meridian_rose

Porn May 'Shut Down' Part of Your Brain is not a porn-shaming article but rather raises an interesting point. Usually watching movies or being involved in a visual task sends extra blood to the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. However researchers found that when the movies are explicit, the brain seems to shunt blood elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal.

The brain can either be anxious or aroused (or neither), Holstege said, but not both. During orgasm, he has found, activity in brain regions associated with anxiety plummets. This phenomenon may explain why women* with low levels of sexual desire often have high levels of anxiety, Holstege said. It makes sense; if you're looking around, focusing on visual details, scanning for danger, it may not be so easy to focus on arousal, he said.

[*the study focussed on a small group of women]

So clearly when I'm feeling anxious, I need to find fic or vids that hit my kinks and get me aroused :D

It makes sense that we can't do all things at once – and we've all heard variations on the Robin Williams joke that "God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time". I'm reminded of the assertion that you can't be afraid and laugh at the same time. Laughing at fears (or despite them) can decrease the immediate fear, stress and anxiety. This research would seem to indicate a similar mechanism, forcing the brain and body to remove itself from a fear state into a contradictory state (in this case arousal rather than amusement).

And in a somewhat 'no shit, Sherlock' moment, the researcher says that "If you want to have sex, as a man, you need to produce a safe situation for the woman…That is what you want, that is the most important thing.". Hmm, like, for instance, obtaining explicit consent?