Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  Sex differences in masturbation have been investigated by scientists. In 1974 sex researchers Ibtihaj Arafat and Wayne Cotton found considerable disparity between male and female students, with the former being much more likely to masturbate, and to masturbate about three times more frequently. But interestingly, they also discovered women were twice as likely as men to be depressed after touching themselves.

  This could be cultural rather than physiological, especially if there is more of a taboo around women touching themselves. A study of US teens published in 2010 found that more boys reported masturbation than girls (73.8 vs 48.1 per cent) and also found marked racial differences in frequency, which could reflect the effects of culture, religion, family guilt. Oh, my favourite thing is about Catholic priests: it’s against the rules for them to masturbate, yet psychotherapist Richard Sipe discovered through probing interviews that of course they do. And yet again there was a sex difference. He reported that priests masturbated more than nuns. I mention this because while multiple studies find there are cultural differences in the frequency of male masturbation, the frequency of female masturbation is reliably lower.

  So does that prove men have a higher sex drive than women? I HATE this assumption. I hate it because I feel like it’s not representative of individual difference, that it minimises female sexuality. But it’s undeniable that there is a divergence. And maybe it’s the fault of a hormone that we’ve not really explored yet. Testosterone.

  * Obviously all death obliterates life. I mean his type of death overshadows, that’s the word I should have used.

  Testosterone

  It gets referred to as ‘the male hormone’ but all bodies have it. In the female body it’s made in the ovaries (indoor testicles) and the adrenal glands. In male bodies it’s produced by the adrenal glands and the testes.

  *TED talk voice* It’s a 19-carbon steroid hormone made from cholesterol and it’s largely responsible for the creation of what we consider ‘male’ attributes. During adolescence testosterone production ramps up to endow the male body with heightened sex characteristics. These include a deeper voice, facial hair, increased body hair, pubic hair, broadening of shoulders and face, and maturation of penis and testicles, becoming ready for reproduction. The body also becomes stronger as testosterone assists the building of bones and muscles. Male testosterone peaks in the late teens and begins to dwindle after the age of thirty.

  That’s why teenagers wank all the time?

  I’ve never been a teenage boy, I don’t know how it feels to have peak testosterone, but there are many pop-cultural representations of this being a very ‘tossing off into a sock’ time of life. And maybe apple pie if American movies are to be believed. ‘Liver in a stiletto shoe’, according to an unforgettable Buzzfeed article I read.

  In men and women testosterone has been proven to promote sex drive. When it dwindles people find their libido decreases. There are illuminating descriptions from people transitioning. Male-to-female (MTF) people having testosterone (T) blockers describe feeling deadened, losing some spark and magic. And the opposite: I read blog posts from a female-to-male person who was aghast at how he was staring at and ogling women in the street all the time with the heightened sexual effects of T injections.

  The male body produces about twenty times more testosterone than the female body. Due to the faster male metabolism, this results in a blood testosterone level that is seven or eight times higher than women’s. But because the female foetus does not receive as much testosterone in utero, our bodies and brains remain much more sensitive to it, so a sharp rise will have a large effect. Women will notice a difference in their libido over the menstrual cycle partly due to peaking testosterone (although, bizarrely, this usually occurs after the peak of fertility).

  When it comes to sex hormones, trans people are the Rosetta Stone, the only ones who have felt both levels of testosterone and who can compare its effect on arousal and desire. Us cis-genders cannot experience the libido of the other side, but it’s utterly compelling to imagine. I’m sure you know the Greek myth of Tiresias. He was a shepherd’s son who was out on a walk one day when he saw two snakes copulating. He hit them with a stick, we don’t know why – jealousy? Boredom? Either way, Hera, goddess of women and marriage, saw him and it pissed her off. She struck him down with a sex change and Tiresias lived as a woman for seven years. During this time Hera was having an argument with her husband Zeus (the god who dresses up as a swan to rape people*) about who enjoys sex more, men or women. Do you have this kind of row with your partner? I think it’s a sign that your lover’s finding you selfish in bed when they start saying ‘You’re enjoying this more than me.’ Either way, Tiresias’s answer, having experienced intercourse in a male and a female body, was that men got only one tenth of the pleasure that women received. Rather than being pleased at being the ten-times-better-sex sex, Hera struck Tiresias blind in her fury. A bit like me when the results of a study don’t reflect my opinion.

  We discussed the Clark and Hatfield campus study before, and how the female students showed no interest in stranger sex, which I put down to the necessity of assessing danger rather than a reflection of low sex drive. The website Ashley Madison provided an unwitting insight into men’s and women’s sex lives on a more level playing field.

  You may remember this being in the press back in 2015. Ashley Madison is a dating site for married people which was hacked – IDEAL for those of us interested in social study and terrible for those trying to have some spicy affairs in secret. The hack revealed the names of the site’s users and the fact that Ashley Madison had been lying about how many women there were. Half of the ladies chatting away were actually bots – only 14 per cent of the genuine profiles belonged to women. That means 86 per cent of the real profiles were male, which is quite the imbalance. Online messaging is a lot safer than going home with a guy you meet in a car park – you can screen those you chat to and there is no obligation to meet in person – yet it appears almost all those inquisitive about extramarital sex on this forum were male.

