Not well and not well known (apparently)

I've been absent for a week!
While I was at the hospital last week I was feeling at a low-ebb. Perhaps I'd been doing too much! I just felt so tired. I went up to see Hitomi at the studio and she was having quite a busy day and so I helped out doing what I could. It was good to see her busy but of course it didn't leave her much time to have a celebration for her birthday and as it was we had just thirty minutes in the late afternoon and then we didn't leave there until nine at night.
Saturday morning was dreadful - I had a cold and I stayed in bed. Madame Plum was working but Hiro sent up some food for me. By the time Monday arrived I phoned into work to say I was sick and I'd be taking a few days off and I ended up having a discussion about literal translations and maintaining context. One headache and sore throat later I finally managed to bathe in the hot tub. When you disrobe and you start to shiver violently is an awful feeling but that's how it is sometimes with colds and flu. It's just so difficult maintaining a comfortable body temperature.

It must be said that I don't have many male friends and there could be many reasons for that but on Tuesday night, and I was feeling much better, Hitomi had invited a couple of girlfriends over and they brought their boyfriends. We had a dinner together downstairs in the restaurant and then came up to the apartment for coffee and wine and a nice cozy chat. I suppose it's natural from when the conversation came up about relationships and ours being girl-girl that the topic would evolve into boys and girls and quite frankly what was said by the boys amazed me and I came to the sudden conclusion that a lot of men either dismiss the fact that women are different, and I don't just mean physically and wash their hands of this fact and just accept it or they live under a series of misapprehensions. These guys and I'm really talking about the two that visited our apartment as well as many many others world-wide, must believe the myths that men share around a boys night out table. It was painful to hear what they believed sometimes and the girls were not much better and so it turned out that ignorance abounded around my couches on that Tuesday night. Sadly it isn't just confined there, it appears many men and women simply don't know the facts, even if they come close and they live under the cloak of serious misapprehension.

So here is Auntie Jazz's guide to peering beyond the veil. What I'm going to talk about is a generalized and very specific view of why we think differently and of course there will be exceptions, nothing I say is written in stone. This is not an attack on either gender, it's simply how I see this and it's a view I've built up from experience and reading. This is not difficult and I'll try to keep it very simple and it is a very base view, there is much more too it!

Let's establish one idea to start with: We all know what it's like to be drunk right? We know from drinking too much ourselves or we've witnessed it in others. We know that when someone is drunk they act differently, yes? Good, we now have established that putting something in our bloodstream changes our behavior. What about drugs? Okay let me give you an example and not use the blanket term of 'drugs' but let me choose two. Amphetamines and barbiturates are the two I choose. While each can again have sub-categories they are generally known as 'uppers' and 'downers'. Amphetamines increase performance and they make you awake and alert and they also make you feel good about yourself. Barbiturates are just the opposite! They are depressants and they can easily sedate you. So now you know that putting different things into your bloodstream can have different effects, right?
Men have lots and lots of a hormone called testosterone and we have lots and lots of a hormone called estrogen and while they are not considered opposites, they do work differently and so one gender will not act or think in the same way the other one does. Once you accept this we can go into a little more juicy detail about what each side wants in sex and love and the plan that nature has to continue the species and for the point of this blog excluding lesbians and homosexuals and for the sake of relationships I am also leaving aside infidelity and fetishes. I am simply going to stay with a simplified and normal ideal male and female relationship, understanding and how it's all supposed to work in theory so none of my sweet readers are left in the cold and wondering if what they heard in the gym about the other gender is true.

