‘As everyone knows, there are insects which die in the moment of fertilization. Thus it is with all joy.’ –Kierkegaard
The first brain scans of men and women having sex and reaching orgasm have revealed striking differences in the way each experiences sexual pleasure. While male brains focus heavily on the physical stimulation involved in sexual contact, this is just one part of a much more complex picture for women, scientists in the Netherlands have found.
The key to female arousal seems rather to be deep relaxation and a lack of anxiety, with direct sensory input from the genitals playing a less critical role.The scans show that during sexual activity, the parts of the female brain responsible for processing fear, anxiety and emotion start to relax and reduce in activity. This reaches a peak at orgasm, when the female brain’s emotion centres are effectively closed down to produce an almost trance-like state.
The male brain was harder to study during orgasm, because of its shorter duration in men, but the scans nonetheless revealed important differences. Emotion centres were deactivated, though apparently less intensely than in women, and men also appear to concentrate more on the sensations transmitted from the genitals to the brain.
“Men find it more important to be stimulated on the penis than women find it to be stimulated on the clitoris,” Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen said.
This suggests that for men, the physical aspects of sex play a much more significant part in arousal than they do for women, for whom ambience, mood and relaxation are at least as important. (…)
The experiments also revealed a rather surprising effect: both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. (…)
The scans also show that while women may be able to fool their partners with a fake orgasm, the difference is obvious in the brain. Parts of the brain that handle conscious movement light up during fake orgasms but not during real ones, while emotion centres close down during the real thing but never when a woman is pretending.
photo { Germaine Krull }
