Vagina: A New Biography
Page 36
Notes
Introduction
1. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
2. Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004).
3. Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 366.
5. Ibid., 329–71.
6. Ibid., 366.
7. William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in The Major Works, Including the Prelude, Stephen Gill, ed., (New York: Oxford World Classics, 2000): “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light. . . . trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”
8. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 370.
9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Penguin Books, 2002).
10. Janniko R. Georgiadis and others, “Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Clitorally Induced Orgasm in Healthy Women,” European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 24 (2006): 3305–16.
11. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 148.
12. Kamil Dada, “Dalai Lama Talks Meditation with Stanford Scientists,” The Stanford Daily, www.stanforddaily.com/2010/10/18/dalai-lama-talks-meditation-with-stanford-scientists.
One / Does the Vagina Have a Consciousness?
Chapter 1: Meet Your Incredible Pelvic Nerve
1. Netter image 5101. “Innervation of Female Reproductive Organs,” www.netterimages.com/image/5101.htm, and 2992; compare “Innervation of Male Reproductive Organs,” 2910, www.netterimages.com/image/2910.htm.
2. “Innervation of External Genitalia and Perineum.” Ibid.
3. www.netterimages.com/image/3013.htm.
4. “Innervation of Internal Genitalia,” www.netterimages.com/image/3093.htm.
5. Ibid.
6. Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 165–67.
Chapter 2: Your Dreamy Autonomic Nervous System
1. Cindy M. Meston and Boris B. Gorzalka, “Differential Effects of Sympathetic Activation on Sexual Arousal in Sexually Dysfunctional and Functional Women,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 105, no. 4 (1996): 582–91.
2. Herbert Benson, M.D., The Relaxation Response (New York: Avon, 1976).
3. Janniko R. Georgiadis and others, “Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Clitorally Induced Orgasm in Healthy Women,” European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 24, no. 11 (2006): 3305–16.
4. Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 165–67.
5. Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery (Nashville, TN: Book Publishing Company, 2002), 86, 440–41.
6. Carter, 1998, cited in Mark R. Leary and Cody B. Cox, “Belongingness Motivation: A Mainspring of Social Action,” in Handbook of Motivation Science, ed. James Y. Shah and Wendi L. Gardner (New York: Guildford Press, 1998), 37.
7. Wolf, Misconceptions, 118, 141.
8. Netter image 3093, www.netterimages.com/image/3093.htm.
9. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (New York: Ishi Press, 2010), 69.
10. Rosemary Basson, “Women’s Sexual Dysfunction: Revised and Expanded Definitions,” CMAJ, 172, no. 10 (May 2005): 1327–1333.
11. The female pelvic neural structure is so complex that at least one researcher, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, found that Sudanese women who have been clitorally excised and even infibulated still report having some kinds of orgasms. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, “The Sexual Experience and Marital Adjustment of Genitally Circumcised and Infibulated Females in the Sudan,” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 26, no. 3 (1989): 375–92.
12. Barry R. Komisaruk and others, “Brain Activation During Vagino-Cervical Self-Stimulation and Orgasm with Complete Spinal Cord Injury: fMRI Evidence of Mediation by Vagus Nerves”: “Women diagnosed with complete spinal cord injury . . . have been reported to perceive, and respond with orgasms to, vaginal and/or cervical mechno-stimulation.” Brain Research 1024 (2004): 77–88. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/piis0006899304011461.
Chapter 3: Confidence, Creativity, and the Sense of Interconnectedness
1. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 338.
2. Ibid., 573.
3. Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” Poems and Prose (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), 105–19.
4. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 115, 135; Sarah Greenough, ed., My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, vol. 1, 1915–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 127, 217.
5. David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 151.
6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219.
7. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 327.
8. Chopin, The Awakening, 82.
9. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics), 177.
10. Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 226–280; Greenough, My Faraway One, 216; Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman: A Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 66.
11. Greenough, My Faraway One, 56–57, 217.
12. Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 8.
