Vagina (43 page)

This, I believe, is why so many marital fights take place just when both members of a couple have entered the house after a day’s work—her brain is agitated and desperate to talk things through, which is how it calms down and feels better, while his is desperate to have some downtime doing nothing, or in front of the TV, which is how his brain calms down and feels better. She feels bored, thwarted, if he won’t or can’t just keep talking to her—and he feels invaded by her need to talk.

Dr. Louann Brizendine, in her book
The Male Brain,
points out that the male brain does not engage in as much verbal processing as the female brain.
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The female brain is always on, verbally. So, often, when women ask men, “What are you thinking?” and men answer, “Nothing,” women assume the man is withholding, or denying them access to their inner lives, because the female brain existentially, hermeneutically, cannot imagine a brain state in which verbal processing is less prominent, at least while a person is still conscious. But men actually do go into a less verbal brain state—and need to, in order to recover their equilibrium.

This is a difficult reality for women, with their ever-restless brains, to accept.

In virtually every culture outside the West, many women spend some time, usually on a daily basis, only with other women (and children). Women run markets in West Africa; do the washing daily at the riverbed in the Valley of Roses in Morocco; spend lunchtimes visiting one another on the verandas in suburban Delhi. While women in these societies face immense hurdles and inequities, they often seem to be much less irritated with the men they live with than women tend to be in the West. (I am not addressing here physical abuse.) The burden is not on the husband to somehow, heroically, alone, fill that deep neural need for talk, which his brain chemistry makes difficult to impossible.

In contemporary Western society, in contrast, men and women in couples or as parents of families are expected to spend most of their leisure time with one another, when they are not at work. So men and women rarely have a break, either at work or at home, from this inevitably neurobiologically stressful, because verbally mismatched, togetherness.

To manage social arrangements, as we do in the West, in such a way that a woman has to get most of her touch, gaze, and attention needs met in the few hours after work, and by only one person—and, most implausibly of all, by a tired
male
person at that, who just as desperately needs the opposite, for a while at least—is a recipe for conflict and frustration.

Dr. Daniel Goleman, in his 1995 book,
Emotional Intelligence,
and psychologist John Gottman, in his 2001 book,
Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,
both explore the differences in the genders’ stress response and its role in marital conflict. In his chapter “Intimate Enemies,” Goleman notes that men are “the vulnerable sex” because they tend on average to “flood . . . at a lower level in intensity” than their wives do, and “[o]nce flooded, men secrete more adrenaline into their bloodstream . . . [so] it takes husbands longer to recover physiologically from flooding.”
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These important books advise women to understand the male stress response—men get “flooded” by too much emotional processing, and need to withdraw—and adjust for it. This is good advice. But I believe it is also very, very important for us to understand the female stress response and adjust for it. Gottman assigns the woman the role of moderating her approach to conflict, since he points out that biologically, she handles stress in conflict better. This is true short term, and both authors equitably give male readers good guidance on how to keep their wives or girlfriends’ stress levels from hijacking the discussion as well. But I think this excellent advice could be complemented with a discussion of the long-term effects on women—especially sexually—of certain kinds of chronic stress that can inevitably arise from living in Western-model close, isolated contact with even the nicest of men.

STROKE, DON’T SNAP

Stress affects each gender differently. In a kind of tragic misalignment, during a fight men tend to get “flooded” with stress hormones in a way that leads them to long to shut down, withdraw, and detach—the “flight or fight” response to adrenaline—in order to regain neuroendocrine equilibrium; whereas women react to the same stress by needing to talk more and connect more—the “tend and befriend” response, which lowers their own stress levels. Gottman and Goleman both based their bestsellers on this data, and both advise couples to adapt their argument styles to account for this gender difference.

Data do confirm that women have a higher neurochemical tolerance for having difficult discussions than men do. John Gottman notes that this is why men tend to “stonewall” in stressful marital or relationship conversations. They can’t really help it: the male body takes far longer—as long as twenty minutes—to subside from that negative arousal.

Gottman’s data show that women’s stress hormones spike when men stonewall. Male stonewalling certainly leaves women negatively aroused and in a state of anxiety, even if the spikes are less dramatic.

However, Dr. Gottman, in what is generally a very pro-woman book, tends to put the “housekeeping” role on women—since the data show that women do not “flood” as much or as destructively as men. He notes that natural selection favored women who could stay calm—thus benefiting from the boost to lactation of poxytocin—while evolution favored men whose adrenaline could spike quickly: “To this day,” he writes, “the male cardiovascular system remains more reactive than the female and slower to recover from stress.” Dr. Gottman is right about the different effects on the male and female body of fights, pointing out that because of men’s slower recovery from stress, men tend to stonewall to avoid emotional discussions, and women are more likely to initiate talking about the couple’s issues, since they can handle such discussion without such sharp adrenaline spikes. But he did not address the lower-level, longer-term, less immediately dramatic ways in which a man can stress a woman out in a couple’s dynamic.
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Women may not get flooded in the same immediate way as men do in a conflict, but without looking at the more holistic and subtler ongoing interactions of everyday life, rather than at moments of conflict, something important may be being missed. In these other less-dramatic interactions, I believe that some women experience less dramatically measurable, but perhaps more chronic states of being stressed out by men. In other words, the very behaviors that Gottman flags as symptoms of male “flooding” during an argument—male withdrawal, silence, turning attention to another subject, and so on—will elevate some women’s heart rates over time, send catecholamines into their bloodstreams, and stress some women out in a lower-key but still significant ongoing way, unless their men regularly do some simple things to calm women down. They can do these things at other times than during the fight itself, since soothing behaviors during conflict itself are very difficult for male neurobiology to accomplish.

