ASM227 Time, Reconstructing Sex, and Being Healthy at Every Size

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time reconstructing sex and being healthy at every size all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] well welcome to ask science mike this is a weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg the science mic of the title and i am a science educator who just loves talking about the way that science can apply in our daily lives but doing so in a way that is focused on and aware of our feelings our emotional responses to information is something that is too often left out when we talk about the sciences so this is a show about fact and about feelings and how the two things work together and not at odds so i'm so happy to talk with you again this week i want to welcome all of our new friends it's been very exciting watching uh so many new subscribers arrive recently um and i i imagine that's from a number of things some of you might be from the mythical beasts you might be part of the audience and community around the work of rhett and link and i'd like to welcome all of you mythical beasts here some of you may be uh getting to know me because of my new book you're a miracle and a pain in the ass thank you all by the way for making that launch so special that has been a good time and by the way the launch isn't over i am still doing in home virtual tour stops most nights every week and these have been amazing i mean any expectation i had for how these events was going to go has been far far too low we get on to um web stream for a couple of hours and we share feelings and we share curiosity and we respond to each other and i want you to know it's a really special format it is not a webcast like facebook or instagram where i talk and then people respond via text only and it's not a zoom call where everybody is up on screen at the same time which is confusing and overwhelming and let's be honest honest some of us just don't feel like being on camera these days what the way this event works is some people are on camera because they choose to be and i invite them up on screen and we talk and other people interact with text and it just they're because i'm doing so many of these they're all the perfect size you know some nights we have i think one night we had uh like 14 or 16 people and then other nights we've had over a hundred it just kind of depends on on the night uh i'd love to see you at any of them now they are named after a city because i am trying to foster local community but anyone anywhere in the world can go to any event at a convenient date and time for them and if you've already got your book you don't have to buy the book ticket to participate you are certainly welcome to i will send you a book and a postcard if you do but if you already have a book if you're like most people and you got the audiobook that's fine i'd still love to see you that's why we have free tickets available for each and every stop so may 19th will be charlotte may 21st san francisco may 22nd denver may 26 philadelphia may 28th detroit june 2nd boston june 4th orlando and june 5th raleigh so going all over many more stops to come the next three weeks it's uh it's me and you and an awful lot of fun together so i really hope you'll join me you can learn more by going to ask sciencemike.com new book and scrolling down to join the tour it's so much fun and on that note about things you can do don't forget that this is a question and response podcast there is literally no podcast without your questions so as always we welcome you to send in your questions by going to asksciencemike.com if you go down to the bottom of the page you'll see that you can send me an email question or send me a voicemail and of course we feature both types of those questions on the program so send in your questions and i'd love to see you on tour and without further ado let's get it started hey mike i'm a big fan and i hope you're doing well something i've always heard people say is that they feel like time is speeding up whenever someone says this everyone else seems to agree i've also experienced this i recall a year as a child feeling like an eternity whereas now i feel like i blank and i'm one year older what i'm wondering is if as you age your perception of time changes is there a part of our brain that perceives time i don't think that time is actually speeding up so i was curious as to what you can share about the brain and its perception of time thanks one of the most remarkable things about our species is in fact our awareness of time we have a remarkable capacity to both with intention recall events from the past and our our brains built a story and a scene around those recollections although the accuracy is somewhat questionable and we have a nearly and perhaps absolutely unmatched capacity to imagine the future when compared to other life on this planet it really is remarkable how much of a temporal focus our species has how much awareness we have of the time part of space-time other species don't seem to function this way they are much more present moment to moment they spend less time planning and less time recollecting than our species by everything we can observe our brains are so wildly focused on this this thing we do where we take our learnings from the past and then we imagine how we could apply them in the future to things that aren't even happening right now and when we look at your question there's a lot of merit here now of course all questions have mirror what i mean is what you're asking in your question is widely reported by people and has been studied when we do experiments involving the perception of time in 2005 for example there was a study done at the ludwig max melon university of munich i suppose that would be ludwig and they did a study with almost 500 participants 499 who ranged in age from 14 to 94 and just ask them about the pace that they felt time moving and here's what's interesting for shorter durations of time say a week or a month or even a year the subject's perception of time did not seem to go up with age or increase with age but when you looked at longer durations like a decade it