Battles of the Sexes: Raising Sexual IQ to Lower Sexual Conflict and Empower Lasting Love

By Joe Malone and Sarah Achelpohl Harris

A fresh look at relationships between twenty-first century females and males.
 
In the twenty-first century, it is no longer just the battle of the sexes, but individual battles of the sexes that pose challenges to how men and women relate to each other. Battles of the Sexes helps men and women understand their own sexual nature, as well that of the opposite sex, and develop sexual empathy for each other. Leading young adult health experts Joe Malone, PhD and Sarah Harris, MS, RDN, provide insight into the mismatch both sexes endure between our rapidly changing culture and our inherited nature and the resulting battles both genders fight. Cutting-edge, yet understandable science is used to illustrate things like the effect of women’s menstrual cycles and the chemical and visual laws of attraction. Malone and Harris lay out what motivates the genders inside relationships, particularly men and their relationship with women and women and their relationship with food, in a way that encourages sexual empathy. Battles of the Sexes illuminates how couples can recognize chemical dangers to their bonds and gives singles valuable insights for dating, empowering loving, lasting, committed romance between men and women that will benefit not only individuals, but also our entire species.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781683508786

Book preview

Introduction

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves

SHAKESPEARE FROM JULIUS CAESAR

Know thyself

SOCRATES

Where the Passion Began

With regard to Socrates’ famous quote, I, Joe Malone, came to know myself by trial and a boatload of error. As a young adult, I experienced a tumultuous time during the early 1990s. When it was all said and done, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

I was first treated through many different versions of Freudian talk therapy, which did not change the OCD symptoms at all.

Freudian Theory: The first psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth century that emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind and rested on the assumption that people are driven fundamentally by unconscious, animalistic, instinctual urges, particularly lust (eros) and aggression (thanatos), and are influenced by childhood events, particularly traumatic ones.

Being continually asked if I had suffered abuse or other negative influences as a child only created frustration, and eventually desperation and depression, as I tried psychologist after psychologist who continued using talk therapies to no avail. The low point was when one psychologist asked me why I wanted to have OCD.

(Trust me, anybody who has OCD will tell you that nobody would ever volunteer to have it. It is a torturous condition to endure!)

It was then that I started seeing a psychiatrist (who I learned is a medical doctor with the ability to prescribe medication). She told me that she had a medication she believed would address my symptoms. She began treating me with antidepressant medications.

After several weeks, she proved to be correct.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned I was one of the approximately 50 percent of OCD sufferers that also has bipolar disorder. The high daily dosages of antidepressants took me out of the dungeon of depression to the mile-high experience of mania. That mania led to unintentional damage to my life and those around me. I learned painfully and personally in no uncertain terms about the biological chemical reality at the root of the human condition that influences our behavor.

On one hand, I finally got some relief. I learned that what I was suffering from was a biologically-based chemical imbalance in my brain that had not come from abusive socialization when I was a child, but from a brain chemistry predisposition I had inherited from my ancestors.

Imagine that.

The bad news was that besides triggering the manic symptoms previously mentioned, the relief from the antidepressants lasted only a few months and I found I had to keep trying new medications as my brain habituated to each one. Eventually, I discovered that a combination of medication plus a new kind of talk therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are what would finally help bring a level of control to my OCD/bipolar brain condition. Looking back on it, I clearly recognize that the key to gaining control was learning how my own brain and those of others worked on a biochemical basis.

That was the point in my life when I realized that I desperately needed what we would eventually call Sex IQ. This is when the initial seeds were planted and the journey through a world of human biochemical research and related self-discovery began.

Going into the 2000s, as I continued acquiring more and more biochemical knowledge, I was able to holistically manage my own life to the point where I could live successfully with OCD and bipolar disorder. I was able to taper off all medication, which my doctors told me would never be possible.

The key insight I took away from my experience with the treatment of OCD and bipolar disorder is that human behavior is a matter of both nature and nurture. Through the Freudian era, which took up most of the twentieth century, human behavior was thought to be mostly a matter of nurture. It became clear to me that we needed to make good use of knowledge from both the sciences of nature and nurture to have the maximum beneficial effect on human behavior. I landed in the midst of the mental health change brought about by the natural scientific breakthroughs in the area of brain function that characterized the 1990s. These fortuitous circumstances happened as a result of changing governmental policy that recognized the importance of understanding the brain on a biological level. The 1990s are still known as the decade of the brain because government funding caused an explosion of new knowledge on brain structure and biochemistry. From a highly personally informed and motivated perspective, I began studying the brain and have yet to stop.

As a result of this study, I started understanding life and how my own brain and those of others worked on a biochemical level. Words like dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, opioids, and oxytocin came to hold deep meaning for me. This knowledge was not only gained through books and research, but through the personal experiences brought about by the prescribed psychotropic medication I was on to combat OCD and bipolar. I learned experientially and in real time the effects of lowered or raised serotonin, dopamine, etc. Those experiences have led me to deeper insights in almost every area of life, including romance and sex.

