Come as You Are (54 page)

Authors: Emily Nagoski

From Lykins, Janssen, and Graham, “Relationship Between Negative Mood and Sexuality.” See also Janssen, Macapagal, and Mustanski, “Effects of Mood on Sexuality.”

9.
There is
some
genetic basis. Two studies published in 2005 independently found that about 40 percent of the variability in women’s orgasmicity was attributable to genes (Dawood, Kirk, Bailey, Andrews, and Martin, “Genetic and Environmental Influences”; Dunn, Cherkas, and Spector, “Genetic and Environmental Influences”). More direct evidence of a genetic basis for sexual response in men showed that around 36 percent of SIS1 (the handbrake) is heritable, and a little under 20 percent of SIS2 (the foot brake) (Varjonen et al., “Genetic and Environmental Effects”). Intelligence, by contrast, has an estimated heritability of from 30 to 80 percent, depending on what you’re measuring and how (Jacobs et al., “Heritability Estimates of Intelligence in Twins”). To put that in concrete terms: Suppose you get chatting with the woman sitting next to you on a plane, and it turns out she’s an identical twin. If she is very, very intelligent, then you have good reason to expect her sister is also very, very intelligent. But if your conversation veers into the domain of sexual pleasure and you learn that she is reliably orgasmic from vaginal stimulation, there’s no particular reason to expect that her sister is, too.

10.
Pfaus, “Neurobiology of Sexual Behavior.”

11.
Pfaus, Kippin, and Coria-Avila, “Animal Models.”

12.
Pfaus and Wilkins, “A Novel Environment.”

13.
Note that this isn’t how human sexual
orientation
works. Little boys who grow up to be gay are, most likely, born with a different “proneness,” which gradually develops into a different orientation. Gay men’s natural proneness means that what they’re sensitive to is different right from birth, as far as we can tell, and they don’t need to experience anything sexual with anyone in order to know intuitively whom they want to be sexual with, just as straight men don’t need to try being sexual with anyone in order to know intuitively whom they want to be sexual with. Obviously there’s a lot more to this subject, including how or whether any of this applies to women’s sexual orientation; whole books have been written about it (e.g., Diamond,
Sexual Fluidity
). For now, I just want to make it clear that we’re not blank slates who just learn whatever is put in front of us, sexually. Remember: There are some, though few, aspects of our sexuality that are innate, organized in advance of experience.

14.
Koos Slob et al., “Sexual Arousability and the Menstrual Cycle.”

three: context

1.
4 percent in Carpenter et al., “Sexual Excitation and Inhibition Profiles,” and 8 percent in my considerably less science-y experience on my blog and in my classes.

2.
McCall and Meston, “Cues Resulting in Desire,” and “Differences Between Pre- and Postmenopausal Women.”

3.
Graham, Sanders, Milhausen, and McBride, “Turning On and Turning Off.”

4.
Gottman,
The Science of Trust
, 254.

5.
Bergner,
What Do Women Want?
68–73.

6.
Graham, Sanders, and Milhausen, “Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory.”

7.
BBC News, “Words Can Change What We Smell.”

8.
Aubrey, “Feeling a Little Blue.”

9.
Ariely,
Predictably Irrational
.

10.
Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow Theory and Research,” 195–206.

11.
Flaten, Simonsen, and Olsen, “Drug-Related Information.” Hat tip to Goldacre, “Nerdstock.”

12.
Reynolds and Berridge, “Emotional Environments.”

13.
Gottman,
The Science of Trust
, 192.

14.
There’s mounting evidence that in a variety of ways, in both rats and humans,
context
changes how the midbrain responds to stimuli. Human brain imaging studies have found that uncertainty and risk can influence NAc response (Abler et al., “Prediction Error”) and that the NAc’s of people with chronic back pain respond differently to “noxious thermal stimulation” (i.e., burning) compared with people who don’t live with pain (Baliki et al., “Predicting Value of Pain”). Something particularly interesting about the study of brain functioning in people with chronic back pain: When they directed their attention to the burning sensation on the skin of their back, they reported that the heat hurt; when they directed their attention to the pain in the muscles of their back, they reported that the heat felt good. Where we focus our attention is part of context. The NAc even appears to be important in placebo studies (Zubieta and Stohler, “Neurobiological Mechanisms of Placebo Responses; Tracey, “Getting the Pain You Expect”). Remember the placebo effect from chapter 2—about 40 percent of people taking a sugar pill that they are told will increase their interest in sex, do indeed experience more interest in sex. I expect that future research will find that the nucleus accumbens is involved in that effect.