really does seem that older people seem to perceive time as moving faster and that seems to uh really kind of hit its full stride when people hit about 40 which is is interesting um now when we look at our brains there's a couple of things at play behind this phenomenon number one is when we experience an event in the moment and when we recall it later are different framings for our mind when we when we're experiencing something that's a prospective perspective and we recall something that's a retrospective perspective and often uh recalling things they can seem like they lasted longer than they did or actually can feel sure they did depending on how exciting the experience was and how familiar the experience was to us now why do i mention familiarity well our brains actually encode our memories differently depending on how relatively familiar or novel a given experience is our brains just don't do a lot of encoding when we're in a familiar environment doing a familiar thing which makes sense our brains want to save energy and there's no need to encode a lot of memories about something that we're very very familiar with our memories in fact are being reinforced simply by doing it and on the other hand when we're experiencing something new our brains really pay attention because uh we bait we may be more likely to be surprised we may need to use more executive function in order to survive and thrive in an unfamiliar situation and i think this starts to get to the difference in perception of time when we are younger if you think about it more of our total experiences every day are novel as a percentage than familiar compared to when we are older here i am in my 40s and many of my days are very similar even before this pandemic that we're in my weeks have a consistent rhythm and because of that time does appear to slow down but i have noticed that when i would go out on tour gosh time felt just as fast in its flow as it did when i was a child and that's the core insight it is not actually a function of age but a function of the way our lives are structured that impacts our perception of the flow of time if things seem frustratingly slow in life the solution may in fact be as simple is adding more new novel and unfamiliar moments and experiences into your routine which is also frankly good for your brain and your neuroplasticity so your question is reminding me that i can do that as well if you'd like to hear more about this i did link to an article in scientific american called why does time seem to speed up with age and that will be in the show notes of episode 227 of ask science mike on ask sciencemic.com [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike thank you so much for your work you have helped me through many tough seasons i've been wondering about the science behind the healthy at every size movement i have an aversion to the idea that weight does not factor into your health but i think this may be just ingrained from years of conditioning by the media of course i support and accept anyone regardless of size and hope they accept me similarly i would never tell someone they need to lose weight but i feel like i need to lose weight to feel healthier the healthy at every size idea runs contrary to this doesn't it i guess my question boils down to can one really be healthy at every size thank you again peace love and entropy rock more well i love i love your um signature there rockmore thank you it looks familiar if uh if you all don't know i signed my messages peace love entropy uh so i feel very seen in that moment and i want to thank you for asking me about this today this is an opportunity to talk about something that is very near to my heart and that is the way that we relate to bodies and this is so personal for me uh as we'll explore as i respond to your question this is um gosh this is at the heart of my struggles in life and well let's just start at the beginning healthy at every size is an acknowledgement that our current approach to health and eating in the united states is deeply flawed now what do i mean by that well what i mean is diets simply are not effective as an intervention for health study after study after study has shown that diets simply are not helpful they don't do anything other than encourage an unhealthy cycle of weight yo-yoing where people lose and gain weight repeatedly in a cycle ultimately according to research doing more harm to their bodies than if they would have simply remained a consistent size this is a big problem and this is amplified by the fact that fat people are deeply stigmatized in our society wildly wildly stigmatized people often look at fat people with disgust or disdain i've experienced that myself walking onto airplanes sitting in business meetings or going to a trendy restaurant and finding that in fact i could not fit in the chairs available that's happened to me by the way more than once fat people get stigmatized in our society and further stigmatized by diet and fitness culture because our american view of behavior is one of individual moral failures or successes we view thin people as those who work hard and we view fat people as those who are lazy now i want to be clear i don't believe those things but i am speaking a truth that i see backed up in the media and in research when in fact a full look at the evidence would tell us that struggles with obesity are a systemic issue how do we know this well number one weight is is racialized it is genderized it is classized we find that people who are black and brown are more often obese we find that people who have lower income or below the poverty line are more often obese and then we get this nasty double stigmatization where we think that people are fat and poor because they are lazy which is very frustrating idea for me to accommodate and even talk about because well number one we won't even go to the structural barriers in our economy in the united states but we can talk about food availability and cost fresher healthier foods are more expensive and less readily available we have things in the united states called food deserts areas of the country where you simply cannot go buy fresh vegetables