emily nagoski

what’s wrong with Naomi Wolf’s vagina

Mar 252013

When a hammer is your only tool, every problem looks like a nail.

I’ve started reading Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina: a new biography.” I’m only 17 pages in and I’m realizing I’ll have to do with it what I did with Sex at Dawn: a series of posts correcting the various problems.

Chapter 1 starts with Naomi Wolf looking for a medical explanation for why her orgasms don’t light up the world they way they used to. She’s feeling depressed (there’a an apparent causal narrative – the lack of luminescence in her orgasms is the CAUSE of the depression, not an early symptom of it…?). So she goes to her gynecologist, Deborah Coady.

Dr. Coady is “one of the few physicians who specializes in… problems with the pelvic nerve.” So guess what Dr Coady thinks is wrong with Naomi Wolf?

Yeah. Numbness from pelvic nerve compression.

When a hammer is the tool you’re an expert in using, every problem looks like a nail.

To be clear: Ms. Wolf went to the doctor because she noticed unwanted changes to “the emotional dimensions of my life and my sexuality” – she had no pain, not even any lack of orgasm itself. Her problem was “that the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure I had certainly experienced.”

Symptom: lack of vitality and delight following orgasm. Diagnosis: numbness due to pelvic nerve compression. Obviously.

So she goes and gets an MRI and, low and behold, she had “lower-back degenerative spinal disease,” about which she was “very surprised, having never had any pain, or any problem with my back at all.” (NB – The presence of spinal degeneration need not be a symptom of anything at all (PDF).)

After “five minutes of probing” to learn about what may have caused this “serious injury,” which he insisted she “must have some memory of having sustained,” she recalls that she had fallen down the stairs once, two decades ago. Of this experience she writes, “I hadn’t felt much pain, but I had felt shaken. An ambulance arrived; I had been taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital and x-rayed. But nothing had been found to be the matter, and I had been released.”

Really. Because when you’ve got a hammer in your hand, you’ll look and look and look for nails.

More tests, and it turns out, Ms. Wolf has “a mild version of spina bifida” and “the blow from twenty years before had cracked the already fragile… vertebrae.”

With no symtpoms, for two decades, until now.

To recap, so we’re clear: Ms. Wolf was born with a spine that was slightly “fragile and incompletely formed.” Most of three decades after that, she fell down the stairs with no apparent injury. Two decades after THAT, she experiences the first symptom: lack of vitality and delight following orgasm.

Treatment? Surgical placement of a fourteen inch metal plate in her spine, recovery from which requires a three month hiatus on lovemaking.

And the vitality came back – gradually, over the next six months or so.

Anyone familiar with the techniques of psychics and other frauds will know that fishing for information, eliciting cooperation, and using props (in this case, “unmistakable” MRI images) are common ploys.

I don’t think her doctors meant to deceive her. I think they were doing their best with the tools they had. And I think they had the wrong tools, and so they fell, as they could not help but fall, into the traps and fallacies that come with using the wrong tools: post hoc ergo propter hoc, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, belief bias. And we know that placebo is most effective when the intervention is hard core:

This will be an interesting book for me. Ms. Wolf reports experiencing it as REVELATORY that individual differences in neuroanatomy influence women’s orgasmicity from different kinds of stimulation. Apparently she believed (and believed therefore that EVERYONE believed) that lack of orgasms from different modalities was cultural training or being too inhibited etc. A woman’s own FAULT. Which I think many of my students believe also, but which is an utterly foreign to me.

So it’ll be interesting.

But in the first twenty pages, most of what I see is the fundamental problem with medical interventions around women’s sexual health. What mindfulness and sensate focus could have treated very effectively, her team treated with surgery on her spine.

genital arts-and-crafts project for the weekend!

anatomy

Mar 232013

When a former student came for a visit a few weekends ago, we got some clay and made external genital homologues! It’s a fun little project you can try at home.

You begin with a list of homologues and match up colors of parts, and then you craft each part.

