Health News

Women and men who have completed their families, or who know they do not want any children, may want a permanent method of birth control.

Permanent methods may be appropriate for mature women and men who find that:

• their partners agree that their families are complete, and no more children are wanted

• they want to enjoy having sex without causing pregnancy

• they don’t want to have a child in the future

• they and their partners have concerns about the side effects of other methods

• other methods are unacceptable

• the woman’s health would be threatened by a future pregnancy

• they don’t want to pass on a hereditary illness or disability

• they are men who choose vasectomy to spare their partners the surgery and expense of tubal sterilization. (Sterilization for women is more complicated and costly.)

Permanent methods are not appropriate for women or men if:

• they want to have a child in the future

• they are being pressured by their partners, friends, or family

• they have marriage or sexual problems, short-term mental or physical illnesses, or financial worries, or are out of work. Permanent methods are not good solutions for temporary problems

• they have not considered possible changes in their lives such as divorce, remarriage, or the death of their children.

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In our sexually repressive culture, we have little concern for the well-being of women and men who have sex less often than mo people. But we have grave concerns about women and men who have sex more often than most people. Having sex very infrequently, or not at all, is called hypophilia. Having sex more often than most people is called hyperphilia. The desire for women to have sex very frequently with many different partners is called nymphomania. A similar desire in men is called satyriasis or Don Juanism.

Some mental health professionals consider nymphomania and satyriasis sexual compulsions, or sexual addictions, if the search for sex partners:

• results from an obsession that is like being in a trance and involves the development of rituals

to intensify sexual arousal

• interferes with important responsibilities and commitments, such as getting to work, home, or

school, maintaining good health, and forming nonsexual social relationships

• seems utterly hopeless to control

Recovery groups, such as Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, can be very helpful for women and men who want to control what they believe to be sexual addiction. However, accurate diagnosis and treatment for sexual addiction through psychosexual counseling may also be very important for people who are concerned that they may be addicted to sex.

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On the basis of clinical experience, surprisingly little of which has been systematically documented, testosterone has long been the treatment of choice to induce or restore sexual functioning and drive in hypo-gonadal or castrated men. Estrogens and certain progestogens which suppress testicular testosterone production and/ or compete with testosterone at the target-organ level, typically interfere with male libido and sexual functioning. The clinical data on the effects of other androgens on sexual behavior are too scanty to permit any reasonable conclusion. There is an increasing number of clinical studies, that show a beneficial effect of LH-RH administration on libido and potency in impotent, hypogonadal, and normal men. Although the data are suggestive, one has to reserve judgment at this point because the sample sizes are usually small, the methodology sometimes inadequate and the results inconsistent.

High-dose androgen treatment as it is used in estrogen-dependent cancer in women is known to have a strong, positive impact on sexual drive in many such patients. Analogously, female patients with abnormally high androgen levels due to adrenal tumors or other abnormalities, also show an increased sexual drive. A new report on endocrinologically normal women presented sizable correlations between their plasma testosterone levels, averaged over the menstrual cycle, and their “self-gratification scores” (a more appropriate label might be “self-rated sexual arousal”). Testosterone has been used successfully in the treatment of sexually unresponsive women. It has been shown—although without replication – that adrenalectomy, not ovarectomy, will decrease female sexual drive. Therefore, Money has called adrenal androgen the female “libido hormone.” It appears likely, however, that it is not the weak adrenal androgens, but the much more potent testosterone itself (which, in the female, is largely a conversion product of adrenal androstenedione) that is responsible for such effects. The role of female ovarian hormones, estrogens and progesterone, on female sexuality is even less clear, and menstrual-cycle studies of female sexual activity and desire have not produced a consistent body of data (McCauley and Ehrhardt). Estrogens clearly affect female attractivity to males via their effects on the secondary sex characteristics and facilitate female receptivity, at least indirectly, through their effect on the vaginal mucosa. However, Persky and others failed to show any relationship of plasma estradiol level to sexual behavior in young women. Data on the role of progesterone in female sexual behavior are not yet conclusive (McCauley and Ehrhardt), and data on behavioral LH-RH effects are not available.

In conclusion, the evidence described above names testosterone as the major hormone for sexual motivation and behavior in human males and possibly in females, while hardly anything is known in humans about a facilitory or contributing role of adrenal androgens, and there is only inconsistent but suggestive evidence for such a role of LH-RH in males. Estrogens and progestogens inhibit male sexual behavior, at least when used in pharmacologic dosage. Their role in female sexual motivation is not well established; it is probably much less prominent than in the case of lower mammals, but the available studies on women are not sufficient for ruling out facilitory effects of estrogens or inhibiting effects of progestogens as they have been observed in nonhuman primates.

