A Woman's Passion Is Neurochemically Enhanced By Stress

I wonder if anyone else is as intrigued as I am by the article in the May, 2003 Discover magazine entitled "Emotions And The Brain: Love" beginning on page 70. The article relates stress to the production of the peptide oxytocin in women but relatively much less so in men, who produce adrenaline instead. Oxytocin has effects which produce behavior quite different from a man's "fight or flight" reaction. Instead women seek out social contact. Their "tolerance effect" in reaction to naturally occurring opiates, (opioids), is suppressed. Hence oxytocin intensifies the feelings of pleasure and reward and satisfaction attendant on social bonds which are produced by opioids, prolonging and enhancing their effect.

I believe this neurochemical complex explains part of the reason women make intense social bonds with Dominant Men when those men subject them to stress. In terms of evolutionary biology, it makes perfect sense. It would have provided an important survival mechanism for women kidnapped by members of neighboring tribes. (This is a common practice in New Guinea even today, in the internecine warfare which reigns in the hinterlands.)

Read the article. I'll bet many of you have had personal experiences which, empirically at least, validate the theory in the penultimate paragraph. (Anyone explaining the behavior of a sub who is a male will have to look for an alternative neurochemical parallel.)

Top-Rock

Okay, this is my "Jackass" post, in which I make a jackass of myself (and hope I won't do it again for a long, long time).

I'm sorry Top-Rock's post didn't attract more attention (or, at least, more response), but it dovetails nicely with something I read a long time ago (and, no, I can't cite my source).

Supposedly, a woman is twice as likely to become pregnant from a single act of rape as she is from a single act of consensual sex. Again supposedly, women have been known to ovulate completely out of cycle during a rape.

Assuming the validity of Top-Rock's attachment thesis, could a suceptibility to "rape pregnancy" have been a survival adaptation? I would presume that a female "adoptee" would be better treated and more quickly integrated into the tribe the more quickly she became pregnant.

Also, often when a female was "adopted", her children (especially her male children) would be slain, so becoming rapidly pregnant could be a racial survival mechanism, as well as an individual one.

As an aside, shortly after the French Voyageurs made their appearance in Canada, The Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroqouis embarked on a calculated program of neighborly genocide. Supposedly, they foresaw that the white men would multiply and eventually encroach upon their territory so, like the Soviet Union in the 1940's, they decided that their best defense was to push their borders as far out as possible. Over the roughly 150 years between Champlain and the advent of large numbers of white settlers in the Mohawk valley and upper Hudson, six neighboring tribes ceased to exist. (All of them were Algonquins and, no, the Mohicans were not one of them -- in fact, Cooper to the contrary, the Mohicans still exist and they have a very profitable casino in Connecticut.) All of the males over the age of twelve were slain and the women and children were adopted (their word), which greatly increased the population of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, a change in policy resulted in the Iroqouis becoming friendly with the British, which caused their downfall in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

If anyone wishes to take issue with any of this, please feel free, since most of it could qualify as hearsay and I have no emotional investment in my position.

I just wanted to state that I am very glad to see this kind of thought provoking posting happening here. :)

veru skjava

and No Curtis you did NOT make a jackass of yourself. ;)

I heard about a study of people living in Finland that used genetic evidence to conclude that a group of invading men did exactly what Curtix suggested. Result: genetic evidence that some people who live in Finland had male and female ancestors of different tribes / ethnic groups / something.

This is only a memory - does anyone have a citation for something like this?

although the reasons given have only recently been discovered
the information is actually not that new,sadly for man the Nazi's experiments on women under duress is still used as is the data on twins , stress , cold and countless other "medical experiments" conducted in the so called name of science.

in the studies on women it was found that stress,that is the threat of death, actually changed the menstrual cycle.this is attributed to the preservation of the species,breed first then die.

the scientific community although condeming the testing done still refer to and use the data collected in the death camps

slavedriver wrote:

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although the reasons given have only recently been discovered the information is actually not that new. sadly for man the Nazi's experiments on women under duress is still used as is the data on twins , stress , cold and countless other "medical experiments" conducted in the so called name of science.