Here’s the penis before it’s outer foreskin wrapping:

The complete outer genital homologue list:

Labia = scrotum
Inner labia = inner foreskin
Clitoral hood = outer foreskin
Fourchette = Frenulum
Glans = glans
bulbs of the vestible = corpus spongeosum
Crura = corpora cavernosa

Here is the final product:

Both pretty and educational, with, if I may be fanciful for a moment, the rainbow of colors reinforcing the idea that we’re all made of the same parts, just oranized in different ways. If we had had more modeling stuff available, we would have also tried creating some intersex genitals, too – because they too are all the same stuff, just organized in different ways.

how you fix that

relationships, sciencey goodness, sexual politics

Mar 202013

[trigger warning: Steubenville, a little bit]

A lot of people have a lot to say on the conviction of the two boys who raped a girl in Steubenville. Henry Rollins asked, “How do you fix that?” The “that” to which he referred is:

It is obvious that the two offenders saw the victim as some one that could be treated as a thing. This is not about sex, it is about power and control. I guess that is what I am getting at. Sex was probably not the hardest thing for the two to get, so that wasn’t the objective. When you hear the jokes being made during the crime, it is the purest contempt.

How do you fix contempt for women? His guess was women’s studies in high school the curriculum, comprehensive sex ed, and less objectification of women in the media. “Education, truth, respect, equality—these are the things that can get you from a to b very efficiently.” He’s very close to what the research tells us is the effective way to prevent the not-so-good things associated with sex: infectious disease, unwanted pregnancy, and sexual violence.

The research over the last 30 or so years has told us what we need to do. We do not lack knowledge of what needs to be done, we lack only the political will to do it. Here is what the science tells us to do:

Economic and educational opportunities for women. Give girls in the industrialized west a way to measure their value apart from their sexual desirability to men. Give girls in the developing world a chance to be people, fully accessing the opportunities available to boys.

Comprehensive sex education. This includes contraception, STI prevention, sexual communication, values clarification, and providing opportunities to think about what you want to be and do when you grow up.

Affordable, accessible, effective birth control. For everyone, everywhere. Period. No limits, no barriers, no conditions, no moralizing. Just birth control, because preventing unwanted pregnancy is the best way to reduce abortion.

Media Literacy. The ability to recognize how media can influence our thoughts, feelings, and decisions is a critical element in unshackling young people from the media’s efforts to brainwash them. The media will not change until the audience changes, and the audience changes when they spot what the media is doing, and reject it.

Bystander Education.The Campus SaVE Act in VAWA now mandates campuses to provide bystander education, and for good reason. When people learn (1) to recognize the precursors of interpersonal violence, (2) Effective and safe strategies for stepping forward when they notice those precursors, and (3) a feeling of personal responsibility for keeping their community free of violence, then we have a population of people who can recognize violence, understands that it’s wrong, and are less susceptible to pluralistic ignorance and diffusion and responsibility.

Emotion Coaching, Mindfulness. Teaching young people the skill of moving all the way through an emotion, from intensity to calmness, and the skill of communicating clearly about their internal state with confidence and joy – what I call “staying over your own emotional center of gravity” – will give us a population of people who can tell the difference between what they need and what the world owes them, the difference between what they’ve been taught and what is true. It will give us a population that is emotionally interdependent and mutually respectful.

The more we have of each of those things, the fewer people will be traumatized and the more effective our responses to injustice will be.

Culture change is slow and painful. People resist because they feel “less free” inside new cultural rules than they do in the old cultural rules. They’re not less free, of course – the current rules are just as limiting (probably more so), but, like the clothes you’ve been wearing all day, we get used to them and forget them.

As I say, we lack not the knowledge of what needs to be done, but rather the political will to make it happen.

300 years of bad sex manuals

sciencey goodness

Mar 122013

[trigger warning for historical description of a sexual assault case]

In working on the book, I’ve been reading sex manuals from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

What’s remarkable about them is their similarity.

They’re not identical in the kinds of mistakes they make – Artistotle’s Master-piece (1684) says that female orgasm is important for conception (it isn’t), while Krafft-Ebbing in 1886 concludes that healthy, normal, well-educated women are not really sexual at all. But they all make mistakes that seem to have resonated down the ages.