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During the first several years of life, the infant’s relationship to others centers mostly on relationships with the mother (or a mother substitute) and having physiological needs met, especially the need for food. Feeding is necessary for survival, but it is also an occasion for intimate contact with other persons as a part of the infant’s exploration of the environment. Objects are experienced by putting them in the mouth, by sucking, touching, eating, and biting. This basically autoerotic stage lasts for the first five or six months of life. From as early as two months of age onward and increasingly through the first year of life, infants are not so much passive and receptive as active in seeking interaction. Most infants show the need for the proximity of others sometime during the first quarter of the first year.

Attachment is a two-way process. Attachment behavior between mother and infant consolidates the affectional relationship. In studying the interaction of twenty-eight babies with their mothers, Ainsworth catalogued thirteen patterns of attachment besides those associated with feeding—the rooting response, sucking, and search for the breast. On the infant’s side, the thirteen include differential crying, smiling and vocalizing, visual-motor orientation, crying when the mother left, following, scrambling, burying the face, exploring from a secure base, clinging, lifting the arms and clapping the hands in greeting, and approaching through locomotion.

Preference for the mother is not present at birth; it must develop out of the feeding and caring experience. The infant’s earliest posture is one of undiscriminating responsiveness. In the first few weeks of life it can be assumed that the infant experiences the mother, and particularly her breast, as part of itself. The first few weeks of life can be characterized as an around-the-clock time of sleep alternating with waking periods in which the infant’s contact with the mother is directed by hunger rather than by any other drive or appetite. But the mother and the infant are two independent psycho-physiological systems. They interact through specific mechanisms of stimulation and pacification. In the process, circular social interaction becomes more discriminating, and the relations between the two become numberless and infinitely varied.

Most mothers in the nuclear family do not share the intimate care of their offspring with another adult (although more and more fathers are becoming involved) and are in a position to develop an unusually close relationship with their babies. Caldwell and Hersher found that such mothers, in contrast to mothers who shared care of the infant with others, were less intellectualized in their relationships with the baby, were more sensuous in their touching and handling, were more likely to vocalize, were more active and more playful with their six-month-old babies. At one year of age they were rated as more dependent upon their babies for the achievement of their own need gratifications. In general, the data suggests a comfortable relationship between infant and mother in the cases in which the mother had exclusive responsibility for the child.

Infants show differing personality traits, strengths in their aggressive instincts, for example. Some are placid. Some are quiet. Some are noisy and active. These temperaments stay with them as they grow. There are also male-female behavioral differences present at birth, though research findings are still sparse. The male infant has greater muscular strength at birth, but the female is in no way less active or expressive. The female infant from birth shows more oral sensitivity, engages in more frequent mouth-dominated approaches, and is a more frequent and more persistent thumb-sucker. Newborn females also exhibit greater cutaneous sensitivity than do males.

Parents treat male and female infants differently right from the start, hence there is constant parental reinforcement, not only of innate differences but also of differences in what society regards as gender-appropriate behavior. In other words, the infant’s unique male or female characteristics, as well as cultural expectations, may affect the nature of parent-infant interaction from the day of birth and onward. Moss found, for instance, that mothers had significantly more contact with infant boys than with girls on such variables as “attends” and “stimulates-arouses.”

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Clearly, the kind of person a man happens to be will have some bearing on the way he and his son get along together and on his son’s readiness to identify with him. For example, a father who is cold or weak may not invite close relationships with his son or seem very interesting or important to identify with. In this regard, studies have described the fathers of homosexual males as passive and ineffective family members who leave major decisions to their wives.

The homosexual men tended to describe their fathers as persons who would presumably be poor objects for identification:

It should be noted that the homosexual respondents did not differ from their heterosexual counterparts in how masculine or feminine, independent or dependent, active or passive, or relaxed or up-tight they said their fathers had been.

In addition, the homosexual respondents’ more-frequent description of their fathers as cold persons appears to be consistent with others’ theoretical expectations. It should be noted, however, that when fathers and mothers were compared, the majority of respondents of both sexual orientations reported their fathers made fewer decisions in the family, and that their fathers were not much colder than their mothers.

Our findings suggest that a father perceived as relatively cold by his son is less likely to get along well with him and offers a less-appealing figure for identification. The influence of paternal traits, however, seems limited to familial relationships; their ultimate effect on a son’s adult sexual preference is at best tenuous.

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