The controversy surrounding journalist Naomi Wolf’s new book,
Vagina: A Cultural History
— an exploration of the brain-vagina connection — has brought fresh
attention to the nature and neuroscience of female sexuality.
Unfortunately, it’s done so largely because Wolf profoundly
misrepresents how the
brain works and how neurochemicals like dopamine,
oxytocin and serotonin really affect our love lives (as well as conditions like
addiction and depression).
Correctly understood, neuroscience offers important insight into how
our minds function and how our brains shape our lives: many of my
articles on Healthland attempt to explore these questions. But the kind
of oversimplification seen in Wolf’s book and, sadly, in many other
popular accounts of neuroscience, threatens to perpetuate a
psychological myth. Rather than illuminating the complex interplay
between mind and brain, it portrays human beings — especially women — as
automatons, enslaved by brain chemicals we cannot control.
That’s not what the science shows. The mind-body connection is far
more complicated and wonderful, as a quick tour through some of Wolf’s
errors will illustrate. There is a new science of female sexual
behavior, but it is far more liberating than the book suggests.
(
MORE: First 3D Movie of Orgasm in the Female Brain)
Let’s start with Wolf’s understanding of dopamine, a neurotransmitter
that rightly fascinates many researchers. Dopamine appears to be
critical for motivation and desire: if it’s depleted or blocked (with a
medication like an antipsychotic, for example), people may lose the will
to strive, even the ability to move. But boost it with a drug like
cocaine and people feel capable, excited, empowered.
Here’s how Wolf connects women’s sexuality with the function of dopamine in the brain:
If as a woman, you are frustrated sexually and even
worse, aroused but denied release, your dopamine system eventually
diminishes in anticipation of sex, you eventually lose access to the
positive energy you might otherwise have had both in sex and also
subsequently to take elsewhere in your life. … With low dopamine
activation, you will suffer from a lack of ambition or drive and your
libido will be low.
The theory sounds plausible, but “the fallacy is that she’s saying
dopamine is primarily involved in sexual pleasure, and that’s not the
case,” says Larry Young, a pioneering researcher on sexual and social
bonding and co-author of
The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction.
“Dopamine is involved in reward and motivation for everything we do in
life — whether we’re eating good food, drinking good wine or interacting
with our kids and family.”
Sexual frustration, therefore, isn’t likely to turn off your dopamine
system. “Taking one [type of pleasure] away isn’t going to change all
aspects of your life like that,” Young says. He also points out that
dopamine isn’t only associated with joyful experience. “It’s also
released under stressful conditions,” he says.
Further, if the dopamine system typically turned itself off when
satisfaction wasn’t attained, few people would develop addiction.
Indeed, the experience of addiction itself is marked by
ongoing
desire in the face of frustration: addiction doesn’t create an overall
lack of desire or drive, but rather a very intense, if misdirected,
motivational pull toward the drug of choice.
(
MORE: The Female Erotic Brain, Mapped)
Wolf further misconstrues how dopamine interacts with serotonin,
another neurotransmitter that has multiple functions, including roles in
mood and sensation. Arguing that antidepressants that raise serotonin
levels (like Prozac and other drugs of its kind) may be used to keep
women submissive, she writes:
Dopamine will — if women and their vaginas are not hurt,
suppressed, injured or demeaned — make women more euphoric, more
creative and more assertive — possibly more than a male-dominated
society is comfortable with. … Serotonin literally subdues the female
voice, and dopamine literally raises it.
Again, there is no basis in neuroscience for this claim. Although
some antidepressants do have the side effect of suppressing sexual
desire, this affects both men and women, not women alone.
Antidepressants that increase serotonin levels don’t typically deplete
desire or motivation in general, however. Quite the opposite in fact:
people whose depression has been lifted by these drugs tend to be more
motivated, not less.
Women are more likely to be depressed than men, so they’re more
likely to take medication for it. And yet while some antidepressants
work by elevating dopamine — for example, bupropion (Wellbutrin) — you
don’t see women being denied such drugs for fear they’ll overthrow the
patriarchy. As with all antidepressants, women are prescribed these
drugs more frequently than men are.
We still don’t know which medication will lift depression better — or
worsen it, for that matter — in any given individual of either gender,
though. The complexity of the condition and the widely varying response
to antidepressants illustrate just how subtle and nuanced the
interactions are between serotonin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters
and our moods and desires. Countless things can go wrong to produce
depression or low libido, and innumerable things can go right to
alleviate such problems. If the brain were as simple as Wolf presents
it, it just wouldn’t work. It’s not as straightforward as one
neurotransmitter, one effect.
“Science, particularly physiology, never works that way,” says
Kathryn Clancy, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of
Illinois, who studies reproductive behavior and
blogs about “ladybusiness” for
Scientific American, noting
that, for example, two women with the exact same levels of hormones can
have vastly different physiology — either a “lush, thick” uterine
lining, say, or a very thin one.
(
MORE: What a Workout! Women Report that Exercise Triggers Orgasm)
Wolf includes a similar oversimplification in her discussion of the
neurotransmitter and hormone oxytocin, which is best known for its
involvement in facilitating bonding between lovers and between parents
and children. Wolf calls oxytocin “women’s emotional superpower” and,
citing research in prairie voles, concludes that it makes women more
likely to become emotionally connected to their sexual partners than men
are.
