The Female Orgasm

The female orgasm is a very fleeting and wonderful phenomenon. It is probably one of those things that reaffirms people's beliefs in the existence of a celestial being. It's been said that many women do not experience an orgasm through sexual intercourse which is very, very sad indeed. Thankfully, with the internet and a more open society, information is readily available to any woman who is in need of help in this area.

The history of the female orgasm seems to be a very sad one. In western cultures, if a woman had an orgasm she was deemed a witch. It was considered bad or satanic for a woman to be able to have orgasms in the first place. Now we know that women are capable of orgasms and even female ejaculation as well. All I can say is that I am extremely thankful for living in a day and age where the female orgasm is not a stranger to women who bother to prepare for its heavenly arrival.

As most magazines will tell you, orgasms don't happen by magic. Women tend to need more effort to achieve the orgasm than men do. Magazines also tell women to touch themselves in order to determine what works for them. Every single body is wired a little differently, what works for one may not work for the other so it is necessary for a woman to be able to convey to their partners of the night what their preferences are. It is also true that the more often you have an orgasm, the easier it is to achieve them during sex as well. There are a variety of ways a woman may be able to achieve her own orgasm, the easiest one being just an ordinary vibrator.

Sex without orgasming is like going to the gym and sweating your ass off without seeing any difference on those thighs of yours. Unfortunately I do know many female friends who've had sex but haven't been able to get off, some having their first orgasm in their late 20s. There just isn't any point to having sex if you're not going to cum, it shouldn't just be a man's territory. Sure the friction is nice, but it doesn't get you off. My only advice is, don't be afraid when you're close. Personally, I was afraid before I had my first orgasm. Whenever I got close to it, I would stop just because the feelings were too foreign to me but once I experienced it for the first time, it was incredible and I've never looked back.

That's really why cultures which promote the mutilation of female body parts are horrifically grotesque and wrong. I mean, I'm all for cultural diversity but every single woman should have the right to pleasure and release. Besides, it's incredibly painful! I question the sanity of women who have their hymens sewn back up and even more so women whose clitori have been removed. Nobody should have to live through the torment of not ever going through one of life's fundamental experiences.

I could go on and on about the female orgasm but I won't. I'm sure most womens magazines and pornography give more than enough information to women about their parts and how to get off. I really think we should have an Ooh week, raise awareness and increase information flow about the female orgasm to everyone.

Animals

We're all animals. Some insist on making the distinction between man and animal even though the two are one and the same. It's hard to think of animals as social creatures with any sort of politics, favouritism, jealousy, the will to kill or the compassion to save. These are all originally human attributes that we thought animals did not possess. But they do.

Insects have been found to be social creatures. It is well known that bees and ants build colonies and set up mini worlds under the ground or on a tree. There's synergistic effort amongst the individuals in order for the group to survive. What's even been discovered is that some ants steal eggs from another ant colony and raise them as slaves to do extra work for their own colony. Sound familiar?

Other animals are also known for their social behaviour such as wolves and lions, etc. Everyone always has an alpha which is the dude in charge who is the strongest, and the omega which is the weakest. There is no doubt that the omega will jump at the chance to rise up the ranks, bottom feeders do, of course. The alpha and the rest of the pack bully the omega and make him submit to their will. There's group politics involved, of course. The alpha gets to have all the girls, the omega gets dumped with the horrible jobs and eats last. Sound familiar again?

Last but not least, our closest relative: The Chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are well, they look incredibly similar to us. They are capable of human-like expression on their faces. They're playful and are able to learn, just like children do. It's also been found that chimps pass on knowledge from one generation to the next. Chimps in one region tend to have different skill sets from chimps from another region.

What isn't talked about is the fact that they've sought out and murdered their own kind before. It was shocking for me to hear as well, I was under the impression that man was the only one to actively seek the destruction of his own kind but we're not alone. I remember watching this documentary of a chimp attack. They hunted a rival group's chimp and they tortured him while he was still alive. They ripped his scrotum off, and proceeded to beat on his chest until his broken ribs poked out of their skin. Brutal? Truly. I just thought it was appropriate to show the extent of the brutality that is present in other species. It is true that non-human animals aren't taught morality, however if their own is hurt or injured, they defend their own.

