There's No Such Thing As Casual Sex

The Passing of an Anthropologist Icon

Just last week, Dr. Helen Fisher skipped this mortal coil. She was a funny, bold and irascible researcher on human sexuality and relationships who delivered viral TED talks Why We Love, Why We Cheat, and served as Match.com’s scientist in residence.

As part of the research for my last book Recapture the Rapture, I got to have some great conversations with her. (she also read an early draft cover to cover in a weekend, and shared her notes, for which I’ll always be grateful).

Here’s a link to the convo we had The Neurochemistry of Love, Lust and Attachment, hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

One of the quippiest quips she offered was:

“despite all of the current emphasis on hookup culture and app-dating, there’s really no such thing as casual sex! The neurochemistry of love and attachment override everything else. So be careful of who you end up in bed with, you will quite likely end up more smitten than you intended!”

So in honor of her research and legacy, wanted to share an excerpt from my last book, unpacking Helen’s work and fascinating findings in the realm of human sexuality.

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You’ve probably heard of Masters, Johnson and Kinsey as the pioneers of human sexuality research.

Despite the controversy and pushback all three received for their boundary breaking studies in the 50’s and 60’s, those were the briefest of glory days for sex ed in the United States.

There have been a couple of spikes of interest since—the AIDS/HIV epidemic grudgingly forced money and attention to sexuality as a public health issue.

The block-buster drug Viagra so thoroughly reshaped the sexual landscape that many pharmacology studies found funding, just to discover the next billion-dollar pill.

But since then, an increasingly focused and sophisticated alliance of religious conservatives and anti-porn activists have targeted federal funding, pressured universities and research institutions, and put a withering spotlight on the study of human sexual response.

“That’s one area where there’s been a big influence on what can be studied and what data can be disseminated,” says Beverly Whipple, PhD, a Rutgers University psychobiologist and a legend in the field. “That’s been somewhat of a stymie to people doing sexuality education re- search.”

Researchers can’t even put the word “sex” or “orgasm” in their funding proposals, or an overzealous politician finds them via key word searches and gets their grants blocked.

“Program officers at the National Institutes of Health instruct you not to include the word ‘sexual’ in any of your grant applications,” one Kinsey researcher admits. “Apparently, congressional aides run regular searches of funding databases to look for studies they can make examples of, and ‘sexual’ is one of the words they search.”

“On every ground, it’s a triumph of ideology over reality,” leading social psychologist Elaine Hatfield told the American Psychological Association. “It’s like a throwback to the fifteenth century.”

Despite a near-constant barrage of hypersexualized imagery in movies, media, and marketing, actual sex research in America is a dying profession. In 2014, the last of the Kinsey Institute’s psycho-physiologists resigned to take a position in Belgium, where they are free to study what they want.

Other leading scientists have decamped for Canada and Australia. As it stands, only two U.S. labs are still federally funded to study sexual arousal. Research on the most central human experience—one responsible for our very existence—has been marginalized almost out of existence.

This lockout of institutional funding and support has pushed the next generation of Kinsey Institute researchers out of academia. They’ve had to take their study of people’s privates private.

Helen Fisher, a Kinsey Institute senior research fellow and professor at Rutgers, took a position with the dating service Match.com as their chief scientist. With their ample funding and massive database, she pioneered a new personality profile to compete with the standard Big Five trait test.

Close to twenty million people have now taken the Fisher Temperament Inventory (FTI), making it one of the largest statistically validated tests of its kind. It’s also the only widespread personality test with a neuroscientific foundation.

The well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test (MBTI), in comparison, was invented in the 1940s from whole cloth by a homemaker who happened to be really into Carl Jung. Despite its mass adoption and popularity, the MBTI and most other personality quizzes have little science to back them up.

The Fisher Temperament Inventory breaks down personality types into four categories based on which neurochemicals drive a person’s sexual and romantic attachments.

The Explorer: the novelty-seeking adventurer who primarily expresses the traits linked with the dopamine system.

The Builder: the cautious, socially compliant rule follower who primarily expresses the traits linked with the serotonin system.

The Director: the analytical and rigorous thinker who primarily expresses the traits linked with the testosterone system.

And the Negotiator: the pro-social empath who primarily expresses the traits linked with the estrogen system.

Our most intimate and personal of experiences—falling in love—might have as much to do with our neurochemistry and neuroanatomy as Cupid’s skills with a bow.

There are reasonable criticisms of Fisher’s test. Psychologists question the reductionist hypothesis that personality expression can be explained by singular neurochemicals.