this is common in inner city areas this is also becoming increasingly common in believe it or not rural areas where retailers like don or general are putting local grocers out of business and then only offering what processed foods and we see that the a high rate of processed food consumption in your diet is one of the best predictors for your health or lack thereof which may or may not correlate with obesity and that's well we'll get to why that's important so what healthy at every size does is it shifts the point of measurement away from the body in the form of what number shows up on a scale or what measurements happen when we put a measuring tape around parts of our bodies to behaviors instead and that is good i i it's such a common notion that healthy at every size in some way validates or supports unhealthy habits and it does not healthy at every size is trying to bypass the failures of diet culture and fitness culture that means gym memberships surge every january and people don't actually go to the gym because they're trying to respond out of shame the the culture around dieting and fitness is a shame culture body size is an oversimplified metric for health here's why quote unquote thin people can experience health complications generally associated with fatness or obesity when they have similar activities when they're sedentary when they eat a lot of processed foods so some people because of their heredity can have a similar lifestyle and they they don't become obese but they do get heart disease they do get diabetes they can get liver disease you see what i mean and at the same time some some fat people really can have metabolic indicators of health especially when what when they eat whole foods mindfully when they exercise portion control through mindful eating when they are active in moving their bodies now i cannot pretend to be some kind of dispassionate objective observer on this topic i have always been fat except for two small windows in my life when i was a teenager puberty and adolescence sapped all the the fat from my body as as i grew taller and then as an adult um i i got up to about 300 pounds and felt such shame and disgust with myself that i i trained for a marathon and finished a marathon and i got down to what um fitness culture would call a healthy size and i wrecked my body doing it listen to me i wrecked my body doing that the intense running i was doing trying to escape not only my weight but my shame ruptured most of the discs in my spine i started getting crippling back pain truly truly i could not function back pain and i went to see a neurosurgeon and he told me that 70 percent of the discs in my spine had ruptured and i shouldn't run anymore and oh gosh the weight started coming back i've always been stigmatized for my weight in meetings at restaurants on airplanes oh gosh i feel so much shame on an airplane when you know i don't fit in a seat when i have to hold cross my arms over my chest to make sure i don't intrude into my neighbor's space i feel so much shame and that stigma about my body exacerbates my mental health challenges and guess what i do when i feel anxious guess what i do when i feel worried or ashamed i compulsively eat i cope with my feelings by eating an ongoing struggle in my life and my wife is fat too both of us have complicated relationships with our body and with food and seeing both me and my wife yo-yo up and down in one diet program and fitness fad after another hearing us dismiss the inherent beauty of our bodies i believe probably played a large role in the fact that my very thin teenage daughter madison is anorexic and anorexia takes lives and is so often response to a terror of the stigma associated with fatness anorexia is celebrated in some ways in fitness culture the bodies that we highlight and call good often a result of routines that aren't attainable for most people and our fashion industry has repeatedly and knowingly elevated bodies suffering from anorexia as a model for the rest of us to follow that does harm that does real harm to people especially women i'd never heard of healthy at every size until we started working with a dietitian to treat my daughter's anorexia because we wanted her to be healthy at her size which was very thin and this dietitian also invited me and my wife to be healthy at our sizes which are fat and so healthy at every size is not about ignoring the risks that come with high-risk behaviors not at all healthy at every size is not a movement that says grab your nachos it's okay like well maybe sometimes it is healthy at every size is about appreciating the beauty and the value and the worth of every single body of every shape every size and every shade healthy at every size is about recognizing that people of all shapes and sizes can have behavioral challenges around eating and physical activity and guess what healthy at every size is about admitting that there are more factors at play other than personal decisions and that social and policy interventions play a role in the way our bodies are shaped what amazed me about healthy at every size was that i could sit down with a nutritionist and come up with an eating plan that supported my anorexic daughter's health goals and my health goals as an obese man with heart disease and our nutritionist was clear scale was never going to be the measure that saved my family's health because when we focus on the scale when we focus on the shape of the body we do temporary intense interventions and then we get close to a goal and we stop or progress is too slow and we give up and we stop and i love the healthy in every size movement because it invites me to focus not on my body shape size or weight but what i do every day what i eat how fast i eat and how much i move my body now to to speak to your question about you know do we can we go too far some doctors criticize healthy at every size as normalizing poor health and some say that it could cause people to ignore weight gain and guess what i don't have an answer to that criticism i won't pretend i have an answer to that criticism and i think that's a discussion worth having we don't want people to have behaviors that lead to poor