Maggie's Farm

Can male and female sex drives be compared in any useful or interesting ways? It's difficult to get honest data for studies, individuals vary widely, and there is no easy way to measure "sex drive" anyway. I am pretty much convinced that the average male is more affected by physical sexual pressures and sexual fantasies than the average female. Why do men, especially young men, masturbate so much even if they have a sexual partner? It is because they do not always have a willing partner at hand when the pressure mounts.

There are two things, really: An (interpersonal) "urge to merge," (ie desire/love/lust), and a more impersonal need for sexual release/relief/recreation (a longing in the loins). A few pieces on the topic:

Women may be more sexually omnivorous than men, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're as hungry.

Turns Out Women Have Really, Really Strong Sex Drives: Can Men Handle It?

Do men really have higher sex drives than women?

How Often Do Men and Women Think about Sex?

Brain cells specific to men fire up when mates are present and override the  need to eat, scientists have found

   All male animals are like that. The comments are amusing.

Males and females are sex objects, and most want to be that sometimes - plus sometimes, or often, more than that. In today's world, a bold woman has far more easy access to sexual experience than a bold guy.

From Ted Dalrymple (who is a Psychiatrist), Everyone on the Couch:

Psychiatric diagnosis—more overblown, all-inclusive, and shallow in the DSM-5 than ever before—has almost driven the word “unhappy” from the English lexicon.

Expecting Scientifically Sound Nutritional Guidance from the Feds? Fat Chance

The government experts are 30 years behind current knowledge. I am not sure why this is a governmental task anyway. People can read on their own and make up their own minds.

From an illuminating review of the MOMA show, How Picasso the Sculptor Ruptured Art History:

Whatever you do, don’t miss this exhibition; this is exactly the kind of show MoMA is made for. Museum co-curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland (with Virginie Perdrisot) make MoMA’s fourth-floor galleries look more beautiful and useful than they have ever looked. Linger in these spaces; the chance won’t come again for a long time. “Picasso Sculpture” could be one of the great learning experiences of your seeing life.

See it if you possibly can. It is a feast. Whatever visual adventures Picasso pursued, he did them with authority, some humor, dead seriousness, and perfect taste.

In the borderlands of physiologic abnormalities, changes happen all the time. For example, yesterday's perversion is today's celebrated "difference," while yesterday's lazy kid now has an internet addiction disorder.

Common sense people take it all with some humor and many grains of salt.

By borderlands, I mean the areas in which there are only subjective, untestable, vague complaints. Of course, that applies to many disorders in the Psychiatric domain.

One of my favorite bugaboos is Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. I am told that one can obtain lifetime disability for this impossible disease which is, in fact, either fictitious in some cases and "hysteria" in others.

Another is "Chronic Lyme Disease," and another is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  It used to be called Neurasthenia. Freud thought, at first, that it was caused by the chemistry of sexual deprivation. Every patient I have seen referred to me with this trashcan diagnosis has had a mood disorder and/or a personality disorder. No, one of them had an undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Nevertheless, the squeaky wheels get the grease:  The Tragic Neglect of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

She said "I've been thinking all week about what you said about how I always focus on whether a boy likes me, and never think about whether I like the boy. I am changing this right now. What was wrong with me?"

Me: "Not worth thinking about that. You have made me a happy doctor today."

"Whole grain." Don't bother with it unless you like the taste of it. It has zero "health" benefit. Living as we do in a prosperous part of the world with an abundance of varied foodstuffs, there is no reason to consume any grain products at all except for enjoyment and to soak up gravy. Breads were once poverty food, just enough carbs to keep the proles and soldiers working one more day. The rich ate meat and lived far longer and more happily.

Often synonymous with good health, whole grains may lack heart-healthy
fiber—in fact, some processed forms increase cardiovascular risk.

The American lobbying and advertising Whole Grains Council has had huge success in selling their health scam. Just like Whole Foods. Food piety has two arms: the ignorant, and their commercial predators.

