On Sex, Lego and Neurons

Maybe I’ll start a new blogging tradition: Off Topic Friday. This is a big ramble with metaphorical motorcycles. Enjoy.

I was at the gym, listening to my special treat only-at-the-gym podcast. It’s Savage Love, a sex advice podcast with Dan Savage. He’s rude and he’s funny, and he has a stealthy kindness to him: it seems like he’s yelling at people, but actually he has quite a lot of compassion and an amazingly open mind.

He had a gentleman on the line with an unusual problem. He wanted to reduce his sex drive, because he would never have sex with the kind of woman he would want to have sex with, and while he had accepted that intellectually, his body wasn’t quite on board with him never having sex.

He sounded like a typical high INT low WIS character. A very intelligent person, but also someone with a very made up mind, which can be dangerous in a very intelligent person. Actually, scratch that, it can be dangerous in any person.

His options for reducing his sex drive, as he saw them, were to take female birth control pills, or to pray the feelings away (which wasn’t a good option because he’s an atheist). He’d even considered castration. “Kind of crazy” but seemed to him like it was what he needed.

Dan Savage tried to talk him down, obviously, and offered that perhaps it was easier to get a prescription for anti-depressants, which can also have a sexdrive-dampening effect. But no, that wasn’t what he wanted, because “my headspace is my favourite thing about me” and he didn’t want anything that would mess with his head. For the same reason, he didn’t want to consider therapy, either.

Cue angry internal ranting in my head.*

*I’ve noticed that something about being at the gym makes me more likely to get angry and ranty about things. Maybe it’s to do with testosterone. Anyway, on to the raint:

I did accept his problem as being a problem. I think a lot of people would be a bit weirded out by it, but a high sexdrive can be a problem, and there are perfectly rational reasons to want to lower it. But if you think that you can be castrated without that having any effect on your headspace, you don’t know very much about hormones.

In fact, if you think you can take birth control pills without that messing with your head, you don’t know very much about hormones. And you haven’t talked to a lot of women about their adventures in birth control. Maybe you should talk to me, I’d have a thing or two to say on the subject!

In his imaginary world, humans are kind of like lego structures. All he wanted was to get rid of this one brick, his sexdrive, and then push the rest of the bricks back together so he was left with nothing but a neat hole, and everything else would be exactly as it was. So he called Dan Savage to ask if there wasn’t a pill or some kind of mental trick to do that.

The answer is no.

The answer is: you’re not made of lego.

The answer is: your body is not a machine driven by your intellect, that you can tinker with like a motorcycle. You can’t chance one thing about yourself without that effecting everything else you are and do. Body and mind. It’s all one thing.

Especially if you’re going to mess around with something as fundamental as sex, or sleep, or (oh hey, we’re back on topic) food, you’re not going to be able to just replace a small part of the machine. Because it’s not a machine. It’s more like a massive web of knots of stringy stuff. And if you do manage to unravel some knots and pull on some strings, it’s going to effect many other parts of the tapestry.

Hopefully to your benefit. But maybe not. And then you try something else.

If you did find a way to calm an unfulfillable desire for sex (or chocolate), you might find you suddenly have greater reserves of patience and tolerance in very different areas of your life. It might well change everything completely and forever. In a small way.

Things change completely and forever every day, in small ways. Cells die, nutrients are processed, muscles break and grow, neurons meet and fall in love. Even your bones are alive. It all changes and it all interacts and cascades and ripples and waves. It’s beautiful, and there is no way in heaven you’re ever going to keep track of it, or control the details. All you can really do is tug on some of the main strings and see if that gets you closer to where you wanted to go.

Sometimes it’s helpful to think of your body as a machine, run by the inbuilt computer, your brain. You can remember you need fuel and maintenance, and regular defragging or virus checks or whatever. But it can also be a dangerous metaphor, because the things nature builds are really not like machines in many important ways.

I’m working on a piece of writing. I started it as a blog post, but it got kind of out of control, so I thought I’d send it as a Picture Post letter, but now I’m thinking it might be a bit big for that too, and maybe it’s more like a manifesto or something. It’s about treating your body badly, or at least as less important than your mind.

I think it’s something close to the core of what this Mad Science thing is going to be all about. If you think that sounds interesting, I hope you’ll stick around. If you scroll back up, there’s a box that allows you to subscribe by e-mail, or with RSS if you use a reader. Of course, you can also unsubscribe if you later think it’s not for you after all.

Have a good weekend, all!

Tagged as: head architecture