health outcomes but we also can't pretend that we're just bodies there's feelings in there and the current diet and fitness culture it ignores most of the person it reduces them to an object that needs to be transformed somehow and movements like healthy at every size are more robust because they look at the fullness of a person and they include mental health interventions while also being wildly more inclusive in a healthy at every size program i can be celebrated as i am today not for how i change but for how i am today and that freedom from shame frees me from an emotional cycle of compulsive eating as it simultaneously liberates my daughter from a painful and difficult eating disorder everybody is beautiful everybody is worthy and everybody deserves to be supported with good choices and everybody deserves to have access to whole nutritious foods that support health i for one refuse to focus on people's weight and weight gain while we have food deserts and while we have structural barriers around food access involving poverty count me in as a supporter and an advocate of the healthy at every size movement [Music] this episode of ask science mike would not be possible without the support of better help but did you know that betterhelp is not 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familiar with kiwico they make things called crates which are you know art and education products that you get mailed every month and they are for children they you know they have crates for uh panda crates for children there's zero to 24 months koala crates ages two to four the atlas crate which is around geography and culture for ages six to eleven the classic kiwi crate ages 5 to 8 for science art and more moving up they have the tinker crate which is science and engineering focused for ages 9 to 16 the doodle crate which is arts and crafts for ages 9 to 16 and then they have the new eureka crate for ages 14 to 104 for engineering and design and the maker crate ages 14 to 104 for art and design and we get four crates every month at my house uh we get a doodle a tinker a maker and a eureka and then we set them on the kitchen table and my family all barters for who gets which um crate that month so uh i just absolutely love it it is a great way for people of any age to go deeper in their understanding of science technology engineering art and math and you can get started today by going to kiwico.com ask sciencemic where you can get 60 off your first month of any of all of kiwico's lines of crates you're going to love them i get so many pictures sent to me of families uh enjoying their kiwi crates after hearing about them on the show and by the way i love those pictures keep sending them when you tag me on instagram i do see it so once again get started today kiwico.com slash ask sciencemike [Music] hi mike thank you so much for everything that you do absolutely love you and all that you do but i need help i need help understanding sexual ethics i want to be a good moral person but i am super stumped on this particular issue it was so much simpler before my deconstruction when the lines were so clear having been raised in the purity culture it was straightforward don't sleep with anyone you're not married to and don't sleep with anyone who isn't of the opposite gender but now that i've broken all the rules and i don't adhere to that system anymore anyways i feel really adrift on this particular point morals by definition are about upholding social constructs right and maybe my world is just too small but it seems like everyone's affected by every sexual decision it doesn't seem private entire communities have opinions and not just religious ones maybe it's just a tantalizing subject but everyone seems impacted by sexual decisions families friends co-workers bosses community members you name it so for me i did everything the way i was told i didn't have sex before getting married i married young for 20 years i didn't sleep with or sexually think about anyone outside my marriage i never thought sexually about my partner either for that matter we had sex two to three times per week as i was taught i needed to do for his sake when we didn't i felt guilty and yet my body was never turned on by him he learned to give me a really good orgasm but i never once looked at his face during sex for me it was a duty and that doesn't sound moral to me anymore also i have a really good friend who's been married for years and she hasn't had sex in a year and a half because her partner isn't interested that doesn't sound moral to me either relationships are hard communication is hard finding language and being brave enough to speak is really hard and maybe all of us should just get gadgets to take care of our biological needs until we mature enough to be able to do the communicating around sex better but i'm not sure that's a better moral choice so help seems like maybe celibacy is safer for everyone but i don't really think i want to make living safe my highest priority i just don't want to hurt anyone else and i don't know how to navigate this minefield so thanks for any help you can offer and thanks so much to your team for making your podcast possible it really is helping make people's lives better you guys are awesome well that question is hard to follow wow you elucidated your thoughts so well the question stands on its own um you've obviously put so much thought into your life and your sexuality and i applaud you for that and you re you bring up so many um vital vital notions um and we'll talk about one of those in particular in the next question so the the the question i'm about to give you uh may not feel complete um but it's because we kind of accidentally have two questions that go together this week uh so i will talk about kind of what to do about lack of desire sexually in the next question because i heard that part of your question loud and clear and we will we will break that down again one question away and then i you know yeah sex is complicated we think about sex so often we're culturally obsessed with it we have a strange relationship to it i've noticed that our culture tends to keep sex very taboo and repressed which means