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I tightened my legs around him. The sky was darkening outside the window, and everything was different. The room was cast in shadows now, and everything was still.
“Where do you want me to cum?”
“Inside me,” I whispered.
He increased his pace, and when he came, I drowned in the rush of heat that seared my galleries like I'd opened the door into a burning building.
Exhilarating, intense. Amazing. I can't get enough of him.
ADDICTED TO CUM
We know that during orgasm, the body releases a hormone called oxytocin, a natural pain-killer that functions as a neurotransmitter, too, fostering intimacy among sex partners. It's also part of the powerful cocktail of mood-altering chemicals that makes up semen.
In a recent piece for The Herald Sun, Christina Larmer writes that having sex regularly reduces depression, citing a study by Gordon Gallup, a psychology professor at the State University of New York in Albany, published in 2002.
The study, an oldie but goodie, created a fuss in the medical community for its claim that semen was not only an antidepressant, but a powerful and highly-addictive drug.
Semen, as we know, is a complex chemical mixture of testosterone, estrogen and other things, including oxytocin and prostaglandins; and these are absorbed into the bloodstream through the vaginal walls.
Gallup had read a previous paper, written in 1986 by a psychologist named P.G. Ney, who, upon noting the recovery of a severely depressed woman following a sexual encounter, hypothesized that semen had cured her. Intrigued, Gallup recruited a group of 293 undergraduate women from the Albany campus to survey.
This survey was composed questions about their sex lives and habits, including how often they had it, how long it had been since they'd had it, and what type of birth control they used. Alongside the survey, the women were given the Beck Depression Inventory, a questionnaire used to determine the level of depression in patients.
The results were in keeping with the Ney hypothesis.
Looking at the data side by side, Gallup discovered that women who did not use condoms were less depressed than women who did or those who were not having sex. Conversely, women who did not use condoms experienced more feelings of depression when they were not having sex. Further, women who did not use condoms were more likely to jump into another relationship following a break-up than women who did.
This suggested to Gallup that ejaculate doesn't simply possess antidepressant qualities, but that it is a drug, and women who regularly take it in become, in a sense, addicted to it and prone to suffer symptoms of withdrawal. The rebound is, according to these findings, nothing but an addict's way of getting more of her favorite drug.
According to New Scientist, Gallup has unpublished data from a larger group of 700 women further supporting these findings.
But as Martin F. Downs pointed out in a Salon article, “It is a reasonable hypothesis that women whose partners do not use condoms are in more intimate relationships than those whose partners do.” And intimacy is related to fulfillment as well.
Intimacy and bonding were not studied by Gallup. His stance is that these factors do not confound the results.
Is it really so simple?
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
I see we're going to start at the beginning. Oh, all right. Well, let me tell you the story of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor and inquisitive man of science. He wanted to find the original human language and devised an experiment to do just that by taking on a group of infants to rear, instructing the wet nurses who cared for them to remain absolutely silent when handling them. In this way, the Emperor would discover whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic or the tongue of their parents, were the natural language of the children once their voices matured.
But something astonishing happened: all the infants died before they said a single word. As his chronicler, the monk Salimbene de Adam wrote, “children could not live without clapping of hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” Frederick II had inadvertently conducted the first study on human bonding.
Later, in the 1940s, René Árpád Spitz would report similar results when studying a orphans in institutions, who, to protect them from exposure to germs, were fed and cleaned but denied any other human contact. These children became ill, losing weight and succumbing to disease at an alarmingly higher rate than children in the community outside their intitutions' walls.
Enter John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist and