“There is no ‘sex’ center in the brain,” a colleague of Fisher’s notes, “so we will never be able to really ‘control’ your sexuality.” People, they insist, aren’t automatons and any explanation of how and why we do what we do cannot be reduced to a mechanistic explanation.

But other studies are finding positive corroboration with the FTI’s neuro-chemical model, “ranging from religiosity, political orientation, and attitudes about sex in a relationship.”

It seems that the way we fall in love informs the way we live the rest of our lives too.

While this kind of integrated neuropsychology is still in its infancy, the premise that how we feel is strongly informed by the hormones and chemicals surrounding our sexuality is unlikely to go away.

It’s the Horned Ape hypothesis of consciousness, compressed from thousands of generations into our own lifetimes. From Jared Diamond to Helen Fisher in a hop, skip, and a hump.

If Fisher’s work seems overly deterministic—giving an outsize role to neuro-chemicals in the formation of love and attachment—we can reverse the inquiry and see if pharmaceuticals can actually generate love itself.

If both naturally and chemically induced methods work in the same ways then their shared mechanism of action seems more valid.

“The time to think through such questions is now,” write Julian Savulescu and Brian Earp, ethicists at Oxford and Yale Universities, in Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships. “Biochemical interventions into love and relationships are not some far-off speculation.”

Fortunately there is some parallel research exploring how pharmacology shapes psychology that can serve as a helpful test case.

For nearly forty years, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has been advancing clinical studies using the chemical MDMA in conjunction with therapy for sufferers of PTSD.

Their results were so significant that the FDA fast-tracked the Phase III trials (before recently scuttling them), earmarking this approach as an essential therapy for people suffering from trauma.

Interestingly, what makes MDMA work so well for therapy are the same neurochemicals that Fisher tracked for romance.

Within an hour of onset of MDMA, serotonin levels rise considerably, boosting mood and heightening perception. Oxytocin follows, reducing fear and stress and increasing trust and connectivity.

Therapists suggest that the calming effect of these neurochemicals allows them to bond with patients and encourage them to revisit and rewrite traumatic memories from a more resilient state.

Soon after, MAPS researchers explain, prolactin is released in the patient’s brain, “contributing to a post-orgasmic sense of relaxation and receptivity.”

The neurocircuitry of PTSD is shut down. Hypervigilant amygdalas and ventromedial prefrontal cortices reset and patients who have been tormented for months or years by traumatic memories get to rewrite their pasts from a safer and more expansive present.

“One man who had been sexually abused as a child,” clinicians wrote, “told us that he had spent his adult life observing that other people were having an experience that he presumed must be what they called ‘happiness’—something he had not experienced and had always assumed he was incapable of experiencing.

By shifting his neurochemistry he gained access to a range of feeling that had been inaccessible since his abuse.”

A female subject said: “I feel like I’m walking in a place [of safety and happiness] I’ve needed to go for so long and just didn’t know how to get there. . . . I’ve been through some bad stuff, but . . . those are things that happened to me, not who I am.”

She was more right than she knew. MDMA prompted the specific blend of serotonin, oxytocin, and prolactin in her brain that allowed her to emotionally get to the place she “needed to go for so long and just didn’t know how to get there.” But she also intuited, “This is me . . . this is in me.”

It’s not just her. “The medicine” is in all of us. We don’t even need external compounds to experience these feelings. We just need to re- learn how to make love to experience more of it.

A few years ago Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, and I were speaking on a panel and I asked him about this dynamic—about how their research into trauma could be extended to other interventions.

“You know,” he said, “from our research mapping patients’ state in MDMA therapy, the closest analogue we can find, with those high serotonin, oxytocin, and prolactin levels, along with the feelings of safety, connection, and openness, is the postorgasmic state.”

I was surprised by what he’d just said.

Option 1: Take thirty years and tens of millions of dollars to navigate a Byzantine federal process to decriminalize a Schedule I drug. Powerful and important work, but slow, costly, and subject to marginalization.

Or

Option 2: Pioneer some utterly novel, groundbreaking way to get people to that exalted state known only to scientists as “post-orgasmic,” and do the work from there.

This has meaningful implications for the rest of us. Transcendent states, arguably one of the essential yearnings of humans throughout history, and now proven to have a strong correlation with well-being, healing, and existential equanimity, are attainable through one of the most accessible, inexpensive, low-tech methodologies available.

No tracking the deserts of Sonora to find a toad to lick, no traipsing through the Himalayas looking for a sadhu to follow, just the simple act that brought us all here in the first place.

Practiced purposefully, with an intent not to procreate but to integrate.

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An almighty hat tip to you, Helen Fisher, helping us all drag our sexuality out of the shadows and into the light…