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A critical examination of the idea that prehistorical humans were egalitarians and polyamorous. A long, long time ago, we lived in tribes in which men and women were equal, sharing in the gathering and preparation of food, and having equal decision power. Tribes lived in peace with each other. Everybody could have sex with everybody else in the tribe. Children were raised in common by the tribe and nobody cared who their father was. But was it really like that? Or rather… A long, long time ago, we lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers in which men did the hunting and women did the gathering. Because men carried weapons to hunt and were stronger, they subjugated the women. In fact, women were considered chattel to be traded between tribes. The kidnapping of women and warfare over them was common. A careful record was kept of who was the offspring of whom and this was a major determinant of allegiances and social status. The first idea is known as the Myth of the Noble Savage and can be traced back to the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I wrote it here as a recent interpretation that I found in the book Sex At Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. The second idea is often called Hobbesian, after the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously wrote that “life in the state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. More nuanced versions of the Hobbesian view can be found in the popular books The Better Angels of Our Nature, by psychologist Steven Pinker, and Sapiens, by historian Yuval Noah Harari. Pinker argues in his book that we live in the least violent period of human history and that this is the culmination of a steady decline in violence from prehistory to our days. He provides compelling evidence for his claim. The way I wrote the second paragraph is taken from the descriptions of the Yanamamö tribe of Venezuela and Brazil by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon in his book My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists. The debate on whether our ancestors were noble or violent savages has raged for over a century. It is critically important because it addresses deeper questions about human nature. The reason for this is the following. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for 250,000 years. During most of that time we were hunter-gatherers and lived in tribes. Only during the last 10,000 years (4% of our existence) we have practiced agriculture, domesticated animals and lived in cities. Therefore, our genes were shaped by evolution during our time as hunter-gatherers and not during our relatively brief existence as civilized people. Questions like whether men have a natural tendency to dominate women, whether we are naturally monogamous, or whether jealousy is inevitable should be answered taking this into account. Political implications Whether human nature is Rousseauian or Hobbesian has deep political implications. Socialists want to emphasize that humans are naturally inclined towards cooperation, because then solidarity between workers, associating in unions, and creating a state that enforces equality would be a natural human tendency. Conversely, capitalists prefer the Hobbesian view of human nature. That way, the selfish search for our own interest and competition for natural resources that form the basis for market dynamics would be just an extension of our natural inclinations. The creation of money, commercial transactions and the laws of economics are ways to rationalize what otherwise would be a violent competition for resources (see Sapiens). A related political issue needs to be recognized: the appalling history of violence, theft and exploitation perpetrated by the European colonizers against indigenous people around the world. This shows that being “civilized” (that is, an inhabitant of industrialized states) does not imply any kind of moral superiority over being a “savage” (that is, a member of tribes of hunter-gatherers). However, important as it is, this is not the subject of this article. Are we naturally violent or cooperative? Who is right? Ironically, research by some economists revealed that humans make decisions about money not based on rational calculus, as assumed by capitalism, but based on emotional decisions about what is fair. Thus, experiments using the ultimatum game proved the existence of altruistic punishment, in which a person is willing to lose something or invest energy to punish another person who is perceived to act unfairly, even if the injustice does not affect the punisher. Altruistic punishment exists in all human communities and is driven by hormones like oxytocin and testosterone (it is stronger in men). This shows that it is biologically