....

the scientific community although condeming the testing done still refer to and use the data collected in the death camps

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A real, sad, and painful dilemma. Should we ignore what was learned by incredibly foul means because of those means or does using the information gained from so many people's pain honor their suffering in some way?

Both possibilities bring new questions, for example:

If ignoring data from Nazi (and Soviet, and ...) torturous "experiments" is best, how valuable is the information lost? Is it possible to regain it by ethical means?

If continuing to use such data is best, how should those who report it or whose work builds on it acknowledge their source? Does keeping the memory of such attrocities alive help to prevent their recurrance?

slavedriver's comment, for example, reminded everyone who read it of the unsafe, insane, and entirely non-consensual events Hitler and his followers forced on the millions they killed directly in their camps and on the battlefield and also of the still larger numbers of civilians who died. Those who died during the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, during the Nazi's invasion of and retreat from the Soviet Union more generally, at Nanking and other places Japan sacked, and on and on and on ...

Antony Beevor's books on Stalingrad and Berlin are worth anyone's time. The Stalingrad book focuses on the cost paid by military personnel while the Berlin book adds a lot of information about civilian suffering. Among his conclusions: an enormous fraction of females above the age of menarche between Berlin and Moscow, nearly all in some regions, was raped between the Nazi's invasion in August, 1941 and their surrender in May, 1945. Soviet troops were apparently particularly thorough as they extracted revenge for Leningrad, Stalingrad, the Einsatz Gruppen, and Nazi POW and death camps.

He has a third book, on the Spanish Civil War, that I have not read. It was the Nazi's and Soviet's training ground for WWII, so I expect it is equally valuable. I would especially like to read his account of the Guernica, the first city destroyed by aerial bombardment and the subject of on of Pablo Picasso's greatest paintings.

The literature on the holocaust has been growing since the war ended, and the Nazi's "Einsatz Gruppen," the teams assigned to impose their racial ideology in eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union, have been studied in recent books I have not read.

Nothing easy here. Thank you, slavedriver.

although violence for the sake of violence is abhorent and should be condemed on all levels i personally do not believe that we as either individuals or nations should ignore what has been learned in the past.however the credit for the information gained should go to those who suffered not those who caused the suffering.
if we cannot learn from the mistakes of our forbears,including all of the knowledge that they amassed,then the passing of time has been for nothing,and the memory of our ancestors is wasted.
mankind has the power to either destroy or enhance and should be expected to use all available knowledge to the enhancement of all.if we cannot use our knowledge for the ultimate good we are not fit to be in existance.

knowledge is the ultimate power

power is the ultimate evil

... because at the time, I could not make an informed opinion. Now I can and my official response is:

Bull-(you fill in the last four letters)

Having seen first hand the effects of stress on a woman's libido, I know now that, in at least one case I know of personally, stress does NOT enhance a woman's passion. In fact, it does the complete opposite and tends to kill any sexual/romantic desire that was present before the element of stress was introduced.

So, from my own perspective, this piece was... well, a piece.

Stress on a woman's body is more apt to stop her menstrual cycles then to enhance her fertility. It is a survival mechanism.

During times of high physical stress even without the presence of malnutrition a woman will cease her cycles. This is seen often in women athletes. The body reacts in much the same way to intense emotional stress.

As for the "medical" data gathered during the Nazi's regimen in WW2, it must be remembered that the men performing these experiments were intent on proving race superiority. That the data may be skewed by these views have to be considered.

I am not going to dispute that stress can affect menstrual cycles, but in the specific case of athletes the reason they start 'skipping' is that their bodyfat drops below a certain percentage.

Your correct Curtis but it has also been seen in women of nomadic tribes during moves without the lower body fat and in women undergoing high levels of stress.