One example. Aristotlehad this to say on virginity and rape:

I have heard, that at an assize held at Rutland, a young man was tried for a rape, in forcing a virgin ; when, after divers questions asked, and ‘the maid swearing positively to the matter, naming the time, place, and manner of the action ; it was upon mature deliberation, resolved, that she should be searched by a skilful surgeon and two midwifes, who were to make their report upon their oaths ; which, after due examination, they accordingly did, affirming, that the [hymen] membrane were entire, and not elacerated ; and that it was their opinion, for that reason, that her body had not been penetrated. Which so far wrought with the jury, that the prisoner was acquitted ; and the maid afterwards confessed, she swore against him out of revenge, he having promised to marry her, and afterwards declined it. And this much shall suffice to be spoken concerning virginity.

Now, this book was among the most widely read books in the English language, with more than 250 editions, and was read both for information and for titillation.

How could the ubiquity of the paragraph quoted above fail to influence twentieth (and indeed twenty-first!) century dialogue about sexual violence? How could this sole mention of rape NOT influence the way people thought about women who reported having been raped?

How could it not influence how the hymen is perceived? And the idea that a woman’s body is a more honest source of information about her sexuality than her words?

I’m interested in the indirect transmission of this idea through culture, this old, old, old paragraph filtering through generations into modern life. This paragraph, which is both the product of bad information and a perpetuator of it, how can we trace its movement through modern western history?

I want to go back in time and smack the anonymous author of this book and tell him to include at least five cases of women reporting rape and the perpetrator being found completely and unambiguously guilty. Maybe then rape culture would not be so entrenched as it is.

hypothesis: hook up culture makes simultaneous orgasms both more difficult and more important

sciencey goodness

Mar 042013

Simultaneous orgasm has plenty of cultural capital; it doesn’t need my assistance. But this NYT article about “dating” culture among 20-somethings makes me want to put in a word for the culturally crowned Ultimate Sexual Experience.

This is the paragraph that did it:

Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.

It’s the conflation of synchronous communication and intimacy, vulnerability, emotional courage that does it.

If relationships begin with asynchrony, will that change how a partnership moves toward synchrony? (Did couples who courted through letters move differently toward synchrony than couples who courted face to face?)

Texting or FB messaging is the opposite of simultaneous orgasm – minimal information, minimal connection, minimal synchrony.

Simultaneous orgasm nearly always requires that you both be fully present, attuned, and connected with your partner RIGHT NOW, RIGHT HERE, eyes open, hearts open, lights on, clothes off, breathing and connected, locked into each other, together, now, US.

So if the Millennials’ dating world minimizes and delays vulnerability, openness, and emotional risk-taking, then what prepares them for the intimacy of attuned, passionate, connected sex?

I dread that they will set up camp in relationships where the sex is half-engaged, half distant, more akin to side-by-side masturbation, using someone else’s genitals as your sex toy, and not even realize what else there is.

I don’t mean to say that there can’t be AWESOME sex in random hookups or any other kind of sex outside an emotionally attuned partnership – by no means! There’s great sex available, fun, beautiful, transformative sex. Someone I know recently decided to have their first pseudo-random hook-up as part of a long-term effort to recover from an agonizing break-up, and it was LIFE CHANGING for them.

But there is some unique and intense sex to be had in the context of a long term, emotionally attuned relationship. There is an important place we can all go, but getting there requires traveling through someone else’s mind and body, while we allow them to travel through ours. There is sex that I would dare to call uniquely human, and we can only have it when all the layers of us and all the ways of knowing we have are aligned, attuned, and paying attention right now to how we feel, how our partners feel, who we are together.

It’s important because of what it teaches us about ourselves. It’s important because of what it builds in our partnership. It’s important because, when the going gets tough (as it inevitably will), the tough can look back on a moment of profound unity, vulnerability, tenderness, and think, “We have bound ourselves together in joy.”

Not the way peanut butter holds two slices of bread together, but the way four arms hold two bodies together, when all those arms are joyfully moving toward the place the other person occupies.

You don’t need to STAY in synchrony, you just need moments of it. Enough moments to build muscle memory of it, a map to it, so you can get there even from the most (emotionally) distant place.

It’s not necessary, by any means. Not necessary. But I say it makes a worthy goal. Even if you never achieve it, the process of aiming for it will break down the asynchrony and build the sense of us-together-yes.

normal, authentic

media

Mar 012013

Not long ago, Ian Kerner sent around some results from The Normal Bar and was like, “So here are some things… what do you think?”