we're fascinated with it we have a like this simultaneously really puritanical sex shaming uh energy in our culture and then this um this almost like sexual binge and purge cycle as a culture and then you're watching people doing the work to toss all that off and all those structures of you know evangelical puritanical notions of sexuality and the patriarchy and you watch queer folks being told that their basic sexuality is even more indecent than everybody else's and then they have to they have to work their way through tremendous difficulty and shame and i just think there's a better way and i start with this notion sex is good and sexuality is good these are fundamentally good wholesome parts of the human experience there is nothing wrong with sexual attraction there is nothing wrong with acting on sexual desires and there is nothing wrong with not having feelings of sexual attraction and there is nothing wrong with not having feelings of sexual desire so how do we form a sexual ethic i've thought about this a lot i think the golden rule really is a good foundation to begin with do unto others as you would have them do unto you that means the beginning of my sexual ethic is consent in any sex act every participant needs to offer their enthusiastic consent that means if it's one person having sex alone there needs to be consent which is i think usually granted but when there are two or more people involved in a sexual situation or sex act there needs to be enthusiastic consent for all involved now a common arrangement for sexuality among people is pears two people of varying gender identities are involved in sexual activity some people have multi-partner sex and some people have sex with multiple partners in those situations everyone involved still needs to offer enthusiastic consent we cannot offer consent enthusiastically or fully unless we have access to education and information education about what about our bodies about sexuality about sexual safety sex is an activity that carries physical and emotional risks so we should be educated about those people have a right i believe to a sexual education to learn about their bodies to learn about different arrangements of sexual activity and sex acts and to learn about different orientations and identities so they can begin to explore their own sexuality more fully so they can know what they do and do not consent to what they do and do not want now what about information if we go with a pure consent model instead of enthusiastic informed consent then you could say that two people could be in a relationship and have sex consensual sex and then go have sex with someone else and have consent both ways i don't think that fulfills consent i'm a married man my wife and i have agreed for our own reasons to an exclusive sexual arrangement and if i or her go have sex with someone else without seeking consent or information we have just violated consent because again what sex does carry risks it is possible to get sexually transmitted infections even with safer sex practices for example or i may just want to be not have the complexity of multiple romantic or sexual partners and so if you agree to the terms of a relationship and i believe terms of relationships can always be renegotiated at any time and that either partner can initiate that negotiation [Music] either way once we've kind of negotiated terms we have to honor that in our form of consent i believe and also to have consent we need communication we need to ask other people if they consent to what is happening we need to communicate our needs we need to be able to say when we feel safe or feel unsafe and people involved with us sexually should what they should honor our requests for safety or distance whenever we need it without question or qualification because built into my understanding of sexual ethics is that every single person has body autonomy every person decides when and how their body can be touched every person and my autonomy of my body does not extend to someone else so if i decide what to do with my hand and there happens to be another body there that other person's body autonomy trumps mine this includes in relationships i've been married almost 20 years i do not assume consent for sex acts with my wife she does not assume consent with me we seek consent we communicate our needs and our boundaries which brings me to another point power dynamics consent can be complicated when we introduce power dynamics into the situation that includes social power dynamics based on race and gender and sexuality it includes organizational power dynamics like if you're someone's boss consent can be complicated it includes obviously familial power dynamics uh i don't believe that a child can offer an adult consent for sexual activity why because of the incredible power dynamic if an adult coerces a child into consent that is not consent now i know that might seem obvious but i am stemming off people saying but what about if you're just consent what if children consent friends that is not what i am talking about and it's not even clever by the way so in my mind if there is enthusiastic informed consent there is a respecting and an honorary of body autonomy and there is a mitigation of power dynamics anything that happens is sexually ethical now there's some caveats here what about that information piece if i have a sexually transmitted infection and i don't communicate to that to someone then they cannot offer their educated and informed consent to me now what about in the thing that you just raised where you felt a duty to have sex with your partner you do not have a duty to have sex with your partner no one does part of body autonomy is we understand we never have a right to another person's body never we never have a right to another person's body and there is no shame in exploring and enjoying our own bodies i think one of the most important and productive things that any person who is interested in sexual activity can do is to learn to enjoy their own body through masturbation i think but people feel too much shame about this topic and especially because we tend to denote masturbation as kind of a shame based