Vagina (8 page)

I clutched my wineglass. So it was not just that orgasm might heighten creativity in women; maybe creativity also heightened orgasm.

“Really!” I said.

“Really,” she said.

“Wow. Do you think that has ever happened to anyone else?”

“I know it has. It has happened, I am certain, to other women in the creative arts. I know women who have had orgasms while painting. And I know the two feed each other: the sexuality fuels the creative work, and the work fuels the sex.” She gave me her card and promised to introduce me to these female artists who had orgasms from their creative work.

I thanked her and walked out into the night, making my way gingerly past the actresses around me to the coat check, as if they were demurely dressed minefields of Eros that might erupt at any moment. But as I looked up at the starry New York winter night, I felt light-headed myself.

That night I began work on an informal survey. I put forth a set of questions to the women in my Facebook “community” of 16,800 people at that time. The questionnaire asked them if they had ever experienced any seeming connection between sex and creativity; if they had ever had a sexual experience boost their confidence levels and sense of self-love; if a sexual experience had ever led them to see better the connections between things; and if, on the other hand, periods of sexual loneliness, depression, or frustration had negatively affected their confidence, creativity, and energy. Their answers confirmed that the young scientists, the actress, and I were not so aberrant in our gender.

A typical question-and-answer e-mail went as follows:

NW:
Has a really profound sexual experience ever affected your confidence levels?

RESPONDENT:
Yes.

NW:
Given you more energy?

RESPONDENT:
Yes.

NW:
Made you like yourself more?

RESPONDENT:
Yes.

NW:
Boosted your creativity? If so, please specify how.

RESPONDENT:
I am a painter, and did an artist’s residency in Vermont for a month about a year ago. I was away from my husband at the time. Because of the private space that I was provided, I ended up delving into [sexual] memories dealing specifically with past relationships. Having a good relationship—both sexually and otherwise—does boost my self-confidence, and my motivation to pursue my artwork . . . after visiting my husband mid-residency, I returned [to work] feeling more confident, and had more self-love. Someone at the residency commented, “You look really nice today,” and I’m sure it was because seeing my husband had boosted my confidence.

Women from many different backgrounds e-mailed me in droves. Many women spoke of unusually profound orgasms—not the everyday kind—as experiences that were followed with a sense of unusual power, energy, and confidence; of self-love; and of the world sparkling.

“Laura,” a British thirty-four-year-old administrative assistant, wrote to me. “I met someone at work,” she confided, “and we developed a fast attraction. It was very quick for me and I suspect he was interested in me for a while. Anyway, we had a go, and a really good sexual experience that changed me deeply. My confidence level shift was immediate; I stood taller and walked stronger. More energy? Every day for two months I woke up and exercised, joyfully. I loved my self more too; started getting pedicures to express it. Creativity? I played guitar every night, and learned four new songs. Connections between things? This relationship restored a dormant psychic ability that has enhanced all of my thinking since. Conversely: that relationship has not continued. Lately I have begun to grieve and miss it; mostly I miss all of the above.” She went on, “I am sad and feel the return of my old stories of negative self-image, of rejection. I find this to be strange, and unsettling to experience.” She concluded poignantly, “I have also tried sleeping with other men and have not felt anywhere near this influx [of feelings].”

Laura wrote that she was orgasmic with the other men; indeed, even more so than with the one with whom intimacy caused such an awakening. Many other women echoed this idea, that what was transformative to them in those profound sexual experiences was not a simple matter of the quantity of orgasmic “fireworks.” What was transformative for them was something subjective about the quality of the orgasm that merged the physical realm with the realm of emotions or perception: the intensity that it created, and in turn the confidence and creativity it unleashed.