Chapter 4: Dopamine, Opioids, and Oxytocin
1. See Stanley Siegel, Your Brain on Sex: How Smarter Sex Can Change Your Life (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2011).
2. Marnia Robinson: Dopamine Chart.
3. Dr. Jim Pfaus, interview, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, January 29, 2012.
4. Ibid.
5. David J. Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (New York: Viking, 2011), 94–125.
6. Dr. Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 162.
7. Ibid., 175.
8. Cindy M. Meston and K. M. McCall, “Dopamine and Norepinephrine Responses to Film-Induced Sexual Arousal in Sexually Functional and Dysfunctional Women,” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, vol. 31 (2005): 303–17.
9. Claude de Contrecoeur, “Le Rôle de la Dopamine et de la Sérotonine dans le Système Nerveux Central,” www.bio.net/bionet/mm/neur-sci/1996-July/024549.html.
10. Ibid.
11. Dr. Pfaus interview, January 29, 2012.
12. See Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
13. Ibid., and Susan Rako, The Hormone of Desire: The Truth About Testosterone, Sexuality, and Menopause (New York: Harmony, 1996).
14. Linden, The Compass of Pleasure, 94–125.
15. Ibid., 94–125.
16. Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson, “The Big ‘O’ Isn’t Orgasm,” www.reuniting.info/science/oxytocin_health_bonding.
17. Ibid.
18. Navneet Magon and Sanjay Kalra, “The Orgasmic History of Oxytocin: Love, Lust and Labor,” Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism Supp. 3 (September 2011): 5156–61.
19. Agren, 2002, cited in Beate Ditzen, Effects of Romantic Partner Interaction on Psychological and Endocrine Stress Protection in Women (Gottingen, Germany: Cuvillier Verlag, Gottingen, 2005), 50–51.
20. C. A. Pedersen, 2002 and Arletti, 1997, cited in Robinson and Wilson, �
�The ‘Big O’ Isn’t Orgasm,” http://www.reuniting.info/science/oxytocin_health_bonding.
21. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, The Letters of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner, 1988), 324–36.
22. James G. Pfaus, and others, “Who, What, Where, When (and Maybe Even Why)? How the Experience of Sexual Reward Connects Sexual Desire, Preference, and Performance,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 41 (March 9, 2012): 31–62:
Although sexual behavior is controlled by hormonal and neurochemical actions in the brain, sexual experience induces a degree of plasticity that allows animals to form instrumental and Pavlovian associations that predict sexual outcomes, thereby directing the strength of sexual responding. This review describes how experience with sexual reward strengthens the development of sexual behavior and induces sexually-conditioned place and partner preferences in rats. In both male and female rats, early sexual experience with partners scented with a neutral or even noxious odor induces a preference for scented partners in subsequent choice tests. Those preferences can also be induced by injections of morphine or oxytocin paired with a male rat’s first exposure to scented females, indicating that pharmacological activation of opioid or oxytocin receptors can “stand in” for the sexual reward-related neurochemical processes normally activated by sexual stimulation. Conversely, conditioned place or partner preferences can be blocked by the opioid receptor antagonist naloxone. A somatosensory cue (a rodent jacket) paired with sexual reward comes to elicit sexual arousal in male rats, such that paired rats with the jacket off show dramatic copulatory deficits. We propose that endogenous opioid activation forms the basis of sexual reward, which also sensitizes hypo-thalamic and mesolimbic dopamine systems in the presence of cues that predict sexual reward. Those systems act to focus attention on, and activate goal-directed behavior toward, reward-related stimuli. Thus, a critical period exists during an individual’s early sexual experience that creates a “love map” or Gestalt of features, movements, feelings, and interpersonal interactions associated with sexual reward.
23. www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/14/female-orgasm-recorded-brain-scans and Barry R. Komisaruk, PhD, and Beverly Whipple, PhD, “Brain Activity During Sexual Response and Orgasm in Women: fMRI Evidence,” presentation, International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health, 2011 Annual Meeting, Scottsdale, Arizona, February 10–13, Program Book, 173–184.
