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" Picking up Dirty Minds: How Our Brains \u00ADInfluence Love, Sex, and Relationships, an overview of developments in &amp;quot;the neuroscience of love&amp;quot; by journalist and science writer Kayt Sukel, jogged a fond memory. Part of my early initiation as the lone male-mascot editor at ELLE, it turned out, took place at a story meeting in which the subject of \u00ADlibido came up. I offered that I saw it more or less as just one of the \u00ADprimal appetites, like hunger\u2014not much more \u00ADcomplicated, given a certain passage of time, than &amp;quot;Shall we hit the rib joint tonight, darling, or go Thai?&amp;quot; Er...no? I was gently given to understand, to the accompaniment of a few sighs and giggles, that the maintenance of the habit of intimacy was, in the eyes of my colleagues, a good deal more complicated than that. Emotional mind-set, relationship psychology, the barometric pressure of the domestic atmo\u00ADsphere, maybe the hormonal readings on a \u00ADgiven day, and perhaps less effable elements besides\u2014all \u00ADentered into what could never be reduced to any kind of \u00ADsimple Newtonian equation. Ah, said I, with a dawning \u00ADrecognition of familiar, if seemingly impenetrable, complications. It&amp;#039;s all so much more...conditional than the average fellow would have it be. I lean away from theories about how men and women are different in essential, hardwired ways, but now and then, there&amp;#039;s really nothing else to say but vive la diff\u00E9rence.          In Dirty Minds, it was the \u00ADcotton-top \u00ADtamarin \u00ADmonkeys that did it for me. I distrust the reverse anthro\u00ADpomorphism that animal experiments \u00ADeasily \u00ADlead us into. But really, how perfect is this: We know that cuddling and mating release the neuro\u00ADtransmitter oxytocin in a whole range of mammal\u00ADian brains, \u00ADincluding ours, and that this chemical \u00ADcascade in turn \u00ADfosters pair-\u00ADbonding. A 2010 study of \u00ADtamarin couples looked \u00ADfurther into this phenomenon and, Sukel reports, established that \u00AD&amp;quot;snuggling and grooming were behind the [oxytocin] variance in females, while for men it came down to how much sex they were having.&amp;quot; In the \u00ADtamarin duos that showed high oxy\u00ADtocin \u00ADlevels, &amp;quot;males initiated the cuddling their mate \u00ADwanted, and females solicited the sex their mate was after.&amp;quot; Go ahead, call me reductive, but this \u00ADpassage put me right back in that story meeting. Sukel&amp;#039;s book fairly bristles with such causes to \u00ADreflect on our erotic complexity, via data from \u00ADanimal and \u00ADhuman experiments, genetics and epige\u00ADnetics, endocrinology, and neuroimaging. But \u00ADChapter 12, &amp;quot;My Adven\u00ADtures with the O-Team,&amp;quot; is the high point of the whole enterprise: The \u00ADauthor consented to have herself strapped into an fMRI machine in a Jason-esque mesh mask to render her head immobile and to bring herself to orgasm while her brain was being scanned by the clanking \u00ADmachine enveloping her. After the short shudder of one \u00ADdemure climax that she thought did the trick came the request from the tech guy: Uh, fail \u00ADbetter? So she rose womanfully to the challenge and \u00ADreally rode one home. Tech guy: &amp;quot;It was \u00ADreally, really great.&amp;quot; Her reward? A 16-slice scan, reproduced in the book, of her brain on orgasm, lit up like a freaking Christmas tree. Serving the advancement of \u00ADscience can&amp;#039;t get much better than that. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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