Since the human body doesn't differentiate wether a stress is physical or emotional the results are much the same. It is also why the sustained "fight or flight" response during emtional stress is so harmful over time. It is there for short term increased reactions to save us, but when it continues over time due to emotional stress it becomes very harmful to the body.

Based on what I know of women's reproduction and the bodies reactions to stressors I strongly doubt that a woman has an increased chance of becoming pregnant during a rape.

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Originally Posted by Curtis

I am not going to dispute that stress can affect menstrual cycles, but in the specific case of athletes the reason they start 'skipping' is that their bodyfat drops below a certain percentage.

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Yes, and let's also not foget the hormone replacement therapies that most female athletes undergo for training. Testosterone is not a banned substance by the IOC or any other governing athletic body. And it will turn off a woman's period in a blink.

I think I got the spelling of that right. It's called 'amenorrhea'; missing a period or several in times of stress. And weight loss seems to be a side effect, not a cause. I haven't had a period since Thanksgiving,right before we moved; in the fuss and hassle of moving, the Christmas holidays, and my husband's wandering thoughts along with various other social and intimate pressures, i haven't had one in a few months. No, I'm not pregnant; I had myself 'spayed' :o after the birth of my second child. So the only other possibility is stress-induced amenorrhea, accompanied by weight loss (I've dropped one pant size since Thanksgiving). So I have to say, in my experience...no. Stress doesn't cause my libido to go up. I will say, though, that I've indulged in more self-inflicted bondage-and-pain sessions since Thanksgiving; the pain helps relieve my stress. Doesn't do anything to raise my sex drive, though I do find myself orgasming during the worst of the pain. But it doesn't bring any kind of sexual relief; the orgasm feels mostly perfunctory.

[QUOTE=Curtis]Supposedly, a woman is twice as likely to become pregnant from a single act of rape as she is from a single act of consensual sex. Again supposedly, women have been known to ovulate completely out of cycle during a rape.
[QUOTE]

You are leaving yourself exposed to the exposed to the sociolological based forces of 'reasonablists' ie the sociological trained caring community, who on the whole, I think, would reject this idea. But I heard something similar in a seminar in another life, years ago when I worked for the Probation Service. It was rejected then as something that just couldn't happen, as if a woman had the choice of it happening or not. Of course there are too many variables to be certain. But rape, like all crimes, is culturally based. In some cultures abuction of women is a pre-requisite for procreation. It would be called rape in our culture but not in every culture.

One has to look at the biological evidence and there is evidence showing reasons why women may be inherently more permissive than men and free from socialisation, might not view what our culture sees as rape, rape. If a woman has the sperm of more than one male in her vagina the sperm from each male have killer sperm (theory and not mine) that fight for the prize of impregnation of the female. The upside for the female is she will be inpregnated by the dominant sperm. This suggests the female (free from sociolisation) is quite happy to be taken by more than one male (the right males one assumes). It is the male who wants to protect his female and it is the male that created the crime of rape.

I'm going to stop as the rioja is going to my head.

I haven’t read the article TopRock is referring to, most of that scientific stuff goes right over my head anyway, but I wish I had. It’s an intriguing topic for sure.

I’ve often heard it said that a woman may climax during rape. It’s also well documented that in ancient Roman times soldiers (who fought naked) would more often than not go in battle with a raging erections. Obviously the body reacts in strange ways under stress.

But I think what might be getting confused here is types of stress.

The type TopRock and Curtis are referring to is very short-term stress known as ‘eustress’ which strengthens a person for immediate and short-term activity. A good example would be a parent who is able to single handedly pull a child from a urgent and threatening situation, that ordinarily they just wouldn't have the physical strenghth for. I hadn’t given it much thought until I now, but I guess rape could certainly induce almost instant bodily changes.

The type Jeanangel is referring, is known as 'distress'. It's caused by prolonged adjustment, or struggle, to adapt to something unpleasant. Hers is a good example of this.