determined, not cultural. This is evidence that human nature is geared towards fairness and cooperation, and therefore supports the idea of the Noble Savage. In other articles, I suggested that uniquely human emotions like shame and pride also evolved to support cooperation. On the other hand, humans are quite violent. Primitive humans living in tribes seem to be more violent, not less, than us. Thus, Chagnon recounts how the Yanomamö live in a constant state of warfare between tribes. The killing of men and the kidnapping of women (which is tantamount to gang rape) are very common. There is also violence inside the tribe, quite often due to disputes among men for the possession of a woman. Women are beaten, even killed, by jealous husbands who suspect them of infidelity. Powerful men may have several wives (polygyny), but sometimes two men may share a woman (polyandry). Similar dynamics in the tribes of New Guinea are described by biologist Jared Diamond in his book Why Is Sex Fun? There is a caveat, however: both the Yanomamö studied by Chagnon and the tribes of New Guinea studied by Diamond are not pure hunter-gatherers, but are more accurately described as horticulturalists: they hunt but also consume fruits and vegetables that they cultivate in gardens near their villages. Therefore, they represent an intermediate step between hunter-gathering and agriculture. The birth of the Patriarchy Feminists propose that the Patriarchy started with the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago, when the defense of cultivable land, domestic animals and food stocks led to the militarization of men. As a consequence, women started to be considered as just another possession, like land and animals. It was also important to determine if a child was truly sired by the man whose possessions he was going to inherit. So, perhaps the Yanomamö and the New Guinea tribes were already infected by the cultural virus of the Patriarchy? Maybe during the last 10,000 years the memes of monogamy and the possession of women have reached even the last remaining hunter-gatherers, but in ancient times everything was different? It is hard to know how humans lived tens of thousands of years ago, since they left almost no cultural remains. However, human bones and skeletons from before the Agricultural Revolution often show signs of violence. Steven Pinker proposes that this means that primitive humans warred frequently and were more violent than we are. The following figure shows that violent deaths were far more numerous in tribal societies than in societies run by the state. This is even true for nations like Germany, Russia and Japan that were decimated by the World Wars of the 20th Century. Is polyamory ancient? Polyamory is a recent cultural phenomenon, so the question of whether humans are naturally polyamorous was not considered by anthropologists and sexologists. In fact, most anthropologists seem reluctant to consider polyamory as a viable alternative to monogamy. For them, the options are between monogamy (one man married to one woman) and polygyny (one man married to several women), because these are what we find in modern cultures. “Of the 1,231 societies listed in the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas, 186 were found to be monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and 4 had polyandry. […] More recent studies have found more than 50 other societies practicing polyandry.” Wikipedia. However, polyamory is different from both polygyny and polyandry, because it allows for any combination of genders, including same-sex relationships. In Sex At Dawn, Ryan and Jethá propose that this is not just a modern phenomenon but was in fact the common way of life before the Agricultural Revolution. They offer a vision of ancient tribes in which sex was shared as commonly as food, even between people of the same gender. The paternity of children was a non-issue because there was no property to inherit and children were raised in common by the whole tribe. Since men didn’t possess women, jealousy, fighting over women, and the abuse of women were unnecessary. This view seems to agree with the myth of the non-violent and highly cooperative Noble Savage. However, it is not required that the two things go together. It is possible that ancient tribes were fairly violent and yet promiscuous, and that monogamy only became standard after the Agricultural Revolution. Are there other indications that we are naturally monogamous or promiscuous? Monogamy is driven by oxytocin and vasopressin There is strong evidence that monogamy in mammals is genetically determined, so whether we are monogamous or polyamorous is inscribed in our biological nature and is not a cultural phenomenon. This evidence is based on research on prairie voles, a species of rodents that are monogamous: they