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:
Pregnancy, the
ultimate human DNA swapping exercise, is your sex brain's nirvana.
Ah, pregnancy. The mere word makes its mouth water in anticipation.
The promised land of pregnancy. Fertility and pregnancy make it feel
warm and glowy all over.
A common modern
American misconception is that your sex brain is interested in sex.
It's not. It's interested in pregnancy. We'll say it again.
Sex
Brain Feature #2: YOUR SEX BRAIN IS PRIMARILY INTERESTED IN
PREGNANCY.
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.
Sex
Brain Feature #3: What your sex brain actually thinks is that orgasms
lead to pregnancy.