Now, I could be wrong here, but I think the type of stress that may cause female athletes to begin skipping their periods, and dropping body fat might be 'hyperstress' or overload, which occurs when we try to overload ourselves and stretch our limits to excess.

And no, Curtis, you did not make a ‘jackass’ of yourself...

I did, however, change the topic (or, more properly, introduce a new one). Top-Rock was trying to open a discussion on whether eustress could make a woman horny. I think anyone who's ever gone to a good scary movie with a woman knows the answer to that one. Near-death experiences, even vicarious ones, have been acknowledged as aphrodisiacs for both men and women for decades (think rollercoasters, skydiving, being shot at and missed, etc.).

The point I raised was different. I was speaking of a strictly physiological reaction (ovulation) to a very specific trigger (rape). Becoming pregnant has very little to do with how horny you are. (Or does it? That might be an interesting point to explore as well.)

And I think Alex sells short her ability to comprehend 'that scientific stuff'. Anyone who can come up with, and usefully define 'eustress', 'distress' and 'hyperstress' won't often find herself in over her head.

... that my reply to this topic might have been a bit blunt. For that, I'd like to say a sincere "oops" from the heart. I guess what goes from my brain to my fingers sometimes doesn't stop by the Bureau of Common Sense on the way out.

So, please realize that I was talking only form my perspective and I did not mean to belittle anyone's responses to this thread.

Thank you.

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Originally Posted by Alex Bragi

types of stress....
The type TopRock and Curtis are referring to is very short-term stress known as ‘eustress’ which strengthens a person for immediate and short-term activity.
The type Jeanangel is referring, is known as 'distress'. It's caused by prolonged adjustment, or struggle, to adapt to something unpleasant. Hers is a good example of this.
Now, I could be wrong here, but I think the type of stress that may cause female athletes to begin skipping their periods, and dropping body fat might be 'hyperstress' or overload, which occurs when we try to overload ourselves and stretch our limits to excess.

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ENABLING STRESS
I seem to have arrived late in on this thread, as is often the case with me. I agree with alex's division of types of stress into three, but have used the term enabling stress , instead of eustress; and have explained it on one occasion, by giving a demonstration of what happened when I removed all stress from my muscles; I dropped straight to the floor, much to the surprise of the audience! another example is in psychiatric patients given overenthusiastic lobotomies, all distress, also all stress is removed, and with it all drive so that a person who retains all their intellectual abilities has so little drive that they are doubly incontinent and have to be handfed. I.E nil stress= nil performance.
DISABLING STRESS (distress)
Have you noticed that when you are so worried and stressed that you cannot think straight, on reflection, you realise that a major contributor, even the main cause was not big global issues like relationships , illness, and death etc, but a noise in the high fi , a mislaid shoe ,or paper back, something so minor , that you don't have time to allocate to it, and yet if you are honest it got to you quite disproportionally; it trod on your emotional corns. Frequently distress can be resolved by emptying the recycle bin of ones mind of these minor problems that get to YOU. (Just small amounts of these make big differences to ones stress levels yet are easily resolved once acknowledged.)
HYPERSTRESS
Too much for too long, wears you down.
When managing all this in oneself it is more beneficial to think of verbs not nouns, I.E. instead of 'why have i so much stress', ask yourself ' what am i doing (or not doing) to get myself distressed.
(If a suitable thread appears I could describe some simple home measures for addressing this subject further.)
I think that the evidence suggests that a weight loss of 30% below average for ht, in women is sufficient for them to cease menstruating and that this is independent from stress levels.

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Originally Posted by DONATIEN

If a suitable thread appears I could describe some simple home measures for addressing this subject further.

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I don't know about a thread, but a link to such things or (greedy, greedy) a list of your favorites would be welcome.