bond for life and raise their offspring together. However, a closely-related species, the montane vole, is promiscuous. The difference between the two species is the number of receptors for oxytocin in their brains: prairie voles have many more receptors that montane voles. Using transgenic techniques, scientists decreased the expression of oxytocin receptors in the brains of prairie voles, and this made them as promiscuous as the montane voles. Since then, there has been a great deal of research on oxytocin and the other social hormone, vasopressin. While monogamous behavior in females is driven by oxytocin, in males it is driven by both oxytocin and vasopressin, which also induces territoriality and playful aggression. Therefore, it is likely that humans are monogamous or promiscuous depending on the amount of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors expressed in their brains. Ape sexuality Another way to look at the question of whether we are naturally monogamous is to look at our close cousins, the great apes. None of these species are monogamous. Gorillas are polygynous, with one silver-back male guarding a harem of several females. Orangutans are quite weird sexually: males are solitary and females sporadically choose to mate with older males having facial plates. However, often a younger male rapes a female orangutan. Chimps live in troops that are hierarchically organized, with a dominant male in control. When a female reaches estrous, the dominant male mates with her and then allows other males that he favors to have access to her (see Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal). Bonobos are by far the most interesting species, sexually speaking. Unlike chimps, their troops are ruled by a coalition of females who bond by having sex with each other. They also have sex with the males, and do not need to be in estrous to do so. Sex is very frequent and is used for bonding and to dispel social stress. Hence, bonobos have become a poster example for polyamory. Their close genetic proximity to our species has been used as an argument in favor of humans being naturally polyamorous. Indeed, if monogamy was natural to humans, it would not be so difficult being faithful. It may be that our brains do not have all that many oxytocin receptors, after all. Gender equality and monogamy are separate issues Some feminists want to tie gender equality, non-monogamy and non-violence into one neat package in a modern version of the Myth of the Noble Savage. According to this view, when sex is shared and there is no jealousy, the use of violence to control women and to keep other men away from “our” woman becomes unnecessary. When a bunch of men and women are deeply bonded by sex and romantic love, social hierarchies based on male power cannot be established, just like happens with bonobos. Then, gender equality comes naturally. Therefore, polyamory eliminates in one full sweep gender inequality, violence against women and violence between men. In fact, they argue, this is the natural state of the human species. The Agricultural Revolution was the Original Sin that started the Patriarchy with all its nasty corollaries of violence, gender inequality, warfare and jealousy. As somebody who practices polyamory and has experienced its benefits in my personal life, I find this view is quite appealing. However, I need to consider the evidence. The Patriarchy is a set of beliefs, customs and laws that assigns specific roles to men and women that put men dominant positions. Likewise, Monogamy (with capital M) could be defined as a set of beliefs, customs and laws that prioritize monogamous, sexually-exclusive relationships and prohibit other types of sexual relationships. Both are power structures that predominate in modern societies. However, this doesn’t mean that Patriarchy and Monogamy are the same thing. Some traditional Mormon and Islamic societies are patriarchal but not monogamous. Conversely, many feminists oppose both the Patriarchy and polyamory, because they view polyamory as another trick of men to satisfy their inveterate lust without having to commit to stable relationships. Of course, this is not true. Recent research shows that women become bored with monogamous sex more often than men. There are also libertarians who practice polyamory while opposing feminism. My point is that Patriarchy and Monogamy are different, and so is the fight against them. My conclusions There is a lot that we don’t know about ancient human societies before the Agricultural Revolution. Given the scant remains that they left behind, perhaps we will never truly know how they were. Uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers have practically disappeared, and with them our hope of learning how we were in the distant past. Only recently we have begun to realize how