You're Teaching My Child What? (29 page)

57
Calvin A. Colarusso,
Child and Adult Development: A Psychoanalytic Introduction for Clinicians
(New York: Plenum Press, 1992).

58
See Anne C. Bernstein,
Flight of the Stork: What Children Think (and When) about Sex and Family Building
(Indianapolis, IN: Perspectives Press, 1994).

59
Ibid., 29

60
“How to Talk with Your Children About Sex,”
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/parents/how-talk-your-child-about-sex-4422.htm
.

61
Ronald F. Moglia and Jon Knowles,
A Family Resource on Sex and Sexuality
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 12–15.

62
“Wardell Pomeroy: Kinsey Coauthor Speaks Out”
Chic Magazine
, February 1981.

63
George Leonard (1983)
The End of Sex
, JP Tarcher, Inc. Los Angeles, p 89.

64
SIECUS Newsletter
Vol 7, No 4, April 1972

65
Online program for 2008 Annual Meeting of The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), San Juan, Peurto Rico November 5-9, 2008, available at
http://www.sexscience.org
.

66
Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “The Failure of Sex Education,”
The Atlantic Monthly
, 274.n4 (Oct 1994)

Chapter 2

1
All the stories in this book are true. In order to protect the confidentiality of my patients, I've changed their names and some details about their lives.

2
Sexuality Information and Education Council for the United States (SIECUS),
Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education
(2004),
http://www.siecus.org/pubs/guidelines/guidelines.pdf
.

3
Some readers might ask why I focus only on Kayla. What about David? I focus on Kayla because in over twenty years of psychiatric work, I have yet
to see a man hurting or confused from casual sexual encounters. When a boy or man experiences pain within a relationship, he describes a serious situation in which he has invested time and emotion.

4
Sexuality Information and Education Council for the United States (SIECUS),
Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education
(2004),
http://www.siecus.org/pubs/guidelines/guidelines.pdf
.

5
Ibid., 50.

6
Ibid., 20.

7
Ibid., 71.

8
A belief is not a stereotype.

9
Estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin.

10
All except her mature red blood cells.

11
Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
(New York: Random House, 2006), 3.

12
George Preti, Charles J. Wysocki, Kurt T. Barnhart, Steven J. Sondheimer, James J. Leyden, “Male Axillary Extracts Contain Pheromones that Affect Pulsatile Secretion of Luteinizing Hormone and Mood in Women Recipients,”
Biology of Reproduction
68 (2003): 2107–13.

13
Personal communication with George Preti, Ph.D. of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the Department of Dermatology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, April 7, 2008.

14
Menstrual synchrony between women living in close quarters is thought to occur via a similar mechanism. The original study was by M. J. Russell, et al, “Olfactory Influences on the human menstrual cycle,”
Pharmacology, biochemistry, and behavior
13, no.5 (November 1980): 737–38.

15
Starting in adolescence, female sensitivity to this male pheromone is much higher than male. See Thomas Hummel, Franziska Krone, Johan N. Lundstrom, Oliver Bartsch, “Androstadienone odor thresholds in adolescents,”
Hormones and Behavior
47, no.3 (March 2005): 306–10.

16
Suma Jacob and Martha K. McClintock, “Psychological state and mood effects of steroidal chemosignals in women and men,”
Hormones and Behavior
37, no.1 (February 2000): 57–78.

17
Brizendine,
The Female Brain
, 13–16.

18
J. Cameron, “Interrelationships between hormones, behavior and affect during adolescence: understanding hormonal, physical, and brain changes occurring in association with pubertal activation of the reproductive axis,”
Annals New York Academy of Sciences
1021 (2004):1-22.

19
Brizendine,
The Female Brain,
38.

20
Ibid., 39.

21
Ibid., 48.

22
Ibid., 38.

23
Ibid., 68.

24
Ibid., 3.

25
Ibid., 2.

26
Ibid., preface.

27
Carol Milano, “The physiological and the psychological: how women and men are different,”
Yale Medicine
42, no.2 (Winter 2008): 41–42.