In research on the female brain and how women process stress, there is some intriguing scientific data confirming that women respond to touch differently than men do. In Roger Dobson and Maurice Chittenden’s 2005
Sunday Times
article, “Women Need That Healthy Touch,” they report on psychiatrist Kathleen Light’s findings. Light, at the University of North Carolina’s Medical Center, and her team, found that after only ten minutes of stroking, a woman’s body produces oxytocin—the chemical that, you recall, strengthens affection and trust. The women’s blood pressure levels also dropped significantly as they were being stroked.
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Light and her researchers tested fifty-nine heterosexual couples: they asked each woman to sit for ten minutes on a loveseat as she watched a romantic movie. Her husband or boyfriend was instructed to stroke her hands, neck, or back—or whatever part of her body he chose. Before and after the stroking, the woman’s blood pressure levels were taken. The stroking actually boosted women’s affection-producing hormones by one-fifth in that brief ten-minute period. In other words, in ten minutes, one could roughly say that they liked and trusted their husbands a fifth more than they had before the stroking began. But the men, in contrast, after being stroked by their female partners, did not show any such changes in their hormone levels and blood pressure.

Kathleen Light said, of the research, “It is a new finding for humans. When a man strokes or hugs his partner it seems to stimulate an increase in levels of oxytocin which tends to lower blood pressure.” The reason this finding is so groundbreaking is that it is the first such finding in humans: other studies have managed to identify the role of oxytocin following stroking only in female mammals lower on the evolutionary ladder than human beings. So, many heterosexual women really do need to be caressed by their men in order to stay calm and healthy, much more than men may think is natural or reasonable, based on their own differing physical needs.

When I presented this data online and asked women (and men) to send in their own accounts of whether stroking—male to female—changed the emotional dynamic in a heterosexual couple, I was overwhelmed with responses confirming that the act made a substantial difference.

“I have started to use this method with my practice,” wrote one couples’ counselor, “after I read about it here, and it has transformed my work with couples. I have been telling the man to stroke the woman when he is bringing up a subject that causes her anxiety. It has a miraculous effect on supporting her ability to listen and not close down, and the couples are able to solve conflicts much more easily, without escalation.”

“When my husband rubs my feet in a nonsexual way when I am tired at the end of the day or stressed from work,” wrote Theresa, from Arizona, “it makes me much more interested and open sexually at other times and makes the feeling between us much more intimate.”

Christopher in Virginia wrote, “I tried what you suggested. I am able to help my wife feel better faster about things that are bothering her much more easily now, and we have stopped bickering nearly so much about little things.”

Mike in Dallas wrote, “My girlfriend can hear me when we are talking about something difficult and I am stroking her hair.” Many men noted, however, that they couldn’t or did not wish to do this during a fight—“It’s hard to want to do this when you’re being told you are the bad guy,” as one man put it. Women, too, cautioned that if this stroking was attempted in the context of a fight, it would seem to them manipulative.
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I personally can attest to the fact that my own tendency toward high anxiety and “flooding” when some subjects come up in the context of a relationship has been softened by drawing upon this practice; since I shared this finding with my partner, he has been stroking my hair and neck when a difficult subject arises between us, and it tends immediately to lower my heart rate—as well as to make me laugh.

While men reported that it was difficult to be the stroker when they felt that they themselves were under attack (a point well taken given their higher susceptibility to stress chemicals during a fight), they noted that if they could stroke their wives or girlfriends often in a natural context throughout the day, it made the women seem much happier and calmer in general. Many women, for their part (in separate responses), noted with surprise that they felt less irritated in general with their husbands or boyfriends also after the introduction of regular stroking into the relationship, the level of bickering about trivia radically deescalated, and that they felt more warmly toward their mates overall. This makes sense: if Kathleen Light found that stroking elevates women’s oxytocin levels by at least a fifth, it will indeed make them feel more affectionate toward, more trusting of, and closer to their men if they are stroked every day, or even caressed many times a day. It will also make these women feel significantly more relaxed. By lowering their blood pressure, men’s stroking the women they love regularly can even help protect the women from heart disease and stroke.

We saw the direct connection between women’s ability to be in a relaxed state around their husbands and lovers, and their ability to “open” fully sexually. The obverse of this is that we need to take very seriously what happens physically in a relationship when a man regularly or even from time to time feels free to snap at his wife or girlfriend.

I have yet to see a relationship guide for couples that takes seriously enough the issue of men engaging in low-level snapping at their wives and children, and how that affects women physically. Plenty of women are certainly guilty of snapping at or showing irritation to their partners and children, of course—and men deserve a book of their own about what female snapping does to the male body. But my subject here is the female body and mind. There is still an often unconscious assumption in our culture that the right of men to snap or be irritable with women and children in their families is not really serious, and that this entitlement goes along with other privileges of male domestic life. There is not a great deal of cultural energy directed at urging men who are not otherwise abusing them, to stop snapping at women and children in their homes.

But in an environment in which women expect to be snapped at regularly, the female ANS closes down the channels that women need open in order to be sexually alive. It is evolutionarily negative for women to bond with violent or scarily unpredictable men. For evolutionary reasons, probably, many women react to men’s sudden anger at themselves and at their children (whom they are wired to protect) in immediate ways, with raised heart rate, adrenaline response, and so on; if the snapping is chronic, the woman’s “bad stress” levels will be chronically raised and her sexual response will suffer. Men who want a more passionate sexual response from their wives or girlfriends may wish to try a no-snapping week on their part, and see what good things begin to happen to them when their partner’s ANS can be activated fully, having gotten used to an emotional environment without those stressors.