Expert answer:NORMAL vs DEVIANT SEXUALITY/SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
Solved by verified expert:Writing Assignment: Normal vs. Deviant Sexuality/Sexual BehaviorWriting Assignment – Normal vs. Deviant Sexuality/Sexual Behavior(from Module 3 materials) – Worth 16 total pointsThis assignment is worth 16 points or 16% of your final grade. BOOK USED UNDERSTANDING HUMAN SEXUALITY TWELTH EDITION
Instructions:Answer each of the following four (4) questions in your own words. Each response should be in the form of a cogent argument. We are interested in your opinion on each topic below, supported with examples from the readings and lectures. Please use complete sentences and limit your answers to one paragraph ( approximately 8 sentences, or half a page). If you refer to a course reading, please cite the author, year, and page number (e.g., Hyde and DeLamater 2010:56). Be sure to cite any exact quotes in quotation marks. If you refer to a lecture, please cite the lecture title and slide (e.g., Sexual Behavior Lecture: Slide 4) . Please use only the course materials in Module 3. Do not use outside sources to complete this assignment. To understand how your assignment will be graded, please see the grading rubric provided below. Your essay should be 2 pages in length. Use font size 12 and 1 inch margins.
Question 1:Discuss the differences between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ sexual behavior. What makes an act or practice ‘deviant’? Does labeling something ‘deviant’ only make sense in comparison to what is normal?Question 2: Why do certain acts seem to be ‘deviant’ in some societies but ‘normal’ in others, and why do other acts seem to be universally ‘deviant’?Question 3:Describe three types of perspectives (i.e., statistical, sociological, psychological, medical, anthropological) used to understand what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘deviant’.Question 4: Is one of the perspectives you described above in Question 3 better than the others, or are multiple perspectives required?
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A p r i l /M ay 2 0 0 8
P E T E R T U R N E R G e t t y I m a g e s ( s i l h o u e t t e o f h e a d ) ; A LT R E N D O I M AG E S / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( f i r e w o r k s )
The
Achieving sexual
climax requires
a complex
conspiracy of
sensory and
psychological
signals—and
the eventual
silencing of critical
brain areas
Orgasmic
g
Mind
By Martin Portner
S
he did not often have such
strong emotions. But she
suddenly felt powerless
against her passion and
the desire to throw herself
into the arms of the cousin
whom she saw at a family
funeral. “It can only be because of that
patch,” said Marianne, a participant in
a multinational trial of a testosterone
patch designed to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder, in which a woman
is devoid of libido. Testosterone, a hormone ordinarily produced by the ovaries, is linked to female sexual function,
w w w. S c i A m M i n d . c o m
and the women in this 2005 study had
undergone operations to remove their
ovaries.
After 12 weeks of the trial, Marianne had felt her sexual desire return.
Touching herself unleashed erotic sensations and vivid sexual fantasies. Eventually she could make love to her husband again and experienced an orgasm
for the first time in almost three years.
But that improvement was not because
of testosterone, it turned out. Marianne
was among the half of the women who
had received a placebo patch— with no
testosterone in it at all.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND
67
Biologist Alfred
Kinsey shocked
the public more
than half a
century ago with
his revelations
about human
sexual behavior.
FAST FACTS
Principles of Pleasure
1>>
2>>
Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls
the sex glands and genitals.
The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising
similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in
women, as they do in men.
3>>
Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power
failure in females.
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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND
creates an incentive to seek more sexual encounters, with clear benefits for the survival of the species. When the drive for sex dissipates, as it did
with Marianne, people can reignite the spark with
tactics that target the mind.
Sex in Circles
Biologists identified sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone in the 1920s and 1930s,
and the first studies of human sexuality appeared
in the 1940s. In 1948 biologist Alfred Kinsey of
Indiana University introduced his fi rst report on
human sexual practices, Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male, which was followed, in 1953, by
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These
highly controversial books opened up a new dialogue about human sexuality. They not only
broached topics — such as masturbation, homosexuality and orgasm— that many people considered taboo but also revealed the surprising frequency with which people were coupling and engaging in sexual relations of countless varieties.
