sex brain

I'm very interested in my sex brain. What can you tell me about it?

Of course you are. And I can tell you many many things about it.

Your sex brain has many many interesting features, too many to be covered by a simple enterprise like this website (although not to say we won't try eventually!) so we'll start with a basic overview of your sex brain. Which turns out to be surprising enough.

Because in some cases, you already know this stuff about your sex brain and in some cases, you are laboring under profound misconceptions about it. Skip the stuff that doesn't interest you and pay close attention to the stuff that contradicts your previous assumptions. Or alternatively, do whatever the fuck you want.

So let's dive right in with the basics you need to know in understanding your sex brain.

Definitional Note: We are going to be talking here about your Sex Brain, not your Love Brain. Your Love Brain is something different. This has been confusing people for a long time. The Sex Brain and the Love Brain are neighbors and close relatives and people very often get them mixed up and can't tell the difference between them. This is partly because the Sex Brain and the Love Brain make use of the same Bodily Equipment and both advocate for various activities we like to call, here at the pretty fucked up website, sex.

It generally seems more convenient and manageable when the Brains agree on things, but often they don't. The Sex Brain and the Love Brain do have different functions and different opinions on things and for the purposes of clarity and long-windedness, we are going to separate them out into the two different entities they are.

The relationship between these two Brains is quite complicated and being that they are close, they do influence each other quite a bit. This gets particularly confusing when they have a disagreement about a particular Other Person and you find yourself having sex with someone you don't love or loving someone you don't want to have sex with. Or starting out wanting to have sex with someone, then accidentally falling in love with them, then with some difficulty establishing a satisfactory relationship with them, and finally suddenly realizing that you don't feel like having sex with them anymore! This can seem pretty darn inconvenient but we will explain it all for you. Eventually.

And we'll start with the Sex Brain. Not the Sex Equipment, which can be found dispersed throughout your body in the form of nerve endings and so on, but the Sex Brain. Because here at the pretty fucked up website, we are just experts on it. Okay, we'll start with Sex Brain Feature #1.

Sex Brain Feature #1: It's very very old.

In evolutionary terms, that is. And that is the context we are going to deal with because here at prettyfedup.com we love evolution because it does such strange and wonderful things. If you are a Christian creationist, everything I say here is going to piss you off - so be sure to read it all to get maximum value for your pissed off dollar!

So way back when, a long time ago, evolution was screwing with things, as it likes to do, and it came up with the idea of enticing organisms to swap DNA and produce new little itty bitty organisms with a variant genotype from their two parents. This turned out to be a great idea! For two reasons - it enhanced the survival ratio of the organisms that tried it, and it gave evolution more material to fuck around with - which is evolution's basic job. And thus sexual reproduction was born and eventually became the very very popular feature of organic life we all know and love.

Not all organisms use sex to reproduce (losers!) but the idea was successful enough that it really caught on and now all your really sophisticated organisms swear by it.

Since swapping DNA with some other shady-looking organism of your own species generally produces more benefits to the offspring than to the parent (it's not like your DNA gets spiffed up during the swapping process, you're pretty much stuck with what you've already got), the need was formed to somehow entice organisms into doing something that otherwise made no fucking sense whatsoever. And thus the first rudimentary sex brain was born. Since the basic model was simple and worked so well (swap DNA you silly organism, swap I tell you, swap!), evolution basically made some customizations to fit the various organisms it had to deal with and left it at that.

Technical Note: Not all organisms bother with a brain during this process, in fact not every organism bothers to produce a brain at all and so perhaps it's more accurate to call it a sex drive or a sex instinct. But we're not going to call it that because in your case, evolution stuffed a fair amount of the necessary stuff to make the process work into your brain, which was otherwise just laying around being big and taking up space. So it crammed some necessary sex stuff in there and let it go at that. And since this procedure proved to work remarkably well, evolution has left your sex brain alone and hasn't really upgraded it for oh I don't know, a couple of hundred thousand years give or take a whole bunch of years.

So what you've presumably got is a 200,000 year old basic Sex Brain - Human Model. Although I suppose some of your acquaintances may occasionally wonder whether you actually got something else instead. But that's another topic.

Well, what difference does it make how old my sex brain is?? Evolutionarily speaking, I mean.

None whatsoever. Except to explain why your Social Brain and indeed Society in general is completely baffled by it. Comparatively speaking your Social Brain is the new kid on the block. And in general, it's completely bewildered by the entire existence of the sex brain, which often seems to pop up and get active at the most socially inconvenient times and then suddenly decide to take a snooze right when you are counting on it to perform some impressive tricks and wow the ladies.

Annoying your Social Brain doesn't bother your sex brain in the least, in fact, it's sometimes barely aware of your Social Brain at all, except as a hindrance. Or to put it more bluntly, your sex brain doesn't give a flying fuck what your Social Brain thinks about anything. What your sex brain cares about is:

However, you, being the observant little sucker you are, have probably noticed that your particular sex brain seems to be very very interested in certain activities that don't directly lead to pregnancy. Some of these non-pregnancy causing activities are among your very favorite activities in the whole world. You have a special fondness for them. And your sex brain seems quite enthusiastic about them as well.

So this raises the question, if your sex brain is primarily interested in pregnancy, why does it give such a big thumbs up to something reproductively useless like a blow job? For that matter, why is the human sex brain so enthusiastic about getting itself mixed up in a whole huge range of things, many of which not only don't cause pregnancy, they are just plain fucking weird?

There is an answer to this question - and the answer is that your sex brain is not very bright. Many of you have long suspected this, due to certain experiences with your own sex brain, and we are just here to scientifically confirm your deep-rooted suspicion.

You see, the basic evolutionary model sex brain got plunked directly into your head without much customization or upgrading to take into account that you are a human being and not a sea slug. There was some upgrading to make the wiring compatible, but not as much as you'd think. The result of this is that your sex brain doesn't actually understand the mechanics of how pregnancy occurs. Think about this. This is not something that people are born knowing. They figure it out - give us credit for that - but this is not something that just naturally makes sense to us. Eating, that we can all figure out, infants can open their mouths from minute one. Blinking and sleeping - no brainers. Breathing - another easy one. How sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy - that's a stretch. In fact, the mechanics not only don't make intuitive sense to us until we get the hang of them, they seem downright ridiculous to the average intelligent three year old. Which leads us to Sex Brain Feature #3.

Sudden Terminology Note: When we talk about 'getting pregnant' here, I am talking about either sex. Although many people have noted that in human beings, women get pregnant and men don't - in the context of the sex brain, that's irrelevant. The sex brain thinks it's getting You pregnant - since it doesn't know the mechanics, it doesn't care whether that's physically true or not. All it cares about is that you are reproducing. So when a male sex brain does what it thinks is a good job of causing pregnancy it thinks 'I'm pregnant! Yes!' or sometimes 'We're pregnant! Yes!' Now on to Feature #3.

prettyfedup.com

the pretty fucked up website

The Not 100% Complete FAQs for the Pretty Fucked Up Person in a Pretty Fucked Up World

Sex Brain 101