Posted by wendy larsen
April 12, 2007
Filed in Society Girl's Personal Blogs
946 views
3. The brain modifies our behavior with pain and pleasure.
I spent almost 10 years with almost daily severe headaches. Why? Because they treated my headaches initially with Codeine. My brain got to liking codeine. It liked it so much that, after a while, it gave me headaches to get me to take codeine. Now I didn't care about the codeine, had no cravings for it, physical or mental. My brain however, was hooked. When I did not give it it's codeine, it punished me by giving me a headache until I gave it a codeine. Not a lot. Averaged one #3 codeine a day.
We are motivated to have sex and reproduce by the brain giving us pleasure...emotional nad physical...as a reward for having sex.
The brain gets us to take our hand of a hot stove by giving us pain.
The point is, that the brain can be very blunt or very crafty in modifying our behavior.
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Crossdressing.
Most crossdressers say they are not women. They say they crossdress for sexual pleasure.
Transsexuals say they are women and that they do not crossdress for sexual pleasure....in fact, they don't crossdress at all. They wear the clothing appropriate for their gender identity....for sexual pleasure? Well, no more than any woman does as part of the process of getting sexual pleasure....but not the gender of the clothing being worn in and of itself.
Other, transgendered persons report varying degrees of sexual pleasure from dressing. Some report starting as "crossdressers" and dressing for sexual pleasure but, over time, the sexual edge faded.
Now there could be a lot of reasons why some of us derive sexual pleasure from dressing in clothing of a gender other than our assigned physical sex. There have been quite a number of psycho-social and psychodynamic explainations for why we are what we are and why we do what we do. I won't list them here. I would like to propose a different theory for why SOME of us get sexual pleasure from dressing en femme for some of our life and then it fades as we accept our transgendered nature.
The brain has won. It doesn't have to motivate us with sexual pleasure to be ourselves any more.
Over and over I hear how many of us tried to bury our femme side under a mountain of manly behaviors. For periods of time, sometimes long periods, we managed to supress the urge to be femme. It always fails. Irrepressible urges break out and we risk destroying our lives by dressing up a girls/women. Why? Well, partly it could be that part of our brain really, really wants to live it's life. Now what is one of the strongest motivators of the male BODY. Sex, darling. So the brain seduces itself. The male is drawn into a male sexual fantasy in which it plays either or both parts...consciously or uncounciously. The payoff is intense sexual excitement and pleasure, culminating in a, probably, explosive orgasm.
No? What happens next? We can't wait to get those clotes off, shower and remove all vestiges while we wonder why we did something so inately,insanely dangerous. Well.......because the brain is clever. It get's what it wants. It gets you to stop burning your hand. It gets it's codeine. It gets you to let that part of your brain that you supress to live...for a few minutes or hours. It does it with sexual favors....from you, to you. It's been said before. The brain is the primary sexual organ of the body.
You accept your transgendered self. You accept your femme side. Maybe, like me, you remember actually working hard to pretend to be a macho male...until it stopped being pretend....then you forgot what and who you were...maybe for years. Finally, you let Wendy, who has been living up in the loft like a hidden, deformed child, hidden where nobody can see her....you let her out, she gets to live. The brain doesn't have to motivate you to let her out any more. You want to let her out. So the sexual urges lessen. They become more controllable.
Why don't they always go away? The brain is also both an addict and a creature of habit. It creates superhighways where repeated behaviors can follow low-resistance pathways. It's a habit. There is little to motivate you to stop experiencing some sexual pleasure associated with dressing. It may change in intensity or flavor. Unless you are pressured/motivated to stop experiencing a sexual pleasure along with dressing en femme, there is little reason for it to stop.
Don't worry about it. One way or the other. You are probably a healthier and happier individual accepting your transgendered self. This is not a bad thing. Don't mess with success. If you made it this far, you will likely come to a compromise that suits you.
Is this THE answer? I can't say. I think it fits most of the observed data. It follows a heavily neuro-biological model of behavior. It also fits into my personal experience. It does not however, eliminate explainations for other people's experiences. I know that it took a lot of motivation to get me to accept who I was. Not just being bribed with pleasure. It also took a lot of hard work to escape the misery that my denial had led me to. I was so dysfuncitonal, in my personal life, that I had lost the person I loved most. It was in working to clear away the anger that buried all my feelings that I found myself. It's a lot more complex than my theory above. That's because we are all individuals with our own psycho-dynamic issues.
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Right or wrong, I think it's good to think about our experiences and try to get a handle on what has happened in our lives. Gradually, we will find the answers that will help the next generation to accept themselves and be accepted by intelligent, rational, thinking people. In the meantime, we can learn to, finally, accept ourselves as a natural phenomenon To live our lives in a way that we can finally be happy.
One day, they will find the answer to helping those, who object to us, to be happy. Then they can stop using us as an excuse to hide from their inner selves as we did from our inner selves. Isn't that the world we really want to live in?
