GVASex
What I love and hate about advances in the medical sciences over the past few decades is the removal of social issues from the moral realm into the biological. Take, as examples, the simple age-old acts of falling in love and becoming sexually attracted to another person. Until Freud came along, the Western world left it to philosophers and the literati to figure out the meaning and root causes of attraction and attractiveness. Since then, the subject has been besieged by theories on attraction from evolutionary psychologists, psychiatrists, cultural anthropologists, and now neurocognitive scientists. So what’s to love about the fact that sex is an intellectual battlefield? From a political standpoint, it changes many things that the moral majority finds reprehensible into something acceptable. In the mid 1990s, the burgeoning research on the biological origins of homosexuality became fantastic ammunition for those of us waging rhetorical wars against those on the religious right who charged that our sexual orientation was a pathological choice. Conversely, this secularization of sex brought up the frightening specter that our sexual attraction might be considered a medical pathology amenable to medical treatment, gene therapy, and even eugenic extinction. In other words, if they find the gene for homosexuality, what’s to stop them from screening pregnant women for it and aborting all of those unwanted gay fetuses? Imagine the tragedy to society’s sense of fashion and taste. Also, many experts in the field of social epidemiology have wondered if finding a biological root for any condition will only lead to ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ focused on the individual. In a sense, these forms of inquiry continue to blame the victim. Instead of asking “what’s the biological cause of homosexuality?” we should ask, “what’s the sociological cause of homophobia?” Enough of the neurotic foreplay. Chuin asked me to write about the biomedical perspective on sexual attraction and addiction, and that’s what you’re getting. We’re going to skip over the purely speculative stuff about why sexual attraction exists on an evolutionary scale. We’re heading right into the firm, hard data that exists on the processes involved in sexual attraction and how this neurocognitive machinery gets sabotaged in the brains of those who develop sexual addiction. Also, we’ll look at how all of this is relevant and unique to gay Asian men living in the U.S. It’ll be quite a stretch, I know. There’s a common phrase out there that “sex is 90% in the brain and 10% in the gonads”. Or something to that effect. Furthermore, the human brain can roughly be divided into two major parts that distinguish it from the brains of other animals: the “old brain” or allocortex, and the “new brain” or neocortex. The new brain is composed of all the parts you’re familiar with in your own mind—the rational thinking part composed of all those memories you can think of and everything subconscious you can’t recall. Emotions, demons, religiosity, creativity, flights of fancy, and that decision to go pick the dyed chartreuse chino over the sensible beige one—all of this happens in this part of the brain. The old brain, to use Camille Paglia’s dated terminology, is the ‘back-brain, the reptilian’ part where all the reflexive stuff we don’t think about gets coordinated. Like breathing, pooing, and wincing with pain. And especially the physical parts of sex. Sexual attraction, then, is a constant interplay between what your new brain sees in the world around it and the excitatory reactions (or reactions of disgust) that your old brain has in response to the new brain. The hypothalamus is a part of the old brain involved in sensations of desire, hunger, lust, excitement, arousal, and satisfaction that bridges the signals from the new brain with the even-lower parts of the body like the gonads. When you watch that hot Japanese bear porn, your hypothalamus is the messenger that tells your heart to race and your penis to get hard. It also sends out hormonal signals that tell the body to make more testosterone. Not surprisingly, the hypothalamus is where Simon LeVay found differences in straight men and gay men in his seminal (pun intended) study in the 1990s. There is a particular part of the old brain involved in memory formation that is linked to pleasure and satiety, which explains why we often remember very exciting times with such clarity. It has been found that this same pleasure center is stimulated in addictions such as nicotine, and its functioning is decreased in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders. This part of the brain may closely link many types of addictions with obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors—it won’t stop its whining until it’s been satiated. Some wacky scientists from the 1960s once made lesions in the brains of cats in this area and found that they would become hypersexual: groups of ten or more cats would form sexual daisy chains and would starve to death because they preferred fucking to eating. What, then, distinguishes