Let’s Talk About Sex—We Are Not the Same

One of the areas I could not ignore in my research was the distinctly unique biochemistries of the sexes. Just like the 1990s’ brain biochemistry research, sex differences research is based on hard or natural science. Natural selection is the net that snares all of the dissimilar findings of the biological life sciences and brings them together as a coherent whole.

Natural Selection: The process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. The theory of its action was first fully expounded by Charles Darwin and is now believed to be the main process that brings about evolution. ~ Oxford Dictionary

One hallmark portion of natural selection is sexual selection, which is the framework for understanding human sex differences.

I was fascinated to see supporting research with non-human species. The pattern was clear: males and females are different on a biochemical basis throughout animal species. For humans, that pattern is especially true during young adulthood (ages 18-39). Clinical psychologist and researcher Dr. Irina Trofimova has established recently that differences between men and women peak at ages 20-23 and decline gradually as they age¹. There is a profound variance hormonally at that age between most males and females. This is a major cause of the significant behavioral variances observed during this life stage.

In Battles of the Sexes, we make the case that it is important to recognize that young men and women are experiencing life differently during this developmental period, and should be given tailored and customized coaching on how to successfully navigate it. There are some people who think that most differences between human males and females are created by societal pressures. We respect this insight and agree that a certain portion can be explained by plasticity of the brain and societal norms; however, after personal life experience and decades of research, it cannot be ignored that a significant proportion of our behavior as humans is reflective of our unique biology. Each of us is a walking biochemical reaction that is constantly responding to others and our environment. We get to where we are at any particular moment in our lives from a combination of biological genetic inheritance, gender, and sociological influence. To discount or dismiss the biological element would be a profound mistake, and one especially dangerous for females. Allow me to explain.

The Biology of the feMALE

The reason that ignoring the biological influence in a woman’s life is more dangerous than ignoring it in a man’s life is that research has been done primarily on males and then extrapolated to females.

Why would they do that?

Up until the 1990s, females were thought to be difficult and problematic to work with because of hormonal variations. They were construed by researchers as smaller men, identical except for genitalia and those pesky hormones that were hard to create a control for in experimental design.

An example of research that proved this physically identical approach dead wrong was the discovery that dosages of Ambien need to be significantly smaller for women than they do for men to avoid the lingering effect and the resulting hazards, including unsafe driving conditions. The female body metabolizes Ambien much more slowly than the male body does. The Society for Women’s Health Research has been working to point out the gravity of this insight, especially to women, with the hope that they will see the importance to their well-being. They have been advocating for this since the 1990s and are finally being heard and responded to by the medical community and society. This is one of many testaments to the biological uniqueness of the sexes.

Sex differences are real and important and can contribute to knowing ourselves in constructive and preventive ways. Dr. David Geary, one of the world’s foremost researchers on sex differences, put it best:

I ask those readers who remain unconvinced to reflect on the theory of evolution of which sexual selection is one set of pressures. Evolution is not just another psychological, sociological, or anthropological theory; it has proven to be the unifying meta-theory for all of the life and biological sciences. Eventually, all psychological, sociological, and anthropological models will need to be reconciled with the principles of natural selection and sexual selection. One can choose to be part of this discovery process, or one can let these forthcoming scientific advances pass one by.²

Society Plays its Part

As someone who has always highly respected the work of social scientists to the point of becoming one myself, I do not take lightly the ability of social groups to influence our behavior. If I did not believe that people could be changed through the influence of others, the college classes I have taught over the years would be designed very differently. Even so, I have come to realize through both empirical evidence and personal experience that the biochemistry and physiology of our ancestors may also have a profound influence on the behavioral inclinations of the sexes. Understanding ourselves and those around us through knowledge of this phenomenon, along with understanding the social influences, is essential.

Shaping the Future

Why is this so important to grasp, especially for young adults?

It is as a young adult that men and women begin sliding into the bodies that can either make them sick and depressed middle-agers or vibrant and joyful old souls. It is as a young adult that humans begin shaping their long-term future. Robin Marantz Henig and her daughter Samantha Henig describe it in their book Twentysomething:

In 2000, when the Add Health (Adolescent to Adult Health) investigators did a new round of interviews, they found that study subjects who were now young adults aged 18-26, had slipped on 16 of the 20 standard indicators of healthy living. They had started smoking, stopped exercising, stopped eating breakfast, started eating junk food and getting fat, stopped going to the dentist and stopped getting annual check-ups. Compared to their behavior as adolescents, the twenty-something participants in the Add Health study engaged in more binge drinking, marijuana use and hard drug use and had higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases.³

It is clear that the formative years after leaving the childhood home are a time when much good can be done through preventive strategies. These strategies can be especially effective when informed by biological insight and clothed in psychosocial wellness approaches.

Another reason young adulthood is such an opportune time to intervene in the typical twenty-first century health deterioration process is brain maturation. Dr. Meg Jay, in her book The Defining Decade, points out that through recent science, we now know that there are two growth spurts in the development of the brain. The first takes place in the initial eighteen months of life with the brain creating many more neurons than it can use.