28
I have often been asked why I focus on the actions of oxytocin in young women. This hormone exists in men too, in addition to the hormone vasopressin, which differs by only one amino acid in its structure, and plays a role in the formation of social bonds in males. These are the reasons: estrogen is critical to oxytocin control, and it increases production and the number of receptors in the brain. In certain areas, the increase can be rapid (72 hours) and profound (300 percent increase in binding). See Thomas R. Insel, “A Neurobiological Basis of Social Attachment,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
154, no.6 (June 1997): 731. Women appear to be more sensitive to oxytocin, (see Grewen, 2005, 537) and they have more of it. Men have more vasopressin, but young men also have raging levels of testosterone, which Drives lust, not attachment. The saturation of the female brain with estrogen and oxytocin, especially at mid-cycle, creates a neuro-chemical environment ripe for intense interpersonal bonding. There does not appear to be a corresponding situation for men. Everyday observations and common sense also support this position; in fact, a study of 16,288 people across ten major world regions, examining the desire for sexual variety and the likelihood of consenting to sex quickly, demonstrated “universal sex differences” (David P. Schmitt, “Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests from 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
85, no.1 (2003): 85–104).

29
Thomas R. Insel, “A Neurobiological Basis of Social Attachment,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
154, no.6 (June 1997): 726–35.

30
Ibid., 727.

31
Ibid., 728.

32
Our knowledge of the actions of vasopressin in the brains of human males is limited. In both humans and voles, there is a gene that controls the number and type of vasopressin receptors in the brain. Having more of a particular receptor means higher sensitivity to the pair-bonding effects of the hormone. So scientists speculate that where a human male's behaviors fall on the spectrum of totally polygamist to totally monogamous may be somewhat predetermined and passed down genetically (Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
, 73–74).

33
Meissner corpuscles.

34
John P. Aggleton and Andrew W. Young, “The enigma of the amygdala: on its contribution to human emotion.” In R. D. Lane and L. Nadel, eds.,
Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); R. Adolps, Peter Kirsch, et al, “Oxytocin Modulates Neural Circuitry for Social Cognition and Fear in Humans,”
The Journal of Neuroscience
24, no.49 (December 2005): 11489–493; R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, A. R. Damasio, “The human amygdala in social judgment,”
Nature
393 (4 June 1998): 470–74.

35
Adam J. Guastella, Philip B. Mitchell, and Mark R. Dadds, “Oxytocin Increases Gaze to the Eye Region of Human Faces,”
Biological Psychiatry
63, no.1 (January 2008): 3–5.

36
The same thing happens in maternal love. See Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, “The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love,”
NeuroImage
21, no.3 (March 2004): 1155–66.

37
Michael Kosfeld, Marcus Heinrichs, Paul J. Zac, Urs Fischbacher, and Ernest Fehr, “Oxytocin increases trust in humans,”
Nature
435 (2 June 2005): 673.

38
Science has confirmed the existence of “beer goggles”—when a person seems more attractive to you after you've had a few drinks. In a British study, eighty college students rated photos of unfamiliar faces of men and women their age; alcohol consumption significantly raised the scores given to photos of the opposite sex. Drinking affects the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain used to determine facial attractiveness. (Barry T. Jones et al, “Alcohol consumption increases attractiveness ratings of opposite-sex faces: a possible third route to risky sex,”
Addiction
98 (2003): 1069–75.

39
Reuters, “ ‘Trust me' says cuddle hormone,” ABC News Online (2 June 2005),
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1382513.htm
.

40
Associated Press, “Scientists study ‘trust in a bottle,' ” MSNBC Mental Health, June 1, 2005; available at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8059069/
.

41
Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Advocates for Youth.

