Karezza: A Reader Responds

Bill Long 9/29/08

After I wrote most of an essay on karezza, a word pointing to a sexual practice stretching back more than 100 years in the United States, and emphasizing a "lower intensity" love-making than the intensity of fully expressed sexual intercourse, I received an email from a person who wanted both to question whether I was taking the subject seriously and to present a sympathetic defense of a more modern form of karezza. We talked back and forth, and she made reference to the work of Marnia Robinson, a fellow Brown Univ. graduate and Oregon resident (she lives with her husband in the Ashland area--a notorious hangout for liberals who have a lot of money and like good food and drink!), who has also been developing a "low-boil" approach to intimacy. A video of her advice is here. Her web site is here. She is far more interested than people in the past in trying to understand the biochemistry of sex and orgasm; indeed, her husband is a biochemist and feeds her the "latest" results in that area--which gives her talking points that at least have the aura of scientific research behind them.

Well, you need that information to understand the email that I received, from a thoughtful and articulate woman in the UK. Here it is:

"Marnia's book [Peace Between the Sheets] is very well worth getting, and what understanding of the biochemistry that we have accumulated through scientific studies is clearly spelled out there. Of course, it is largely up to Marnia to provide the interpretation of the various findings, since no one out there is designing a study to test exactly what she is interested in (someone needs to give this woman a research grant). Few people like her findings as it is, for obvious reasons. Speaking for myself, I generally find her interpretations more than acceptable, and I am quite happy with the way she connects the dots representing the various studies. I will give one note of warning, though - the book is published by Berkeley, and contains one chapter that for many, I imagine, does serious damage to the credibility of the rest. If you are like me, you will be able to happily disregard that chapter and still take the rest of the work for what it is worth, but I do warn you that it is there. I am sure her ideas would have made it a bit farther by now if the publishers hadn't been tempted to include the aside in question.

Orgasm is definitely the "bad guy" in Marnia's approach [I had put that question to my reader]- even more so than it was for Stockham (apologies for my ealier mispelling). While Stockham was for allowing the basin of desire to gradually fill completely full and then "naturally run over", which amounts to allowing the man the occasional climax during infertile periods, Marnia doesn't want you to ever get anywhere near the brim, i.e. no orgasms, ever. She feels that a couple shouldn't even get into a heightened state of arousal - we're talking probably staying BELOW the plateau level - this is an important difference between the schools of thought that have arisen from the "coitus reservatus" movement versus tantric sex as it is usually practiced in the West. I don't know if you have any familiarity with tantra, and I am not a practitioner myself, but I do know that the goal of most people in tantra is to hover on the verge of the orgasmic threshold for as long as physically possible. Such a state is way too close for comfort in Marnia's book.

The endocrine system is, of course, a system, and therefore it's pretty impossible to look at one hormone without considering how it affects and acts in concert with the rest of the neurochemical crew, since it seems that any change in one causes ripples across the board, as the rest of the set juggles and rebalances, but the main chemical that Marnia focuses on is dopamine, which I tend to think of as the "motivation" hormone. Dopamine's job, as I see it, is to make something seem like a good idea, whether that be eating a chocolate bar, engaging in a high-risk or thrilling activity, or having hot sex. In a way, you could say that we are naturally addicted to dopamine - we have to have it in sufficient quantity in our system to feel good, and we tend to crave having it in high levels. It would seem that orgasm is one of the most dopamine-spiking activities available to us. The flip side, however, is that dopamine is quite stimulating, and the body simply wouldn't be able to sustain high levels for a long duration without burning out (the hormone often has a close link with adrenaline, as well). If a lot of dopamine is dumped into the system, the body needs time to come down and reorder itself, and we experience a crash in dopamine levels and consequently a loss of motivation - this is behind the male "roll over and snooze" response that has upset and frustrated we women for the better part of recorded history. And I am talking a "loss of motivation" often to the point where nothing seems worth doing, giving life a bit of a pointless-feeling quality - not a nice feeling! One can feel empty, itchy, and irritable, and life just loses its lustre when we have a lack of drive while our dopamine level is depressed. The healthy body will, of course, rebalance itself to a medium, functional sort of level of dopamine in time if nothing else is done to cause a spike and subsequent crash. However, many people respond to a dopamine slump by trying to jump-start themselves back to a high level of feel-goodness by forcing another spike, and this pattern of behavior can quickly become an addictive cycle. Most couples end up on a dopamine roller-coaster, and Marnia believes, and I after her, that a great many of the emotional ups and downs in a relationship are simply following the neurochemcial roller-coaster ride of the two participants. Any intensely physcially pleasurable sensation is likely to be accompanied by a spike in dopamine, and so Marnia feels that these are to be avoided in order to avoid the harsh come-down on the other side.