important it is to leave their cultures intact, instead of trying to convert them to Christianity and to the pervasive religion of consumerism and industrialization. Other sources of knowledge about human nature are the great apes, but research on them has been seriously curtailed by animal rights activists. Perhaps our best hope to answer these questions is neuroscience research comparing the human brain with the brain of monogamous and non-monogamous mammals. With these caveats, here are my temporary conclusions on these issues: Cooperation is the most basic characteristic of the human species. We do this better than any other animal thanks to language, which is able to transmit an enormous amount of information, not just in the present but across time. However, we are also violent. Cooperation does not automatically eliminate violence. In fact, we are very good at cooperating for violence and warfare. There is ample evidence that ancient humans were more violent than we are. As demonstrated by Steven Pinker in Better Angels, civilization and moral progress were the key factors in diminishing violence through history. Regarding gender equality, I think that this is a modern achievement. If primitive societies were violent and engaged in frequent warfare, this would have established power structures in which men dominate women. Regarding monogamy, I don’t think that we are naturally monogamous. What we have is a great flexibility in our ability to bond and form sexual relationships. These are largely determined by the culture we live in. One of the most remarkable features of the human species, that we share with bonobos, is that sex has evolved from a mere reproductive function to sustain social bonding and cooperation. This explains some mysterious features of human sexuality: concealed ovulation, lack of estrous, continuous availability for sex, the prevalence of homosexual sex, sexual dominance and submission, having powerful orgasms, and menopause. In general terms, I don’t believe in the Myth of the Noble Savage. I wish it was true, but the balance of the evidence indicates otherwise. We have a tendency to believe in a golden past era when everything was better. In fact, it is quite the opposite. By any standards, we live in the best possible moment in History, in terms of lack of violence, wealth, decreased poverty, sexual freedom and gender equality. I have to thank Steven Pinker and his book Better Angels for opening my eyes in this regard. Perhaps polyamory is just one more of these modern achievements, and not a return to the relationship model of ancient humans. If so, it is okay. Still, it is clear that monogamy, sexual exclusivity and jealousy are not written in our genes, but are cultural norms that can be overcome. Therefore, even if polyamory is not the natural relationship model for humans, there is nothing in our nature that keeps us from practicing it. Perhaps it will become the relationship model of the future.

Scientific evidence debunks the belief that vegans have healthier sex lives This article is in response to This Is Why Vegans Have Better Sex, by Christopher Kokoski. Claim 1: vegans have a reputation for being good lovers “But what you may not know is that vegans also have a reputation for being great in bed.” Christopher Kokoski. Creating this “reputation” was the objective of an infamous ad campaign by PETA that showed an injured woman after supposedly having sex with her vegan boyfriend. The campaign was denounced for promoting violence against women. The ad can still be found on YouTube: The misogynistic leanings of PETA have been denounced in many places. Time: PETA compares rape to eating meat. Ms. magazine: PETA does not support the ethical treatment of women. This contradicts their name because, technically speaking, women are animals, too. BuzzFeed: like Donald Trump, PETA encourages men to “grab a pussy” PETA Kills Animals is a website devoted to expose the practice of PETA of killing cats and dogs by the thousands, and other outrages perpetrated by this organization. The link takes you to a list of misogynistic things that PETA has done. If vegans have a reputation for anything, is for being self-righteous and preachy. The article by Mr. Kokoski is just another example of that. Let me examine his other claims in the light of scientific evidence. Claim 2: vegans have higher red blood cells and better tissue oxygenation— it is actually the opposite “A vegan diet, which is high in various nutrients and low in saturated fat and cholesterol, can help to enhance blood viscosity. This allows more oxygen to reach the muscles, which aids athletic performance.” Christopher Kokoski. There are actually several claims embedded in this paragraph: a) That a vegan diet increases blood viscosity. b) That an increase in blood viscosity is healthy. c) That