42
Ruth Bell's book mentions it in context of abortion.

43
“The question of ‘What does it mean?'—in other words what does a particular sex act signify and communicate—is centrally important to the female sexual experience, before, during, and after. For men, by contrast, the different possible meanings matter less, and sex might often be a perfectly fine experience even if it hardly means anything at all.” (R. F. Baumeister, “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive,”
Psychological Bulletin
126, no.3 (2000): 371).

44
A phrase borrowed from Institute for American Values'
Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities
, 2003.

45
SIECUS,
Guidelines
, 54; available at:
http://www.siecus.org/pubs/guidelines/guidelines.pdf
.

46
David P. Schmitt, “Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests from 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
85, no.1 (July 2003): 85-104.

47
Johan N. Lundstrom, Miguel Goncalves, Francisco Esteves, and Mats J. Olsson, “Psychological effects of subthreshold exposure to the putative human pheromone 416-androstadien-3-one,”
Hormones and Behavior
44, no.5 (December 2003): 395–401.

48
Aron Weller, “Human pheromones: Communication through body odour,”
Nature
392 (12 March 1998): 126–27.

49
The vomero-nasal organ.

50
Caroline M. Larsen, Ilona C. Kokay, and David R. Grattan, “Male pheromones initiate prolactin-induced neurogenesis and advance maternal behavior in female mice,”
Hormones and Behavior
53, no.4 (April 2008): 509–17.

51
H. Gelez and C. Fabre-Nys, “The ‘male effect' in sheep and goats: a review of the respective roles of the two olfactory systems,”
Hormones and Behavior
46, no.3 (September 2004): 257-71.

52
M. T. Mendonca and D. Crews, “Control of Attractivity and Receptivity in Female Red-Sided Garter Snakes,”
Hormones and Behavior
40, no.1 (August 2001): 43–50.

53
Peter W. Sorensen, Norman E. Stacey, and Katherine J. Chamberlain, “Differing behavioral and endocrinological effects of two female sex pheromones on male goldfish,”
Hormones and Behavior
23, no.3 (1989): 317–32.

54
Christopher A. Pearl, Misty Cervantes, Monica Chan, Uyen Ho, Rane Shoji, and Eric O. Thomas, “Evidence for a Mate-Attracting Chemosignal in the Dwarf African Clawed Frog Hymenochirus,”
Hormones and Behavior
38, no.1 (August 2000): 67–74.

55
Bruce Alexander Schulte, Elizabeth Watson Freeman, Thomas Elton Good-win, Julie Hollister-Smith, and L. Elizabeth Little Rasmussen, “Honest signaling through chemicals by elephants with applications for care and conservation,”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
102, nos.3-4 (February 2007): 344–63.

56
Kathleen Stern and Martha K. McClintock, “Regulation of ovulation by human pheromones,”
Nature
392 (12 March 1998): 177–79.

57
Martha K. McClintock, Susan Bullivant, Suma Jacob, Natasha Spencer, Bethanne Zelano, and Carole Ober, “Human Body Scents: Conscious Perceptions and Biological Effects,”
Chemical Senses
30, suppl. 1 (2005): i135–i137.

58
Martha K. McClintock, “Pheromones, Odors, and Vanna: The Neuroendocrinology of Social Chemosignals in Humans and Animals,” in
Hormones, Brain and Behavior
, Vol.1, ed. D. W. Pfaff (Academic Press, 2002), 797–870.

59
H. Varendi and R. H. Porter, “Breast odour as the only maternal stimulus elicits crawling towards the odour source,”
Acta Paediaticar
90, no.4 (2001): 372–75.

60
Bruce J. Ellis, “Timing of Pubertal Maturation in Girls: An Integrated Life History Approach,”
Psychological Bulletin
130, no.6 (Nov 2004): 920–58.

61
Kerstin Uvnas Moberg,
The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2003).

Chapter 3

1
Zogby International, “2004 Survey on Parental Opinions of Character or Relationship-based Abstinence Education vs. Comprehensive (or Abstinence-First, Then Condoms) Sex Education,” January 28, 2004. Retrieved on 4/28/2008 from
www.citizenlink.org
.