Things like this make me wonder if human behaviour is more governed by genetics than we initially thought.

Growing up

I've come a long way since a few years ago when I left my home country and started living on my own here. It was a bit of a stretch seeing as how I had only barely turned 17 and was living with my sister and her ex husband. I admit I was pretty immature at the time and I didn't know half of the things that I know now but that's okay.

I'm glad I've moved out. There's a lot to be said about living on your own and making your own way. I could easily say that I wasn't ready at all, when I first took the plunge but I'm glad I did. I came out a lot better for it. At least now I'm more prepared for the future, having a job and full time uni work load has taught me about prioritizing and time management.

I'm at a really happy place right now. I'm not so depressed anymore, I don't feel like everything's out of my control anymore. It's great, I recommend it to anyone who wants to try.

I've been busy

I'm looking for a place to live now. Hope I get this particular place just because it's fucking gorgeous and I've fallen in absolute love with it.

So time for some random musings...

Lance claims that most of my arguments and philosophies are ridiculously based on a biological standpoint. Well it is, I ache for the day people will be more inclined to realise that their brain and body play a centre role in personality and human to human interaction. I still maintain that I do not believe in instinct, that is an archaic and simplistic way to view biological function. I do not believe in its existence for one second . Genetic imprinted memory may occur, but that is still expressed via protein synthesis, it's not just some magical and intangible concept.

Another thing he's asked me is, how do I explain love? Well I can't, honestly. It conflicts with most of my beliefs, unfortunately. I also can't say that I don't believe in love, although one has to admit that it is a very, very rare thing. You don't always get love in places you expect. Some parents hate their children, some siblings, some men despise their women, some women hate their friends but we all pretend to be civil so we don't go to jail.

I think at this current point in time, it's hard to say what really is love. I know it's cold of me to denounce the most celebrated feeling in the world, but I can't help it. It must be studied and dissected as well! Why do we fall in love? Is it really so we protect our young? Does it just make things easier for child bearing? Is there really such a thing as love at first sight? Is it better to play mind games to sustain a relationship or is being straightforward is the better path to choose?

Frankly, I believe in love at first smell. Yeah, smell. I don't mean cologne smell, I mean HIS smell needs to be pleasing.

Genetics - Why so hard to believe?

One of the reasons flu vaccinations are practically redundant is because viruses evolve at such a fast rate that by the time they develop one, the virus would have evolved beyond what they originally made the vaccine from. Truthfully, viruses don't evolve quickly, their lifespans are only a few hours long so their rate of evolution shouldn't be something that is shocking.

Currently, the medical field is able to provide a variety of cures for a variety of microbial infections. Another phenomenon that has been seen is the fact that microbes are getting stronger due to natural selection. The ones that are resistant to normal treatments survive, pass on their genetic material to future generations, and it goes on and on.

This happens over the span of a couple of years, now consider if humans lived as long as microbes. Is it so hard to believe that over the span of a few "weeks/months/years" or thousand/million/billion years that we couldn't have evolved from something that looked completely different?

I wonder why religious people find it so hard to believe that we evolved from microbes. If you can believe an invisible being in the sky can magically clump some dust together and make it alive and think, surely you can believe a much more rational explanation? There are many shapes and sizes of animals in the world now, whatever worked for that particular species has kept it alive till today. That's just the thing, whatever works, lives. Whatever doesn't work or isn't suitable at that point in time, dies. That's just the fact, it's such a simple concept that a child could understand it without blinking. Sometimes random mutations or environmental changes occur, and we eventually popped out. We're mutants, I'm sure if humanity was left to its own devices and was separated for a long enough period, they would have evolved into different species.

Does it matter how we got here? Isn't the point that we ARE here? That we are able to interpret the surroundings, appreciate beauty, listen to music, taste a variety of wonderful dishes and feel emotion and different textures?

I liken the reject of the theory of evolution to acting like a child refusing to believe that he was a mere mistake that his parents made. He wasn't a planned child, he couldn't have been loved if he was just a mistake. Is it just because finding someone that actually cares about you is truly a rare gem? Is it because people can turn on you and hurt you deeper than you thought possible, and the only person that you can depend upon is yourself and your imaginary friends?