Enjoyment applies to OJ too. It's basically sugar with no other food value. Years ago, the Florida Citrus cabal convinced Americans that they should have it for breakfast. Tasty, but no different from a Coke. Scurvy is not a problem.

My point with my nutrition myth posts is that you should eat whatever you enjoy. If you have a weight problem or a health problem, that's another matter. Just don't pretend, for example, that an OJ is any "healthier" than a Pepsi, or brown bread is "healthier" than white bread. That is just marketing to the low-info shopper and gullibles like Michelle Obama.

We all love happy myths, do we not? The fantasy that we can control fate.

Viruses are a reproductive parasite, so some of them cause ailments. Most do not.

Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive.  I suppose it has to do with definition of "alive."

Good info for ordinary passengers, physicians, nurses, EMS people, etc.: The Clinician's Guide to In-Flight Emergencies

I'd rather be on a flight with an EMS person than with a Dermatologist. Every person should know how to do CPR. The tricky part is knowing when it is needed. If they stop breathing and turn blue, probably yes.

People do die on airplanes, but they probably would have died anyway. Interesting factoid: airplane air has 10% lower oxygen than the air on the ground.

From Alva Noe's How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience:

If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.

I am no skeptic about basic neuroscience. I am skeptical about its overeach, its hubris. Aesthetics can never be understood at a neuronal level of organization any more than a living cell can be understood at an atomic level.

Many animals, like birds and reptiles, have a cloaca (or "vent" - hence the word "venting"), which combines urinary, defecatory and sexual functions. (Most birds copulate via a "cloacal kiss," but a few lucky birds, notably ducks, swans and ostriches, have penises.)

This reminds me of the Yeats:

Vl: Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

The problem with a powerful central government in the US is that it is a big place with many localities with highly-varying viewpoints on life and values. With all of our immigration and home-grown subcultures, and with divisive politics, the US has few shared values or foundational attitudes.

All we have is a bedraggled Constitution, and most Americans don't know what it says.

Thus the average American sees himself as a citizen of the US in the abstract, on national holidays, and in time of war, but lives life primarily as a citizen of a community, or communities, of some sorts.

As a New England Yankee myself of original heritage and thus with minimal respect and instinctive distrust for government, politicians, amd government power, I was led to this subject by the post about David Leff. He is a fellow who seems to be a pillar of his community.

Every community requires such people who jump in and participate in a positive way, with no personal advantage expected other than the rewards of positive involvement. It's been the American Way since de Toqueville described it so well. Other than the Founders, that Frenchie explained American Exceptionalism better than any American ever had.

I have written about the "Circles of Community" in which we all live, and their importance to a good life. Except for hermits, humans need that for pleasure and life enrichment if not for support and survival. Venn diagrams, circling around, with family circles, social circles, neighborhood circles, athletic circles, professional circles, club circles, civic circles, political circles, church circles, hobby circles, etc. Most circles end up overlapping. Much of life consists of these circles, but they do not happen by themselves. Somebody made them happen just as somebody organized the barn-raisings. Government did not do that.

However, I am just focusing on local community here. Big cities have local communities just as Mr. Leff has his little Collinsville.

JFK's famous inaugural line about "Ask not..."  (who wrote that line for him?) can be better applied to one's local community and to one's circles of community than it can to this huge nation.

All localities, like all "circles," have energetic contributors, minor contributors, benign passive recipients, parasites, exploiters, and damagers of the social fabrics. It's probably a bell curve like everything else. Just paying your taxes does not count, nor does holding down an honest job or making some effort to obey the laws because those are the minimal expectations of residency anywhere.

What does count? Cub Scout Mom, Bible study, book club, Kiwanis, town meeting attendance or being on town committees, club committees, volunteering for virtuous or charitable purposes or at the library, organizing a block party or book club or softball games. It doesn't have to be big like being on the board of your local hospital or president of your country club, but if you are not engaged in positive ways without personal advantage, you are no capital "C" American Citizen in my book because you are a free-rider. A resident, not a Citizen.