  How do we resolve this? We know, evolutionarily speaking, that extramarital affairs can benefit both sexes: males may have more offspring, females can find better genetic qualities and variation for theirs. We also understand that for females there are risks involved in meeting new men/strangers. They may also have more to lose if caught ‘cheating’. From an evolutionary perspective, a female losing a male partner due to her infidelity would become vulnerable, her offspring less likely to survive and pass on her genes. Though we’re all Strong Independent Women in the modern world, this may be echoed by our cautious behaviour.

  Unintentional experiments like the Ashley Madison data breach make it seem that while some women are philanderers, they are far less numerous than the male equivalent.

  Is that fair?

  It allows for the individual – some women enjoy multi-partnering – but makes it less of a female trait in general. Could this be related to testosterone level? As well as influencing sex drive, this hormone has been proved in studies to be related to risk-taking behaviours. Heightened testosterone in adults and adolescents has been linked to reduced fear and lower sensitivity to punishment. That’s why teenaged boys can be such daredevils – they’re swimming in testosterone, while their brain has not fully matured to evaluate danger.

  Testosterone plays an important role in human interaction. It can make a person more domineering, more fearless. It’s easy to comprehend how such traits would have been beneficial to ancestral Homo sapiens. No leap in imagination is required to fathom that when living tribally, being in charge would have meant better quality of life. It makes absolute sense that being respected would result in security and safety. Testosterone is a biological component underlying power, and POWER† is a social dynamic we’ll be paying more attention to from here on in.

  The most fascinating study I read on testosterone was on the brain’s reward system, the dopamine pathway that we discussed earlier. At
the University of Cambridge, Michael Lombardo and colleagues tested the level of foetal testosterone in twenty-five boys, then gave them fMRI scans later in childhood. They found that the boys who had been subject to raised testosterone in the womb had an increased sensitivity in their brain’s reward system later on. If the dopamine pathway motivates all animals towards the rewards that will benefit them, this study is evidence that heightened testosterone develops a brain that is EVEN MORE AWARE – which would have an evolutionary benefit.

  But it might have a modern-day disadvantage. The dopamine pathway is linked to addictive behaviours. Having a more sensitive, goal-orientated brain may have helped our ancient ancestors forage longer, but might now lead to destructive, compulsive behaviours – like Joji enclosed and ultimately flattened by his porn collection.

  The reason I find this intriguing is that stress can affect the testosterone levels of a pregnant woman. From a biological perspective, this makes perfect sense – a stressed mother indicates the environment is dangerous or difficult to navigate. Those stressors create hormones within her body that affect how her baby develops, preparing them for a more precarious life by making extra certain they’ll be driven by rewards.

  STRESSED MUMS MAKE PORN ADDICTS.

  Before you go writing headlines please remember that hormones and genes never predict behaviour; rather they interact with the environment to have an effect on us. An effect that may well be negligible. We are considering these biological attributes not as blueprints that build us, but as interesting considerations. A perspective rather than an answer.

  I struggle with the idea that a loading of testosterone creates imbalance between males’ and females’ desire for sex and risk-taking behaviours because the maths doesn’t make sense. If 86 per cent of affair-seekers are heterosexual males, who will they all have sex with? The 14 per cent that are women cannot get around them all, as hard as they might try. Nature has made a silly mistake? Or was this over-enthusiasm of the male necessary for sexual success?

  I believe it is worth considering the pressures of social conditioning on sexual expression. I would argue that women have been the victims of social and moral obstructions to their sexuality for centuries because of paternity certainty, and this contributes to the numerical imbalance in studies of affairs and masturbation. But while male sexuality may not have encountered the same stigma and suppression, while the cad and philanderer have been tolerated and celebrated, men have had their share of anti-masturbatory taboos in western culture.

  * The legal department had no problem with me saying this even though Zeus is far more likely to strike me down than Richard Branson.

  † You remember, from the title.

  Anti-Fap

  Let’s start with all the old wives’ tales that wanking will make you go blind, wanking will give you hairy palms, wanking leads to shrivelled, pale, wasted lads with no energy, confined to their bedroom. There’s a whole heap of propaganda we’ve all absorbed without really noticing. Did you know cornflakes were invented as a way of quelling masturbatory urges?

  Is that why there’s a cock on the box?

  LOL. John Harvey Kellogg was an American doctor who believed abstinence necessary for health. Kellogg thought exciting foods got people all stimulated and worked up, and that tasteless food was the antidote. He also advocated cutting into penises to prevent erections and putting carbolic acid on clitorises, so a legacy of boring breakfast is the least of his crimes.

  The Christian church has a long history of inducing guilt and shame for natural bodily impulses. The word ‘onanism’ for masturbation comes from Onan in the Bible.* He is a minor character who appears in Genesis and gets killed by God because he spilled his semen on the floor (to be fair, he was trying not to get his sister-in-law pregnant). Any kind of ‘wasting’ of ‘seed’ has been interpreted by theologians as sinful. Masturbation is warned of as ‘self-abuse’ and a sin against the body. The Bible’s main character, Jesus, tells people they mustn’t have lusty thoughts, and his disciple Matthew says that adultery, one of the top ten sins, includes looking at a woman lustfully.