activity we tend to like have tropes around it being a predatory activity and [Music] that just should not be the case our bodies are our own we learn to enjoy them i suffer um i'm a sexual assault survivor so access to my body is complicated and i've been through therapeutic practices to get through that we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next question [Music] but i just want you to know i know it's not simple and we should always be able to handle our own sexual needs if we are having a sexual encounter and our partner is not interested in proceeding for literally any reason that encounter is over that doesn't mean people have to just like be frustrated and miserable without stigma about masturbation and with a good connection to yourself there should be no problem there now people can communicate their needs so if one partner is interested in sex and sex often and the other partner is averse to sex or wants sex only occasionally that is something that you can discuss without coercion in a relationship it may be in such an arrangement that the relationship isn't fundamentally compatible and there may have to be amendments or changes or even a dissolution of that romantic relationship and in that case no one is wrong and no one is bad good sexual ethics is simply an extension of good relational skills and too often men women people of all gender identities are reticent to openly share their needs with their partners we want people to guess our needs we try to do emotional displays to manipulate people into meeting our needs and it is simply more simple if we get in touch with ourselves and learn to openly name our needs in relationship and our partners can then name what they can and cannot fulfill for us so informed enthusiastic consent honoring body autonomy and acknowledging power dynamics are the three legs of my burgeoning non-religious sexual ethics our last question came in via email and it reads hi science mike i am married and have children but don't fall into the average sexual category i grew up in a very conservative baptist church and never understood the lust issue that all men quote unquote deal with i am attracted to women and love my wife but i've never even thought of having sex with anyone else i never struggled with porn or even masturbated sex is okay but it takes me a lot of foreplay to get into it i know you are lgbtq affirming but i've not heard much of anything about asexuality from you or anyone is there science behind asexuality how can i know if i am asexual might i be asexual or am i just baptist prodigy sarcasm question mark oh gosh thank you so much for this question it is uh very vulnerable to talk about sexuality and sexual desire especially in a culture that tends to equate masculinity with sexual conquest and i appreciate you for pushing back against that mold by speaking honestly about your experiences i just want you to know first of all that this is not just you and you're not weird and you're not strange when i read your message it feels like sentences whole pieces of it could be about me and my life and um gosh and i love to talk about asexuality you know we used to talk about asexuality all the time on ask science mike because people asked me about it never forget that i talk about whatever you all ask me to talk about on this program because it is it is your show um i'm just here responding to whatever you'd like to talk about and asexuality is absolutely real there is science behind it um and asexuality is a sexual orientation and i'm going to share from a article here from williams college and this is from their lgbtq student life program and why i'm going to refer to this is i would rather refer to people using the terms that they prefer in their own community and as i do not identify as asexual i want to defer to those who do as i share this so by their own estimation asexuality is defined as a lack of sexual attraction an asexual is someone who is not sexually attracted to anyone now asexual people can be romantically attracted so you can be asexual you can be a romantic or you can be just one of those or you can be neither of those right so um so people who are aromantic asexuals they're not sexually or romantically attracted to anyone that does not mean that asexuality is some form of celibacy or a mental disorder there's nothing wrong with asexual people they enjoy relationships they can enjoy intimacy they can even enjoy masturbating uh maybe even enjoy sexual intimacy with others without actually having attraction to anyone okay so that's kind of what we're talking about when we talk about asexuality might you be asexual you could be here's what i want you to remember our sexual orientation and our sexuality is not static it is dynamic we are people who grow and change in life our orientation is not fixed and any orientation we have at a moment is only a problem if it is creating cycles of repression or oppression in our lives right so if being identifying as asexual is liberating for you if that seems to match the experience you have as a person saying that you are not sexually attracted to anyone then that could be a tool that's useful to you now i also want to make you aware of some other notions that are not meant to erase asexual asexual people but merely other places for you to research and look into as you get to know and understand your own sexuality one is responsive arousal men as we age are often prone to believing we have reduced libido i have often thought am i asexual i just don't feel sexual attraction really ever um like you i don't i very very seldom masturbate and when i do it is a part of a therapeutic process which we'll talk about in a few moments [Music] but responsive arousal simply means that it takes time to experience an arousal response this is common as men get older and so in any given moment i'm not thinking about sex or sexuality and if i give my wife a hug it's just affectionate but if we hold an embrace for a while and i mean several minutes then i will start to experience feelings of arousal and then really enjoy them and really enjoy sexual intimacy as you have described in your question i enjoy that as well i