24. Ian Sample, “Female Orgasm Captured in a Series of Brain Scans,” The Guardian, November 14, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/nov/14/female-orgasm-recorded-brain-scans.
25. Dr. Pfaus interview, January 30, 2012.
26. Simon LeVay, The Sexual Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 71–82.
27. Sappho, “Fragment,” Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, trans. Diane J. Rayor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 52. “Come to me now again, release me from / this pain, everything my spirit longs / to have fulfilled, fulfill. . . .”
28. “Song of Songs,” 2:5–16, The New International Version, www.biblegateway.com.
Chapter 5: What We “Know” About Female Sexuality Is Out of Date
1. Liz Topp, interview, New York City, April 15, 2010.
2. See Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004); Shere Hite, The Shere Hite Reader: New and Selected Writings on Sex, Globalism, and Private Life (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006).
3. Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1977), 140.
4. J. A. Simon, “Low Sexual Desire—Is It All in Her Head? Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder,” Postgraduate Medicine 122, no. 6 (November 2010): 128–36.
5. Dr. Helen Fisher and J. Anderson Thompson, Jr., “Sex, Sexuality And Serotonin: Do Sexual Side Effects of Most Antidepressants Jeopardize Romantic Love and Marriage?,” www.medscape.org/viewarticle/482059.
6. In 1992, the National Health and Social Life Survey found that the prevalence of low female sexual desire in the general population in the United States was high and that low desire and arousal concerns were the category most strongly associated with dissatisfaction in women: http://popcenter.uchicago.edu/data/nhsls.shtml. The survey was updated in 2009, and it still found that 43 percent of women in the sample reported sexual dysfunction, compared to 31 percent of men: Edward O. Laumann, Anthony Paik, and Raymond C. Rosen, “Sexual Dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and Predictors,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, no. 6 (February 10, 1999): 587.
7. J. J. Warnock, “Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: Epidemiology, Diagnosis and Treatment,” CNS Drugs 16, no. 11 (2002): 745–53. Another study found a third of premenopausal women suffered from low sexual desire: S. L. West, A. A. d’Aloisio, R. P. Agansi, W. D. Kalsbeek, N. N. Borisov, and J. M. Thorp, “Prevalence of Low Sexual Desire and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in a Nationally Representative Sample of US Women,” Archives of Internal Medicine 168, no. 3 (July 2008): 1441–49.
8. Corky Siemaszko, “Sex Survey Finds U.S. Men Aren’t the Lovers They Think They Are—and Women ‘Faking It’ Is to Blame,” New York Daily News, October 4, 2010.
Two / History: Conquest and Control
Chapter 6: The Traumatized Vagina
1. Jonny Hogg, “400,000-plus Women Raped in Congo Yearly: Study,” Reuters, May 11, 2011, citing a study by the American Journal of Public Health. www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/11/US-congo-rape-idUsTRE74A79Y20110511. See also Jeffrey Gettleman, “Congo Study Sets Estimate for Rapes Much Higher,” New York Times, May 11, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/Africa/12congo.html. The Congolese Women’s Campaign Against Sexual Violence confirms lower numbers, but notes that forty women are raped daily in Eastern Congo: http://www.rdc-viol.org/site/en/node/35.
2. Jimmie Briggs, interview, New York City, May 12, 2010.
3. Douglas Bremner, Penny Randall, Eric Vermetten, Lawrence Staib, Richard A. Bronen, Carolyn Mazure, Sandi Capelli, Gregory McCarthy, Robert B. Innis, and Dennis S. Charney, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Based Measurement of Hippocampal Volume in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Related to Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse—A Preliminary Report,” Biological Psychiatry 1, no. 41 ( January 1997): 23–32.
4. Dr. Burke Richmond, interview, New York City, November 20, 2011.
5. Roni Caryn Rabin, “Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted,” New York Times, December 14, 2011. www.nytimes/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html.
