Phrasing

Today at Curves the mailman brought in a copy of Women's Health Magazine. So I browsed through to see if there were any handy tips or such to share with the ladies who work out at the club. Although there weren't any this time around, I did find this fantastic little tid-bit in their "sex" section. (Also, random question, is it just me or does like every single magazine have a "sex" section in it now? Like a designated section just to talk about sex.)

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Serious Attraction

Lust and love aren't all that different, a recent study says - at least not to your brain. Researchers reviewed brain scans of people looking at photos of their significant others and at pornography. Both types of images activated bonding mechanisms in the brain, indicating that sexual longing and long-term relationships share similar chemistry - and that initial sparks can transition into something serious. "When you're feeling like you could be in love, sex can turn that into a reality of actually being in love, if you are open to it," says study coauthor Jim Pfaus, Ph.D.

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At the get-go, this excerpt makes my brain go all, "heyyy, I see what you did there.

You appropriated research that essentially said people don't show a huge difference between love and lust on a neurological level, and turned it into a fucking support analogy for monogamy." Although it also appropriates the idea that women are incapable of having sex with somebody without falling in love with that person. It also is sort of creepy the implication that you need to test your relationship with sex in order to somehow validate "love feelings."

Mostly, I wonder how long the "significant others" had been together. Was the number of years of commitment standardized in some way? Were at least 75% of participants in relationships for more than 3 years? Were there requisite previous tests that each couple had to take in order to prove happiness together? (I like to imagine this testing involved something like a version of The Newlywed Game - I have two good things to post for this internal joke, so you get both of them. NPH and his hubby, and the chick that likes it up the butt.) Did they scan each person for like...an optimal amount of "bonding" neurological response so they knew what type of reaction they could count when they did the scans with porn and stuff?

Although I do like the implication that the subjects could have possibly been shown the porn at the exact same time as photos of their significant others. Like a sort of brainwashing association task. "Now whenever you look at your girlfriend you will be unable to disassociate her with deep anal penetration. It should make things very awkward, unless of course she was already into it."

So...I did a little bit of leg work on this, and found this elaborated version of the snippet from WHM. Which, the main thing missing from the first little paragraph is the connection to drug addiction.

The brain treats love like a habit that has been formed over time. So, after lust may come love, and those feelings of love move to different part of the brain that processes habits and reward patterns. The same brain pattern occurs when people become drug addicts.

By having casual sex with people I am actually just being a better controlled human being and not getting addicted to something harmful. Checkpoint, people that form committed relationships.


*Note: This blog entry was almost completely derailed because Now-hubby got me the James Deen dildo for Christmas and I literally fucked myself with it until I felt like I was levitating off the bed with how intense my orgasms were.