run-of-the-mill attraction from sexual addiction? When does a normal state of being make the leap into psychiatric illness? According to the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity (NCSAC), “sexual addicts engage in persistent and escalating patterns of sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self and others.” In its list of addictive sexual behaviors, the NCSAC includes: Compulsive Masturbation, Multiple Affairs, Consistent use of Pornography, Unsafe Sex, Sexual Anorexia, Multiple or Anonymous Partners, Phone, Cybersex, Sexual Massage, Escorts, Prostitutes, and Prostitution. Pretty exciting, no? Does this list of activities describe the behavior of anyone you know? Well it ought to, because well over half the U.S. population has engaged or currently engages in these activities. But in fairness to the NCSAC, they use the criteria for drug addiction in their definition of sexual addiction—things like loss of control over the addicted substance, preoccupation with the addiction, negative social consequences, and loss of normal day-to-day functioning. So it’s not enough to just engage in the behaviors listed above—a person must also lose self-control to the point where it interferes with how they feel about themselves and how they normally function. In fact, the diagnosis of sexual addiction is not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and mostly exists in popular culture and less renowned professional societies. The APA does recognize what are called “paraphilias”, however—compulsive sexual behaviors associated with specific things—such as frotteurism (getting off on rubbing against other people without their permission like on crowded subways), pedophilia (attraction to kids), sadomasochism (S&M), and fetishism (getting off on inanimate objects). In the old brain, serotonin is an important chemical (called a “neurotransmitter”) that is involved in both memory formation and the perception of pleasure. When people take the club drug ecstasy, it artificially stimulates serotonin receptors, giving them a high. The effect of ecstasy on serotonin-containing brain cells probably explains why people who take it have serious problems with short-term memory too. Serotonin receptors are also where anti-depressant drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) act, bringing pleasure back into peoples’ lives but without the kind of brutally forced stimulation of ecstasy. These anti-depressants have been found to be effective at treating sexual addiction where other treatment modalities like psychotherapy have failed. Other things that have been tried include group therapy, which doesn’t work because people just end up sleeping with each other. The constant interaction between the old and new brains as we grow up shapes the brain itself and makes us who we are. People may be born with the biological predisposition to sexual addiction, but reared in the right environment, they can avoid it. Likewise, people who grow up in the wrong environment, such as abusive families or with chemical addictions, tend to develop brains more easily sabotaged into sexual addiction; and indeed addictions tend to occur together. Moreover, it’s been found that a childhood history of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse is significantly more common in those with sexual addiction, pointing to the poorly developed, starved hypothalamic pleasure center as being the predecessor to the needy, hypersexual adult brain. Allow me to hop back on the soapbox as I close up. Many people think (and many of us know) that there are a lot of gay men out there who are sexually precocious and preoccupied. It’s my own theory that repressive, deprived, homophobic cultures actually produce most of the sexual addicts we see in the gay community. Not only are the right-wingers right about gay promiscuity, it’s their own damn fault—and now we have insight into the neurological mechanisms involved in this observation, on top of all the other myriad theoretical explanations. But there’s a lot of neurocultural research that still needs to be done to back this idea up. Moving from the issue of addiction and back into the question of where attraction comes from, we could extend the logic of the previous paragraph to gay Asian and Pacific Islander men. It might not be so far a stretch to explain why there are many GAM in the U.S. who are only attracted to white men (researchers in San Francisco have found that GAM date other GAM only 10-25% of the time—can you believe someone funded that study?). Just as the lack of sexual expression growing up in a straight world can lead to sexual addiction, so can growing up invisible in the mainstream and gay cultures lead a gay API man to become attracted to the oppressive class. This is by no means an indictment of those who end up potato queens. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the social circumstances that lead up to that point where they now exclusively find white men attractive. In the end, just remember that it’s all in your head. And his. And everyone else’s. |
||
sexdoctor > 
|