Sex in 3 places: Your brain, your bedroom, and in society

A lot of people think that sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of attachment are phases

They're not phases, they're brain systems. Sex is far more a brain process than a genital process

It's the accelerator or the gas pedal. And it notices all the sex-related information in the environment

You can't have sex without a brain. We still are basically adapted to the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors

We now have very different material conditions in all sorts of ways

We have the pill, we have ways of treating sexually transmitted diseases, we have technologies

like the internet, and therefore why should we be beholden to the mating structures of

the past? I think there's biology involved. Sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of attachment

If you want to maintain a long-term happy partnership, you want to sustain all three of these brain systems

Unfortunately, if you want to explore these ideas with a partner, you are going to have

to talk to your partner about sex. And there are a lot of people who feel like

having sex with their partner is a whole lot easier than talking about sex with that same partner

I'm Helen Fisher. I'm an anthropologist, and I actually know where love is in the brain

When I got to graduate school, they thought that the mind was an empty slate, a tabula rasa

An environment just filled up the brain with who you are. And as I sat there and listened to these various academics, I thought, that's not true

I thought to myself, if there's any part of human behavior that has a biological origin

it must be our patterns of love and marriage. because, as Darwin would have said

if you have children and I have no children, you live on and I die out

The game of love matters. A lot of people think that sex drive, romantic love

and feelings of attachment are phases. They're not phases. They're brain systems

I really had a wonderful childhood. I grew up in a modern house, a glass house

and it was thrilling. We had a lot of land. We could see the deer and the foxes and the possums all around the house all the time

I have an identical twin sister, so I always had somebody to play with. My father and mother really believed that sex was an important part of a partnership

On Saturday afternoon, we were instructed to never walk around that side of the house

because it was a glass house and you could see in. We were never allowed to knock on their bedroom door if it was shut

So I knew from a small child that when I grew up, there were certain things in a partnership that really should work properly

And one was you should find your partner sexually attractive. When I first began to study romantic love, I wrote my very first academic paper

It was on these three different brain systems that I think evolved for mating and reproduction

Sex drive being one, feelings of intense romantic love being the second

and feelings of deep attachment being the third. And I was maintaining in that article

that these all evolved for various reasons. Sex drive evolved to get you out there

looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your meeting energy on just one at a time

And attachment evolved to enable you to stick with this person at least long enough

to raise a single child through infancy. The peer reviews came back

and at least one of the peer reviewers wrote back and said, you can't study this, it's part of the supernatural

And I looked at that and I thought to myself, does this person think that anger is part of the supernatural

That fear is part of the supernatural? That disgust or joy is part of the supernatural

Why would they think that romantic love, a basic brain system, would be part of the supernatural

I mean, all over the world, people everywhere fall in love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love

It's a powerful brain system. And I thought, maybe if I could put people into a brain scanner

I could find the basic brain pathways, the basic brain circuitry of these three basic brain systems

So I assembled a team and began to put people in the scanner. They would look at a picture of their sweetheart

that called forth the wonderful feelings of romantic love, and they would also look at a photograph of somebody who called forth no emotions

no positive or negative emotions. And when you put the neutral and the romantic love on top of each other

and cancel out what they have in common, you're left with what's going on in the brain when you're madly in love

I'll never forget the first moment that I looked at our data

What we saw was activity in a tiny little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area

It's a brain region that actually makes dopamine a natural stimulant and gives you that focus, that motivation, that craving, the elation of intense romantic love

After we discovered this data, a lot of people came and wanted to talk to me

And I thought to myself at the time, you know, Helen, this really isn't very important

You know, when you're madly in love with the right person, there's no problem

The real problem is when you've been rejected in love. That's where I can make a contribution to humanity

Sure enough, I was able to put 15 men and women into the scanner who had just been dumped

I was able to find activity in a lot of brain regions. One brain region is that same basic ventral tegmental area, the VTA

that pumps out the dopamine, that gives them the feeling of intense romantic love. You don stop loving somebody when they dumped you I found activity in a brain region linked with pain This is a brain region that also becomes active when you have a toothache

But most important, I found activity in three brain regions linked with craving and addiction

Specifically, is activity in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. It's the basic brain region that becomes active when you are addicted to cocaine

heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling. And so I was able to prove that romantic love

when you are rejected, is an addiction. I hope the world understands that this intense feeling

of romantic love came out of nature. Everybody feels it, and we have to respect

the intense feelings of people when they have been rejected in love

when they're happily in love, and when they're in love long term. My colleagues and I have put 17 people into the scanner who were in love long term

These were people all in their 50s and 60s who were happily married, in love an average of 21 years

And sure enough, we found activity in these same brain regions. The ventral tegmental area pumps out the dopamine, gives you feelings of intense romantic love

A brain region in the hypothalamus linked with a sex drive. And brain regions linked with calm and security

So in long-term love, you can remain in love, but you've got to pick the right person

And that's what sent me into wondering, why him? Why her? Why are we so naturally drawn to one person rather than another