I asked this same set of questions of an old friend “Patrice,” a woman my own age who was now an accomplished businesswoman. We were sitting out in her back garden in a pretty suburb of what I will say, to conceal identities, was Ann Arbor, Michigan. She had a postage-stamp garden; her laundry was drying in the sun on a line just beyond us; and her six-year-old boy was playing with a friend in the glass conservatory that we could see from where we were sitting at an outdoor table by a plot of herbs. She looked like a perfectly “ordinary” wife and mother in her forties. Oddly enough, though we had talked frankly about our sex lives for twenty-three years, since we first met, we had never talked about the possible connection I had set before her, simply because it had never occurred to me. She looked at me, again, as other women had, with that abrupt expression of surprise and recognition.

“Oh my God,” she said, and started laughing. “Ohhh . . .
Naomi.
Wow. Oh, definitely. I can have perfectly fine sex most of the time, fine orgasms, and what you are talking about does not happen. But then, once in a while, there are those amazing times just after sex like that, you feel—oh, things are electric! And you have insights about your work. It is like you get some kind of superpowers. And you just want to run a marathon, or write an opus. Climb the Alps!” She was laughing hard now. “But,” she cautioned, “it is not every time, by no means every time. I mean, I wouldn’t want it to happen every time, right? Because you would never want to do anything else if it did, or else you would be walking around in a creative mania all the time. If it happened every time, you would never get out of bed.”

Does really special sex, sex that engages the vagina, emotions, and body in very specific ways—ways that involve very concrete kinds of activation of the parasympathetic nervous system—actually lead to female euphoria, creativity, and self-love?

“Laura,” whom we met earlier, eloquently described this transformation of her whole self via sexual experience as “strange and unsettling” to go through. This sense of bafflement or mystification at our own reactions as women came up many times in the e-mail responses I received. If we don’t understand our own neurology and biochemistry in sex and love, our own female selves can be very “unsettling” to us.

What had happened to us? What had happened to the actress who was transformed in an erotic ecstasy onstage? What had happened to the scientist who saw new connections in her lab, and to the entrepreneur who “wanted to write an opus”?

4

Dopamine, Opioids, and Oxytocin

I write like I love . . . the kisses we gave each other at ten o’clock that night of Saturday, October 12 . . . how many fields of wheat, how many vineyards, there are, between you and me! I hate the law . . . I want to feel—to make others feel . . .

—Explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902

W
hat had happened to us was that dopamine—among other substances, including oxytocin and opioids—had hit our systems, before, during, and after lovemaking. Dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.

When a woman’s dopamine system is optimally activated—as it is in the anticipation of great sex, an effect heightened by a woman’s knowing what turns her on, letting herself think about it, and letting herself go get it—it strengthens her sense of focus and motivation levels and energizes her in setting goals. All those effects are involved with dopamine activation. It is accurate to say that if you activate your dopamine system in seeking out great sex, as a woman, your brain can take those heightened capabilities of energy and focus into other areas of your life and into other endeavors.

But this heightened superpower, this self-potential, is dependent on reward: on getting what you want. If, as a woman, you are frustrated sexually, and, even worse, aroused but denied release, your dopamine system eventually diminishes in anticipation of sex; you eventually lose access to the positive energy that you might otherwise have had both in sex and also subsequently, to take elsewhere in your life.

You are less likely to get what scientists call “activation”—loosely translated as “excitement”—from anything; you could be depressed and be likely to experience “anhedonia”—the literal meaning of which is “no pleasure”—a state in which the “world looks colorless.” With low dopamine activation, you will suffer from a lack of ambition or drive and your libido levels will be low.
¹
But if your dopamine levels are just right, you are confident, creative, and talkative, and you trust your perceptions.

An illustrated chart (see insert) compiled by dopamine researcher Marnia Robinson shows how dopamine affects human behavior in relationships and in social settings.
²
Focused drive has been shown to be related to dopamine activity.

Opioid release, which is measurable in brain scans, and which meditators describe as states of “awe,” “bliss,” and “oneness,” is boosted by orgasm. There have been suggestions that the “out-of-body” experiences some people have during surgery, and the “near-death” experiences that lead dying people to feel euphoria and bliss, are also probably related to dopamine and opioids.