We all ask ourselves daily how we wish to live, what example we wish to set, how we wish to be known, and how we wish to be remembered. Every human has a gift or gifts to offer and it is sinful to withhold them.

I've always been told that the pursuit of personal "identity" with its "personality integration" and "self-realization" was a distinctly modern and Western notion. Perhaps a too-precious conceit of artistes and suchlike.

In recent years, we have even used something called "identity diffusion" as a diagnostic marker. It's a thorny topic that very few people ever think about.

When I meet a new patient (or sometimes just a new person), I never ask "Who are you?" I just ask "Tell me about yourself" or "Tell me about your life."  I once met a fellow who told me that he was an "unresolved self." He was one of the most pleasant, well-put-together people I have ever met.

It is often said that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are about inventing comprehensible, presumably explanatory narratives. Well, our narratives change with time. We evolve with time and experience; sometimes with awareness of our flaws and sometimes with awareness of God.

Some of these topics discussed here: I am not a story: Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

The Alternative Medicine Racket: How the Feds Fund Quacks

There is a huge market out there for the gullible and the ignorant. It's a shame.

I can recommend Canshipmeds.com in Vancouver. Just ask for "expedite" and it arrives promptly to the US. Prices far lower than CVS or Costco.

We have reported here, in the past, on the dismayingly-poor reproducibility of medical studies. It's true in the sciences, generally.

In the softer "sciences," even more so: An expansive new project is able to replicate results from fewer than half of its psychology experiments in question.

The thing about the sciences is that Fact and Truth are elusive. People in the sciences know this. People in Scientism do not.

Friends have just returned from a week in Ravello, While there, the whole family (all 5 of them) took a full-day cooking class with Mama Agata. Despite their other holiday pleasures, they all agreed that was the high point of their trip. Mamma Agata (click on cooking classes - reservations required).

They stayed at Hotel Villa Cimbrone, which they recommend.

The best satire skirts the edges of reality and blends reality with fun, creating amusing disorientation. Of course, when it's from The Onion, you know what to expect.

I enjoyed this subtle satire on the self-centered Western obsession with identity, self-realization, and self-actualization: How to Be Yourself When You Don't Know Who You Are - with JP Sears

Facts and Stats

Yes, it is as dangerous, or more dangerous, than drunk driving

How to Stay Awake on the Road: Tips to Combat Drowsy Driving.  Those are some reasonable ideas, especially the quick nap in the car or a stop with a little walk. If it's a frequent problem that you have, and you need to drive long distances often, you might persuade your doc to prescribe some low-dose amphetamine or adderal for the purpose. That's what truck drivers do. Call it "Driving Narcolepsy."

It is odd, isn't it, that when you arrive at destination you can feel just fine?

"If it's dry, wet it. If it's wet, dry it. If it looks funny, cut it off and send it to the Pathologist."

Walter Isaacson: Walker Percy’s Theory of Hurricane:

 Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called “the malaise,” a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached. As Percy put it in “The Moviegoer,” “The malaise has settled like a fallout and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall.” The heroes of his books, each in his own way, embark on a search for the cause and cure of this syndrome. “What is the nature of the search?” wonders Binx Bolling, the narrator of “The Moviegoer.” “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

"The problem with storms is that they pass."

Eggs are bad, low-fat is good, right? Here's how science has debunked those and other persistent food myths,

You can ignore the gluten baloney.

A good, personal description of one form of what we put under the umbrella label of "depression":

Having anxiety & depression is like being scared and tired at the same time.  It's the fear of failure, but no urge to be productive.  It's wanting friends, but hate socializing.  It's wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely.  It's caring about everything, then caring about nothing.  It's feeling everything at once, then feeling paralyzingly numb.