  So porn is adultery?

  Yes, if you’re married to Matthew. I want to flag now, although it should have been stressed two thousand years ago, that what Jesus and Matt are preaching is impossible. The more you try not to think about sex, the more you’ll think about it. Same with anything. Obsessing about NOT LOOKING actually makes it a lot harder not to look. Perhaps this is the root of all the guilt created by religions, we’re doomed to failure.

  The modern incarnation of the anti-masturbation movement is the NoFappers. ‘Fap’ is a slang term, an onomatopoeic description of a man’s fist moving quickly up and down his penis. NoFappers are a wide community of men who have ‘given up’ porn and masturbation because of the negative effects they felt it was having on their lives. On the NoFap website or Reddit threads these symptoms are said to include poor concentration, insecurity, depression, general malaise and inability to connect with others, as well as sexual problems, being scared of women and unable to get an erection in ‘real’ life. It’s immediately clear that for some people the amount of time spent watching porn and masturbating was a problem in itself – if you’re masturbating for five or six hours a day, where is the room for anything else?

  I must add that porn and ‘fapping’ seem inextricably linked. I have looked through as many threads as I could stomach, searching for anyone masturbating a lot who didn’t use porn, and couldn’t find anyone. There were no guys saying, ‘My imagination is out of control, I can’t help picturing sexy scenarios.’ They all used porn. They all blame porn for the compulsion. The visual aspect of male sexuality is a vital element for us to now consider.

  * Aka ‘My name is God and this is My Story.’

  Making Eyes

  Visual stimuli and arousal are undoubtedly connected, so let’s think about the eye for a moment. Like the wings of birds, eyes have been used as evidence of ‘Intelligent Design’. The logic narrative of Intelligent Design claims that the mechanics of living things are far too clever and intricately made to have been thrown together by a random process of cell mutations. Some complete genius must have planned us and put all the bits and pieces together. Someone called God.*

  For Intelligent Design theorists, the most persuasive evidence against evolution is eyes and wings. How can they evolve gradually? You either have them and can see and fly, or you don’t and can’t. What use is some wing? What you gonna do with a bit of eye? You’re not making any sense, evolution, get out and take your scrawny half-wings with you.†

  If you fancy swinging by Fact Town (population: most of us), here we know that the eye did evolve gradually. Beginning with a single light-responsive cell, growing to a patch of cells, eyes have evolved unrelatedly in over fifty distinct ways in very different animals and insects.

  Our eyes and the act of seeing are about much more than processing light. There is deep interplay with the brain. What we see will affect our emotions, our sense of safety and sometimes our level of arousal. When I first learned about the senses at school, I considered all this passing of information as being very superficial, e.g. the eye ‘looks’ and can ‘see’ a red rectangley thing. A messenger runs from the eyeball into the brain and shouts at all the brain, ‘Anyone want a red rectangle?’ And the memory says, ‘I remember that thing, it’s my school blazer!’ Then the brain sends a messenger down to the hand telling it to pick up the blazer … you get the idea, and that idea is oversimplified.

  Now I’ve learned more about the brain and the different ways it controls our bodily processes, I understand that a human being is an instinctual animal inside a conscious animal. Fear and arousal is not just a great band name, they predispose our deepest, most subconscious emotional needs.

  Here’s an example of this at work, something universal that’ll surely have happened to you unless you’re a robot. In a dark room have you ever seen something human-shaped and jolted with fear?
/>   Yes

  I have an instruction manual and no feelings

  This startle response is easily triggered because our brains do not wait to have all the information before alerting our fight-or-flight circuitry. The visual cortex registers any abnormality as possible danger and, rather than waiting for our conscious mind to ascertain if it’s an intruder or Henry the Hoover with a hat on, we react. Our glands provide the adrenaline we’d need in a worst-case scenario. Sugar is released from our cells to fuel fleeing or defending ourselves. This startle response might seem a touch histrionic, but it kept our ancient ancestors alive. Anyone dopey perished; their reactions were too slow. The shadow became a hungry wolf. The strange face wasn’t Henry, it was the girl from The Ring, and now you can’t continue your genes because she’s eaten them.

  Human beings have physiological reactions that bypass our rational selves.

  Sexual arousal can be like that fear response. We don’t consciously command it. We don’t see things we intellectually recognise as sexy and instruct our genitals to react appropriately: ‘Quickly, there’s Nelly Furtado, get a boner!’ The slightest shadow of sexual suggestion can send blood to the genitals. Studies show that vaginas lubricate and penises engorge in response to many things, even when we have no conscious desire to have sex. You may not need a scientist to tell you this, you may have noticed from your own experience of having a penis or a vulva and vagina that they have a life of their own. Twitching, saluting and responding to the world and people around you in a very different rhythm to your sane self. Like a sleeping dog raising his ear to a distant noise, ‘Hello?’ says our body. ‘What’s this?’ ‘This’ for me today was an old man on the tube wearing the same aftershave as my ex. *puking emoji*