By the same token, a female self’s experience of freedom, and its impulse to seek more freedom, and to do so from a basis of self-love—the feminist quest and the feminist sensibility—are all strengthened in women by preorgasmic dopamine, and by the effect of orgasm on the brain. The brain’s limbic system, as we saw, mediates the hormones the female brain receives in arousal and produces after orgasm (or lack of orgasm). So in this way, the vagina is the delivery system for the states of mind that we call confidence, liberation, self-realization, and even mysticism in women.

Just because these states are chemically mediated does not mean that they are not “real” self-love, “real” attachment to freedom, or “real” bliss. Those of us who are not scientists often forget that brain chemicals are vehicles for very profound human truths. Remember how, after my spinal injury, but before I was diagnosed and treated, I saw the world as flatter, less colorful, and less interesting than it had seemed to me before I was injured? That change in worldview was probably due to inactivated dopamine and opioids in my system, since one of the pelvic nerve branches that would have triggered dopamine activation was frozen. Because of the impairment to the nerves in one of the branches, there was lower than usual dopamine, oxytocin, and opioid activation in my brain. I was getting some level of the hormones from the clitoral orgasms, but missing the full activation of those same chemicals in the brain that I would have expected from a fully functioning pelvic neural network. As one of the few women in the world—as far as I know—to have, neurobiologically speaking, experienced the interruption of these circuits and their healing, I consider my experience a control with some important information: the world looked different, and I was different.

A woman with low dopamine will have low libido and depression, as we noted. On the other hand, if you are a woman, and your dopamine levels are optimally activated, you will be confident, creative, and sociable. You will have strong opinions, clear boundaries, and you will take pride in your own work. You will experience feelings of well-being and satisfaction; have a sense of directedness and persistence in accomplishing tasks; experience strong feelings toward others; make sound choices; and have realistic expectations. These are qualities that every CEO writes about as critical to accomplishing game-changing work and affecting the world in major ways.

Your life is more likely to feel meaningful—as long as you continue to get reward at the end of your experience of sexual arousal—and you will see the connections between people. Because of the role of dopamine, you will also see the connections between your own body and actions and reactions from others. As Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, put it, “You could call dopamine the ‘cause-effect’ chemical.”
³
You activate dopamine’s release in various ways: aerobic exercise, taking drugs like cocaine, socializing, shopping, gambling—and having good orgasmic sex.

The feminist echo of the consequence of a woman’s regularly strengthening her brain’s perception of a direct link between cause and effect—between one’s agency and a desired outcome—is obvious. “Dopamine’s optimal work in your brain is about flexibility in decision making: it helps you make the right decision at the right time for
you
in an ever-changing world,” notes Dr. Pfaus. It is the “decider” chemical, the chemical involved in leadership and confidence building.
⁴

Experts such as David J. Linden, whose book
The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good
explores dopamine’s effects, point out that dopamine makes you feel good about yourself, makes you feel as if you have a strong ego, and makes you feel open to new challenges.
⁵

Dr. Helen Fisher, anthropologist and author of
Anatomy of Love,
found that romantic love is not an emotion—it is an overwhelmingly powerful part of the “motivation system” of the brain—a drive, part of the reward system of the brain.
⁶
Dr. Fisher found that romantic love has three different chemical components: lust, composed of androgens and estrogens; attraction, driven by high dopamine and norepinephrine levels and low serotonin (this accounts for mood swings in early courtship); and finally, attachment, made up of oxytocin and vasopressin. And all these mood-altering chemicals can possibly become higher, because of their multiorgasmic potential, in some women than in most men.
⁷
Researchers Cindy M. Meston and K. M. McCall, in their 2005 essay “Dopamine and Norepinephrine Response to Film-Induced Sexual Arousal in Sexually Functional and Dysfunctional Women,” also reported finding a link between well-functioning dopamine (and norepinephrine) systems and strong female sexual response. Regarding dopamine and norepinephrine, the authors wrote, “these transmitters play a prosexual role in female sexuality.”
⁸