But Young says there’s no data on gender differences in oxytocin in
humans. “Based on what we know from animals, it is likely that when
women have sex that they are going to experience more of an oxytocin
release than men,” he says, adding, “We don’t know.”
Wolf then jumps from this conjecture to the notion that women’s
intense oxytocin release makes them more likely to become literally
addicted to sex: “Good sex is, in other words, actually addictive for
women biochemically in certain ways that are different from the
experience of men — meaning that one experiences discomfort when this
stimulus is removed and a craving to secure it again.”
From this unscientific claim, the author leaps even further afield,
concluding that because of their biochemistry, women are less capable of
controlling themselves when it comes to love and therefore, less human.
“The tricky part, if you look at the new science, is that women are
indeed, in sex, in some ways more like animals than men,” she writes.
Note here that we’ve gone from assuming that an animal finding
applies to humans to an assumption (one without any data at all) that
the previous conclusion creates an uncontrollable desire for sex in
women that is similar to addiction, which characterizes women in love as
having little more self-control than animals.
There is a truth buried amongst this nonsense: but it’s not the truth
that Wolf is claiming. Love — for both men and women — does rely on the
same circuitry that engenders addiction. It’s the same circuitry that
fuels the desire to persist in frustrating tasks like parenting as well.
Like addiction, both love and parenting involve continuing with
behavior despite negative consequences. But that’s a good thing: we need
to be a little bit irrational to stay with partners who are far from
perfect and to deal with children who can easily drive adults mad.
(
MORE: How a Squirt of Oxytocin Can Ease Marital Spats and Boost Social Sensitivity)
This doesn’t mean, however, that we become powerless in the face of
our brain chemistry. Even heroin addicts remain human and capable of
self-control: you don’t see junkies shooting up in front of the police,
for example. Similarly, people maintain control despite the pulls of
parenting and love — and women aren’t any more romantically compulsive
than men.
That’s because the brain circuitry that drives us to love and to
parent — the same region that can be derailed during addiction — isn’t
the only part of our brain. Even in the throes of addiction, romantic
obsession or the early chaotic days of parenting, we’re still capable of
choice, and none of the neuroscience data proves otherwise. “Just
because genes or a molecule modulate a behavior, it doesn’t mean that
genes or molecules determine that behavior,” says Young. “People who are
in love will generally engage in behavior that they wouldn’t normally
do, but I don’t think that means they’re less responsible.”
Oddly, one of the few places in her book where Wolf gets the science
right — in a discussion about the physiology of a clitoral versus
vaginal orgasm — quashes the universalizing claims she makes elsewhere
in the book. It was a pinched pelvic nerve in Wolf’s spine that
apparently prevented her from experiencing vaginal orgasms and a
surgical cure of the problem that inspired the book. She notes that her
doctor told her, “Every woman is wired differently; some women’s nerves
branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum,
or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences
in female sexual response.”
Indeed, there is important new research here suggesting that, for
example, that the wiring of these nerves affects the types of orgasms
women have. Clitoral-focused orgasms seem to rely on one arm of the
pudendal nerve, while cervical and some vaginal sensation and related
orgasms are linked to the pelvic nerve. As Wolf rightly notes, this
knowledge should bring comfort to women who think themselves different
or psychologically immature for having the “wrong” kind of orgasm.
Again, however, there is more complexity to the female orgasm than
the author conveys. For one, as she does mention, new anatomical data
suggests that the clitoris, far from being located only outside the
body, actually wraps around the vagina internally. Which means that it,
too, can be stimulated from within. “It’s shaped like a wishbone and the
tip of the wishbone is the part that is external,” says Barry
Komisaruk, professor of psychology at Rutgers and a leading researcher
on sexuality. “The rest of it has these two legs that straddle the
vagina and during intercourse the penis can actually stretch the vagina
to the point where the legs of clitoris are stimulated.” While there
are distinct vaginal and clitoral orgasms experienced by many women, the
two types of stimulation can also intermingle. Neither is inherently
superior, nor required for conception.
(
MORE: Sharing a Bed Makes Couples Healthier)
Moreover, Komisaruk and his colleagues have found that women with
spinal injury, even those who have paralyzing damage, can often still
have vaginal orgasms because the spine and pelvic nerve are not the only
conductors of sensation from the vagina and cervix. The vagus nerve
transmits these impulses, too, outside of the spinal cord. “It’s
probably that nerve that carries sensation in [women with] spinal cord
injuries [during orgasm],” says Komisaruk. Wolf’s vagus may not have
functioned this way, but that doesn’t mean other women have the same
problem.
The brain and female sexuality are extremely complicated — and
reducing them to simplistic formulations that deny women their humanity
fails to do justice to either feminism or science. Properly
contextualized, neuroscience can add to our knowledge of sexuality, but
not if it’s twisted to support sexist ideas about women as “animals” who
are so addicted to love that they become zombies.
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com
. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland
‘s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.
A representation of the four-stranded structure (L) with fluorescent markers revealing its presence inside cells (R)
Prof Shankar Balasubramanian in front of a painting by artist Annie Newman that represents quadruplex DNA
