Feb 17, 2012 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS STRAIGHT: The Surprisingly Short History of HeterosexualityHanne Blank
Beacon
ISBN 978-0807044438
228 pages
$26.95
HOW WE LOVE NOW: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second AdulthoodSuzanne Braun Levine
Viking
ISBN 978-0670023226
260 pages
$25.95
DIRTY MINDS: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and RelationshipsKayt Sukel
Free Press
ISBN 978-1451611557
270 pages
$25
Reviewed by Elaine Showalter
Will the century change the ways we think about sexual orientation, romantic attraction, love and fidelity? Our sources of information and solace have certainly changed, as science writer Kayt Sukel points out: "Instead of Mom's shoulder, Freud's couch, or the pastor's office, we now look for answers in genetic profiles and brain scanners." But science has yet to come up with matchmaking formulas that would make online dating, or The Washington Post's Date Lab, reliable predictors of compatibility. Science hasn't been able to identify a gay gene or, for that matter, a straight gene; it can't outdo Mom, Freud or the pastor in explaining transgendered people. After Chaz Bono became a celebrity on "Dancing with the Stars," he dumped the girlfriend who had stuck by him through years of his surgical and hormonal change from female to male - strong evidence to me that the operations were successful, but nothing that would show up in a brain scan. We know that technology has changed the way young people find partners, but is it also changing the rules for older men and women? These three books offer both scientific and anecdotal takes on the way we love now.
Despite its tacky title, Sukel's "Dirty Minds" is a serious, informative and highly entertaining survey of the neurobiology of sexual attraction. Sukel consulted a number of outstanding neuroscientists in the United States and abroad about their ongoing work on sexuality, including the examination of brain chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin, analysis of DNA, genetics and hormones; brain-mapping; and animal studies. A fearless as well as tireless researcher, she sniffed a substance called Boarmate, a packaged aerosol spray of boar androsterone used to arouse the desires of female pigs, and then tested it on her unaroused and indignant cat. She participated in a neuroimaging experiment on female sexual desire by having an MRI of her brain performed at a laboratory in New Jersey while she masturbated. When her first orgasm was too brief for good scientific results, Sukel cheerfully tried again, and achieved "great length and latency" the second time around.
But not all women are so willing and able to participate in scientific research on sexual response. Much of the scientific data comes from anonymous surveys, while monkeys and other animals stand in for human subjects in laboratory studies. The lab stars of Sukel's book are the prairie voles, North American rodents who are among the 3 percent of monogamous animal species. Some neuroscientists speculate that the prairie vole may be faithful because of the highly pleasurable brain chemical dopamine, "released after the initial mating session." But before we rush to market dopamine, Sukel cautions, we should note that these "uber-monogamous rodents" are also the lying rats of the laboratory world. Although they stay with one partner for a lifetime, "both the males and the females are still getting a little on the side"; about 20 percent of their offspring have fathers who are not the bonded male. Even for a vole, biology is not destiny. "Hormones are not absolute regulators of behavior," Sukel quotes a scientist as saying, and human beings are far more complex, individual, changeable and affected by their environment than animals.
Sukel concludes that neuroscience does not offer solutions, certainties or advice to the lovelorn. It can't predict which potential partners will attract us or prescribe the determinants of their fidelity. But she also takes comfort from the idea that "there is no 'right' way to approach relationships, no one 'right' partner for me. ... There's already enough pressure involved in the search for love, thank you very much."
Hanne Blank is a historian who in her new book, "Straight," approaches the question of sexual orientation through studying the emergence of "heterosexuality" as a concept. The creation of a term and a category for what had previously been thought universal and natural depended on the creation of the category of "homosexuality" in the late 19th century. Blank takes a skeptical look at the efforts of medicine and science to define what is normal or legitimate in sexual expression. Her historical survey is more academic than Sukel's lively account of neuroscience, but she is often witty in her defamiliarization of the heterosexual. "No one knows," she writes," whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals." Using her own marriage to a man with a sex-chromosome anomaly as an example, Blank argues that sexuality is too complex, variable and manifold to be contained within a simple binary framework.
Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. magazine, is the most breezy and confident of these three writers. The author of two previous books on what she calls "Second Adulthood," a creative life stage for women between 50 and 75, in "How We Love Now" Levine turns her attention to the re-invention of intimacy in older women's lives. Based on interviews with women and responses to a questionnaire she posted on a website, she believes that fulfilling relationships of all kinds are characteristic of the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood, and that they are largely facilitated by the Internet. "In cyberspace, "she writes ecstatically, "we meet, we find, we experiment, we play, we pretend, we reach out, we care for, we share, we tell the truth, we try on personalties, we maintain intimacy, we establish intimacy."
It's nice to think that older women can have such a great time on the Internet, instead of waiting by the phone for a call that doesn't come. But I wouldn't count on it. For new insights into intimacy, love and sexuality, science has more to teach us, even if we may not like the answers. "There's no clever playbook for navigating love's messier situations," Sukel cautions. But neuroscience does have one piece of advice. To find your best match, you have to "up your N," that is, increase the size of your friendship sample. Or as Mom might say, kiss a lot of frogs.
Elaine Showalter, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, has written extensively on gender and science.
Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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