pleasure. We’ll hear more about the cause of Merritt’s challenge in chapter 4, and a great deal about the solution in chapter 8. all the same parts, organized in different ways It’s true for us, too. Humans go through a learning process similar to (though much more complex than) rats. And that learning process is different depending on whether you’re a boy or a girl. There are several theories about how this works, but I’m going to tell you the one I like best.
Let’s imagine those fraternal twins from chapter 1, the brother and sister. Born on the same day, having developed in the same hormonal environment in the womb, they’re as similar as different-sex siblings can be.
The little boy—let’s call him Frankie—soon begins to notice (in his preverbal infant way) that some significant changes happen to part of his body—his penis grows and changes and feel tingly! His infant brain begins to link that change in his body to the external stimuli in the environment and to the internal sensations and emotions that accompany it. And so from the earliest moment, his brain is linking his environment with his erections.
In boys, then, the process of teaching their accelerator what constitutes a sexually relevant stimulus is a fairly straightforward process of categorizing 13as “sexy” those things that are associated with erection.
The little girl—we’ll call her Frannie—doesn’t have that obligingly obvious physiological response to her environment. As a result, her brain links “sexually relevant” not to her internal state or genital response but to the social context. The “sexy” category in a little girl’s mind is populated not with erection-related stimuli but with social stimuli.
Here’s how that works: Have you ever seen a toddler learning to walk? When toddlers fall down, their first reaction is to look up at the faces of the adults around them, as though to say, “Something unexpected just happened! How should I feel about it?” And when the adults are calm and chirp, “You fell down.
You’re okay!” the toddlers get back up and keep going. But if the adults panic and run over, exclaiming, “Be careful, you could get hurt!” the toddlers panic, too, and burst into tears.
In the same way, girls learn what’s sexually relevant not because their genitals do something so obvious and new that they can’t help learning from it, but rather by paying attention to their environment, especially to the other person there with them in the sexually relevant situation.