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Originally Posted by Top-Rock

I wonder if anyone else is as intrigued as I am by the article in the May, 2003 Discover magazine entitled "Emotions And The Brain: Love" beginning on page 70. The article relates stress to the production of the peptide oxytocin in women but relatively much less so in men, who produce adrenaline instead. Oxytocin has effects which produce behavior quite different from a man's "fight or flight" reaction. Instead women seek out social contact. Their "tolerance effect" in reaction to naturally occurring opiates, (opioids), is suppressed. Hence oxytocin intensifies the feelings of pleasure and reward and satisfaction attendant on social bonds which are produced by opioids, prolonging and enhancing their effect.

I believe this neurochemical complex explains part of the reason women make intense social bonds with Dominant Men when those men subject them to stress. In terms of evolutionary biology, it makes perfect sense. It would have provided an important survival mechanism for women kidnapped by members of neighboring tribes. (This is a common practice in New Guinea even today, in the internecine warfare which reigns in the hinterlands.)

Read the article. I'll bet many of you have had personal experiences which, empirically at least, validate the theory in the penultimate paragraph. (Anyone explaining the behavior of a sub who is a male will have to look for an alternative neurochemical parallel.)

Top-Rock

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Fascinating. The article is still available on line for $1 but could you email me a copy? The responses are also interesting. The kidnapping of women in raids is also traditional in the nomadic tribes of Arabia. Note that I say 'is', as I'm not sure that it is not still going on in the more remote areas.

Rape brings up conflicting emotions. The classic 'rape and pillage' scenario is occurring in many parts of the world at frequent intervals, recently in the Balkans, Sudan and other places such as parts of Asia that are not in the news. There is nothing sexy about the reality in which women are often killed after being brutally, mercilessly raped with no thought of minimising the damage, and the ultimate aim of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. Neither is there anything sexy about rapists in Western countries who attack women with equal brutality, and absolutely no consideration for the woman's feelings. Some rapists are even indifferent to the age of their victims. I find it hard to understand how a man can be turned on by the brutal destruction of the source of his pleasure. No degree of visceral need can explain it.

The nomadic cultures of Arabia are a different matter. The reason for taking multiple wives was that men were killed in battle, leaving a surplus of women, widows who could only be looked after by a husband, and the wealth of a tribe was counted in women and animals (mainly camels and goats) captured from weaker tribes in raids. There was no interest in brutal attacks on women. Reproduction, resources permitting, was a way to make a tribe numerically stronger than their competitors for survival, and sex with captured women was regarded as a reward for success in battle. So when a woman was captured she knew what she was in for, and she had better be compliant. If she was compliant she could expect equal treatment with her husband’s other women. Otherwise she could expect punishment, or even death if she was judged a danger, or even just a nuisance.

Although the original post did not mention rape, many of the followup posts did, The original talked about stress, although it did mention internecine conflict in a similar context to my comments on Arabia. Unlike rape, biochemistry does not turn me off! On the contrary, it is much easier to understand a properly supported scientific argument, even if it was just a summary. It was a good summary. Women do like the kind of excitement that comes from stressful fear.

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Originally Posted by Top-Rock

I wonder if anyone else is as intrigued as I am by the article in the May, 2003 Discover magazine entitled "Emotions And The Brain: Love" beginning on page 70. The article relates stress to the production of the peptide oxytocin in women but relatively much less so in men, who produce adrenaline instead. Oxytocin has effects which produce behavior quite different from a man's "fight or flight" reaction. Instead women seek out social contact. Their "tolerance effect" in reaction to naturally occurring opiates, (opioids), is suppressed. Hence oxytocin intensifies the feelings of pleasure and reward and satisfaction attendant on social bonds which are produced by opioids, prolonging and enhancing their effect.
I believe this neurochemical complex explains part of the reason women make intense social bonds with Dominant Men when those men subject them to stress. In terms of evolutionary biology, it makes perfect sense. It would have provided an important survival mechanism for women kidnapped by members of neighboring tribes. (This is a common practice in New Guinea even today, in the internecine warfare which reigns in the hinterlands.)