I’ve spent a lot of time lately in Sex Positive Hulk mode (SMASH SHAME, SMASH BULLSHIT SCIENCE, SMASH RAPE CULTURE, SMASH PATRIARCHAL MODELS OF SEXUAL FUNCTIONING), raging against various forms of sex science bullshit (but also noting some of the AWESOME stuff!), so maybe it was just muscle memory for me to go into that mode at this point, so that’s kinda what I did and Ian used some of what I said about it

But because my overriding motivation in life is to do whatever it takes to be effective – to have people listen to what I say, actually hear what I said instead of what they’re afraid I said, and put what they heard to use to improve their sex lives – it got me thinking about the notion of “normal,” and its power to draw our attention.

I’ve been paying attention to mainstream messages about sex lately, in preparing a lecture on that topic for my class and for the talk I’m doing at the Feminist Porn Conference, and I can see how the book would seem like a good idea in that context. Mainstream stuff, tv and magazines and stuff, tends to take the form of “statistic, anecdote, tip; statistic, anecdote, tip” and it is almost exclusively focused on What People Do, with little reference to How People Feel While They’re Doing It. In that context, it seems like a perfectly natural step to conclude that whatever satisfied couples are doing must be what people do in order to be satisfied.

And of course it’s about What People Do instead of How They Feel. On the one hand, culture has many rules about what feelings are or are not okay, so it’s easier just not to talk about them. And at the same time, we’re deep in a transition away from text, to image instead. Mostly, we don’t READ about others’ sexual experiences, we WATCH them. Text gives us the opportunity to learn the participants’ internal experience, in a way an image can’t. We watch what people are doing, rather than reading what they are experiencing. Even with the tepid sentence of last resort, “It felt so good,” we hear that there was an internal experience, not just an insert-tab-A-into-slot-B description.

Look at the two videos below with the sound off, if you like. Compare this, which a student showed me as a joke because it’s Friday:

with this, which my sister showed me because it made her feel hopeful about the future of the world:

You need only watch a few seconds of each to see what I want to talk about.

My sister describes the conductor in the second video as “alive in his body.” And I can’t think of a better phrase. The boys in the boychoir are alive in their bodies, they’re awake inside the here and now. Look at the settled alignment of their spine, the soft relaxation through their shoulders into their arms. At 3:10 when that kid “faints,” he mostly just flops, just loosens his whole body and collapses.

That poor little kid in the Friday video looks dead inside. All those kids in the video are absent. Hollow. That kid is just 13, ya know, and she got a lot of shit for it. But really the difference between the music she’s making and the music the boychoir is making is authenticity. Aliveness.

Internal experience. Not what you do, but how you feel.

When someone worries about what they DO, how they look, when they try to be like what they’ve seen, they will inevitably wall off the parts of their internal experience that don’t fit within the model of “normal” they’ve learned.

People can only show us their internal experience when they are liberated from fear – which very often takes the form of shame. Efforts to conform to some prescribed range of “normal” are inherently shaming; you have to hide some parts of yourself in order to be the person the world expects.

When you accept and welcome 100% of yourself, 100% of your partner, you can be authentic, awake, alive, attuned. And THAT is when the best sex happens. And that’s not normal at all.

Shame, fear, authenticity, aliveness, absentness, are all equally normal, useful in different contexts (there are some situations where walling off parts of yourself is not only okay but necessary). But our lives are most complete, I believe, when there is somewhere we can let all the walls down, soften our spines, and just flop.

toy review: the easy glider

product review, toy review

Feb 262013

Today friends, let us discuss The Easy Glider waterproof vibe.

Because vibrators, am I right?

(Mine is green. I guess they don’t have green anymore. I got mine in like 2004. It still works.)

It looks like a penis – only hard plastic, translucent, and with a more elaborate glans than you’ll find on a human penis, which makes it better than many penises (but not all) I have known. It is also narrower than the average penis.

Good things:
Waterproof!
Hard plastic – easy to clean
Quiet yet powerful! Amazingly so! (GV rates the volume a 2 out of 5. It’s not Lelo quiet, but for $20, wow.)
Useful for both clitoral and vaginal stimulation – though not both at once.
The motor is mounted in a position that focuses sensation, either on clitoris or g-spot
Analogue variable intensity!
$20! Are you kidding me?

