Alcohol Makes Your Sperm Stupid, Too

New research suggests that alcohol, even a moderate weekly amount, makes your sperm slow and stupid. Not quite stupid enough to not find the egg, but stupid enough. If you want good strong swimmers, skip the liquor.

Moderate weekly alcohol intake linked to poorer sperm quality in healthy young men

Date: October 2, 2014
Source: BMJ - British Medical Journal

Summary:
Moderate alcohol intake of at least 5 units every week is linked to poorer sperm quality in otherwise healthy young men, suggests research. And the higher the weekly tally of units, the worse the sperm quality seems to be, the findings indicate, prompting the researchers to suggest that young men should be advised to steer clear of habitual drinking.

They base their findings on 1221 Danish men between the ages of 18 and 28, all of whom underwent a medical examination to assess their fitness for military service, which is compulsory in Denmark, between 2008 and 2012.

As part of their assessment, the military recruits were asked how much alcohol they drank in the week before their medical exam (recent drinking); whether this was typical (habitual); and how often they binge drank, defined as more than 5 units in one sitting, and had been drunk in the preceding month.

They were also invited to provide a semen sample to check on the quality of their sperm, and a blood sample to check on their levels of reproductive hormones.

The average number of units drunk in the preceding week was 11. Almost two thirds (64%) had binge drunk, while around six out of 10 (59%) said they had been drunk more than twice, during the preceding month.

The analysis showed that after taking account of various influential factors, there was no strong link between sperm quality and either recent alcohol consumption or binge drinking in the preceding month.

But drinking alcohol in the preceding week was linked to changes in reproductive hormone levels, with the effects increasingly more noticeable the higher the tally of units.

Testosterone levels rose, while sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) fell; similar associations were also evident for the number of times an individual had been drunk or had binge drunk in the preceding month.

Almost half (45%, 553) of the men said that the quantity of alcohol they drank in the preceding week was typical of their weekly consumption.

And in this group the higher the tally of weekly units, the lower was the sperm quality, in terms of total sperm count and the proportion of sperm that were of normal size and shape, after taking account of influential factors.

The effects were evident from 5+ units a week upwards, but most apparent among those who drank 25 or more units every week.

And total sperm counts were 33% lower, and the proportion of normal-looking sperm 51% lower, among those knocking back 40 units a week compared with those drinking 1-5.

Habitual drinking was associated with changes in reproductive hormone levels, although not as strongly as recent drinking, while abstinence was also linked to poorer sperm quality.

This is an observational study, so no definitive conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. And the researchers point out that the findings could be the result of reverse causation -- whereby men with poor quality sperm have an unhealthier lifestyle and behaviours to start with.

But animal studies suggest that alcohol may have a direct impact on sperm quality, they say.

"This is, to our knowledge, the first study among healthy young men with detailed information on alcohol intake, and given the fact that young men in the western world [drink a lot], this is of public health concern, and could be a contributing factor to the low sperm count reported among [them]," they suggest.

And they conclude: "It remains to be seen whether semen quality is restored if alcohol intake is reduced, but young men should be advised that high habitual alcohol intake may affect not only their general health, but also their reproductive health."


Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
T. K. Jensen, M. Gottschau, J. O. B. Madsen, A.-M. Andersson, T. H. Lassen, N. E. Skakkebaek, S. H. Swan, L. Priskorn, A. Juul, N. Jorgensen. Habitual alcohol consumption associated with reduced semen quality and changes in reproductive hormones; a cross-sectional study among 1221 young Danish men. BMJ Open, 2014; 4 (9): e005462 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-005462

NPR - Trent Reznor: 'I'm Not The Same Person I Was 20 Years Ago'

There are not a whole lot of musicians I admire as men, and Trent Reznor is one of them. We are roughly the same age, have a similar history of drugs, alcohol, and anger, and have grown out of that chaos to become happier, more productive, more healthy human beings. Biggest difference? He is a rock star, and I, clearly, am not.

In this new interview at NPR, in support of his new album - the first new album since 2008's The Slip - Hesitation Marks, he makes the following statement that resonates with me:

"My life has been many examples of shortsighted goals that I thought would fix things. If there's something broken inside me, if there's a hole in there, I thought if I could just write a good song someday, then I'd be OK. You know, if I could just get a record deal, or if I could just be onstage in front of people I'd never seen before and be validated by them. I feel very fortunate that I've been able to achieve those things, and there have been moments of feeling good about it, but it didn't fix things, you know? It wasn't the solution to me feeling spiritually complete or whole." 

No matter what scale we operate at - filling stadiums and getting record deals, or getting the promotion and winning the Fantasy Football league - external things can never fill the internal holes, the emptiness that seeks completion.

A lot of hard NIN fans are disappointed in the new album because they think it shows Reznor's age, that he has lost his edge. Exactly. He has matured, the fans? Not so much.

Trent Reznor: 'I'm Not The Same Person I Was 20 Years Ago'

by Melissa Block
September 04, 2013

Listen Now

All Things Considered

8 min 15 sec

• Download

Trent Reznor. Baldur Bragason/Courtesy of the artist

Trent Reznor is known as a detail guy: a meticulous composer and manipulator of sound, layers upon layers of it. From his band's genesis 25 years ago, the leader of Nine Inch Nails has been known for songs of deep, menacing pain, rage and self-destruction. Today, Reznor's dark days of alcohol and drug abuse are behind him — and he finds himself, at 48, with a wife and two young kids. 

The new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks, ends a hiatus that Reznor announced in 2009 — and, as he tells NPR's Melissa Block, he sees the new record in part as a reaction to his earlier self. He recently spoke with Block about reacting to criticism, working with Lindsey Buckingham and the reasons he thinks opening for Guns N' Roses in Germany was a big mistake. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.  

I'm thinking about your new song "Everything," which starts with this really kind of triumphant declaration? What's the first line of that song?  

"'I survived everything.' I think? I haven't listened to it for a few days." 

It absolutely is. And in the course of the song you say, "I've become something else." 

"Yeah, I meant that song to feel kind of absurd. You know, it's an arrogant, bold statement that might appear defiant but is actually, in my opinion, kind of self-destructive. And by the end of the song, when it doesn't resolve as nice and rosy with me running through a field of dandelions, clouds come over and there's a sense of getting what you asked for. 

"My life has been many examples of shortsighted goals that I thought would fix things. If there's something broken inside me, if there's a hole in there, I thought if I could just write a good song someday, then I'd be OK. You know, if I could just get a record deal, or if I could just be onstage in front of people I'd never seen before and be validated by them. I feel very fortunate that I've been able to achieve those things, and there have been moments of feeling good about it, but it didn't fix things, you know? It wasn't the solution to me feeling spiritually complete or whole."  

This song does start out in such a sunny way, with all these joyful harmonies. I'm sure you know there was a disgruntled fan who thought this was entirely too poppy — maybe a softer, happier side of Trent Reznor — and put together an animated video of you riding a unicorn under a rainbow with birds flying by. You're saying, though, that's ignoring what's really going on in this song? 

"That certainly wasn't anything that crossed my mind when I was working on this. You know, I still think in terms of album formats: collections of songs and how they relate to each other and how they integrate and tell a bigger story than what's contained in each little four-minute parcel. But when you've been around for a while and you've created, essentially, a brand, that has a certain level of expectation. And it encourages you to not color outside the lines if you pay too much attention to what you expect that fan base wants from you. I think many, many artists have suffered an artistic death by doing just that. I think we live in very dangerous times right now with the Internet and the feedback loop you can get from people who somehow feel their fingers are connected to an impulse — first second of hearing something, I need to write some reaction that gets blasted out to the world."  

