that being said, i will talk about each chapter individually.
(PS - i am eating Top Ramen as i type this and it looks like brains!!! appropriate!!) ;)
Chapter Four: Sex: The Brain Below the Belt
This chapter was super informative, though it made me feel like an emotional wreck what with women needing to completely shut off areas of their brains in order to feel even romantically inclined. we just can't help ourselves i guess. i liked the mention of the fact that women are more attracted to "sexy" mates at different points of their cycles (p. 88) because it relates back to what i learned in anthropology last semester; i wish we had been able to read this book instead of listening to all those dumb lectures and looking at bar graphs, i would have gotten the information much more easily. but i guess since the teacher was a boy, graphs and raw data were more connected to his learning patterns (see i am learning something!!).
there were some hysterical scenes in this chapter. the visual of men and women's brains was spot on: "Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes" (p. 91). i think that is an excellent analogy. it makes me tolerate my younger brother a little bit more, but only slightly.
the story about the woman burying her vibrator in the backyard made me laugh out loud (p. 82)!! it reminded me of a situation on Sex and the City, and as i've been reading i keep finding similarities. In my head i keep thinking, "the SATC writers must have read this book when they were coming up with ____ storyline." but then i remember that this book came out after the show ended. it makes me feel less guilty about watching it; there are a lot of real female brain issues in that show!
one part i was shocked by was the fact that 4 out of every 10 women have experienced a traumatic sexual event in their lives that affect their current (healthy) sex lives (p. 81). it's like the statistic that 1 in 3 women will be raped in their lives. it's totally unacceptable and it makes me angry to read about it. i'm glad that Brizendine is doing her part to help women work through their sexual issues and to not feel ashamed of their feelings and the situations they find themselves in.
on a happier note: my very favorite part of this chapter came at the beginning when Brizendine pointed out that research has shown that women need to feel comfortable and have warm feet in order to become truly sexually aroused (p. 79). so socks, apparently, are the number one aphrodisiac ;) though i feel a little alarmed about this: my feet are always cold (regardless of my sock status), and not just cold, but ice box, cold-as-the-grave cold. what can i do?? it's a little disheartening.
1 comment:
Mmmmm.... brains for lunch...
I agree that the more I read this book, the more I love it, which is saying something because I loved it from the start. It rings so true! And totally helps to explain things about who we are attracted to and why. I think that we forget just how much our brains really have to do with everything about us. I always understood that the brain controlled everything, but never realized exactly what that meant, especially when it comes to matters of the heart (or loins I guess).
I was thinking about Sex and the City while reading this chapter too! Some of the situations make even more sense to me now! And knowing that the writers were mostly women who dealt with a great deal of those issues just makes it all so real.
The statistics about women being raped and molested are scary. And it really can affect you for the rest of your life. It is the ultimate violation, and women have so little power over it all, which is even scarier. It is so sad that someone can do something so horrible to someone else and not care that the woman will have trust issues for the rest of her life.
Ha ha! My feet are not usually that cold. But when they are, I don't really feel good all over. So again, this book has made sense. But one thing I didn't quite agree with is that it takes 24 hours after a fight for a woman to be in the mood for sex. I just don't think that is really true. The world would not be over-populated if it was :)
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