Are we a sexy society? Random and off topic, again.

Everything seems to be about sex. Let's take a day to day example, you're at a restaurant.

You don't want to order the burger and chips drenched in oil because you've been feeling fat.
Fat relates to attractiveness which relates to sex.
In the event of a highschool situation, you want to be cool.
You want people to see you as attractive,
So you'll eventually get sex, have more sex.
You go to uni, you try getting into a course that'll make you a ton of money
So you can attract more women if you're ugly
So you can eventually get sex or have more sex.
You fall in love, so you can start having sex.
Sex
Sex
Sex

Everything is related to sex and people not getting any sex are unhappy. People not getting quality sex tend to be unhappy too. I suppose that's why vibrators, vibrating pussies, vibrating condoms, cock rings, pornography, prostitution, sex toys and swingers parties exist. Currently, it is quite liberal but I don't believe that people weren't into trying new things and spicing up their sex lives in the past either. Curse abrahamic religions for making the majority think that sex is a dirty, disgusting act. Well it could be, if you were really gross, hairy and sweaty but you know what I mean.

It is true that men think about sex more often than women, but I think it should be accepted, or at least acknowledged that women do think about sex too. It seems a shame that women are forced to live this life where, a woman having sex as often as men is deemed a slut whereas men are allowed to have sex as much as they like. Even be congratulated on it, but women are shunned. Sexist.

There should be educational programs for children that are deemed old enough to have sex. I personally think it's ridiculous that teenagers aren't allowed to have sex until they're 16-18. People were getting married and having sex as soon as puberty hit and this practice only stopped about 2 generations ago. Even the previous generation, at least in my part of the world, got married really early as well. It's considered better to have children then as well, because your eggs are still fresh and sperm is most virile and the best you'll produce. Still though, putting off the time at which teenagers have sex is a possible cause of the angst and frustration that teenagers seem to have. The whole concept of a teenager was only recently invented anyway.

I think it's more pertinent to have safe sex information rather than force the children not to have sex until a particular age. It just isn't natural, if all the other animals in the animal kingdom are not doing so, why are we?

Can you spell backlash?

My mind's a blank - I'm bs-sing

I personally do not really believe in good and evil. I get irritated when people simplify things to something black and white. It just doesn't work that way, in a lot of cases. Like the poor man who steals so he can buy his dying wife some medicine that he can't afford to keep her alive. Technically, society should be helping the less fortunate instead of allowing a man to resort to stealing in order to keep someone else alive.

Good and evil, like when I hear my mother talking about how she hates lions because they kill animals. Pfft, why don't people like this just turn vegetarian? It's one thing to be annoying and vegetarian, it's another to be selectively caring of an animal's fate. Sure, the abattoir doesn't involve people running after zebras and strangling them to death, but surely people recognise that the slabs of meat they engulf everyday has to come from somewhere? Just because it comes on a nice styrofoam plate with hardly any blood and backed by very bright lights doesn't make it better, it doesn't diminish any responsibility. We're able to just go about doing what we do, without any thought to where that meat comes from.

Who knows where the meat comes from anyway? Have you ever been in an abattoir? Have you ever seen the slaughtering of cows, goats, sheep? How am I supposed to know that the shitty, cheap beef in the supermarket isn't from somewhere else like cat or dog? Could you kill an animal yourself? Our society now, where people cringe at the thought of slicing a chicken's neck open, I can't help but wonder if this is a good thing.

Then again, that's something to think about as well, the act of just not thinking about things which leads us to live like blind men.

The science of addiction - Opioids

Addiction: compulsive drug seeking

Repetitive drug use, often with known harm

Assoc with tolerance: escalating doses to achieve same effect (metabolic or neuroadaptation)

Withdrawal symptoms (neuroadaptation)

Drug craving and associative cues (neuroadaptation)

Heroin excite dopamine containing nerve cells in nucleus accumbens

Heroin is metabolized to morphine in the liver which acts on miu opioid receptors in the nucleus accumbens.