Neurons: Cells that transmit nerve signals.

These are employed for learning skills like crawling, walking, speaking, and eating. Those that aren’t used to learn are pruned. The second growth spurt occurs from adolescence through at least the mid-20s. Most of these neurons develop in the frontal lobe, which is the seat of judgement, self-control, and intentionality. In the same way as before, the ones that are used to develop behaviors (good or bad) are kept, while those that are leftover are pruned.⁴ This makes young adulthood in particular a crucial time to intervene with preventive strategies that lead young men and women onto a healthy and successful path. Because this is the final development stage of the hardwiring of the brain, these habits will have a tendency to become permanent—for better or worse.

From Bad Habits to Heart Attacks

There is a combination of events and experiences that bring us to where we are in life. In the late 1990s, my experiences had shaped me into a disillusioned fitness professional. It was during this same decade that health problems caused by poor lifestyle choices had increased dramatically in Western societies, and it hit me personally when a client of mine died of a heart attack at age 60 while on vacation in Florida. During his forty-year business career, he had created a corporation and amassed a fortune. Unfortunately, he had been so physically inactive that he had no body or health left with which to enjoy it.

In a related incident, I found out that a dear friend of mine had experienced his first heart attack at 48 years old. He too was a victim of the wealthy businessman’s excessive traveling lifestyle. I found myself one unforgettable day eight years later giving him chest compressions as he struggled to live after suffering another heart attack. It wasn’t like the movies or TV. He was turning colors no human should be, green, purple, etc., and trying hard to breathe to stay alive. After twenty-five of the longest minutes of my life, the EMTs arrived and took over.

Unfortunately, he didn’t make it.

I came away from that experience traumatized, and as I said, disillusioned and considering quitting the fitness industry. We were being overwhelmed at that time by the sheer number of people needing our help, but could only work with one at a time. It was a feeble and discouraging way to address a tsunami of bad health and although I was tempted to quit, I determined to continue fighting back for the sake of others’ health, and, along the way, discovered the massive potential for reaching young adults in preventive ways to avoid them becoming suffering, future-chronic-disease candidates.

Optimal Health Starts in the Womb

I began teaching at a local university in the early 2000s and found that the energy and enthusiasm of the college students matched my own. It was around this same time that I began to discover the emerging science of fetal programming.

Fetal programming scientifically explains how conditions inside the mother’s womb during pregnancy through epigenetic processes can influence the health of the fetus and the future adult throughout their lives. Those conditions can strongly influence a fetus’s chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, stroke, autoimmune disorders, and even cancer. Or, looked at from the positive perspective, it can help prevent all of them.

Epigenetics: The study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression, rather than alteration of the genetic code itself.

The state of young women’s health leading up to pregnancy is a strong influencing factor on the future health of a baby. The baby is created, quite literally, from the mother’s muscle, bone, and fat.⁵ I realized this meant that focusing on health promotion, particularly for young women, could finally produce a formidable weapon in the war against the effects of our unhealthy, twenty-first century environment. With each young woman prospectively having an average of two children, this was finally a way to fight back exponentially against the tide of bad health that the 1980s and 90s had launched. When I was working with one young woman, I was essentially working with three people, which included her probable two future babies. I knew that research also showed that she would be a greater influence on her husband than vice versa and would set the health culture of their future home. This raised the number of benefited individuals to four.

This revelation led me on a course of finding innovative ways to work with the college women demographic. In fact, some colleagues and I eventually designed and implemented a new college women’s wellness course that became the subject of my doctoral dissertation research. It was about this time in 2007 that I crossed paths with a remarkable and brilliant young woman: Sarah Harris. When I shared my thoughts and vision with her, she said, If you ever need a right-hand man, let me know.

That was the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership that started with her as a student in my class and proceeded through many health promotions for college women and continued all the way to the present, where she is now a Registered Dietitian with a Master of Science degree in Clinical Nutrition.

At this point, I will let her speak for herself.

A Word from Sarah

As a student studying Nutrition and Food Science and minoring in Exercise Physiology, I took class after class on nutrition and exercise. Joe Malone’s Personal Conditioning class was unlike any other course I took as an undergraduate. I could tell something was different immediately. The science he shared with his students about young men and women’s health challenges and the relationship between women’s health and reproduction (among so many other topics) were unheard of in my traditional classes and it hit me particularly hard. I was that person he was teaching about, and being a member of a sorority at the time, I had a front row seat viewing the poor health decisions young women (including myself) were making on a daily basis: excessive drinking, pizza at every event, fast food and soda galore from rushing around from event to meeting to class, poor campus food choices, substance and supplement abuses, eating disorders. This is what compelled me to reach out to Coach Joe in the first place nine years ago. He was up to something important and I wanted to be a part of the preventive effort alongside him. He genuinely cares for every person’s life that he affects and has such incredible intentionality in his coaching efforts. In Battles of the Sexes, as a now married 28-year-old with two young children, it will be my role to chime in and further qualify Malone’s science with real-life situations and provide additional expert insight in regard to practical nutrition