a vegan diet allows more oxygen to reach the muscles. What Mr. Kokoski probably means by “blood viscosity” is an increase in hematocrit: the density of red blood cells (erythrocytes) in the blood. Erythrocytes contain hemoglobin, an iron-containing protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to all the tissues in the body. Athletes know quite well that a higher hematocrit improves their performance. Erythropoietin is a hormone that can be taken to increase red bloods cells. However, it is forbidden in sport competitions, being considered a doping agent. Another way to increase the hematocrit is to live for a while in high altitude places, like Bolivia. However, going vegan does not increase red blood cells. It is actually the opposite. Increasing red blood cells requires two things that are abundant in red meat and absent in vegetables: heme iron and vitamin B12. Each molecule of hemoglobin contains four atoms of iron, which are required to bind oxygen. Therefore, producing red bloods cells requires that we absorb iron in our food. Although iron is present in some vegetables, it is difficult to absorb it in our gut. However, iron that is already bond to hemoglobin or to myoglobin - a similar oxygen-binding protein present in the muscles - is absorbed readily. Red meat is basically muscle that is rich in myoglobin - that’s why it is red, myoglobin is red, like hemoglobin. Hence, eating enough red meat is the best way to have healthy levels of red cells. Indeed, anemia is a frequent health problem in vegans. One study (Waldmann et al., 2004) found that 40% of young vegan women in Germany had iron deficiency, even though there was enough (non heme) iron in their diet. A study (Tong et al., 2019) of large samples of people in the UK found that people who did not eat enough red meat - not just vegans and vegetarians, but also poultry and fish eaters - had 3.7% less hemoglobin and a higher risk to develop anemia. Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) is necessary for DNA synthesis during red blood cell production. Its deficiency causes megaloblastic anemia, another form of erythrocyte deficiency. Vegans must take vitamin B12 supplements to avoid it (Selinger et al., 2019), because it cannot be synthesized by the body and its main source is animal foods like meat, liver, eggs and milk. This type of anemia is a concern in babies with vegan mothers who are exclusively breastfed (Chalouhi et al., 2008; Shinwell and Gorodischer, 1982). If not given B12 supplements in time, these children can develop lifelong neurological deficiencies. Therefore, it is completely false that vegans have higher a red blood cell count than omnivores or a better oxygen supply to their muscles. It’s the opposite: unless vegans take iron and vitamin B12 supplements, they risk anemia. This is particularly true for young women who lose a lot of blood during menstruation. As for blood viscosity, it is actually a liability because it increases the risk of stroke. That’s precisely the reason why taking erythropoietin to increase athletic performance is prohibited in athletic competitions and risky. High blood viscosity is not a good thing. Claim 3: vegans have stronger erections - unproven I couldn’t find any evidence of this. The PubMed search (vegan[Title/Abstract]) AND (erection[Title/Abstract]) yielded 0 hits. Mr. Kokoski cites the following paper as evidence (Kostis and Dobrzynski, 2014): The Effect of Statins on Erectile Dysfunction: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Trials. As the title indicates, this study has nothing to do with veganism. It simply shows that taking statins to lower cholesterol counters erectile dysfunction in older men. Following my doctor’s recommendation, I started taking rosuvastatin last year. Both my parents died of cardiovascular disease, so keeping my cholesterol in check as I age seems like a good idea. Mr. Kokoski argues that a vegan diet lowers cholesterol, and that this may indirectly improve erections. I found two papers that addressed this issue. The first (Sanders and Key, 1987) reported that cholesterol was lower in male but not in female vegans. Blood pressure in vegans was the same as in omnivores, but vegans had higher diastolic blood pressure. The second study (Resnicow et al., 1991) also found that vegans have lower cholesterol and low-density-lipoprotein (“bad”) cholesterol, and normal high-density-lipoprotein (“good”) cholesterol. So, it is true that vegans have lower cholesterol. This is not surprising, since vegans eat less cholesterol, which is abundant in animal foods like meat, eggs and seafood. I doubt that cholesterol has any effect on erections in normal men. Ideas about cholesterol have changed lately with the realization that it is important for brain function, particularly during childhood and