Naomi Wolf on Women

The main headline, in my view? The new science has established a radically new insight: that there is such a strong brain-vagina connection in women that many of the neuroscientists whom I interviewed called it "a single system".
I'm trying to imagine, just now, the most disdainful male chauvinist trying to come up with some argument against the 19th Amendment. Could he have come up with anything more vicious than this?

But wait! There's more.
More remarkably, few of us know that when a woman has an orgasm – and, even before that, when she feels empowered to think about pleasurable sex, anticipate it, focus on how to get it, and feels in control of and knowledgeable enough about her body to know she can probably reach orgasm during sex – her brain gets a boost of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Then, in orgasm, opioids and oxytocin are also released. This experience does not just yield pleasure, a fact that is well known; it also yields specific states of mind.

Dopamine is what I call the ultimate feminist neurotransmitter: it yields motivation and goal-orientedness, trust in one's own judgement and, most notably of all, in my mind, confidence.
That's funny. You know what causes "the ultimate feminist neurotransmitter" to be released in men's brains? Increasingly extreme internet porn.



Hey, he's also suggesting that manipulation of the sex-organs can rewire the brain! He's going one step further, though, and questioning whether this rewiring is a good thing.

So let's look at Ms. Wolf's terms. One can get, essentially for free, "motivation, goal-orientedness, trust in one's own judgment and... confidence." Is that good? Put another way, is it good to trust your own judgment more because you've spent a few hours dropping dopamine into your brain?

Put yet another way, what would justify your increased confidence in your judgment? Has your judgment improved in this way? Is your increased confidence, then, rooted in something real?

We get increased confidence in our judgment from drinking too much alcohol, too. Goodness knows I'm not against alcohol! (Nor sex.) Yet when a man thinks to himself, "I know people say that drinking ten beers is bad for your ability to drive, but to be honest, I feel even more confident of my driving ability now than before I started drinking," we can recognize that the artificial stimulant to his confidence is not a good thing. Can we make the same recognition here?

I wonder. Mark Steyn seems to have understood the problem.
Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined.
That does seem to be the spirit of the age. Or at least a very loud part of it.

2 comments:

Texan99 said...

I wonder if there are any goals other than orgasm that are worth pursuing, now that she's twigged to the idea that personal effort has some connection to results?

bthun said...

The four F drives, according to biologists of the evolutionary bent, are IIRC, fight, flight, feed, and, ah... makin' whoopie.

It's sounds to me as if some folks are intensely driven by the latter, perhaps due to the first and second drives being diminished due to the minimal to nonexistent violent/deadly threats relative to times in our not so distant past, while the third is, for all intents, guaranteed to be provided by modern western society.

..."we can recognize that the artificial stimulant to his confidence is not a good thing."

Some folks don't need alcohol or [the prospect of] sex...
//hears those infamously, albeit overconfident last words, watch this//