The miu opioid receptors are GPCR, the GPCR phosphates phosphorylates internal binding domains of opioid receptors leading to decreased ability to couple to G proteins. Linker molecules called beta-arrestens drag phosphorylated form of the receptor into the cell which in a process called internalization. By dragging receptor proteins into the cell, less receptors are present on cell surface which causes more tolerance to drugs. These phenomena may cause desensitization and a decrease in number of the receptors which can be attributed to tolerance.

Morphine acting on these miu receptors also cause opening inwardly correcting potassium channels which cause a decrease in the level of the enzyme adenylate cyclase. This in turn causes a decrease in cAMP which then leads to decreased excitability of the cell. Chronic intake then leads to neuroadaptive features causing a high increase in cAMP to cope. Normally, in the presence of chronic drug use, this causes a homeostatic balance which counteracts the excess excitability however in the absence of the drug, the excess cAMP production leads to excitability of the cell. This could be the mechanism through which withdrawal symptoms may arise.

Craving occurs when the mesocorticlimbic dopamine pathways are stimulated by morphine. The drug causes sensitization of the receptors which cause an increase in the release of dopamine. A long lasting change is that the increase of PKA and cAMP in mesolimbic dop system.

Dopamine acts on D1 and D2 receptors where D2 receptors cause a decrease in cAMP and D1 receptors cause an increase in cAMP. During chronic usage, D1 receptors become dysfunctional whereas the D2 receptors become super sensitive. This then causes the up regulation of D2 receptors.

This may be deemed as the first change that occurs in a sequence in changes. The mechanism of this action is quite unknown however, it should be noted that an increase in beta-fos B genes have been seen for days in subjects after chronic use. This could be as possibility of mechanism of action.

Bored as hell, useful procrastination

So... How things work in your body is that you have cells, ok? And in order for the cells to communicate and know what's going on in their world, they have receptors. Different receptors for different chemicals, which cause different things and at different points of the cell life, etc etc etc. So now you have some basic pharmacology, here we go.

First I'll start with barbiturates and benzodiazepines.

Barbs
Drug name: phenobarbitone, pentobarbitone
Used therapeutically (not much anymore) as anticonvulsant agents and anaesthetics

Barbiturates work by enhancing activation of GABA A receptors, inhibiting release of glutamate and antagonizing activation of glutamate receptors. They work by acting on different combinations of GABA A receptors, increasing mean open time of GABA A activated chloride ion channels, slowing rate of dissociation of GABA and GABA A receptors, in high concentrations activate GABA receptors thereby increasing maximum effect of GABA and GABA A interaction.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter which is a little molecule which tells the cell to allow the influx of chloride ions so it becomes hyperpolarized. GABA actions are sedation, etc etc, you get the drift, inhibition.

Benzodiazepines: Diazepam, oxazepam, serepax
Benzos are used therapeutically as anxiolytics, anticonvulsant agents, muscle relaxants and sedatives

They work by potentiating GABA, increasing opening and closing frequency of GABA-activated chloride ion channels and its enhancement of GABA agonists and enhancement of GABA binding through allosteric modulation.

So that's how barbs and benzos work, benzos were the first million dollar drug available on the market. A whole array of drugs were released following benzos footsteps but newage benzos don't look much like conventional benzos anyway.

So you can die from using barbs but not benzos alone, if you want to kill yourself using benzos you need to drink alcohol too. On the other hand, you can also kill yourself with paracetamol and alcohol, that way you don't need to go to the doctor and waste money on the bill.

Onwards, amphetamines and cocaine affect catecholamine transmission and blockage in the brain. Cocaine is non-selective, competitive blocker that blocks Noradrenalin, serotonin and dopamine transport. It causes psychological dependence by triggering the limbic reward system.

Amphetamines, on the other hand, deplete catecholamine stores in the synapse. It works by releasing dopamine into the synaptic cleft. Amp travels into the synapse through dopamine transporters to increase concentrations of amphetamine in the neuronal terminal. The increased amphetamine concentrations releases endogenous stores of dopamine from vesicular monoamine transporters thereby increasing intra-neuronal concentrations of transmitter. This increase in concentration causes the reverse transport of dopamine via the dopamine transporters into the synapse, blocking the transporters ability to clear dopamine from the synaptic space causing the potentiation of dopamine action in the synapse for long periods of time. This also happens to 5-HT and noradrenalin but to a lesser extent.

Man I'm so bored.