Kinsey thus debuted sex as a science, paving
the way for others to dig below statistics into the
realm of biology. In 1966 gynecologist William
Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson— who
originally hailed from Washington University before founding their own research institute in St.
Louis — described for the first time the sexual response cycle (how the body responds to sexual
stimulation), based on observations of 382 women
and 312 men undergoing some 10,000 such cycles.
The cycle begins with excitation, as blood rushes
to the penis in men, and as the clitoris, vulva and
vagina enlarge and grow moist in women. Gradually, people reach a plateau, in which they are fully aroused but not yet at orgasm. After reaching
orgasm, they enter the resolution phase, in which
the tissues return to the preexcitation stage.
In the 1970s psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan
of the Human Sexuality Program at Weill Medical
College of Cornell University added a critical element to this cycle — desire — based on her experience as a sex therapist. In her three-stage model,
desire precedes sexual excitation, which is then
followed by orgasm. Because desire is mainly psychological, Kaplan emphasized the importance of
the mind in the sexual experience and the destructive forces of anxiety, defensiveness and failure of
communication.
In the late 1980s gynecologist Rosemary Basson of the University of British Columbia proposed a more circular sexual cycle, which, despite
the term, had been described as a largely linear
progression in previous work. Basson suggested
A p r i l /M ay 2 0 0 8
G E T T Y I M AG E S
Marianne’s experience underlines the complexity of sexual arousal. Far from being a simple
issue of hormones, sexual desire and orgasm are
subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and
genitals. And many of those influences are environmental. Recent research, for example, shows
that visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women,
as they do in men. Marianne’s desire may have
been invigorated by conversations or thoughts
about sex she had as a result of taking part in the
trial. Such stimuli may help relieve inhibitions or
simply whet a person’s appetite for sex.
Achieving orgasm, brain-imaging studies
show, involves more than heightened arousal. It
requires a release of inhibitions and control in
which the brain’s center of vigilance shuts down in
males; in females, various areas of the brain involved in controlling thoughts and emotions become silent. The brain’s pleasure centers tend to
light up brightly in the brain scans of both sexes,
especially in those of males. The reward system
Simple sensations and more complex mental processes
probably contribute to orgasm in both sexes.
that desire might both lead to genital stimulation
and be invigorated by it. Countering the idea that
orgasm is the pinnacle of the experience, she
placed it as a mere spot on the circle, asserting that
a person could feel sexually satisfied at any of the
stages leading up to an orgasm, which thus does
not have to be the ultimate goal of sexual activity.
JAMIE GRILL Get t y Images
Dissecting Desire
Given the importance of desire in this cycle, researchers have long wanted to identify its key ingredients. Conventional wisdom casts the male
triggers in simplistic sensory terms, with tactile
and visual stimuli being particularly enticing. Men
are drawn to visual erotica, explaining the lure of
magazines such as Playboy. Meanwhile female desire is supposedly fueled by a richer cognitive and
emotional texture. “Women experience desire as
a result of the context in which they are inserted—
whether they feel comfortable with themselves and
the partner, feel safe and perceive a true bond with
the partner,” opines urologist Jennifer Berman of
the Female Sexual Medicine Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Yet sexual imagery devoid of emotional connections can arouse women just as it can men, a
2007 study shows. Psychologist Meredith Chivers
of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in
Toronto and her colleagues gauged the degree of
sexual arousal in about 100 women and men,
both homosexual and heterosexual, while they
watched erotic film clips. The clips depicted samesex intercourse, solitary masturbation or nude
exercise— performed by men and women— as well
as male-female intercourse and mating between
bonobos (close ape relatives of the chimpanzee).
The researchers found that although nude exercise genitally aroused all the onlookers the least
and intercourse excited them the most, the type
of actor was more important for the men than for
the women. Heterosexual women’s level of arousal increased along with the intensity of the sexual
activity largely irrespective of who or what was
engaged in it. In fact, these women were genitally
excited by male and female actors equally and
also responded physically to bonobo copulation.
(Gay women, however, were more particular;
they did not react sexually to men masturbating
or exercising naked.)