When it comes to the idea of selecting a mate, men are highly visual and look for the markers that would suggest that she can make lots of strong and healthy babies. The visual markers in a woman for this include youth, beauty and childbearing hips. Women on the other hand look at a man's power, commitment, status and the very important material resources. This is the way it has been for human history even if it's an unpopular thing in a world that needs to be seen to be politically correct. In such a world they say men and women want the same things and that's what confuses the hell out of those setting out to find their first mate in life. I have to ask why religious leaders, feminist groups and other power seekers maintain this myth when everyone who has lived with a member of the opposite sex in a relationship simply knows it isn't true. I cannot answer that, it is a mystery to me. All I can say is that we don't have the same motivations, preferences or urges.
Fact: Love and romantic love is universal. It appears in songs and poems and stories in every single culture and so we have to believe that it is common to humanity as a whole and is not culture or geographical feature like a language or a religion. It is something that we are born with and aspire to find when we grow.
If I am to take away the poetry and romance from love for a moment and look at it from the scientific and medical point of view, then we will see that falling in love is a set of hormones acting on the brain. These chemicals and hormones include dopamine, oxytocin, testosterone, estrogen and norepinephrine. All mammals have these and they work on their brains the same way as they do in ours.
If we experience that love at first sight we get dopamine and norepinephrine flooding into our brain and it can lead to obsessions that can last for days or even years. Lust on the other hand is brought about by surges in the sex specific hormone, testosterone or estrogen. Lust, according to my medical encyclopedia, starts by two parts of the brain becoming active, the hypothalamus (the bit that controls primordial urges like thirst and hunger) and the amygdale (which is responsible for arousal) and that all makes perfect sense if I hunger for someone and feel that I want her (or him). Dopamine is released into these areas and that triggers a massive release of testosterone (even in girls) which makes sexual attraction occur. Even a casual chat with a girl will have testosterone levels climbing high in a male because of the possibilities. I must however add that the levels rise far higher in single men than they do in married men or Fathers. Obviously this is because the single men are still looking to pass on their genes. If we look at lust as a biological imperative it is obvious that this came about to continue the species under stressful conditions (such as war, tribal conflicts) when there was little time for romance. Human females can only (generally) produce one offspring per year (with the rare exception of twins and other even rarer multiples) and so because compared with other animals we are slow at reproducing, Mother Nature in her wisdom made us enthusiastic reproducers. Before men go off to war or if they manage to get home on leave during times of conflict we know exactly what they want and that's to pass on their genes before anything bad were to happen to them.

Testosterone is the hormone responsible for sex drive and men have it up to thirty times more than we do and that's what makes the drive in them so much more urgent. It makes men bigger, stronger, hairier, more aggressive and more hornier than women. However men have thirty times less oxytocin than we do and it's this hormone that makes us want to cuddle, in fact it is called the cuddle hormone, Google "cuddle hormone" and see! Both genders get this flooding into our brains during orgasm. Men get a massive hit and their orgasm reaches a peak that we women will never know but because we have large amounts of this hormone to being with, we have longer lasting and multiple orgasms that men will never know. Unfortunately after his orgasm and his penis becomes flaccid once more, his oxytocin levels dissipate quickly and so to then does his desire to cuddle. That's why after sex cuddles are important to us women but of very limited appeal to men. Oxytocin gives us the warm fuzzy feelings of being in love and men get it when they feel love for the first time but since we have more, we naturally feel deeper in love than men do. This is no fault of men, it is how nature works. But as we fall in love, men will experience a high of this oxytocin and give them a warm feeling too. It is part of a bonding process since this cuddle hormone makes them softer, more relaxed and easy going (we've all seen this - they do not behave in a lovers company as they do when they are out with the boys talking sports or cars). As we women fall in love our testosterone levels rise and it makes us hornier and this gives the illusion that our sex drive is as strong as a man's. So laughingly, after six months to a year of lots and lots of sex in the new relationship and our hormone levels return to normal, men get the idea that we lose interest in sex and we get the idea that they are sex maniacs! Who said Mother nature did not have a sense of humor?

As I have said, men are very visual, they love to look at women and fantasize and watch pornography which is no surprise to any of us! For over a million years they needed to look at women to assess the young, the healthy and the strong to initiate the mating process. Men use their eyes to evaluate a woman's potential and since visual imagery is instantaneous, they get to fall in love all that much quicker. They get erections as they are flushed with all those sex hormones (which also amazingly turns off the part of the brain that they use to make rational decisions and figure out logical procedures) which leads to the old joke about God giving man a brain and a penis but only enough blood to run one at a time.
Women on the other hand remember things well and the areas of the brain associated with recall become active when falling in love. We remember his words, his behavior. The Woman's role  for the last few million years was to raise the baby (the product of all our wild sex) to a stage where a modicum of independence was realized. Of all the mammals on Earth, the human job of Mothering is the hardest. Our newborns can't walk on the first day and don't stay silent when predators are close. Because of this, we Mothers need care and protection from the male. In ancient days, if a woman's partner died, she would expend a lot of energy caring for the infant, herself and hopefully, attract a new partner and one that would invest in a child not of his seed. So where the man can make a visual assessment and say yeah, I'll have this one, a woman needs time to assess the important things like if he's honest and trustworthy and can he hunt successfully and bring home the meat and share it! In today's world we look at his assets, his employment and is he kind and generous, does he relate well to children, his Mother and we use that to evaluate his potential of being a good partner.

In basic terms, even though the world we live in has changed in just one or two generations. We had the sex taboos and then the freedom of love in the 1960's but our instincts have remained intact for a million years. What was important then is still hardwired into our brains and is still important now.