just don't often feel a hunger or an appetite for sexual sexuality and because of a lack of communication in our marriage for some time that meant my wife believed that i was not attracted to her that the problem was with her and now to be clear there's actually not a problem there's nothing wrong with me that i experienced responsive arousal it just required communication for my wife to understand that i love her and i value her and i enjoy sexual intimacy and i just need some time to warm up to it physically it's a communication understanding ourselves enough to explore our own sexuality and then be able to communicate that with our partners is very very important so be aware of responsive arousal also be aware of disembodiment and numbing and medicating mechanisms there's a everyone knows of the term sexual addiction but there's also a mere image of sexual addiction that's sexual anorexia and sexual anorexia is a way of us controlling our sexuality when we have experienced trauma or patterns of codependency or when we have a lot of internalized shame we often repress our connection to our sexuality people do that because of conditioning and because of trauma i both grew up evangelical and i'm a survivor of sexual assault and so sexual arousal is very complicated for me because i've experienced sexual arousal in the context of someone violating my consent and doing something against my will and that means no matter how good it feels to be aroused and to engage in intimacy is also easy for me to experience a trauma trigger in common forms of sexual intimacy my body responds by protecting me and pushing down my sexual feelings so that i don't get triggered and when you combine that with the shame i felt about sexuality because of my religious upbringing it was just easier for me to not feel sexual or think about sex at all most of the time when i did think about sex or sexuality it was from a codependent place of trying to please my partner trying to make my wife jenny feel valued and seen by kind of forcing myself into a posture of sexual desire which of course exhausted me emotionally now i'm not sharing all this with you to over share these are very intimate details of my life and i'm being so open simply so you know that there's a lot of things that can happen with our sexuality some people are asexual and they're asexual their whole lives and those people are fine that's good for them and i've had periods where i felt like asexual is a label that would apply to me because what i experienced no sexual attraction towards anyone for years of my life at a time and in my case my asexuality um was dynamic there are periods where i feel more or less asexual current period uh well probably more the pandemic has really put me back into that trauma state i have to be very intentional now in order to engage in intimacy because my body what wants to separate me from that feeling because of trauma but when i when i do this disembodiment this numbing i lose access to a lot of feeling so what i find is that my other emotional development work you know allowing myself to feel sad or angry also helps me uh get access to sexual desire and sexual arousal and in fact in conjunction with therapeutic support i have been encouraged to incorporate a mindful masturbation practice into my life now you would say what really how strange not at all the notion here is to to destigmatize physical pleasure and to take it away from being associated with sexual media and fantasy and simply allow one to get in touch with one's own body this is something you also may want to look into if it feels right and feels good for you the main thing i want you to understand is that no matter how you feel about arousal no matter how you feel about attraction there's nothing wrong with you you're not bad you're not broken and you're worth getting to know including your sexuality so i would encourage you to keep researching to keep exploring to keep discovering yourself and to communicate that with your partner as your partner communicates that with you in turn because working through my sexual trauma and working through my patterns of codependency have led to some of the most beautiful moments of physical and emotional intimacy that i've ever had in my life there have been some truly remarkable moments of seeing and knowing my wife sexually as a result of all this difficult work and guess what if i would have done that work and i had figured out that i just don't experience attraction and i'm not interested in arousal i would have communicated that to my partner without shame because it would be who i am i encourage you you're doing good work and trying to get to know who you are because when we name who we are and we name what our needs are relationships can be focused on mutual respect and mutual fulfillment and they escape the cycles of manipulation shame and loss of connection and communication that too often typify our romantic relationships with other people i wish you well on your journey of discovery and of exploration [Music] i always loved this podcast but this was an exceptional set of questions in a podcast full of exceptional questions i love your curiosity thank you don't forget you can be a part of this program just by sending in your question on ask sciencemike.com and if you'd like to go just a little more deeper than that you can join my patrons on patreon just go to ask sciencemike.com and click the join us on patreon button we have a great community there they're the ones who pick the questions that you hear every weekend so patrons this week great great work i'd like to thank caitlyn hermstad for producing ask science mike andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordine for production and sound design and editing brent cradle for management services victory paul mazzano for production services and producing tanner hearn for management and operations and logistics and the whole team at inverse i would also like to thank jed botter for writing and recording the ask science mike theme song and of course all of you for making this show so special thanks for listening and i just can't wait to talk with you again next week [Music]