Not-so-good things:
Requires two AA batteries. I hope you use recharegable ones. Because the earth shouldn’t pay the price for your orgasms. ::author looks at you significantly from over the top of her glasses::
Not ideal for folks who want HIGH intensity or very FOCUSED stimulation.

Who it’s good for: well, folks who enjoy vaginal penetration in the shower or bath, to begin with. And for folks who like relatively diffuse clitoral stimulation… in the shower or bath. It’s pretty darn intense for under $20, and did I mention quiet?

It’s better for the clitoral majority than most shaft-shaped vibrators, because the motor is mounted high in the shaft (you can see it! I love that!), which means you can put the motor right over the clitoris if you like. The placement of the motor is really a key feature.

For anyone who finds it not easy to reach your vulva (I’m thinking of folks with limited mobility and also some people of size), this adds an extra 5 inches to your reach, and still allows you to apply pressure! Corded bullet vibes can add more reach, but generally you just have to let the bullet sit on your clit without touching it – ditto expensive remote control vibes.

Who it’s not good for: though you CAN use it for clitoral stuff, those who enjoy INTENSE clitoral stimulation may prefer something like a bullet vibe or a vulva-shaped vibe. They can provide more direct, more focused, more intense stimulation.

It’s also not good for putting in your butt. It can be used OUTSIDE your butt – diffuse vibration on the anus can be lots of fun, and the shape this can add bonus fun to that, but not IN the butt.

In summary: an affordable, quiet, sturdy vibe that will do great for most folks, though perhaps not folks who prefer very intense, focused stimulation. But for $20, really, how wrong can you go? (Also, don’t forget, waterproof!)

Sex at Dawn: the end (thank the little baby jesus)

evolution, sex at yawn

Feb 252013

Okay here we go.

p. 252 – an entertaining romp through history’s mistakes about women’s orgasms, with no claim on science and no need to be comprehensive. If the whole book had been this stuff, I probably would have liked it.

p. 254 – And there it is. “If psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey was correct when she wrote, ‘The strength of a drive determines the force required to suppress it’ (an observation downright Newtonian in its irrefutable simplicity), then what are we to make of the force brought to bear on the suppression of female libido?”

not a drive

(2) Even if it were a drive, cultural force (which they’ve spent the last several pages describing) is not what Sherfey was talking about; she was talking about individual-level force, which has important implications for inhibitory and excitatory mechanisms in the central nervous system. These kinds of level-of-analysis problems show me how superficial S@D’s reasoning is. It’s how I can tell it’s just an Op-Ed, but lay readers might think it’s actually really compelling, because it IS a clever rhetorical trick.

(3) Even if sex were a drive and cultural force was what Sherfey meant, a motivation system does not function in isolation, but rather in competition and collaboration with he various other motivation systems in an organism, which means that such a Newtonian view, though beguiling in its simplicity, is totally inaccurate in practice. See the last chapter of Toates for details.

Oh fuck we’re just 4 pages in and I’ve written 250 words. Fuck.

Chapter 19. Two examples in a row of S@D failing to present the complex interaction between innateness and culture, from which emerges the abundant and beautiful diversity of human sexual expression. On female copulatory vocalizations as proof that sex is not “private.” In women these vocalizations are not reflexive but socially constructed. Noise varies from culture to culture, from partner to partner, and from sex act to sex act.

And then breasts and other secondary sex characteristics. Again, they’re offering a simple, essentialist view that the sexualization of female bodies indicates that they are very sexual. Women ARE very sexual, but not because of how they display their sex role. As just one obvious example – so obvious I had to read the section twice to make sure they didn’t address it – the traditional culture of Mali, where the idea of men being sexually interested in breasts is laughable (for details see Breasts: Women’s Perspectives on an American Obsession).

