Pump Up the Vole-ume: Talking Oxytocin
The more young people are told – usually by adults who know from their own experience it’s not true — that sex outside of marriage, outside long-term, monogamous relationships, or with any more than one partner in a lifetime, will always do them terrible, irreparable harm and make them damaged goods forevermore, the more we get questions about oxytocin, one common staple in that messaging. So, around a year ago, I started excavating. It’s taken me a while to get this out here: I confess, it’s mostly because I was dreadfully bored by it all. I’m not a neurochemistry geek, but a sex geek. Because so much of it wasn’t all that relevant to sex, and because this just isn’t my area of geekdom, every time I’ve picked this up what I found most amazing about oxytocin was its ability to miraculously cure my bouts of insomnia by just reading or writing about it.