What did you think of the video?  

"I saw about the first five seconds of it, and it lessened my faith that I am reaching an audience that is open-minded enough to understand what I'm trying to do. That's what I thought off the bat. And then I thought, 'I really don't care what you think.' We wouldn't be sitting here doing an interview, because my career would have been over 24 years ago, if I'd have listened to what I think people want to hear from me. [But] this is just my off-the-cuff thesis here. I'm sure it's riddled with holes that I'll be reminded of on the Internet any minute now."  

If you choose to read it.  

"When we started out, you would get feedback from fan mail, if you dared to read it. And I remember early versions of [online] bulletin boards, where it was exciting to see that somewhere, digitally, people were talking about your band in little chat rooms and things like that. When we got up to whenever Twitter came out, I took it upon myself to try to direct market to people. Myself, Rob Sheridan — my art director and collaborator on pretty much everything creative — we spent an enormous amount of time really studying the behavior of people: how people wanted to consume music, how they learned about music, what formats they liked, what felt insincere to them, what they felt the value of music might be. Really just watching. But it tuned us in to that feedback loop of commentary, and you can easily go down rabbit holes with niches of people that are unpleasable, regardless of what you could possibly do as an artist. My brain is wired to follow the negative down there and try to engage people and defend and fight, but that's an utter waste of time. I left that era of my life realizing that just because everybody now has the ability to be a self-publisher and broadcast every whim and thought to the world, it doesn't mean that that opinion is necessarily valid or needs to be consumed or listened to or paid attention to. I think — and I've said this recently in the press — as an artist it's an incredibly dangerous time to pay attention, too much, to what other people think. Because it inevitably leads to either homogenous, crowd-pleasing, meandering work, or it leads to something that's just as insincere — just to go against that."  

You're known for really intricately composed, crafted, layered songs. Walk me through what's going on in the new song "Copy of A." It starts out with this repetitive synth pattern, right?  

"Yeah, that's five 16th notes with a rest in there, so it's hard to tell where the downbeat is. I like the way it flips around and doesn't always land on the beat in an expected way. This song is really about repetition and starting to layer small elements of rhythm, percussion and treatment of vocal into something that is meant to feel hypnotic but slightly unnerving. Not comfortable, not EDM dance-tent, wave-your-hands-in-the-air, but more something that keeps you on the edge of your seat, that doesn't feel quite right." 

So the intent is to be unsettling? 
 
  YouTube
"In this particular song, yeah. It's about tension. It's about layers of complexity that don't feel showy, that don't feel like, 'Look at all the things I can put in here.' Things suddenly creep in. If you were to study this track or listen to the multitracks of what made it up, there's a lot more in there than what it sounds like. It's meant to feel understandable and minimal in its surface."  

Do you remember how many tracks there are on this song, layered on top of each other?  

"No, no idea. I remember when we did The Fragile, however large the mixing console we had, we always had to add more tracks — we were always maxed out. This album in general was very much the opposite of that."  

And somewhere in here, on guitar, is Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. How did that happen? 

"The idea that [co-producer] Atticus Ross and I had was to bring in some other brains that work in a way that's different than ours. Lindsey Buckingham was kind of the oddball choice: 'Man, it'd be great if we could get him — let's try!' A couple days later, we were sitting in the studio with him."  

Why did you want him?  

"I've always greatly admired Fleetwood Mac from as far back as I can remember — and in particular, I've always admired his production skills and his guitar playing, which I think get overlooked because of all the other great aspects of Fleetwood Mac. His picking style, his sound, his aggressiveness and just his mastery of the instrument, I always thought was amazing. I thought it was so different than what I do, it might be interesting to see what happens if we put those things together. 

"We did the same thing with [guitarist] Adrian Belew and [bassist] Pino Palladino, which was just to bombard these guys with snippets of music that we assumed would be a bit unfamiliar and kind of a foreign land to drop them into. We would offer guidance, but not strict guidance — basically, 'Do whatever you want, but what if it was something like this? For this track, what if it was just long melodic phrases that were at least four bars long? Or what if your guitar was a percussion instrument [and] we don't hear any sense of melody?' We'd just record everything and sort through it later. I've been doing this with Adrian since The Downward Spiral; what Lindsey brought to the table was, the second he picks up his guitar, it's him. There's all these different sounds coming out and I think, 'What pedals is he using?' And he's not. He just knows how to play his instrument really well." 

I'll bet there are lots of tucked-away sounds in these songs that you're really, really pleased by, that are layered so deep in that we may not really hear them — but you know they're there. And I'll bet you love that.  

"We all acknowledged — when I say we, I mean Atticus Ross, [mix engineer] Alan Moulder, myself, the core team here — that we thought this was a pretty important collection of songs that would benefit from an extended period of time working on it. It ended up taking almost twice as long as we originally thought. We discovered [that] the sound of the record, the way we built it up and kept it fairly sparse, became very tricky to mix and get the puzzle just right. And what you were mentioning about layers and pieces — we spent a lot of time really weaving a kind of tapestry, a sculpture of things that work in very subtle ways, that lift up choruses or make certain areas feel more intimate or a bit more tense, really taking the time to get the mix and the tiny details right. I think those things come out after repeated listenings. Those are the kind of records that always change my life, that make it feel like my brain got larger or my taste widened a bit, so I try to make those type of records myself."  

You mean you're still discovering new things in this record?  

"Yeah, I mean, I aspire to make a record that sounds better 10 listens in than it does after two — and still, at 50 listens, you're picking out things that add a depth and a thoughtfulness. There's enough in there that you can still be extracting pieces out of it. I don't know that people listen to records that many times these days, but I do."  

There's a sort of a creaky, percussive sound on the song "Find My Way." What is that?  

"We put a mic up in a room and had a bunch of just junk around — slats of wood, miscellaneous percussion pieces, a table. We just started banging on things, recording everything and extracting them and treating them. And we stumbled into certain things that work in that context."  

I just love that sound so much. What were you trying to get out of it? 

"Well, we were trying to make it feel like it wasn't coming from the same place as the loop around it. What's around it is all electronic drums, processed and delayed. They feel very direct; there's a nice, fundamental low end and warmth to it. We wanted something that felt much more live sitting on top — not in a way that fights it, but that makes the track come alive. 

"We record a lot of things with a stereo mic in a room so it actually has a sense that it sounds real. If you walk in a room where someone's playing drums, it doesn't sound anything like drums usually sound on records — because drums on records have lots of close mics, and everything's gated and compressed and EQ'ed and polished up. If you walk in a room and Dave Grohl's bashing on a drum kit at full volume, it sounds exciting and live and ringy and chaotic. You're hearing it splash off the walls and the snare's too loud and the cymbals are kinda scary because your eyes vibrate when he hits them that hard." 

  YouTube  
A few years ago, back in 2009, you wrote on your website that it was time to let Nine Inch Nails disappear for a while and you were done touring under that name. You worked on other projects, but now you're back — doing these big arena shows, huge festivals, Lollapalooza. What's it like feeding off of those crowds again after having been away for a stretch of time?  

"It's pretty interesting, the transformation from the idea of it to the actual execution of it. A year and a half ago or so, I realized a record was going to be made, and there was the inevitable talk of doing a supporting tour — you know, do I think I have anything left I can pull off in that format? Can I say something new? If it's for nostalgia, no. If it's for me to just get up and relive running the touchdown across the finish line in the homecoming game, then I can't allow myself to do that. But if I think I haven't done everything I can do — if I have something to say and a way to present it that warrants it, and I can physically pull it off, and it's something that I think belongs under the heading of Nine Inch Nails and what that means to people, then yeah. And I'll catch some flak for saying I wasn't going to do that again, but I changed my mind. I feel much more invigorated and inspired than I did when I said I didn't want do it anymore. 

"A year and a half ago, that seed gets planted and the decision gets made: 'Let's play some shows, and let's put this record out.' Then it turns into executing it, and in the last month, it's turned into actually being onstage. Festivals can be the greatest and they can be the worst; I think we had a taste of both of that on this little run we just did. You're up there and it's a sea of people, and it's not a given that it's going to be your crowd because people are there for a variety of reasons — but when you see it connect, it feels fantastic. I think the show that we just built to play festivals was very smart, and I had that feeling as we were about to walk onstage that I can't wait to show this to people. You know, at song 22, I'm completely exhausted with a sore throat, saying, 'Did I just sign up for a full year of this?' I'm a hundred years old right now. It feels a little different in that way. But it's felt great."  

So when you say it could be the greatest or the worst, what's the worst?  

"There were a couple festivals where we were sandwiched in the wrong kind of bill, to be honest with you. Nine Inch Nails is kind of an anomaly because we've never had hits. We had one kind-of hit, 'Closer,' but we're not like a singles band. And to see us sandwiched with the people making Rihanna singles and some of the stuff that's at the top of the charts right now. ... We played a show in Belgium, essentially opening for Eminem. And there was a realization about midway through the first song that, OK, this audience doesn't care about what I'm up to."  

So what do you do when that happens? How do you adapt or calibrate what you're doing next? 

"I don't know. Twenty years ago, it would have been smash equipment and insult the audience and throw a tantrum. Now, it's smash equipment, throw a tantrum internally, maybe. I'm not sure what you do. "I'm trying to think if I should say this out loud, but I will say it out loud because it's what I do. In '91, Nine Inch Nails was kind of the new, hot band that was starting to break in the States. We had just played the first Lollapalooza and our song that had been out for a year and a half had just gotten picked up on MTV; you could feel a kind of momentum. Guns N' Roses was the biggest band in the world at that time, and Axl Rose, who was a fan, publicly asked us, 'Come play some shows with us in Germany.' You know, play in front of 65,000 people in Mannheim. [I thought], 'I've never been there; let's do it.' Stepping onstage, I'm sure it didn't take the whole first song for me to realize, OK, this was a huge miscalculation, because the only thing that can be achieved here is confrontation. There's an audience that's here for a certain thing, and what we're doing is not in the wheelhouse of what's acceptable for that thing. And then you question, 'Are these people that even I would want to have as my audience?' And generally, no — I don't like this kind of music; I wouldn't come to this concert myself. And then you think, 'I should have thought this through before I said yes and flew to Germany.' We made a couple of those mistakes on this festival run. 

"But you can get comfortable playing to your own audience all the time. We're about to embark on an arena tour in the U.S. here — that will be our audience. And what's good about that is I feel we can get away with more things, we can stretch your attention span further, I can play songs that I feel are more challenging. But you're also walking into a home-court advantage every night. Sometimes it's humbling and can be beneficial in a sense that you still have something that you have to prove."  

When you're onstage now and you're doing old Nine Inch Nails songs from the dark days, songs full of hurt and pain and anger, how do you pull that off? Does it feel very different from where you are now, in that it's painful in a visceral way — like peeling off a scab?  

"I've kind of watched with amusement as the press has latched on to 'Reznor, now 48, happily married with two kids and an Oscar winner,' as if I can be summed up as that now. 'He made a song with a major chord in it that we don't understand' is something that references Joy Division and New Order. It's pop-punk. That's the tagline for who I am now. I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago, and I'm happy to not be that person. When I'm onstage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me and matter to me, and when I'm in those songs, I get transported into those songs. It can be draining to go through that."  

You mentioned your kids — you have two young sons. Are they on the road with you when you go out on these tours? "Yep." What's that like?  

"We're just at the beginning of it, but so far, it's been great. I said I wasn't going to tour if it meant missing them grow up, and I mean that. I love playing and I love touring, but I'm not going to miss out on their lives to do that, so I'm attempting — and so far, so good — a balance there."  

Are you with them right before you go onstage? I mean, do you have to sort of shed one persona to become the other?  

"Generally, they don't come to the venues. But to be able to wake up and hang out with your family, to have that normal aspect of being present for them, that matters. I find that quite centering. You know, instead of sitting on a bus with a bunch of guys — nothing against it, but I've done that for quite some time. And it adds an interesting duality where I can kind of switch that off and kick into show mode. It keeps things, so far, feeling kind of sane. Ask me in a few months and we'll see what the answer is." 

You were talking before about the through-line in some of the new media coverage — the happily married guy with the two kids, and how that can be sort of misleading. What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding about you?  

"That's a good question. There were times when I kind of believed what I read about myself because I wasn't sure who I was in the first place. In the mid-'90s, I certainly fell prey to that. Nowadays, I don't care as much about what people think, and certainly what the press thinks. And I say that not out of arrogance — just, I've learned to tune out things that I find destructive. 

"I could spend a lot of time being frustrated about one aspect of the press, which is what low qualifications are required to become a quote-unquote journalist these days. I can do an interview with somebody and have a conversation with them. That person can extract their version of what was said, and then I'll get hundreds of Google Alerts extracting that quote out of context as some new slogan that's link bait — so they can sell advertisements. One of the ones — well, I won't even give it credit. Somehow it's being twisted into, I'm anti-'do-it-yourself' and I'm criticizing anybody that's trying to have a Kickstarter or do things on their own. That couldn't be further from the truth. There's been a big thing of, 'My album costs 10 bucks or go screw yourself,' with a different word in there — all taken out of context of what I was actually trying to say. And even trying to explain myself is tedious and kind of pointless, because this explanation will be taken out of context. So the end result of all that, for me, is to kind of just tune it out. Try to do the best work I can, try to do that work with integrity — and then, I can't control how you're gonna feel about it or what you're gonna think about it or how I'm gonna be represented about it." 

 If you look back farther at how you've been viewed as a musician or as an artist, are there other misperceptions that make you feel like, "They just don't get who I am and what I'm doing here"?  

"Well, there's always been a need to put things in boxes — understandable little headings so you know what the thing is. What were we called in the '90s — industrial? What does that mean? Well, we don't know. It's not alternative like grunge, and it has synthesizers — let's call it industrial. That was never me out there, waving that banner around. I think in Europe we got called metal at some point, and so we'd wind up in this kind of metal heading as if we're brethren with whoever's considered a metal band. I don't know. I think if you've been around long enough and you're attempting to continue to expand and reinvent, it becomes more difficult to niche — until they can comfortably place you in a Neil Young slot, as someone that's been around long enough that they've proven themselves to be something else." 

 You decided to master the new album, Hesitation Marks, two different ways: There's the standard version and the "audiophile" version. How are they different?  

"When we were working on the album, we realized the songs had a lot of dynamics: They went from very quiet to fairly loud. There was also a lot of low-end frequency: We made this record kind of inspired by a lot of what's happened in hip-hop and club stuff, where there's a lot of information happening down in the low end that you won't hear out of your computer speakers. In the last several years, the 'loudness wars' you hear about [have] been everybody trying to make their record louder than everybody else's — the idea being when you put your song on, it blasts out of the speakers and it sounds more exciting than one that's not as loud. The compromise that happens when you make things louder and louder is, you lose the dynamic range. The fidelity suffers, but the hype goes up. 

  YouTube   "We were faced with a dilemma at the very end of mastering, which was, do we compete with everyone else? Do we want to be as loud as other acts when you're shuffling through on iTunes? Or do we a make it just a purist thing where it's exactly how we want it to sound? So we decided to master it two different ways. And this wasn't meant to be any kind of tricky marketing way to fool you into buying the record twice — it was just for the small percentage of people that would appreciate the difference. If you have a high-end system, you'll need to turn it up a little bit louder, but you'll hear it closer to what we actually were listening to in the studio. Don't get it expecting [that] you're going to radically notice the difference, particularly if you're listening to it on your computer. It's a subtle thing that was meant for the people that care about that sort of detail."  

That's got to make you happy, to know that some people will hear the album as you heard it.  

"Well, it's just like a number of other things. In the olden days, being on a major label, we'd get into fights about the cost of the package. I would be arguing, 'It needs four-color ink and it needs this kind of paper.' And the argument would be, 'Nobody cares about that stuff.' I don't know if the guy that bought the Eminem record cares about that — and that's nothing against Eminem. I don't know that my biggest fan cares about that. But I care about it. I care about the way that paper feels, and if it leaves fingerprints, and I would prefer that it's not the jewel box that explodes when you try to take the plastic off the outside. And with vinyl, I care about what's written on the inside with the engineer's handwriting. I think about those things. So if I'm able to offer something that actually makes it sound a little closer to how we wanted it to sound, I don't expect everyone to care about that. But if you do, then here it is."

Joseph Gelfer - The Teetotal Consciousness Shift

I resonate pretty strongly with this post from Joseph Gelfer over at the Good Men Project. I used to enjoy alcohol, a lot. Moderation was not in my vocabulary - if three drinks felt good, then six would feel better, and then 12 would feel better than that. Unfortunately, I could do this without appearing to be out of control (my father was a dry drunk by the time I was born, but if there is a genetic component, I had it).

By the time I turned 30, and celebrated with a 3-day weekend I still don't remember, it was time to stop. Stopping seemed inconceivable, however. Alcohol was how I socialized; alcohol was my sleep aid; alcohol was the fuel to my writing; alcohol was a central part of my life.

But I did stop.

Aside from a few periods of deep depression, I have not had more than a drink or two in a sitting, and at this point it's often months between beers or glasses of wine - and then only with dinner on a night out.

I drank to self-medicate my social anxiety, my insecurities, my lack of self-awareness. I drank to be numb. When I stopped, there was no physical withdrawal, but there was a lot of psychological turmoil as I began to learn how to feel my feelings, to regulate my affect, to sit with the discomfort of my inner critic and my wounded inner children.

I credit Buddhism and therapy with giving me the tools and the inspiration to stop drinking. I credit sobriety with the ability to feel empathy and compassion for others, which started with feeling it for myself.

The Teetotal Consciousness Shift

MARCH 2, 2013
BY JOSEPH GELFER

Joseph Gelfer found that when he became a teetotaler, he became genuinely free to be who he wanted to be.

I used to enjoy alcohol, a lot. I was never one for moderation. I knew it was not really sustainable health-wise, but found it very difficult to imagine a life without booze: giving up right now rather than some hypothetical point in the future felt a bit like moving to Mars. From the age of 18 I had a maximum of five days off in a row without alcohol and this occurrence required being half way up the Himalayas. I managed to wind down the consumption in my early thirties to three days off, four days on, but four days on when you’re not so great at moderation is still not so good. I loved booze, but also resented being somewhat beholden to it, which for someone with delusions of superhuman grandeur felt like a significant compromise to my sense of self.

I found arguments about health, relationships and wasted money uncompelling as a path to giving up: not even having children and wanting to be better for them made a difference. Ultimately, for me, the path away from alcohol was a thinking exercise, which has lead me to believe that most problematic relationships with substances of any kind are not physical, rather existential.

The Lightbulb Moment

I came to this realization during a time when I was feeling rather sorry for myself. In particular, I had allowed myself to resent my domestic circumstances of being married with children and a mortgage. I felt that I should really be out doing wild and interesting things: instead of being at home watching TV I should be deep in the Amazon guzzling psychedelic brews with shamans. Then I started to unpack the constituent parts of that desire and concluded that what I really wanted was not something exotic, rather something extreme. I wanted to get out of my mind, which actually meant wanting to get out of my status quo consciousness.

I then asked myself, what was the most extreme thing I could do as a person that had been drinking alcohol for every week of his adult life? The answer, of course, is extreme sobriety. I framed this as the ultimate shift in consciousness: this was a trip from which you did not come down or return home; this was a trip that kept going forever.

Recalibration

On the evening of 6 December 2009 I sat with a glass of cheap red wine and decided that the next day was the beginning of the New Order. The first week was something of a challenge, inasmuch as it felt like a clock-watching exercise, chalking up days which were all populated with analysis of the exercise and the viability of its longevity. By the second week I was in unchartered territory (remember the previous five day record?) and this brought a certain amount of renewed energy. In the third week a tangible sense of grief set in. I knew by this point that there was indeed life after booze, but it didn’t look very appealing. I felt that the drinking me had died, and this brought with it a feeling of significant loss. The question then became: was it worth it?

I won’t lie to you, this sense of grief lasted for months. Whenever it was one of my historical on-days (Thursday-Sunday) I would think wistfully of the old times; whenever I walked by a bar and saw people enjoying themselves I had a pang of envy. But slowly that sense of grief began to recede. At some point I realized I was going for a day or more without the idea of alcohol even crossing my mind. And then some breakthrough moments occurred.

One of the things I used to enjoy about alcohol was that it felt like coming home. Whether in a foreign city or in my front room, having a drink brought a certain sense of union, a bit like Neo seeing the code. But once the recalibration phase had completed I began to get those moments of union quite randomly: on the train to work, strolling down the high street, sitting in a cafe. Indeed, one day it occurred to me that both qualitatively and quantitatively I was experiencing a greater sense of union than ever before.

Evangelization

One of the things that happens when you don’t drink is that everyone demands to know why when you turn down alcohol past 6pm. It’s possible to dance around the subject with excuses such as “I’m driving” or “just having a week off.” But I like to gently confront people with the truth stating with a smile, “I don’t drink: I’m not so good at moderation.” I initially thought this would make people feel uncomfortable, but it usually does the opposite. I have lost count of the amount of times people have launched into a story about their own troubles with moderation. I then usually tell them about the “thinking exercise” that brought us to the conversation at hand, and that is the only excuse they need to identify the existential issue that is causing those troubles.

In short, most people are drinking because they are petrified of being alone with their dreams and anxieties, as confronting both would often require a radical change in perspective and lifestyle. Indeed, it’s easy to become rather conspiratorial about all this and to start thinking that the reason why alcohol is so ubiquitous in society (a fact that becomes even more explicit after recalibration) is precisely so that people stay away from this realization, as addressing it usually requires unhooking oneself from many of the things that keep mainstream society operating in the way that it does. Indeed, I find that being teetotal can easily be framed as a significant countercultural gesture.

I therefore find it paradoxical when I see people consuming alcohol (and drugs) in the cause of freedom because I am left with the suspicion that such consumption is doing precisely the opposite. Do not hear me say here that people should stop consuming alcohol or taking drugs, but I would urge everyone to have a serious think about the true nature of freedom within the context of such consumption, and the many different shades of conformity and regulation.

Why Some Men Like Dumb Women Sometimes

When looking for casual sex, some men have a real preference for dumb women, or more to the point, women who seem to be less than fully conscious: drunk, tired, dimwitted, high, and so on. It's not the guys' fault, according to some researchers from the University of Texas-Austin - they are wired that way and its called the sexual exploitability hypothesis.

Jesse Bering wrote the article for Slate. He points out some weaknesses in the studies (there are two) and raises some good questions. However, in the 2nd study, which was published first, they sought out some personality characteristics in their male subjects. The men who were more, shall we say, slutty, also turned out to be "deficient" in personal empathy and warmth - and these were the guys who most easily and consistently noted the female “exploitability” cues. A good example is Ben Roethlisbrger (in the photo above).

So the moral of this story is? Promiscuous men with narcissistic tendencies will seek out "exploitable" women for one-night stands. These guys are predators, and they are only a couple shades of gray short of date rape (although an argument can and has been made that knowingly having sex with a woman too intoxicated to consent with awareness is date rape). 

Do Men Find Dumb-Looking Women More Attractive? A new study says yes.

By Jesse Bering | Posted Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Are tipsy women more attractive?
Photograph by Thinkstock Images.

Ask a straight man, “How do you like your women?” and it’s unlikely he’ll answer, “Dumb and sleepy.” But according to new findings, these characteristics—and any other traits suggesting that the lady isn’t particularly alert—are precisely what the human male has evolved to look for in a one-night-stand.

In an article soon to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Texas–Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her colleagues explored what they called the sexual exploitability hypothesis. The hypothesis is based on the differences between male and female reproductive strategies as humans evolved. For ancestral women, casual intercourse with an emotionally unattached man who had no clear intention of sticking around to raise any resulting offspring constituted a massive genetic gamble. By contrast, for a man with somewhere around 85 million sperm cells churned out every day—per testicle—the frivolous expenditure of gametes was far less detrimental to his genetic interests. Goetz and her team began with the assumption that—because our brains evolved long before prophylactics entered the picture—female cognition is still sensitive to the pregnancy-related consequences of uncommitted sex and women remain more reluctant than men to engage in it. They set out to test the idea that any indication that a woman’s guard is lowered—that she’s “sexually exploitable”—is a turn-on for your average man. “[T]he assessment of a woman’s immediate vulnerability,” surmise the authors, “may be central to the activation of psychological mechanisms related to sexual exploitation.”

This is an inflammatory hypothesis, of course, and the language employed in the field doesn’t help matters. It’s worth noting that in the evolutionary psychology sense, the word exploitable simply means that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex—which takes her own desires, rather disturbingly, out of the equation. Even if she’s the aggressor, a prostitute, or a certifiable nymphomaniac, having casual sex with her would still constitute “exploiting” her (or at least her body), according to this model.

So how did this team put their sexual “exploitability” hypothesis to the test? Goetz and her colleagues planned to call a bunch of undergraduate males into the lab and ask them to rate a set of women in terms of attractiveness based on their photographs. But first they needed to pick the appropriate images. To figure out which sorts of women might be deemed most receptive to a sexual advance or most vulnerable to male pressure or coercion, they asked a large group of students (103 men and 91 women) to nominate some “specific actions, cues, body postures, attitudes, and personality characteristics” that might indicate receptivity or vulnerability. These could be psychological in nature (e.g., signs of low self-esteem, low intelligence, or recklessness), or they might be more contextual (e.g., fatigue, intoxication, separation from family and friends). A third category includes signs that the woman is physically weak, and thus more easily overpowered by a male (e.g., she’s slow-footed or small in stature). According to the authors, rape constitutes one extreme end of the “exploitation” spectrum—cheesy pickup lines the other.

By asking students for the relevant cues, the experimenters reasoned, they’d keep their own ideas about what makes a woman “exploitable” from coloring their study. When all was said and done, the regular folks in the lab had come up with a list of 88 signs that—in their expert undergraduate opinions—a woman might be an especially good target for a man who wanted to score. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with: “lip lick/bite,” “over-shoulder look,” “sleepy,” “intoxicated,” “tight clothing,” "fat," "short," "unintelligent,” “punk,” “attention-seeking,” and “touching breast.”

Next, Goetz and her colleagues searched the Internet for publicly available images of women displaying each of these 88 cues. Once they had pictures of women licking their lips, partying, circling their areolas, and all the rest, they cross-checked them with a separate group of students who surmised that—at least in their subjective views—the images indeed matched the cues. The specific coding details aren’t provided, unfortunately, but presumably these independent raters just used their best guesses to determine what an “attention-seeking” or “unintelligent” woman looked like.

Now it was time for the test. A fresh group of 76 male participants was presented with these images in a randomized sequence and asked what they thought of each woman’s overall attractiveness, how easy it would be to “exploit” her using a variety of tactics (everything from seduction to physical force), and her appeal to them as either a short-term or a long-term partner. The results were mixed. Physical cues of vulnerability—the pictures of, say, short women and hefty ones—had no effect. These women were not necessarily seen as easy lays, nor were they judged as especially appealing partners for either a casual fling or a lifelong marriage. On the other hand, the more psychological and contextual cues—pictures of dimwitted- or immature-seeming women, for example, or of women who looked sleepy or intoxicated, did seem to have an effect: Not surprisingly, men rated them as being easy to bed. But more importantly, they were also perceived as being more physically attractive than female peers who seemed more lucid or quick-witted. This perceived attractiveness effect flipped completely when the participants were asked to judge these women as potential long-term partners. In other words, the woozy ladies were seen as sexy and desirable—but only for fleeting venereal meetings. They lost their luster entirely when the men were asked to rate these same women’s attractiveness as prospective girlfriends or wives. The possible evolutionary logic behind this interaction is fairly straightforward: In the latter case, the man would risk becoming the cuckoldee, not the cuckolder. (Of course you could also argue that men might rather marry a woman who looked like she could hold up her end of the conversation over French toast.)

In a follow-up study (that ended up being published first), the authors tried to add some nuance to their sexual exploitability hypothesis. Graduate student David Lewis led a project to narrow in on the specific type of man who would be most alert to the sort of "exploitability" cues outlined above. Not every man, it seems, is equally proficient at homing in on these weak spots in women. So he and his colleagues asked 72 straight men to evaluate the same photos as before, and in the same way. But this time, the researchers also measured some key personality traits in the male raters, as well as the extent to which they desired and pursued uncommitted sex. The students were asked, for instance: “With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse without having interest in a long-term committed relationship with that person,” and, “How often do you experience sexual arousal when you are in contact with someone you are not in a committed romantic relationship with?”

The main finding to emerge from this follow-up study was that the more promiscuity-minded men who happened also to have deficiencies in personal empathy and warmth were the ones most vigilant and responsive to female “exploitability” cues. Men without this critical calculus—say, a disagreeable man who prefers monogamy, or a caring one who likes to play the field—are more likely to have these cues fly right past their heads and miss the opportunity to capitalize on an “easy lay.” So rather than the sexual exploitability hypothesis summing up the male brain as one big ball of undifferentiated stereotype, the caveat here is that there are multiple subtypes of reproductive strategies in men. Not all men are pricks, in other words.

It’s easy to see the sexual exploitability hypothesis as misogynistic, but I don’t believe the authors are advancing a chauvinistic ideology. Take those kinds of complaints up with natural selection, not the theorists untangling its sometimes-wicked ways. The authors are trying—admirably, I think—to decipher an implicit social algorithm in the hopes of better understanding gender relations.

Having said that, the studies to date are also far from perfect. There’s the obvious criticism that ancestral women didn’t have mojitos and martinis to loosen their tenuous hold on chastity, and so ethanol-fueled conceptions couldn’t have exerted any kind of selection pressure. Yet knowing evolutionary psychologists, the equally obvious countercriticism is that modern women’s inebriation is just an exaggerated version of altered states of consciousness that human beings have indeed experienced for hundreds of thousands of years. More important are methodological concerns.

For example, given that the photos of women were collected online, confounds are inevitable. Do photos of boozed-up young women posted on the Internet simply happen to depict more physically attractive females—ones who’ve dolled themselves up for parties, say—than the sober head shots of those who party less? It’s hard to believe that this would be the same for all the “exploitability” cues (such as “sleepy”) but the same problems would certainly apply to cues such as “tight clothes” and “come hither look.” To control for things like facial symmetry, it would have been better, in my opinion, to have the same model exhibiting a targeted sampling of the 88 cues generated by the original raters.

It also seems to me that although men may lower their standards when it comes to judging women for casual sex, even the creepiest, horniest, coldest man has his aesthetic limits. This could be why the proposed physical signs of “exploitability” —say, being obese or a dwarf—didn’t pan out in the first study. According to a strict interpretation of the authors’ model, after all, a woman with even profound mental handicaps (such as being comatose while on life support or having an IQ commensurate with that of a sickly possum) would make her pretty damn hot. That just doesn’t ring true. I’m going out on a limb here, but from their evolutionary theoretical perspective, perhaps some minimal degree of genetic normalcy or maternal competence, even in “easy” women, is key. According to their model, given that the unconscious goal for these males is to spread their genes without being tethered to paternal responsibilities, even the most incapacitated of women should, at the very least, have enough brain cells firing to raise a healthy child to the age of maturity.

I think it’s fair to say that the findings are consistent with the authors’ sexual exploitability hypothesis—and evolved sex differences in reproductive strategies more generally. But here we run into one of the consistent criticisms of evolutionary psychology, which is that there can be a “just-so story” to explain every data set. Perhaps the effects reported by Goetz and her team can be interpreted just as well from a non-evolutionary perspective. (If you think so, I’d be curious to hear your ideas in the comments section below.) However you interpret them, results like these can feel self-evident, given that “obviously” men would find drunk and air-headed women easy to screw. But we also must be on the lookout for our own retrospective biases: After all, I’m not so sure most people would have predicted that men would also find such women more attractive. All else being equal, would you really have thought that the average man would subjectively perceive such women to be physically more alluring than their sober, bright-minded peers?

 

Joanna Schroeder Mocks Norwegian Study Suggesting LSD as a Treatment Option for Alcoholism

Joanna Schroeder is a contributor at The Good Men Project, a site I read for articles about men, gender issues, and other related issues. I was disappointed see her article this morning with the headline, Beer? No Thanks, I’m Sober. But Pass Me A Hit of Acid. But I read the article anyway, hoping for something serious behind the snarky headline. Yeah . . .not so much.

She is responding to the incredible attention being given to a new meta-study that looked at the use of LSD for alcoholism back before LSD research was banned by the government. It's an open access article, which is rare for Sage Publications, and if one takes a few minutes to read it, the rigorousness of their approach is obvious.

But I suspect Ms. Schroeder did not read the study itself, and was only looking to generate a few laughs with her vacuous post. Other than that, the only reason I can see for this appearing on the Good Men Project is that nearly all of the subjects in the studies were male, which in itself is interesting and worth a more serious examination. Why only men? Were men far more likely to have alcohol issues then? But none of that is mentioned or explored.

She begins (and yes, she appears to be mocking her own headline as well):

Ahh, the allure of the tantalizing headline. I wonder if the Norwegian researchers who went back to the 1960s and 70s to study whether LSD use can help treat alcoholism thought to themselves, People are gonna eat this shit up! when they went into the research archives, because this new look into old research is definitely causing headlines.

She then lists some of the reporting, all of which is from the mainstream press, who notoriously get science so wrong that it's painful to read. And upon reading that the study used 536 participants, she observes,

536 participants? Am I the only one who finds that to be a bit flimsy? Though I guess it’s sorta risky to test people with an illegal substance… Researchers aren’t exactly able to dose 5,000 people in multiple studies and create a real meta-analysis of the data on the effects of trippin’ balls.

Sound research or not, LSD to treat Alcoholism is definitely something fun to bring up at your next cocktail party.

 All of these studies were preliminary in nature, so to get a total of 536 subjects in six individual studies is pretty impressive. But the author clearly has little or no understanding of research methods and standards - and she clearly did not read the original study.

I felt compelled, maybe because my coffee was just kicking in when I read her post, to leave a comment. Here is that comment:

Did you read the study, Joanna, or just the media reports about the study? It’s open access, so there is no reason not to have read it.

If you had, you may note that the researchers found 4275 subject records from LSD trials, but narrowed the pool to 536 through their rejection of any studies that do not meet the more rigorous standards of current research. Exclusion of the other studies does not mean they were not useful or effective, only that the study design did not meet current standards (placebo controlled, double blind, etc.).

It’s also important to note that these studies were done in the period from 1966-1970. One of the leaders in that era of research was Stanislav Grof (see Grof, et al; JAMA, 1970;212(11):1856-1863), who conducted many years (beginning in the 1950s) of LSD-based research for alcoholism, narcotic addictions, and neurosis (in the old psychoanalytic sense of the word, suggesting highly rigid defense mechanisms). He created very detailed protocols for using LSD in psychotherapy, as well as how the subjects experience on the drug impact outcomes, none of which were employed in the studies included in this meta-analysis.

One is left wondering after reading the study that you dismiss as “a bit flimsy” if the outcomes would be different, i.e., more effective, if the Grof protocols were used along with more intensive therapeutic work during the sessions, and more active follow-up to integrate the insights gained while on the drug. Perhaps results could be better still if the treatment model included a mindfulness based recovery approach in the pre-drug period and in the post-drug integration period.

We are now in a place of being able to offer an integrated and integral model for these issues, but only if people are open-minded enough to look beyond their own limited paradigms. A treatment model that includes body (which can include drugs such as LSD or the shorter acting psilocybin, or yoga, tai chi, etc), psyche (mind, emotions, and spirituality), community (family and friends), and environment will likely produce much better outcomes than any one approach in isolation.

If you are going to report on science, please be responsible rather than going for the easy response (and headline) that may lure readers to the blog but offers them nothing of value once they arrive. Snark is entertaining, but knowledgeable information keeps people coming back for more.

Michael Castleman - Men Fake Orgasms, Too

This seems to me to be a risk of the casual sex trend - too much to drink (or drug), the newness of the partner, or even prescription medications (like antidepressants) all can make orgasm seem unlikely or impossible.

In a committed relationship, with trust and openness, faking it should never be necessary (or even an option). A little honesty goes a long way when we are clear that it's not about our partner, but about our own exhaustion, racing mind, or lack of emotional closeness (yes, some men need this, too, to relax into sexual expression).  If it is about your partner, it's time for a talk.

But when it's casual, or friends with benefits, no reason to hurt the other person's feelings, I guess.

Men Fake Orgasms, Too

Men faking orgasm? Unheard of! Well, no, not exactly. 

 

Published on February 14, 2012 by Michael Castleman in All About Sex

Over the past 40 years, many surveys have asked women if they've ever faked an orgasm, and consistently, half to two-thirds (53 percent to 65 percent) have said yes they have at least once.

But men faking orgasm? That's unheard of. Well, no, not exactly. Many sex therapists offer anecdotal reports, and a 1981 study of 280 college students (185 women and 95 men) showed the familiar rate among women (60 percent)—and faking by 36 percent of the men. But that was the only real study, until recently.

In 2010, researchers at the University of Kansas asked 281 undergraduates (180 men and 101 women) to complete an anonymous sex survey that included questions about faking orgasm. Consistent with previous findings, two-thirds of the women (67 percent) said they'd pretended at least once—and 28 percent of the men said the same.

While not a nationally representative sample, the participants included a reasonable demographic cross-section of college students: largely white, but some Asian, Hispanic, and African-American, and largely heterosexual, but some gay/lesbian or bi. Pretenders and non-pretenders reported generally similar sexual experience, but the fakers were more experienced, so they'd had more opportunities to pretend. Fakers were also sexually more adventurous, reporting more masturbation, oral sex, and anal play.

Most faking took place in established relationships (78 percent of the women, 53 percent of the men), but it also occurred among dating couples (2 percent of women, 16 percent of men), friends with benefits (10 percent and 9 percent), and casual hook-ups (10 percent, 16 percent).

No women faked it with men they'd just met, but 7 percent of the men did with new women acquaintances.

Most faking took place during vaginal intercourse (55 percent of the women, 80 percent of the men), but some occurred during oral sex (8 percent, 11 percent), or other unspecified sexual play (37 percent, 8 percent).

Women's pretending was rarely linked to alcohol, but men's was. Two percent of the women had some alcohol before faking orgasm and 6 percent said they were drunk. Meanwhile, 11 percent of the men had been drinking and 24 percent claimed they were drunk.

Faked orgasms typically involved acting—moaning, hip thrusting, and thrashing about in an effort to fool the partner. Young women's acting often tricks young men because guys with limited sexual experience may not recognize the pelvic muscle contractions of real female orgasms.

But men's orgasms produce visible evidence, semen, so how can men fake it? Condoms are often the key. Men thrust and moan, and then deftly discard the condom before the women notice there's nothing in it. But the men who'd pretended didn't always use condoms, so it seems that some college-age women are as clueless about men's orgasms as men can be about women's. As one man recalled about faking it: "She was like, well, did you get off? And I was like, yeah."

Men and women fake orgasms for similar reasons:

• Orgasm was taking too long or wasn't going to happen: women, 71 percent; men, 84 percent.
• They wanted the sex to end:  61 percent and 82 percent.
• They wanted to avoid hurting the partner's feelings: 69 percent and 47 percent.
• They felt bored, or tired, or sleepy, or no longer in the mood for sex: 56 percent and 72 percent.

This study confirms the previous research that a majority of women have faked orgasm at least once, and it corroborates the one previous study that men also fake it. Based on these two studies, it seems somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of college-age men have faked it, meaning that men pretend to have orgasms about half as much as women.

Have YOU ever faked orgasm? I'm especially hoping for comments from men. Why? And how did you explain the lack of semen? Or did you? I'm also interested in reports of faking by people older than college age. Is anything about faking different for older lovers?

The study: Muehlenhard, C. and S.K. Shippee. "Men's and Women's Reports of Pretending Orgasm," Journal of Sex Research (2010) 47:552.

Tom Matlock - The Sweetest Sound

Tom usually offers inspirational posts at The Good Men Project, and he has an inspirational story that got him to this point in his life. This post is a little darker, but it offers a clearer glimpse into this past - a past that I can identify with all too well, even though I never reached his level of success.

The Sweetest Sound

January 17, 2011 By Tom Matlack

During my waking life I’ve always been tormented by noise—voices in my brain that turned terror into self-hatred.

For as long as I can remember I have had the same nightmare. My brother and I are in a prison buried deep beneath a mountain. The guards beat us. A fire breaks out. The guards flee, leaving us locked up. My dad is trying to get to us but he can’t. Just as the flames reach our cell, I wake up. I would stare into the dark and try to see something real to focus on—something to erase the images in my mind. Mom said that I’d often scream for quite some time before she could wake me up. Apparently, the unconscious drama had to play out to a certain point before I was allowed to escape death by fire.

During my waking life I’ve always been tormented by noise—voices in my brain that turned terror into self-hatred. The sensation in my body is bone grinding on bone. Tracing the origin of the noise is like trying to unravel the mysteries of the Big Bang. I am sure my parents’ utter commitment to justice, combined with my fragile nature, planted a seed that sprouted and flourished as my size (I was already six feet tall in the sixth grade) made me a freak. It became a cancer that grabbed my soul with its dark tentacles.

Despite being a swimmer of great promise, as a teenager I’d gorge myself on Oreos and banana bread until my stomach was distended, then look into the bathroom mirror with an overwhelming urge to smash my blond-haired, blue-eyed image. I discovered some small respite by going out for my daily 10-mile run through the hills that surrounded our house. I was always alone. I liked to run the same paths to reduce the mental energy required to figure out where I was going. The physical pain of running up those hills was what I sought. At the top, I could swear at the top of my lungs and no one could hear me. The payoff was the dead, dreamless sleep I craved. The noise stopped at least until the next morning, when I’d have to figure out a new way to obliterate my senses.

♦◊♦

From age 17 to 27 I was in a blackout. I experienced moments of freedom rowing boats in college, crushing opponents in our wake, but the main focus was all-out drinking; it required less effort than my physical trips to the other side. I flipped a car on the Massachusetts Turnpike, threw a couch out a high rise UCLA dormitory, got kicked out of Tuck Business School before attending my first class for lying on my application, put holes in any number of walls in frustration over relationships with random women—and still woke in the middle of the night in the prison of my own making.

Read the whole post.

Tags: Tom Matlock, The Sweetest Sound, psychology, Good Men Day, alcohol, mental health, self-hatred, voices, divorce, addiction, escape, fatherhood

Men and Mascunility Links - 11/6/2010

Oy vey! So many links, so little time. Rather than simply delete these links because they are aging and I haven't had time to post on them, I'll just share them here and let you choose what may or may not interest you.

I'm posting the first few paragraphs of each article, so follow the title link to read the whole post.

The first two are from Science Codex, a cool research summary site.

Low testosterone linked to heightened risk of early death

Posted On: October 19, 2010 - 11:30pm

Low testosterone levels seem to be linked to a heightened risk of premature death from heart disease and all causes, suggests research published online in Heart.

The finding refutes received wisdom that the hormone is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

The researchers base their findings on 930 men, all of whom had coronary artery heart disease, and had been referred to a specialist heart centre between 2000 and 2002. Their heart health was then tracked for around 7 years.

On referral, low testosterone was relatively common. One in four of the men was classified as having low testosterone, using measurements of either bioavailable testosterone (bio-T) - available for tissues to use - of under 2.6 mmol/l or total testosterone (TT) of under 8.1 mmol/l.

These measures indicate clinically defined testosterone deficiency, referred to as hypogonadism, as opposed to a tailing off in levels of the hormone as a result of ageing.

* * * * *

Why are men more susceptible to alcoholism?

Posted On: October 18, 2010 - 2:50pm

Philadelphia, PA, 18 October 2010 - Alcohol is one of the most commonly abused substances, and men are up to twice as likely to develop alcoholism as women. Until now, the underlying biology contributing to this difference in vulnerability has remained unclear.

A new study published in Biological Psychiatry reveals that dopamine may be an important factor.

Researchers from Columbia and Yale studied male and female college-age social drinkers in a laboratory test of alcohol consumption. After consuming an alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink, each participant underwent a specialized positron emission tomography (PET) scan, an imaging technique that can measure the amount of alcohol-induced dopamine release.

Dopamine has multiple functions in the brain, but is important in this context because of its pleasurable effects when it is released by rewarding experiences, such as sex or drugs.

Despite similar consumptions of alcohol, the men had greater dopamine release than women. This increase was found in the ventral striatum, an area in the brain strongly associated with pleasure, reinforcement and addiction formation.

"In men, increased dopamine release also had a stronger association with subjective positive effects of alcohol intoxication," explained Dr. Nina Urban, corresponding author for this study. "This may contribute to the initial reinforcing properties of alcohol and the risk for habit formation."

* * * * *

This one comes from Graham Phoenix at Male eXperience:

Men Shy Away From Intimacy

by Graham Phoenix on October 28, 2010

Men often have difficulty dealing with intimacy, particularly when a relationship appears to be out of their control. The interesting part of this is that men also have difficulty acknowledging that they have difficulty dealing with intimacy. They usually sublimate the emotions into actions that they can understand.

I understand this, I have been there. I went through a period in my life where I had great difficulty dealing with the behaviour of my ex-wife. She was an alcoholic and I found increasing problems coping with intimacy in light of this behaviour. I was angry at how she was and expressing it only made the situation worse. I retreated into my man cave to find a way to deal with the situation. There were times when, during arguments, I would get so frustrated that I would go to bed, hide under the duvet and scream loudly. I did not know how to deal with the emotions I was feeling.

In the end I had to cut myself off and withdraw intimacy. That was the beginning of the end of our marriage. Using intimacy, or lack of it, as a weapon in a battle was not a clever thing to do. To me it felt like I was ‘doing’ something to solve the situation, in fact I was just hiding away from it. I was refusing to actually deal with the emotions I was feeling.

* * * * *

This piece is from Gene Latimer at Divine Masculine:

Emerging...

About 30 years ago, halfway through an intense 12+ year process of learning/working with inner light/fire (a Western version of Agni Yoga), my mental chatter stopped. At the time, I was amazed and elated...as time passed, that just became the norm which I took for granted.

Now, I wonder about the loss/gain ratio of it all, of being so cut off from the voices of my own shit...having been shaken the past few days in uncovering a core feeling of being unloveable buried deep, deep within.

* * * * *

Finally this cool post on sexuality and intimacy comes from David Cates at Deep Masculine:

Sex Creates Realities

Posted on November 1, 2010

Make no mistake about it: sex is power.

Kingdoms rise and fall for sex. Societies legislate marriage to control sex. Churches advocate celibacy, on pain of hell. They want to keep the genie in the bottle.

The raw experiential nature of sex gives it mindblowing potency. Something that powerful, happening in the body, sweeping us along emotionally, overriding the senses, seems more real than anything we’ve been told to believe.

Sex creates its own reality.

If you are using the power of sex for egoic purposes, no matter how refined and pure your ego, sex will reinforce the consciousness you’re coming from. Every act of sex will drive you deeper into separation. Partner, solo, ritual, group, loving, healing, using: doesn’t matter what kind of sex. If you start from ego, you will end at ego.

If you start with God, you’ll end with God.

Hope you found something you like.

Tags: men, masculinity, sexuality, intimacy, testosterone, alcohol, link dump, relationships, David Cates, Deep Masculine, Gene Latimer, Divine Masculine, Graham Phoenix, Male eXperience, Science Codex

Humor - The Gentleman's Discourse

From The Onion - one of the cool things about being a grown-up is that I no longer have nights like this.

Excuse Me, But I'll Be Handling The Gentleman's Discourse For The Rest Of The Evening

By A 750-Milliliter Bottle of Whiskey
November 10, 2009 | Issue 45•46

Ah, pardon me, milady. May I have a word? I trust you're enjoying tonight's festivities? I should say I am. Nothing stirs the blood quite like an evening of dancing, conversing, and libations, wouldn't you say? My apologies for the confusion; while I'm aware that you have been speaking with the gentleman here, I should let you know that, as he has now imbibed a considerable proportion of my contents, the conversational duties will henceforth fall to yours truly.

I think we've heard quite enough from him by now, anyhow.

I should clarify: You began a conversation with a somewhat charming and erudite man, and now you shall be interacting solely with me, the substance contained within an ordinary bottle of whiskey. The shift is slightly jarring, I'll admit, and perhaps even unsettling. Nevertheless, let me assure you that this is as he intended. By consuming nearly half my contents, he elected to have me act as his proxy in all manner of interpersonal communications.

You'll be getting to know me quite well over the next three hours, or at least until I take over his body in toto and pass out in the nearest chair, whichever comes first. If you care to listen, I believe you'll find many of my anecdotes and opinions fascinating. For example, were you aware that it took him nearly half an hour to drive himself here because the Chinaman in front of him never learned to read a damned speedometer?

Now, now, please—calm yourself. Before you jump to conclusions, know that I am not being deliberately racist. No, that's just the sort of unfiltered "from the hip"—if I can use the vernacular—statements you can expect for the rest of the night. I'll be unearthing many facets of his personality of which he himself was previously unaware, as represented by the aforementioned racially charged remark, a few half-baked political notions, and a long, rambling explanation of why his former romantic partner was so wrong to abandon him despite the fact that he dedicated nearly three years of his life to her and who in the hell was she to imply that he was incapable of loving anyone but himself?

This reminds me, I have also been tasked with undertaking all possible romantic endeavors tonight. Most likely this will occur in the form of an awkward pass; perhaps I'll lean in to brush your hair out of your face but inadvertently poke you in the eye, because I will have control of his motor functions as well.

Have I mentioned that you have great tits?

My apologies, that was merely an observation intended as a compliment. I can see how it might be misinterpreted, but believe me, I had only the purest intentions at heart. In matters of beauty, I prefer to do away with formalities, and in point of fact, they are quite impressive as far as tits are concerned.

I say, is that Van Halen I hear? Ah, splendid. Permit me to scream "Hell, yeah! Turn that shit up, goddamn it!" Also, if you would be so kind as to indulge me in this opportunity to pantomime playing multiple instruments. I am infrequently afforded a setting in which to clumsily pretend I am performing before an audience I imagine to be appreciative, and I must say I do enjoy it so.

Panama! Whoo! Panama-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…Pana…. Fucking Panama!

Well now, I suppose at this point you should know that I am also assuming the duties ordinarily filtered by his sense of decorum and dignity. This will result in some spectacularly bad dancing, as well a fair amount of drooling. I may also stand over a bowl of chips and shovel them into my mouth with the same glassy-eyed stare one sometimes sees on a particularly unintelligent dog or cow. But fear not! If I should overstep some social convention, you may inform me in any way you see fit without fear of consequence, as my charge will have no recollection of it the next day.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I've been slighted by that gentleman who just bumped into me, and I feel that the only way to maintain my honor is to call him a fucking faggot and engage in fisticuffs. I've enjoyed this chat, and look forward to talking once again, assuming I don't decide that I'm going to take over tonight's driving duties as well.

Tags: humor, men, alcohol, Humor, The Gentleman's Discourse, The Onion, 750-Milliliter Bottle of Whiskey