In both cases, they COULD have talked about cultural differences and how the innate sex differences between males and females interact with social norms to give rise to culturally varied ideas about what is sexual. This is a rich and fascinating topic, but they make it sound like these are simple, universal sex characteristics that are also simply and universally viewed as sexual.

p. 263 – Oh look! They reference Elisabeth Lloyd’s book. I’m guessing it doesn’t show up in the REFERENCES because they either didn’t read it or didn’t understand it. (Also: THEY think SHE is contemptuous??? That’s like calling someone a snob because they can tell the difference between Bach and Mozart. Knowledge is not arrogance, my friends, and never mistake the two.) Anyway, they’re wrong about female orgasm. I’m inclined, by things they say later, to think they make the common mistakes of believing that if something was not selected for, then selection has not acted on it, which is not true at all. If a trait exists, evolution may act upon it – this is secondary selection – but that is not the same as evolution selecting FOR it.

p. 264 – Oh my god Baker and Bellis. Authors of 30% of the most egregious bullshit in the field of the evolution of human sexuality. Can we please just not?

p. 266 – Anne Fausto Sterling recently tweeted about the failure of science writers to generate a narrative of conception that represented the female role. I appreciate that they included this and that they talk about how such narratives are a reflection of patriarchy. (See? I’m saying the nice things too.)

p. 269. Here it is again. “Permeating the standard narrative of human sexual evolution is the depressing claim that men and women always have been and always will be locked in erotic conflict.” Setting aside that REPRODUCTIVE conflict is not EROTIC conflict, this is another example of the misunderstanding of reproductive strategy as social strategy. No. Jesus. No.

p. 272 – Meredith Chivers’ research, excellent, lots of stuff about the plasticity of women’s sexuality. However, let the record show that, though I have been accused by readers of making it seem like I thought women are mysterious and incomprehensible, I have never remotely said they were “the very picture of inscrutability,” as S@D does (p. 273). Women are not inscrutable; they are merely complex, in the precise, technical sense. Did S@D need to describe researchers as “befuddled” (p. 274)? THAT is what it sounds like to say that women are incomprehensibly different from men.

Also, they repeat the error made by de Boton when they say, “It could well be that the price of women’s greater erotic flexibility is more difficulty in knowing – and depending on what cultural restrictions may be involved, in accepting – what they’re feeling. This is worth keeping in mind when considering why so many women report lack of interest in sex or difficulties in reaching orgasm.”

One can only wonder if they mean that women want to get it on with the other chimps in our family when they write, “Straight or gay, the women reported almost no response to the hot bonobo-on-bonobo action, though again, their bodily reactions suggested they kinda liked it.” (p. 273). Seriously people, I couldn’t make this up, even if I wanted to.

p. 275 – Wild and unsubstantiated speculation about the role of the pill in partner selection. Apparently I need to say out loud that more goes into the partner selection process than SMELL. I do totally buy that smell is a factor, but there is no evidence that it impacts whom we have children with, only that it impacts whom we are attracted to. It’s possible to GET such evidence, to support or contradict the hypothesis, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist.

p. 278 – Yay, Lisa Diamond’s work, but wait, what? “Most women presumably wake up the morning after their first same sex erotic experience more interested in finding some coffee than in conducting a panicked reassessment of their sexual identity.” What?

They had the opportunity to make an important point: on the one hand, women’s sexuality has a fluidity and plasticity that is different from men’s (at the population level), and at the same time, modern western culture has gone to extremes to control and delimit women’s sexuality. Those are phenomena at the same level of analysis that are interestingly contradictory. But what do they say? “While many women are freed by their erotic flexibility, men can find themselves trapped by the rigidity of their sexual response…”

Which is mistaking levels of analysis again. A women’s experience of “freedom” derives from the interaction between the individual and the culture in which she behaves, not from the plasticity of her responsiveness.

The dual control model could have helped them enormously in understanding this, but they haven’t read any of THAT work either – or if they have, they didn’t reference it or discuss it. Continue reading »

what to do with your tension

anatomy, dysfunction

Feb 232013

I’m exhausted from all this bashing my head against the desk of bad sex science in the mainstream. How about we talk about pleasure for a minute?

I was chatting with my sister about some things, and theme was this:

Tension.

We all carry it. Some of us are great at allowing it to move through us; others hold on to tension, hold on with a desperate grip. Chronic tension sets up camp in our muscles, reshaping our posture over time, locking our throats.