I don't think it's just culture. I think there's biology involved. Sex drive, romantic love, and feelings of attachment

If you want to maintain a long-term happy partnership, you want to sustain all three of these brain systems

You want to have sex regularly, that drives up the testosterone system, so you want more sex

Sex is very good for you if you like the person you're having sex with. If you want to sustain feelings of intense romantic love, novelty, novelty, novelty

And you don't have to swing from chandeliers. Just ride your bicycles going out to dinner, walk in a different part of town, go on a summer vacation to someplace else

And if you want to sustain feelings of deep attachment, stay in touch

Any kind of holding hands, kissing, walking arm in arm, sitting next to each other to watch television instead of separate armchairs, any kind of continued pleasant touch drives up the oxytocin system

So I think what I'm working towards here is understanding these brain circuits enough so that we can use the data to find the right person

That's number one. Understand who they are. That's number two. And sustain a long-term happy partnership

Romantic love will be with us forever. It's primordial. It's adaptable. And it's eternal

it will survive as long as we survive as a species. I'm Louise Perry. I'm a journalist and author

And my book is called The Case Against Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century

It seems quite plausible that polyamory is going to be the next sexual minority rights movement

Currently, of course, marriage is defined in strictly monogamous terms, and there are some polyamorous who say that this is unjust

and that their relationships should be legally acknowledged in the same way that monogamous people's relationships are acknowledged

But I think that there is a risk of rejecting the monogamous model

Proponents of polyamory would say that in our species history, the most common mating model has been the polygynous model

So when you have one male having multiple female partners, that's about 80% of cultures on the anthropological record have been polygynous

And then the remaining 20% have been monogamous. The monogamous model is the unusual one

We now have very different material conditions in all sorts of ways

We have the pill. We have ways of treating sexually transmitted diseases

We have technologies like the internet. And therefore, why should we be beholden to the mating structures of the past

This is a brave new world with all sorts of new possibilities. I think the problem with that defence of polyamory

is that it overestimates the extent to which we are really capable

of controlling our Stone Age brains. Our brains have not kept pace with the technological change that we've seen

We still are basically adapted to the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors

That puts a fairly hard limit on the extent to which we can completely design utopia on the back of an envelope

salt lake city utah and the home of dr rc allred fundamentalist believer in plural marriage

the practice and preachment of polygamy people are free to experiment with all sorts of mating

passions including polyamory for some individuals that's good in terms of the whole society though

women and children in particular the monogamous system is much preferable for all of its flaws

Monogamous America waits for the answer to the question, how many wives

Monogamy makes societies more stable, more peaceful, more prosperous. You can compare this quite directly by looking at certain countries

which have both monogamous and polygynous systems operating in tandem and you can see that there are these differences

Households with multiple wives are much more prone to conflict. stepchildren in particular are much more vulnerable to abuse by their step parents

It's a phenomenon that evolutionary biologists call the Cinderella effect, described by Steven

Pinker as the single greatest risk factor in child abuse ever identified

We inherited our monogamous marriage system from ancient Rome which is unusual in having a monogamous model But Roman sexual ethics were wildly different Roman culture including sexual culture was fairly cruel and shocking

In the Roman world, Harvey Weinstein would have been completely unremarkable. The idea that a rich, high-status man should have sexual access to his social inferiors, in particular his slaves

was completely unquestioned in the era before Christianity. Prostitution was completely permissible

The sexual double standard was alive and well in that men were basically allowed to be as promiscuous and unfaithful as they wanted

whereas women were expected to protect their chastity fiercely and so on. And into this world, in the first century AD

comes Christianity with some very radical, very shocking ideas about sexuality. the idea that yes women should expect to be chaste but so should men the expectation that

women shouldn't have premarital sex this is also applied to men for the first time ever

often this is a most unwelcome message to men of the first century AD but for all sorts of

complex historical reasons it caught on and Christian sexual ethics became the dominant

force in Europe and colonies for 2,000 years. And then in the 1960s and onwards, we end up

slowly unravelling the embedded Christian ideas. We're still on that kind of de-Christianisation

course. I think that often feminists make a mistake in assuming that there's a binary between

feminist ideas on the one hand and Christian ideas on the other, and that they are necessarily

in conflict. For all of the downsides of the Christian view of men and women and sexuality

Also, there is this fundamental idea that the weak should be prized and protected

and the strong should restrain themselves, which was radical then and really remains radical now

I'm Emily Nagoski. I'm a sex educator. And I'm the author of Come As You Are

the surprising new science that will transform your sex life. And like it actually does

how to keep the spark alive. And what I want to say is screw the spark. So how most of us think

about sexual desire is as a spontaneous desire where you're just like walking down the street

you have a stray sexy thought, you see a stray sexy person, kaboom, you just want the sex

