Human Sexuality

• What’s Sexy? is extremely important in understanding relationships.

• Dr. Helen Fisher - Anthropologist

• Lust – the sex drive. The craving for sexual gratification

• To look at a range of partners

• Romantic love – our adoration for the one partner that seems to be all that we seek

• To focus on one partner

• Attachment – the way we develop a secure union with a long term partner

• To tolerate a partner for the nurturing of an offspring

• Evolutionary processes determine attraction. Sexual selection.

• Men are turned on visually. Women are stimulated in the area of character, memory recall.

• Males produce testosterone and females produce estrogen. Hormonal markers for males and females

• Women look for reliability, loyalty, and kindness in men. A woman in love has more blood flowing through the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is associated with memory. Women build a memory map of her mate to see how he stacks up over time to determine if he is going to be reliable.

• Women continually talk to other women recounting what he did or did not do. Status is also a feature women look at.

• How do we choose our partners? Lust, romantic love and attachment come with their own biochemical trigger. Hormonal messengers.

• Lust is driven by the hormone Testosterone. Men produce it in their testes and women produce it in their ovaries. The excitement of lust activates adrenaline. Adrenaline dilates the pupils and they become wider. Intelligence and kindness are the most attractive features in attraction.

• Romantic love fuels our desire for one person. The second stage. This stage is activated at the corde neucleus. Being in love effects the brain in the same way that drugs affect us. Dopamine is the chemical that produces the intense focus on a person or object. Love is compared to an addiction. This stage causes us to want to have sex until one becomes pregnant.

• Can we be faithful to one partner long after the romantic love stage has fizzled out? 97 per cent of all mammals are not monogamous. Real love binds us together but it is in constant conflict w/ lust or desire. Love helps you solidify commitment to a partner. Desire can cause a problem with commitment. Long term attachment is the sense of calm and security you can experience with a long term partner. Oxytocin produces attachment. Oxytocin is released during sexual intercourse. The more sex a couple has with each other the more oxytocin is released and the deeper the bond becomes.

• Vasopressin is released during sexual intercourse and produces a sense of reward for having sex with that person.

• The above is what is working in nearly all relationships. This makes it difficult to break ties with an intimate partner. If the ship is not sinking we tend to stay on board in hopes that things will get better.

• Sexuality What’s Sexy w/ Dr. Helen Fisher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDUW_TTj-p0