My sister knows what tension does to people’s bodies because she’s a choral conductor. Her job is to embody the musical intention of the composer, show it to the choir, and facilitate their trusting entrainment with that intention. In other words, she feels stuff, and the choir empathizes with what she feels, and that empathy changes the way their bodies resonate, and then when they sing, they sound the way they feel.

I know what tension does to people because students sit in my office, knotted like Christmas lights, and want to know why they struggle with orgasm. They sit in my class, locked up tight in a cage of intellectual critiques, thinking of their body only as a social construction, not as their home, and they wonder why sex hurts. I know they’re in those intellectual cages because their body wanted to keep them safe from the tension inside them. The cage might well be important. But it’s also closing the gate on pleasure.

And then there are the students who sit joyfully, peacefully, living inside their own skin with comfort and grace. They’re curious about orgasm, attentive to sensation, but their foreheads are relaxed, their eye orbicularis oculi lifted.

(There’s a whole conversation to be had about the privilege of relaxation. But not now.)

Brakes and gas, brakes and gas.

The human central nervous system is, from one point of view, a collection of brakes and gas pedals, stop and go, yes and no. Food, water, sleep, heat… attachment, exploration, sex. Liking a thing, or not; wanting a thing, or not. Our motivation systems are constantly at work, responding to the environment – an environment that includes the state of the other motivation systems.

If you’re starving, you aren’t horny. If you can’t breath, you’re not hungry. (There is a hierarchy.)

If you’re tense… well, about 80% of people aren’t horny, and another 10-20% are MORE horny.

For the moment I’m going to talk about the 80% who aren’t; I want to talk about what to do with the tension that’s clogging up your central nervous system, blocking your awareness of and sensitivity to the sexy things in the world.

Can you feel it? Where it live inside you? Is it in your digestive system? Your shoulder muscles, jaw muscles, scalp, face? Your abdominal muscles? Wherever you find it, can you allow yourself to notice it very quietly and calmly? Curiously. Compassionately.

It’s there for a reason. It’s there because your brain thought you might need it later.

Do you need it?

If not, would you try allowing it to move through you, and away?

When you release tension, sometimes it’s bigger than you thought it was and you feel like you want to sigh or cry. That’s cool. Let your body do what it wants to do. These things are physiological cycles, with a beginning, middle, and end; when you allow them to finish, they’re over. Roll credits. Move on.

When you’ve allowed the tension to release and you’re feeling different, you could add a partner if you like, if you have one, and accept a massage, allowing the sensation of a trusted person’s touch to soothe you and fill you with oxytocin and dopamine and opiods.

And when you ease into those brain chemicals, like easing into a hot tub, your brain might well shift into attunement with the sexual world. It might just do that.

But it starts with pleasure. When tension eases, your brain can LIKE pleasure. And when you can LIKE pleasure, you can begin to feel desire.

The tension was there for a reason. Your brain thought you might need it later.

If you don’t… allow it to release. The space it frees up can now be filled with pleasure.

book review: Sex at Dawn

evolution, monogamy, sex at yawn, sexual politics

Feb 222013

I’ve spent the last 6 weeks reading Sex at Dawn and I can offer this summary of the experience.

I started the book skeptical but hoping to be proved wrong, because several people I respect liked the book a lot. But it was far worse than I feared: sloppily reasoned, contemptuous, and ignorant.

There are four main things I want to say about the book:

1. I agree with the book’s assertion that there is a great deal to criticize in the science that is typically known as “evolutionary psychology.” Much of that science is bollocks, but beguiling and persuasive bollocks that gets lots of media attention. I would have loved this book if it had been a love song to the deep, rich pool of research that the media more or less ignores, or an analysis of why that narrative dominates culturally, when the science offers so much more.

2. To the extent that the book proposes that monogamy is not the innate sociosexual system of humans, it is correct. However. Through a number of serious problems in their reasoning about and/or understanding of evolutionary science (which I’ll discuss in more detail below, for those who are interested), they come to the wrong conclusion about the nature of human sexuality. Human sexuality is not designed to function in open relationships any more than its designed to function in socially and reproductively monogamous relationships. What human sexuality is DESIGNED to be is massively variable, plastic, adaptable, and diverse. ALL of it is “natural” – and that’s all evolution can tell us. There is no system that is easy and comfortable for everyone; all sociosexual systems involve rules about what is or is not okay, and those rules will feel oppressive and wrong to SOMEONE.