adolescence. Older men like me could go vegan to improve their cholesterol but, personally, I’d rather take statins. My erections are fine, thank you very much. When they are not, I’ll take some Viagra with my steak. Claim 4: vegan men have more sperm and higher testosterone - not true We start to see a pattern here. When Mr. Kokoski says that vegans are better at sex, he seems to mean men with stronger erections pounding their girlfriends into the wall until they have to wear a neck brace. Like that poor woman in the PETA video. Is veganism a path to toxic masculinity? Anyway, let’s go back to the science. Mr. Kokoski cites another paper (Kljajic et al., 2021). This is a study with a small sample size (10 vegans and 10 omnivores) published in an obscure journal, but it does show that the vegans have higher sperm count and motility. However, this has nothing to do with the quality of sex, unless the goal is to get pregnant. This paper (Key et al., 1990) shows that vegan men have 7% higher total testosterone, but actually 3% lower free testosterone. They also have a whopping 11% higher estradiol, the female sex hormone. The difference between total and free testosterone is due to a higher level in vegans of sex hormone-binding globulin, a protein in the blood that sequesters testosterone. These results are confirmed by another paper (Allen et al., 2000). A review paper (Allen and Key, 2000) concludes: “These studies have not demonstrated that variations in dietary composition have any long-term important effects on circulating bioavailable sex hormone levels in men.” Claim 5: vegans are more compassionate and hence likely to treat their lovers better “In addition, vegans typically possess deep compassion, which can carry over into the bedroom.” Christopher Kokoski. The vegans I know are good people who have the good taste of not being too preachy about their eating habits. They don’t seem to be more or less compassionate than the regular guy. However, I know a different type of vegan, the animal liberationist, who is not compassionate at all. They are actually quite dangerous if you get in their sights. They will burn your car, flood our house and leave bombs at your door. Here is an article about them. Does veganism have any effects on the mind? “Veganism has also been linked with lower levels of stress and anxiety, which can further improve sexual performance.” Christopher Kokoski. Sorry, Mr. Kokoski, but that is not true. A meta-analysis of several scientific studies (Dobersek et al., 2021) shows that meat consumption actually lowers depression and anxiety. This is true for both men and women. Another paper (Sariyska et al., 2019) shows that vegans score high for care, sadness and spirituality, but lower for play. This means that your potential vegan lover is caring, religious, sad, and not very playful. Just the things to look for in a lover, right? The paper also shows that vegans score lower for Machiavellism, narcissism and psychopathy. But, wait! The differences stopped being statistically significant when you corrected for gender. Perhaps because there are differences in these things between men and women. Go figure. Vegans are also more predisposed to pathological eating behaviors (McLean et al., 2022). But we knew that already. Claim 6: vegans have higher sex drives - unproven Mr. Kokoski does not provide any evidence for this. I couldn’t find any, either. The PubMed search (vegan[Title/Abstract]) AND (sexual arousal[Title/Abstract]) produced 0 hits. He assumes that, because vegans have “good circulation”, they have a higher sex drive. However, I already debunked the claim that vegans have better oxygenation of their tissues than omnivores (claim 2). Claim 7: veganism relieves the symptoms of menopause - unproven “According to new research, a plant-based diet can also help relieve the symptoms of menopause.” Christopher Kokoski. Unfortunately, Mr. Kokoski does not provide any citation to this exciting new research. “In case you’re wondering, soy isoflavones are estrogen-like compounds found in plant-based foods. They ‘deepfake’ estrogen in the body.” Christopher Kokoski. Actually, pseudo-steroids and other endocrine disruptors are not a good thing. They are pollutants blamed for the feminization of male animals in the environment, and they may be feminizing men as well. If isoflavones mimic estrogen in women’s body, they would do the same in men’s bodies. Either veganism enhances femininity by mimicking estrogens, or they enhance masculinity by increasing testosterone. