Will the 21st 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, a reliable predictor of compatability. 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 transgender 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.
(Jillian Tamaki for The Washington Post) - The laws of atttraction.
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 work on sexuality, including the examination of brain chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin; analysis of DNA, genetics and hormones; brain mapping; and animal studies. A fearless and tireless researcher, she sniffed a substance called Boarmate, a packaged aerosol spray of boar androstenone 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 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.
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