6. Tami Lynn Kent, Wild Feminine: Finding Power, Spirit & Joy in the Female Body (New York: Atria Books, 2011), 51–65.
7. Alessandra H. Rellini and Cindy M. Meston, “Psychophysiological Arousal in Women with a History of Child Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 32 (2006): 5–22. See also Cindy M. Meston and Boris B. Gorzalka, “Differential Effects of Sympathetic Activation on Sexual Arousal in Sexually Dysfunctional and Functional Women,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 105, no. 4 (1996): 582–91, and Cindy M. Meston, “Sympathetic Nervous System Activity and Female Sexual Arousal,” in “A Symposium: Sexual Activity and Cardiac Risk,” American Journal of Cardiology, vol. 86, no. 2A (July 20, 2000): 30F–34F.
For more data on the link between relaxation and female sexual arousal, and the link between anxiety and female sexual inhibition, see Andrea Bradford and Cindy M. Meston, “The Impact of Anxiety on Sexual Arousal in Women,” Behavioral Research and Therapy, vol. 44 (2006): 1067–77: “A high incidence of sexual dysfunction has been reported in women with anxiety disorders.” Hannah Gola and others show that women who have been violently raped show changes in their cortisol responses in response to psychological triggers: “Victims of Rape Show Increased Cortisol Responses to Trauma Reminders: A Study in Individuals with War- and Torture-Related PTSD,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 37 (2012): 213–20.
8. See Margaret Buttenheim and A. A. Leven
dosky, “Couples Treatment for Incest Survivors,” Psychotherapy, vol. 31 (1994): 407–14. The studies that document the damage of sexual abuse, especially early sexual abuse, to female sexual response later in life are many and the correlation is strong. Most of them, however, focus on emotional and psychological trauma as the primary inhibitor of sexual response in previously victimized women. The Abuse of Men: Trauma Begets Trauma, edited by Barbara Jo Brothers, summarizes many studies: “Courtois (1988) has reported that 80% of the victims of childhood sexual abuse experienced some difficulty in adult relationships.” Becker, Skinner, and Able, they note, cited in Sarwer and Durlak, 1996, place the range of such damaged relationships, rather, at 50 percent: “Difficulties range from hypoarousal, to aversion of genitals and painful sex. . . . Buttenheim and Levendosky confirm [this issue] when they describe the sexless marriage as another manifestation of the survivor’s difficulty with sexuality.” Barbara Jo Brothers, ed., The Abuse of Men: Trauma Begets Trauma (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2001), 20. Sandra Risa Leiblum, ed., in Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy, cites Levendosky and Buttenheim’s 1994 study that argues that sexual dysfunction in a relationship that involves an incest or sex abuse survivor is “an elaborate mutual reenactment” of the original incest. Sandra Risa Leiblum, ed., Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 361.
9. M. F. Barnes, 1995, cited in Abrielle Conway and Amy Smith, “Strategies for Addressing Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Hope Approach,” Regent University Hope Research Study, www.regent.edu/acad/schlou/research/initiatives.htm#hope.
10. J. Douglas Bremner, and others, “MRI and PET Study of Deficits in Hippocampal Structure and Function in Women with Childhood Sexual Abuse and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160, no. 5 (May 1, 2003): 924–32. These researchers found that women with childhood sexual abuse have measurable changes in the hippocampus area of their brains—16 percent to 19 percent smaller hippocampal area and less hippocampal activation was found in the women who had experienced childhood sexual abuse as opposed to the controls. The hippocampus is involved in “verbal declarative memory” tasks, as well as consolidation of new memories and emotional responses—which raises an intriguing question about the possible light that this result may shed on the brain-level ability of women who have been sexually traumatized in childhood to easily experience an unmediated “I.” Sexual-abuse or rape-induced PTSD could be shown in this experiment as well to break down a woman’s ability to “know what she knows” and reconstitute a certain sense of self in an ongoing way: