Philosophical fancies aside, the intricacies of the human heart are known most plainly to chemists.

We can spend years musing about the psychological precursor to our tastes or behavior, but can often learn as much in minutes from a scientific explanation. And while the full complexity of conscious experience is mysterious and unknown, there are clear links between certain chemicals and our most basic drives – explaining, for example, why we feel horny one moment and mellowed another, or why our sex drives are highest after exercise.

At the core of sexual pursuit are the yin and yang of lust, two vastly different substances but with complimentary roles of switching desire on and off: dopamine and prolactin. They regulate more than sex, but for our purposes we can summarize; dopamine plays a central role in generating horniness – while prolactin shuts it down.

Chances are you’re familiar with the effects of each. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter and relatively small molecule, is your brain’s sense of pleasure and reward. It fires when we see a pretty face, taste sugar, puff a cigarette, or touch skin-to-skin. When your dopamine levels are highest, sex is number one on the agenda, sometimes by so much that you’ll have lower-than-normal interest in food or sleep. (read the full article)

Furry porn must be the natural conclusion of when kids who are infatuated with Disney’s Robin Hood hit puberty.

Furry enthusiasts are, generally, people who love a certain style of cartoonish, anthropomorphic animal characters, and often dress up as such at Star Trek-style conventions to find others who share their interest. But its easier to understand the movement’s popularity when you recognize the sexual element, which is all I can think of to explain how adults show so much interest in such obscure material.

Run a Google search for “furry fox” and you realize how real and pervasive “furry fandom” is. A term like that should be a reasonable descriptor for a fox in the wild – like “scaly lizard” or “large elephant” (both of which return images of animals in nature). But the Internet sees our furry fox as drawn cartoonish images of slender, grinning animals, some of which are in overtly sexual poses with enormous genitals or breasts. (read the full article)

America’s last mass-produced export: Paranoia.

With Debt and Greed now battling to the death like a mongoose and a cobra in a crumbling garden of fading delights, it’s only manic suspicion tinged with primitive superstition that the U.S. seems capable of galvanizing to any real effect. Sure, xenophobia still makes for a fine bordeaux of self-contaminating dread — Muslims in the White House! Communism shackling the Free Market! Mexicans besmirching the snowy white, God-given face of the nation! — but it’s ultimately disdain for our own home-grown lusus naturae that’s the meat and potatoes entree of a diet built upon meaningless plenty gone sour. The greatest of all threats walks among us, your own neighbors and co-workers the agents of subversion bent on eradicating all you hold dear.

The discourse making the rounds in the wake of the wildly hypocritical Prop 8 passage comes down to homosexuality not having the cred to be a civil rights issue because it doesn’t hinge on skin color or other such physiognomy. Second class status is apparently the price tag attached to being a self-willed ethnicity. Heterosexuals have lives; gays have “lifestyles,” which I infer means owning luxury cars, eating quiche, and using “summer” as a verb.

So that makes it okay then. (read the full article)

In anticipation of the January 29 broadcast of The Trials of Ted Haggard on HBO, an older and perhaps wiser Haggard was quizzed by the press on , what else, his sexuality and previously announced “cure.”

Filed under: Gay Politics |  Psyche |
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