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To TOP rock's excellent summary of this article, and his highly relevant (for us) hypothesis, I thought it might be useful for those forum members who don't want the bother of reading the at times technical article to add a more detailed bulletin of its target points :-

1)rats subjected to repeated electric shocks bit and clawed each other to death, but this and many other experimental studies on reactions to stress, all supporting the adrenaline driven “ fight or flight “ response were all carried on males.most research on humans also related to males

2) A researcher(female)struck by this, thought that, instead of F&F, women tended to reach out for loved ones.She looked up mega reviews and found that 26 out of 28 studies showed that women in stressful circumstances are significantly more likely to seek social support than men.

3)Oxytocin levels are known to be significantly raised in childbirth,breast feeding , and at times of sexual climax, and whilst the presence of oestrogen enhances its effectiveness, testosterone reduces it; oxytiocin is thought to be associated with mother/infant bonding, and even face recognition

4)Praire voles belong to the 5% of mammals who after mating remain monogamous for life. On examining their brains it was found that their oxytocin (tending and nurturing) production centres
overlapped with their dopamine( pleasuring) production centres; a feature lacking in polygamous montane voles. However when the action of prairie voles oxytocin was experimentally blocked they began fucking indiscriminately appears that the overlap in the prairie voles caused caring and nurturing behaviour to become pleasurable

5)Lactating women have high oxytocin levels and handle stress better than, non lactating women .
It appears that oxytocinis actually responsible for that gut wrenching feeling that occurs when a mother hears a thud followed by her child screaming, in other words it is an “ Oh god”crunch time mobilising feeling that gets all the nurturing and tending into full gear,.So People under the influence of oxytocin have smaller, briefer stress responses than others do; bad news seems to roll off them more readily. The link between stress response and social attachment is at the heart of the idea of the tending instinct. You can fight your way out of stress by destroying your enemies, or you can reduce stress by reaching out to loved ones. In terms of brain chemistry, you can load up on adrenaline and fight or flee, or you can cool down with oxytocin and tend and befriend.

6) Another interesting fin was that "older women living with husbands and finding those husbands to be non supportive have chronically higher levels of oxytocin. Now it's not clear what the direction of causality is. But a tentative conclusion that I would make is that when social-support needs are not being met, oxytocin levels go up as a signal to seek out social contact. And then once found, oxytocin may be restored to normal levels. So oxytocin isn't the 'feel good' hormone. At times, it may be the 'feel crummy' hormone that leads you to take steps to feel better." Some scientists believe oxytocin works in tandem with the body's natural opiates, with oxytocin triggering the drive for social attachment and the opioids supplying the warm, fuzzy feeling of being in the company of loved ones.( no wonder drug addicts abandon their family for those cuddly needles with the sensuously sweet contents).

7)One of the effects oxytocin has is to reduce the tolerance effect that plays such a devastating role in drug addiction. Just as addicts develop a tolerance to heroin that causes them to take ever-larger doses, the brain develops an identical tolerance to naturally occurring opiates. In tests with animal subjects, oxytocin injections dramatically reduced tolerance to opiates. In other words, oxytocin may not create the visceral pleasure of love and attachment, but it does enable that pleasure to last for a longer period of time.

From all of this I can only echo Top rocks idea that maybe this gives clues as to why owned slaves can experience intense waves of love and gratitude after floggings of such intensity as to send them into subspace, and not unlike the feelings Winston felt for his interrogator, after he had been confronted and broken by exposure to his worst fear in room 101, in George Orwell's chilling novel1984.
I have also makes one ponder on whether consent can always be assumed to be informed consent in more extreme D/s relationships. Another situation I have been wondering about is the Stockholm syndrome ( where kidnap or hostage victims start to take up the kidnappers perspective , a famous example being Patty Hearst). I don't know but intend to try and find out whether women are more at risk of this effect than men.