direct stimulation points around the penis. As such, sexual intercourse that focuses on male arousal without locating the specific arousal source(s) of the woman will greatly affect her pleasure and her ability to achieve orgasm.

According to Wolf, the autonomic nervous system which controls and contains the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, is key to arousal. Women have the mind-body connection that feed one off the other: women need to be relaxed and in a good mental state to physically experience orgasm and orgasm affects that state, to be relaxed and released.

For women, sexual response involves entering an altered state of consciousness. … In women, the biology of arousal is more delicate than most of us understand, and it depends significantly on this sensitive, magical, slowly calmed, and easily inhibited system.

Emotional security, Popova summarizes, is directly linked to arousal. Stressors such as safety threats whether physical violence or emotional abuse, inhibit the autonomic nervous system, and if prolonged, may cause physiological changes in the vagina, thereby eliminating the ability to experience orgasm or pleasure. It may even lead to symptoms unrelated to sexual pleasure such as vertigo, excessive startle response, diabetes and heart disease, to name a few.

If you sexually stress a woman enough, over time, other parts of her life are likely to go awry; she will have difficulty relaxing in bed eventually, as well as in the classroom or in the office. This in turn will inhibit the dopamine boost she might otherwise receive, which would in turn prevent the release of the chemicals in her brain that otherwise would make her confident, creative, hopeful, focused — and effective, especially relevant if she is competing academically or professionally with you. With this dynamic in mind, the phrase “fuck her up” takes on new meaning.

Wolf describes how a woman can still have a stimulus response during rape but not the blissful response that occurs in the concordance of physical stimulation and mental safety relaxation. In fact, if the threat of violence or other insecurity persists, physiological changes will be permanent, in some cases.

The vagina responds to the sense of female safety, in that circulation expands, including to the vagina, when a woman feels she is safe; but the blood vessels to the vagina constrict when she feels threatened. This may happen before the woman consciously interprets her setting as threatening. So if you continually verbally threaten or demean the vagina in the university or in the workplace, you continually signal to the woman’s brain and body that she is not safe. “Bad” stress is daily raising her heart rate, pumping adrenaline through her system, circulating catecholamines, and so on. This verbal abuse actually makes it more difficult for her to attend to the professional or academic tasks before her.

The concluding remark underscores the conclusion from Wolf’s biography: the respect afforded to woman’s happiness, her way of achieving it, is integrally tied to her biological and emotional health, which is dependent upon not being threatened or treated disrespectfully, that her body, her vagina is not targeted, exploited or mistreated but treasured and valued.

The way in which any given culture treats the vagina — whether with respect or disrespect, caringly or disparagingly — is a metaphor for how women in general in that place and time are treated.

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Doubting Women’s Sexuality

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And in a world where women’s narratives about their sexual experiences are routinely called into question, the debate over female ejaculation serves as a reminder that, when it comes to sex, we still don’t believe women. Even when they’re literally wetting the bedsheets with proof.

Lux Aulptraum, a self-proclaimed squirter, questions in The question isn’t if female ejaculation is real. It’s why you don’t trust women to tell you the attitudes toward women’s perceived sexual experience and women sexuality overall. She claims women’s sexual pleasure is suspect because it is hidden, imperceptible to her partner and herself.

What miffed me a tad was learning that Australia has a ban on female ejaculation in pornography on the chance that the ejaculatory substance might be urine and so obscene. Meanwhile, there is no scientific confirmation, according to this article, that female ejaculation is merely urination. Just goes to show you how much there is still a need for feminism.

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“What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”

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George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, interviews Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and asks “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter?'”, also the title of the article. He opens the discussion of race in light of recent demonstrations in the wake of black deaths and police brutality where slogans of ‘Black Lives Matter’ were extended by non-Blacks to “All Lives Matter.”

The article is a keen exposé of Butler’s views about how bodies–black, white, gendered, or monied, all kinds of bodies–matter, though some bodies do not matter. Specifically, black bodies do not matter by reason of the continued exposure to behaviors and preconceptions about their bodies– the black body as threat, and not only to police. She says we make assumptions about people, and those assumptions affect how we act toward others, whether we avoid interaction or find them a threat.

Sometimes a mode of address is quite simply a way of speaking to or about someone. But a mode of address may also describe a general way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other is, even the meaning and value of their existence. We address each other with gesture, signs and movement, but also through media and technology. We make such assumptions all the time about who that other is when we hail someone on the street (or we do not hail them). That is someone I greet; the other is someone I avoid. That other may well be someone whose very existence makes me cross to the other side of the road.

And not only is the black body as threat assumption institutionalized and reiterated through the disproportionate incarceration numbers of blacks to whites, arrests, relegation to poverty, etc., but concomitantly, whiteness, which is not a color so much as a predisposition of privilege, is normalized.

Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.” But just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time. This is why there must be a collective reflection on, and opposition to, the way whiteness takes hold of our ideas about whose lives matter. The norm of whiteness that supports both violence and inequality insinuates itself into the normal and the obvious. Understood as the sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit power to define the boundaries of kinship, community and nation, whiteness inflects all those frameworks within which certain lives are made to matter less than others.

The challenge to whiteness normativity is to saturate the culture (and thus reformulate preconceptions about race) with other conceptions of what is normal: Black Lives Matter. By insisting on that concept through persistent public demonstrations and exploitation of media, black lives can be seen first in the very insistence–that they have not mattered. To say that all lives matter, though true, is to ignore this first recognition–that certain lives do not.

She is right. We cannot just sweep up the protests in good feeling and treat everyone the same–because that is not how all people are in fact treated. The article is well worth reading for mapping the deliberate process of her thinking, how she moves through her thoughts to conclusion.

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