3. This is mostly a matter of personal preference, but I found the voice of the book to be obnoxious and unlikable. Basically, S@D is a dick, and one of the rules I attempt to follow when I write (not always successfully) is Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick. The book is kind of a dick.

Just one example: On p. 76 they write: “From our perspective on the far bank, Helen Fisher, Frans de Waal, and a few others seem to have ventured out onto the bridge that crosses over the rushing stream of unfounded assumptions about human sexuality – but they dare not cross it.” The arrogance and ignorance to suggest that their review of the literature gives them privileged insight that someone like Frans de Waal (whose work they cite and quote heavily, who has actually been doing the research for decades) only kinda sorta glimpses, is breathtaking.

There is a reason beyond personal taste to object to dickwaddery in a book that critiques science: the core of the scientific endeavor is the engagement of ideas with each other, playing together, competing, learning. Like in a schoolyard, no one will want to play with you if you’re a jerk. (That’s not always true. We can all think of the popular mean kid.) Not that there aren’t plenty of scientists who are assholes, but science (like sex!) works better when people are curious and compassionate playmates, rather than judgmental and self-righteous dicks.

4. The books makes three errors in reasoning, repeats these errors throughout the book, and never blinks as it does so (and this is the point at which those who don’t so much care about the science can skip ahead…):

At no point does the book even attempt to convince me that this is the narrative; it simply asserts that it is so and moves on. As a person who has read a great deal of the science they cite, I can tell you that among scientists, S@D’s narrative is not remotely “standard.” I could buy the argument that it is a CULTURAL narrative, and if that were the claim the authors were making, a great deal of my struggles with the book would be resolved. But alas, they claim to address the science per se.

(b) The book makes serious mistakes about unit of selection, without ever directly addressing the problem of unit of selection. This is an important and complicated point of contention in the field of evolutionary biology, and it is particularly relevant to the evolution of human sexuality. Failure to address this issue makes any book on the evolution of human sexuality, if not irrelevant, then at least critically incomplete.

Perhaps the most egregious version of this mistake is that the book promotes the misguided notion that reproductive strategies are COGNITIVE or PERSONALITY strategies, when in actual fact they are REPRODUCTIVE strategies. Behavior motivated by the structure of our gametes doesn’t make us “who we are” any more than the reproductive strategies of flowers makes them “who they are.” Flowers that mimic another flower in order to attract pollinators are not characterologically “deceptive,” and early human females who maximized their reproductive success were not “scheming, gold-digging women” (p. 58) and no scientist anywhere think so. (I discuss this a bit more here.)

I want to acknowledge that it’s difficult NOT to hear a character description when you read about reproductive strategies. When Hrdy, de Waal, Fisher, or Dixson talks about minimizing risk and maximizing reward, it can sound temptingly like conscious decision-making. But that means S@D’s job, as a critique of the science, is to offer its readers salvation from that temptation, in the form of reasoning. The book not only fails to help readers not make this mistake; it actively promotes it.

(c) The book claims, in the end, that there is a “natural” human sociosexual system. This is both an example of the naturalistic fallacy and, at the same time, a devaluing of what is (in my view) MOST extraordinary about human sexuality: its adaptability, plasticity, variety, and diversity. ALL human sexuality is “natural,” whether polyamorous, polygynous, polyandrous, monogamous, or anything else. Marriage is “natural,” though it varies tremendously from culture to culture and only very rarely refers to lifelong exclusivity. The use of sex as a weapon is “natural,” though morally disgusting and traumatic to survivors (and “natural” does NOT mean “adaptive,” or “selected for”!). Jealousy is “natural.” Much of sex is pleasurable, fair, and joyful; much else of it is painful, unjust, and despairing. It is all natural – equally. We maximize our happiness not when we try to behave according to some hypothesis about our environment of evolutionary adaptedness but when we maximize our sexual potential, which is complicated and personal and only incidentally informed by our evolutionary heritage.

Page 2 of 56 Newer Entries 1 2 3 4 … 55 56 Older Entries

May 2013
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Apr
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

share

share

share

share

share

share

share

share

share

share