Your Brain and Sex

...was the topic of a great presentation I went to today. Granted, when you have a choice between "Your Brain and Sex" or "Ethics in Counseling Management" the choice is clear.

Some highlights:

• Marriage counseling is basically trauma work. "People say marriage counseling doesn't work, but statistics aren't very good in trauma surgery either." This is yet another case for PREVENTION! Work on your marriage before you need counseling.
• Addicts, at a basic level, are addicted to dopamine. The presenter opined that "orgasm is the largest naturally occurring rush of dopamine. The initial heroin high is similar to a two-minute sustained orgasm... now I don't want anybody running out looking for heroin!"
• Often women are blamed (or blame themselves) for a lower sex drive, and may be diagnosed with low sexual desire, but "How can you diagnose someone with decreased desire, when there’s not much there that is worth desiring?”
• People get caught in the "Dopamine/Prolactin Rollercoaster" which occurs when a desire for a new partner increases dopamine, which can begin an addictive cycle of increasing amounts of dopamine followed by bursts of prolactin.
• The "Coolidge Effect" - New sexual stimuli creates a quick fix that may start the cycle over again. More types or more frequency of sex for couples may actually make things worse in the long term. Variety to deal with sexual lulls are not enough. Couples need to know how to deepen their intimacy and bonding (which is associated with Oxytocin). Oxytocin facilitates stability in the desire/orgasm/resolution cycle shown below. This effect also suggests that moving quickly into a sexual relationship may result in a faster dissolution of the relationship.
• People often interpret the dopamine rush with a new person as "there's something here" when there is really not. The presenter suggested that people should interpret is as "I need to do something more in my own relationship."
• Regarding sex ed, if we are just teaching abstinence, or just that sex is bad, we may actually make the problem worse! When something is taboo it becomes more biologically enticing. He suggests that we teach our children what is happening with their bodies, and encourage them to find other ways of getting dopamine that involve bonding and commitment, such as through sports.

No God in School

...apparently leads to all kinds of things, including abortion, violent music, and the cessation of spanking your kids. Watch out! Anyone else get this email?

1. God says he didn't save all the kids who have been killed in school shootings because he isn't allowed in school? Wha? What kind of God is that?
2. We shouldn't have organized prayer in public school. Keep it personal, or keep it in seminary. No one should be subject to be around open religious practice in a public school if they don't want to be, especially when they're a minority. I don't want my son to feel like he has to pray to someone else's Jesus just because everyone else is doing it.
3. The video tries to suggest that the Bible is only full of common sense and wisdom, and therefore should be allowed in schools. Really? The intention here is not to Christianize public schools? Actually, I think the Bible should be allowed in school, right along with every other religious text, but in that case it should be used for academic purposes.
4. Did Dr. Spock really say spanking would warp our kids' personalities? It may not do that but it may make them more aggressive. This point really lost me. Is the cessation of spanking really a sign of the downfall of society? How about just better parenting?
5. Teacher's shouldn't touch students? Isn't that a good idea? If you need to touch a student it better be an emergency and require a restraint. Otherwise, does the video suggest that smacking them around a bit is a good idea?
6. ... and no spanking of the kids leads right to... ABORTION? wow where's the missing link there?
7. Giving out condoms is a bad idea? Granted, I definitely believe in abstinence for high-schoolers, but I believe even more in not making babies in high school! As a poster in my supervisor's office says, "Become a High School Grad before you become a Quality Dad!" What the school nurse needs to do is tell the kids that the condoms may not work, and you may get pregnant anyway, so here's where you can get other forms of protection.
8. It doesn't matter what people do in private, unless it affects other people. In that case I agree. Like if our POTUS was doing meth in the closet.
9. BUT, this leads right to child porn right? Hmm.
10. And child porn leads to bad music? Wow we're taking a step back here.
11. And this leads to our kids killing strangers. Now that's a slippery slope!

Do you think organized prayer should be allowed in public schools?

Do you think not spanking is a bad idea?

What think ye?