15.
Berridge and Kringelbach, “Neuroscience of Affect,” 295.

16.
Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Bevin (
Archaeology of Mind
) include in their taxonomy of the limbic brain SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. Frederick Toates includes, along with stress and sex, social behavior, aggression, and exploration (
Biological Psychology
). Paul Ekman, using research on universal facial expressions, theorizes the basic emotional categories of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise (
Emotions Revealed
). It says a lot that there isn’t yet a single, universally agreed on system for understanding the organization of our most basic emotional systems. Nor is there a universally agreed on definition of what an emotion or a motivation
is
, or if they’re the same thing or different—though my references here will reveal my inclinations (Berridge and Winkielman, “What is an unconscious emotion?”; Panksepp, “What is an emotional feeling?”).

17.
Meizner, “Sonographic Observation of In Utero Fetal ‘Masturbation.’ ”

18.
Berridge,
Mechanisms of Self-Control.
The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert described Berridge as “one of the best neuroscientists in the world,” (Berridge et al.,
The Neuroscience of Happiness
), but I would distinguish him from other neuroscientists this way: As a source of both the Iggy Pop rat study and the One Ring metaphor, he is the one and only author of rat brain research who has made me LOL.

19.
Authors resort to quotation marks (Berridge’s “wanting” and “liking”) and capitals (Panksepp and Bevin’s SEEKING etc. system in
Archaeology of Mind
) in an effort to reinforce the distinction between conscious enjoying, expecting, and eagerness and mesolimbic
enjoying
,
expecting
, and
eagerness.
To make that distinction in this book, I use a shortcut metaphor throughout: When I talk about cognitive motivation, learning, and pleasure or suffering (what people use to describe what they want, know, or feel), I say “
you
want/know/feel.” When I talk about affective motivation, learning, and feelings (
eagerness
,
expecting
, and
enjoying
), I say “
your brain
wants/knows/feels.”

20.
Childress et al., “Prelude to Passion.”

four: emotional context

1.
Porges, “Reciprocal Influences Between Body and Brain.”

2.
Levine,
In an Unspoken Voice
, 55–56.

3.
Lykins, Janssen, and Graham, “Relationship Between Negative Mood and Sexuality”; ter Kuile, Vigeveno, and Laan, “Acute and Chronic Daily Psychological Stress”; Laumann et al., “Sexual Problems Among Women and Men.”

4.
Hamilton and Meston, “Chronic Stress and Sexual Function.”

5.
Levine,
In an Unspoken Voice
, 8.

6.
Inevitably, it’s more complicated than that. There is a brake that, in a healthy nervous system, is linked with the autonomic gas pedal, so that when life hits the gas pedal, the brake disengages, and when life relaxes the gas pedal, the brake reengages—the neomammalian vagus, or “vagal brake” as Stephen Porges describes it. This is in contrast to the reptilian vagus, which slows the heart and is the brake of “freeze” (Porges,
The Polyvagal Theory
, 92–93).

7.
It shows up over and over again in both fact and fiction, such as Forrest Gump’s, “I just felt like running,” and, most memorably, in P. G. Wodehouse’s
Performing Flea
: “The puppy was run over by a motor bike the other day and emerged perfectly unhurt but a bit emotional. We had to chase him half across London before he simmered down. He just started running and kept on running until he felt better.”

8.
If you know of some research on this, please do send me an email! [email protected].

9.
The World Health Organization reports that “35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime” (WHO, “Violence Against Women” fact sheet). The US National Criminal Justice Reference Services reports that about 18 percent of women in America are raped in their lifetime; about 25 percent are raped, assaulted, or physically abused by their partner in their lifetime, compared with 8 percent of men (US Department of Justice,
Full Report
).

10.
US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Boston, “Title IX and Sexual Assault: Exploring New Paradigms for Prevention and Response,” March 24–25, 2011.