Sexuality

What is meant by sexuality?

Scientific studies on sexuality encompass various dimensions, including biological sex, gender identities, gender roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and procreation. Sexuality is expressed through a wide range of elements such as thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, roles, and relationships.

Scientific research on sexuality

Scientific research still presents numerous unresolved questions regarding the causes of the variety of sexual behaviors and the reasons why there are variations between what is considered “normal”—in given social contexts and/or in relation to the statistical average—in terms of sexual preferences and less common sexual behaviors, up to extreme behaviors considered aberrant.

Human sexuality appears to be closely linked to a personal and individual dimension. Research on these issues has involved the study of neuro-psychophysiology that generates the particular type of pleasure perceived as sexual.

The neuro-psychophysiology of sexuality

Research so far suggests that the particular characteristics of sexual pleasure do not depend on specific peripheral receptors or specific parts of the nervous system, as occurs with other sensations, but are processed at the level of the central nervous system, especially cortical, based on the individual’s overall experience, both sensory and internal. This would explain the primarily psychological nature of individual variability in sexuality. Human brains, in fact, are never identical, since, although genetics contributes to their formation, the microstructure and specific functions depend on individual experience, which differs from person to person.

A different line of neuro-psychophysiological research proposes an alternative interpretation, highlighting the massive involvement of neural areas that process emotions. With some notable exceptions: in two studies, Holstege and colleagues, in 2006 and 2011, recruited 12 female participants for an orgasm experiment. Participants were placed in a brain scanning device while their partners attempted to induce orgasm through clitoral stimulation. Scans of the participants revealed that the left orbitofrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and self-regulation, was minimally active, and that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortexThe prefrontal cortex plays a fundamental role in numerous p... More, responsible for self-control and social judgment, was also in energy-saving mode. This demonstrates the importance of letting go for sexual satisfaction.

However, researchers were surprised to find that crucial emotional centers of the limbic system, such as the amygdala"The amygdala is a gray matter structure named after its cha... More, became less active during female orgasm. This led Holstege to a paradoxical conclusion shared during the Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in 2005, stating: “At the moment of orgasm, women experience no emotional feeling.” From a more nuanced perspective, it is possible to hypothesize that the type of feeling experienced was completely different from the usual experience of emotions related to projections of the Self.

Future studies may be useful to examine whether this is not an emotional sensation, but rather a state of bliss similar, for example, to the deeper experiences of meditationThere are many ways to define meditation, but perhaps the si... More.

In this context, human sexuality could therefore be defined as an emotion and, like all emotions, it also manifests somatically. From this perspective, the peculiarity of human sexual emotion, compared to other emotions, is the broader and more evident somatic manifestation that involves the genitals.