From the High School Archives

It’s amazing what you can find on the Intertubes. Thinking back to high school (I know, the agony) I wondered if some of my stuff from the school newspaper was still there. It was. Lest it fall into further Interwebian oblivion, here are some keepers:

Some cartoons:
One of my friends (thanks Judd) on the staff got the crazy idea that I could do political cartoons. My first one managed to offend many, so I consider it a success. Feel free to be offended. For a high school newspaper I probably should have left the first letter of the profane verbages off, but I was trying to go for realism...

Reactions ranged from, “It was rude and inconsiderate” to “Hey I go to seminary and swear all the time--the cartoon was awesome!” The truth is, I was on a self-righteous anti-swearing brigade from age 14-18. (Not using profanity being the only thing that differentiated me from the jocks, of course. Well, that and dates.)

Trying to go a little more mainstream with this one--with a nod to my mother’s anti-mouse weapon of choice.

The last one was inspired by an AP Physics teacher who wouldn’t let us out during the fire alarms… we did have them almost daily though. Don’t let the phrase “AP Physics" fool you. I nearly failed that class, and it confirmed to me that I didn’t belong in the so-called “hard” sciences. Hello, Psych!


Some excerpts from an editorial (that portends my future in ersatz intellectual blogging):

Thank goodness for MTV
A bill was passed to take any talk of sex out of health classes. What next, taking God out of seminary? Or how about banning music from choir classes? I can imagine what it would be like during registration... "Let's see, I can take either 'Beginning Air Guitar', 'Plastic Child Development,' or 'Tonka Trucks Repair.'"

We're all just a bunch of little Dantes
In a recent issue of the Deseret News, Utah was said to be a very clean and moral state. In an article on the next page, 60% of Utah teens were said to be sexually active. Oh, I get it. Morality must mean not knowing anything. Since future Utah scientists won't know anything about AIDS, they can always work on finding a cure for hitchhiker's thumb or something else equally as important.

Not everyone has it as easy as Brian M*****
Why does Prom have to be so early? I know it wasn't as early as ***** High's Prom (February), but how am I supposed to get a date in such a short period of time? All right, I confess. I wouldn't be able to get a date if I had two years to try. But that is beside the point. I'm sure there are others who think Prom should be in May.

I loved being on the Newspaper staff. I often skipped other classes and stayed for hours after school rewriting headlines (if I didn’t think they were witty enough), and getting the paper ready. Being able to share some of my thoughts in print and know that at least three people would read it gave me a sense of satisfaction. I suppose that is why I blog. For those who are reading this, your IP addresses do not go unnoticed. Thanks for reading. :)

Partial Abortions, Gun-people, and Cheney vs. Monson

Could someone (preferably someone who is pro-choice, but I’ll take anything) explain the opposition to the “partial birth” abortion ban? The abortion issue is so muddy I don’t know what to think, other than I don’t like mud. Personally, I think the whole abortion issue would be much less of a problem if we had sex education that covered more than “don’t do it,” and people had easier access to plan B medication. And educating teenagers does not encourage them. I think that is a huge myth propelled by fear. Teenagers have hormones. And they have brains. If they want to have sex, they will, whether or not they are educated about it. All this mess about abortion could be greatly reduced if we had better and more comprehensive sex education. And I also don’t think the plan B pill is the same as an abortion. It prevents pregnancy in something like 80% of the cases. Why is this not more available?

English is a sexist language. It has sexist history. ‘Husband’ comes from a word meaning owner, and ‘wife’ from a word meaning woman. On top of that we have mailman, chairman, and most notably, ‘mankind’. I can see why some people would like to change these words to mailperson, chairperson, etc. One word that doesn’t need to be changed is ‘gunman’. I haven’t heard of any feminists lobbying to change the use of this word to ‘gunperson’. Why? Well it’s obvious. There are no female gun-people. Women don’t shoot people. Think about all the shootings in the last decade and tell me how many of them were female. Is it evolutionary? Maybe we do need a female president (and by the way, I’m undecided about that race right now).

Lastly, for those of us Utah Mormons, The U. is having LDS leader Thomas S. Monson speak at the graduation. BYU is having Dick Cheney. Hmmmm. BYU may have won in basketball and football this year, but Utah really kicked BYU’s collective rear in the commencement speaker department. So there.