The men, by contrast, were physically titillated
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mainly by their preferred category of sexual partner— that is, females for straight men and males
for gay men— and were not excited by bonobo
copulation. The results, the researchers say, suggest that women are not only aroused by a variety
of types of sexual imagery but are more flexible
than men in their sexual interests and preferences.
When it comes to orgasm, simple sensations
as well as higher-level mental processes probably
also play a role in both sexes. Although Kinsey
characterized orgasm in purely physical terms,
psychologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutgers University has defined the experience as more multifaceted. In their book The Science of Orgasm
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Komisaruk, endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores of the
Tlaxcala Laboratory in Mexico and Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple describe orgasm as maximal excitation generated by a gradual summing
of responses from the body’s sensory receptors,
combined with complex cognitive and emotional
forces. Similarly, psychologist Kent Berridge of
Like men, women
can be aroused by
visual stimuli.
(The Author)
MARTIN PORTNER is a neurologist living in Brazil. He is author of Inteligência Sexual (Sexual Intelligence, Editora Gente, 1999). He lectures and
leads workshops on the brain and creativity.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND
69
During ejaculation, neural activity declines in the
amygdala (red region), the brain’s
seat of vigilance —
an apparent sign
that men are momentarily throwing caution to the
wind. In females,
various regions of
the brain, including the amygdala,
virtually shut
down at orgasm.
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has described sexual pleasure as a kind of “gloss” that
the brain’s emotional hub, the limbic system, applies over the primary sensations.
The relative weights of sensory and emotional
influences on orgasm may differ between the sexes, perhaps because of its diverging evolutionary
origins. Orgasm in men is directly tied to repro-
comparable to that induced by heroin. “Because
ejaculation introduces sperm into the female reproductive tract, it would be critical for reproduction of the species to favor ejaculation as a most
rewarding behavior,” the researchers wrote in
2003 in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The scientists also saw heightened activity in
brain regions involved in memory-related imagery
and in vision itself, perhaps because the volunteers
used visual imagery to hasten orgasm. The anterior part of the cerebellum also switched into high
gear. The cerebellum has long been labeled the coordinator of motor behaviors but has more recently revealed its role in emotional processing. Thus,
the cerebellum could be the seat of the emotional
components of orgasm in men, perhaps helping
to coordinate those emotions with planned behaviors. The amygdala, the brain’s center of vigilance and sometimes fear, showed a decline in
activity at ejaculation, a probable sign of decreasing vigilance during sexual performance.
To fi nd out whether orgasm looks similar in
the female brain, Holstege’s team asked the male
partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s
clitoris — the site whose excitation most easily
duction through ejaculation, whereas female orgasm has a less obvious evolutionary role. Orgasm in a woman might physically aid in the retention of sperm, or it may play a subtler social
function, such as facilitating bonding with her
mate. If female orgasm evolved primarily for social reasons, it might elicit more complex thoughts
and feelings in women than it does in men.
Forgetting Fear
But does it? Researchers are trying to crack
this riddle by probing changes in brain activity
during orgasm in both men and women. Neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues attempted to solve the male side of the equation by
asking the female partners of 11 men to stimulate
their partner’s penis until he ejaculated while they
scanned his brain using positron-emission tomography (PET). During ejaculation, the researchers
saw extraordinary activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a major hub of the brain’s reward circuitry; the intensity of this response is
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leads to orgasm — until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team
reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led
to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that
part of the body and in describing a body sensation— for instance, labeling it “sexual.”
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain
went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat
in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may
govern self-control over basic desires such as sex.
Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest,
might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation
in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has
an apparent role in moral reasoning and social
judgment— a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that
seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their
A p r i l /M ay 2 0 0 8
HANK MORGAN SPL/Photo Researchers, Inc.
When a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected
happened: much of her brain went silent.
female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need
to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to
have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see
it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege
says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm,
women do not have any emotional feelings.”
