Does Sex Make Us More Creative?

Anna North excerpts 15 of the strangest passages from Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography:

Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, ‘the Goddess.’ […] I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real.

Zoë Heller tackles Wolf’s claim that good orgasms make women more creative:

Wolf claims to find strong evidence in the biographies of women writers and artists (Georgia O”Keefe, Emma Goldman, Edith Wharton) that women often “create best after a sexual awakening or a particularly liberating sexual relationship.” … Whatever moral Wolf draws from the fact that Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence after experiencing orgasms for the first time is surely rather undermined by the fact that Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights after having no sexual intercourse at all. (She might have masturbated, of course, but Wolf specifically disqualifies masturbation as a method of achieving high orgasm: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”)

The Neurocritic demolishes the book’s spotty science:

This unlikely combination of pseudoscientific and mystical elements provides a little something for everyone to hate. Among neuroscientists, howlers such as “dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain”, oxytocin “is women’s emotional superpower” and the vagina is “not only coextensive with the female brain but also is part of the female soul” have been making the rounds of social media. I almost feel sorry for Ms. Wolf because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Dopamine is not a feminist neurotransmitter, unless snails and insects have been secretly reading Betty Friedan and listening to Bikini Kill.