There are more types of pleasure in life, however, besides the physically intense, instantaneously gratifying kind, and Marnia seeks to build more of these gentler, less shifty pleasures into a relationship by focusing on oxytocin, a chemical that encourages social bonding in mamals. Your system is full of it when you get the "warm fuzzies", and because it's not so demanding of our time and behaviors, we don't experience a crash from high oxytocin levels. While dopamine is about instant pleasure, oxytocin is about a feel-good glow that lasts. Marnia's philosophy can be pretty much summed up by, "Stabilize the dopamine, boost the oxytocin."

For all of these reasons and more, I see "coitus reservatus" as much more than just an early form of birth control. However, my favorite "sex philosopher" is not Marnia or Stockham but one Dr. J. William Lloyd, whose book you can find here http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/krz/index.htm

I find his approach to be the most balanced. I hope you will read his work, primarily because I think it is very good and I am indebted to him for my philosophy, but if nothing else because I think you would find it very entertaining :)

I have a few problems with how Marnia's philosophy comes together as a whole. The first being that, compared to Stockham and Lloyd, she comes across as excessively negative, focusing on the terrible things that can happen if you fail to not do what you're not supposed to do. Buying wholesale into Darwinian Evolution, she seems to see fertilization-driven sex and its buddy dopamine as a cruel trick that has trapped us (almost as if by design) in a "vale of tears" - the natural conclusion of which is a rather negative outlook on life, something to be avoided at almost any cost in my opinion. The fact that the natural system contains the potential for imbalance does not mean that it is wholly evil but simply that it must be treated with respect in order to yield the best results. You will find that Lloyd is very positive :) In fact, his emotive writing style really helps a person to set the right mental frame to succeed at this stuff by engaging and enlisting the imagination, not just the critical-thinking function of the brain. Marnia also believes that all you need is a partner who is willing to stick to the program, regardless of prior affection or issues. I certainly cannot agree with this - I think that "being in love" is a prerequisite for an intimate relationship, because inability to fall in love with someone is the way a deep part of your awareness tells you that they are not trustworthy or compatible enough for quite that level of intimacy.

You brought up the question of balance of activity/inactivity. Marnia requires that both parties be pretty doggone passive - as much so as possible, in fact. Now, this is where I put on my Carmen Miranda hat and get "fruity", but I find something to be missing in that scenario, and it's not just the elevated levels of dopamine. Something of the psychological relationship suffers when the man is forced to be too, well, feminine. Marnia really seems to sort of put the woman in control, which makes sense since women are, I think anyway, biologically predisposed to be a little more level-headed in these situations, but that just seems to deprive the man, and therefore the relationships as a whole, of something vital. I find it important to take the risk of allowing the man to remain the dominant partner - it keeps the two really relating psychologically as man and woman and means that when he does develop a good command of himself, he really has a lot of confidence, as opposed to being in a state where he comes to doubt himself because the only way he has been able to do the right thing is by completely deferring and yielding control of the situation to a woman. After we had followed Marnia's program for a while, my ex admitted to me that he found the format a little emasculating, and he is certainly not a macho sort of guy in the least. And you know, I felt the same thing that he was referring to. When we began to read and follow Lloyd more heavily, something clicked, and it is not that Lloyd is more phycially permissive, but that he is more encouraging of emotional and psychological expressiveness, especially in a gender-identified way. If you read and compare the two works, you will see what I mean.

Switching from hot sex to meaningful sex is really all about a shift in mind-set. Avoiding orgasm is important for biochemical reasons, but what really changes the experience and makes it more rewarding is the act of turning focus away from worry about whether ones physical "needs" will be met and turning it onto the act of sharing and caring for one another with the goal of building emotional intimacy ( a moving of the goal posts - to a whole other playing field!) I cannot stress enough how different things become when you become completely focused on one another. It is that shift, that can happen in an instant, that is the whole key - that is the difference between success and failure - it negates the need for perfect technique and often enables you to weather a storm that would otherwise have torn you apart. It makes the whole world look DIFFERENT. I know of a hypnotist who writes about intimate relationships (though he is of a superficially very different school!) who is very good at illustrating the power of different frames of mind, should you be interested.

Conclusion

Sounds like some ideas worth exploring, don't you agree?

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