But that lack of emotion may not apply to all
orgasms in women. Komisaruk, Whipple and their
colleagues studied the patterns of brain activation
that occur during orgasm in five women with spinal cord injuries that left them without sensation
in their lower extremities. These women were
able to achieve a “deep,” or nonclitoral, orgasm
through mechanical stimulation (using a laboratory device) of the vagina and cervix. But contrary
to Holstege’s results, Komisaruk’s team found that
orgasm was accompanied by a general activation
of the limbic system, the brain’s seat of emotion.
Among the activated limbic regions were the
amygdala and the hypothalamus, which produces
oxytocin, the putative love and bonding hormone
whose levels jump fourfold at orgasm. The researchers also found heightened activity in the
nucleus accumbens, a critical part of the brain’s
reward circuitry that may mediate orgasmic pleasure in women. In addition, they saw unusual activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, two brain areas that Rutgers anthropologist
Helen Fisher has found come to life during the
later stages of love relationships. Such activity may
connect a female’s sexual pleasure with the emotional bond she feels with her partner.
Pleasure Pill?
Disentangling the connections between orgasm, reproduction and love may someday yield
better medications and psychotherapies for sexual
problems. As Marianne’s case illustrates, the answer is usually not as simple as a hormone boost.
Instead her improvement was probably the result
of the activation or inactivation of relevant parts
of her brain by social triggers she encountered
while participating in an experiment whose purpose centered on female sexual arousal. Indeed,
many sex therapies revolve around opening the
mind to new ways of thinking about sex or about
your sexual partner [see box on this page].
Companies are also working on medications
that act on the nervous system to stimulate desire.
One such experimental compound is a peptide
called bremelanotide, which is under development by Palatin Technologies in Cranbury, N.J.
It blocks certain receptors in the brain that are
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Domestic Bliss
s the pursuit of sexual gratifi cation vital to the
health of an established relationship? In her
book Mating in Captivity (HarperCollins, 2006),
New York–based psychotherapist Esther Perel
emphasizes the importance of eroticism and
orgasm in a marriage. She chronicles the typical dissolution of a couple’s sex life when the
love bond becomes politically correct and excessively domesticated. To avoid sexual staleness, Perel advocates
unusual strategies such as cultivating separateness — developing different interests and groups of friends from those of your
partner, for example — instead of closeness, as a way of making
your partner more mysterious and exciting. She also suggests
looking for creative ways to let fantasy and even a little craziness
thrive within the confines of a long-term relationship.
Other psychologists, however, advise against placing too much
emphasis on orgasm in a mature relationship. In her book Peace
Between the Sheets (Frog Books, 2003), couples therapist Marnia
Robinson suggests that the journey to orgasm renders us prisoners to dopamine, a neurotransmitter secreted in the brain’s reward centers. After all, dopamine underlies other addictive behaviors, from gambling to drug abuse. In Robinson’s view, partners
should mutually unite in pleasure, without the sexual relationship
necessarily having to be crowned by orgasm.
— M.P.
I
involved in regulating basic drives such as eating
and sex. In human studies bremelanotide has
prompted spontaneous erections in men and
boosted sexual arousal and desire in women, but
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has held
up its progress out of concern over side effects
such as rising blood pressure.
Continued scientific dissection of the experience of orgasm may lead to new pharmaceutical
and psychological avenues for enhancing the experience. Yet overanalyzing this moment of intense pleasure might also put a damper on the
fun. That is what the science tells us anyway. M
(Further Reading)
◆ Brain Activation during Human Male Ejaculation. Gert Holstege et al.
in Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 23, No. 27, pages 9185–9193;
October 8, 2003.
◆ Brain Activation during Vaginocervical Self-Stimulation and Orgasm in
Women with Complete Spinal Cord Injury: FMRI Evidence of Mediation
by the Vagus Nerves. Barry R. Komisaruk et al. in Brain Research, Vol.
1024, Nos. 1–2, pages 77–88; October 2004.
◆ Testosterone Patch Increases Sexual Activity and Desire in Surgically
Menopausal Women with Hypoactive Sexual Desire. James Simon et al.
in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Vol. 90, No. 9, pages
5226–5233; September 2005.
◆ Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Clitorally
Induced Orgasm in Healthy Women. Janniko R. Georgiadis et al. in
European Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 24, No. 11, pages 3305–3316;
December 2006.
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