And that absolutely is one of the normal healthy ways to experience sexual desire, spontaneous

desire, it emerges in anticipation of pleasure. But there's also responsive desire, where instead

of it just appearing like a lightning bolt, it emerges in response to pleasure. Just that

information alone can resolve people's sexual desire problems because they realize they don't

have a desire problem, they just have responsive desire. So it's not about figuring out where the

pleasure is. It's finding a pathway to the pleasure. Boom mics are really funny when you're

talking about sex. Is that the boom mic was moving? And I'm talking about sex and I'm in the mindset

and it's funny to me. So the history of the science of sex therapy really has three major phases. The

first is grounded in the work of Masterson Johnson, whose fundamental four-phase model of sexual

response was what sex therapy was based on. But when you listen to those phases, you've got

arousal, plateau, orgasm, refractory period. You know what's missing in that? Desire

So when Helen Singer Kaplan came along in the 1970s, she noticed that desire was nowhere in

the model they were using to treat sexuality. So she created the desire arousal orgasm model

the triphasic model. And it was a revolutionary to add desire. So now we can develop interventions

targeting specifically when and how much people want sex. And then Eric Janssen and John Bancroft

at the Kinsey Institute had the wacky idea that sex works in the brain just like all the other

things in our brain, which is that it's a pairing. And it's called the dual control model because

it's got two primary parts. There's the sexual excitation system or accelerator

and there's the sexual inhibitory system or brakes. Sex is far more a brain process

than a genital process. Genitals can be fun. The brain is essential. You can't have sex without a

brain. So the sexual excitation system is colloquially it's the accelerator or the gas pedal

and it notices all the sex-related information in the environment. That's everything that you see

everything that you hear, smell, touch, taste, and crucially all the sensations in your body

and everything that you think, believe, or imagine. What are some common things that activate people's accelerators

The sight of their partner. The smell of their partner. Reading a sexy book or watching a sexy scene

And it sends the turn-on signal that many of us are familiar with. Functions unconsciously at a low level all the time

Here we are talking about sex, so there's just a little bit of sex-related stimuli

But fortunately, at the same time, your brakes. the inhibitory impulses are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now And it turns out when people are struggling with any aspect of sexual response pleasure desire arousal orgasm it not usually because there inadequate stimulation

to the accelerator. It's because there is too much stimulation to the brakes. And a lot of them have

nothing to do with the sex itself, but have to do with stress, body image, trauma, and relationship

issues. So the process of becoming aroused is a dual process of turning on the ons and turning off

the offs. The dual control model sort of makes it sound like touch me here, don't touch me that way

It could be as simple as that, but that's not how pleasure works. The perception of a sensation in

our bodies as pleasurable or not depends on the context in which we experience it. And the context

means the external circumstances and our internal state. External circumstances, the bedroom door is locked. We know we're not going to be interrupted

We're wearing the sexy underwear that makes us feel sexy. That's the external circumstances

The internal state is whether you are stressed, depressed, anxious, lonely, experiencing repressed

rage. We've all got it. So there can be certain kinds of stimulation that in one context feel

amazing and in other contexts make you want to punch somebody in the face. My usual example is

tickling. If you are already in a fun, flirty, playful, aroused, trusting, loving frame of mind

and you're certain someone tickles you, it's not everyone's favorite, but you can imagine a world

where that feels playful and good and can even lead to other things

But if you're in the middle of a fight and they tickle you

it is going to be very irritating. What? It's the same sensation

It's the same certain special someone. But the emotional context, by which I mean the actual activation in your brain, is different

And so your brain interprets the sensation as exactly the opposite. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term are not couples who constantly can't wait to put their tongues in each other's mouths

They're the couples who know how to co-create a context that allows both of their brains to have access to pleasure

The most common reaction people have when they learn about the dual control model, especially in conjunction with responsive desire, is why did no one tell me this before

It's a kind of freedom to know that you're already normal. You are not broken

Nothing is wrong. You just need to work to create a context that allows your particular brain to be ready to respond

The mindset to bring to the process of coming to understand who you are as a sexual person

and how you came to be this person is to turn toward your own internal experience with kindness and compassion

If you want to understand yourself, there are worksheets that you can do

There are lots of other books that you can read. Talk to a therapist. Unfortunately, if you want to

explore these ideas with a partner, you are going to have to talk to your partner about sex. And

there are a lot of people who feel like having sex with their partner is a whole lot easier than

talking about sex with that same partner. So really what it comes down to is tips for how to

talk to your partner about sex. And one of the positive frames that you can use is that you and I

belong together in a sexual way. And I am interested in exploring the ways that we can

deepen our erotic connection. I want to know what works for you. I want to be able to tell you

what works for me in a way that's going to feel good to you and not critical

It's not about spark. What I want is smoldering embers for anyone in a long-term relationship

so that it is banked and ready to stoke and partners have a shared vocabulary for understanding how to stoke the fire

to bring it to life for the times when you are ready. If I could have people remember only one thing, it would be pleasure is the measure

It is not how often you have sex or who you have it with or where you do it or in what positions or even how many orgasms you have

It's just whether or not you like the sex you are having

And if everybody involved is glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences and likes the sex they are having, you're already doing it right

And all of the other pieces, all the other things that you could be worried about, like desire and orgasm

Those things will fall into place when you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being

Thank you

Thank you