Noli Irritare Leones

A couple of links that are unrelated to each other, but both related to celibacy:

First, my sister emailed me a recent Slate medical examiner article, which covers several scattered topics – poison ivy, sunscreens, how some people seem to have way more lobster to eat than the rest of us (and, perhaps most importantly, biases in pharmaceutical studies). And one of these topics happened to be a study linking variants of a particular gene to variation in sexual desire.

One of the most intriguing research reports
I’ve read recently links a specific gene to human sexual desire. This preliminary research by a group of Israeli scientists, including I.Z. Ben-Zion and R.P. Ebstein, examined a human gene, DRD4, that controls one of the brain receptors for dopamine, a neurotransmitter (a chemical
the nervous systems uses to relay electrical signals between nerve cells) that’s deeply involved in the brain’s reward-by-pleasure system….

… More interestingly, however, subjects who scored lower on the
desire-arousal-function continuum were more likely to have one
particular variant of DRD4, called D4.4. Subjects who scored higher were more likely to have other variants of this gene….

Not just sex: There’s more. The variants of DRD4 previously had been studied with great attention because they’re strongly associated with variation in other human behaviors. The D4.4 variant, for instance, has been shown to be associated with altruistic and prosocial behavior. Other variants associated with higher sexual desire-arousal-function scores were also more commonly found in subjects with a greater tendency toward aggressive, novelty-seeking, and maybe even anti-social behavior. These other variants were also to some degree associated with Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

First thought: Hey, cool, a gene associated both with low sex drive and with altruism. It’s a monk/nun gene!

Second thought: The medical examiner went on to say that the different variants of the gene had been preserved for 40,000 to 50,000 years. The low sex drive variant isn’t dying out. Even though, you know, low sex drive, in itself, doesn’t seem nearly as conducive to reproducing yourself as high sex drive. But then, we’re describing a variant that has complex effects on several different behaviors. Maybe the people with the low sex drive, but also high altruism and low risk taking, are averaging fewer conceptions, but a higher percentage of those children surviving to reproduce, so that the different effects of the variants balance each other out. If there is such a thing as a “gay gene,” it could survive in the same way.

Now, the totally unrelated link (except that it also has something to do with celibacy), is on Rivers Cuomo at Harvard: The Tough Sex Life of a Rock Star when he decides to stop sleeping with groupies and frequenting porn sites, and instead be celibate for two years. With mixed success, and some sharp and humorous self-criticism on his failures. Via Jill at Feministe, who remarks that the article “illustrates why celibacy is not a cure for the belief that women are objects to be obtained and owned.”

Moving further afield from celibacy, I also want to note this other post by Jill at Feministe on a study showing men’s misperception/wishful thinking about women’s sexual interest:

Call it ego, machismo or downright delusional behaviour, but men are more likely than women to “oversexualize” conversations and incorrectly assume sexual interest, a new study says.

…

“For men, there is a step back here somewhere, where you have to think about what cues were you are actually getting. Clearly, the first judgment they are making may not necessarily be accurate,” he said. “For women, be aware this may well be a judgment he is making almost regardless of what you’re doing.”

Yeah, I’ve noticed. And in my single days, I spent a lot of time wondering what the heck I was doing to give so many men false perceptions of my interest. But this also had the effect of messing with my own perceptions of whether I should be assuming sexual interest on the part of men. Because, on the one hand, I had to keep thinking about the possibility that I might unintentionally be leading someone on (so assume most of your friendships with men are in some sense potentially sexual), but on the other hand – can that interest I think I see really be there? Probably not, right, because I’ve seen so many men making that mistake with me. So, I’d better be careful not to make the same mistake the other way – assume men aren’t really attracted to you, and you’re imagining things, just as others have with you – especially if the guy’s at all attractive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 7:37 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.