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. Maybe this is why vegan men have 11% higher estradiol (Key et al., 1990)? I don’t think female hormones would improve the sexual performance of men, do you? And out-of-control estrogens are bad for women, too. They can induce breast and ovarian cancer. That is why we should avoid the parabens - which are endocrine disruptors - that are often used in cosmetics (Jiao et al., 2021). Conclusions Unlike Mr. Kokoski, who only cites two papers, I have provided 16 citations to peer-reviewed papers to address each one of his claims. These were selected as the most informative amongst many other papers I found in several searches of the PubMed database, the most complete repository of biomedical papers in the world. Of the many claims in Mr. Kokoski’s article, only two have some validity: that vegans have lower cholesterol and higher sperm counts. However, neither of these things supports his general claim that vegans have better sex than omnivores. Quite the opposite: a vegan diet entails risks of anemia that, if not countered with iron and B12 supplements, can negatively impact your sex life. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Hamlet, Shakespeare. Why are vegans so adamant in defending that they are better in bed? Is this just another propaganda move to make us accept their ideology? Or does it reflect some insecurity that their vegan diet may actually lower their (male) sexual performance? After all, there is some evidence in the papers I cite that veganism may have a feminizing effect in men - it increases a female hormone. I would be happy to settle in that diet does not have a great effect on sexual performance, one way or the other. As long, of course, that pathological obesity is avoided. But I think I have debunked the claims of PETA parroted by Mr. Kokoski. Bullshit is the only animal product that vegans seem to consume in large quantities. References Allen, N. E., Appleby, P. N., Davey, G. K., Key, T. J., 2000. Hormones and diet: low insulin-like growth factor-I but normal bioavailable androgens in vegan men. British journal of cancer 83, 95-97. Allen, N. E., Key, T. J., 2000. The effects of diet on circulating sex hormone levels in men. Nutr Res Rev 13, 159-184. Chalouhi, C., Faesch, S., Anthoine-Milhomme, M. C., Fulla, Y., Dulac, O., Chéron, G., 2008. Neurological consequences of vitamin B12 deficiency and its treatment. Pediatr Emerg Care 24, 538-541. Dobersek, U., Teel, K., Altmeyer, S., Adkins, J., Wy, G., Peak, J., 2021. Meat and mental health: A meta-analysis of meat consumption, depression, and anxiety. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr, 1-18. Jiao, L., Li, S., Zhai, J., Wang, D., Li, H., Chu, W., Geng, X., Du, Y., 2021. Propylparaben concentrations in the urine of women and adverse effects on ovarian function in mice in vivo and ovarian cells in vitro. J Appl Toxicol 41, 1719-1731. Key, T. J., Roe, L., Thorogood, M., Moore, J. W., Clark, G. M., Wang, D. Y., 1990. Testosterone, sex hormone-binding globulin, calculated free testosterone, and oestradiol in male vegans and omnivores. Br J Nutr 64, 111-119. Kljajic, M., Hammadeh, M. E., Wagenpfeil, G., Baus, S., Sklavounos, P., Solomayer, E. F., Kasoha, M., 2021. Impact of the Vegan Diet on Sperm Quality and Sperm Oxidative Stress Values: A Preliminary Study. J Hum Reprod Sci 14, 365-371. Kostis, J. B., Dobrzynski, J. M., 2014. The Effect of Statins on Erectile Dysfunction: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Trials. The journal of sexual medicine 11, 1626-1635. McLean, C. P., Moeck, E. K., Sharp, G., Thomas, N. A., 2022. Characteristics and clinical implications of the relationship between veganism and pathological eating behaviours. Eat Weight Disord 27, 1881-1886. Resnicow, K., Barone, J., Engle, A., Miller, S., Haley, N. J., Fleming, D., Wynder, E., 1991. Diet and serum lipids in vegan vegetarians: a model for risk reduction. J Am Diet Assoc 91, 447-453. Sanders, T. A., Key, T. J., 1987. Blood pressure, plasma renin activity and aldosterone concentrations in vegans and omnivore controls. Hum Nutr Appl Nutr 41, 204-211. Sariyska, R., Markett, S., Lachmann, B., Montag, C., 2019. What Does Our Personality Say About Our Dietary Choices? Insights on the Associations Between Dietary Habits, Primary Emotional Systems and the Dark Triad of Personality. Frontiers in psychology 10, 2591. Selinger, E., Kühn, T., Procházková, M., Anděl, M., Gojda, J., 2019. Vitamin B12 Deficiency Is Prevalent Among Czech Vegans Who Do Not Use Vitamin B12 Supplements. Nutrients 11. Shinwell, E. D., Gorodischer, R., 1982. Totally vegetarian diets and infant nutrition. Pediatrics 70, 582-586. Tong, T. Y. N., Key, T. J., Gaitskell, K., Green, T. J., Guo, W., Sanders, T. A., Bradbury, K. E., 2019. Hematological parameters and prevalence of anemia in white and British Indian vegetarians and nonvegetarians in the UK Biobank. Am J Clin Nutr 110, 461-472. Waldmann, A., Koschizke, J. W., Leitzmann, C., Hahn, A., 2004. Dietary iron intake and iron status of German female vegans: results of the German vegan study. Ann Nutr Metab 48, 103-108. Copyright 2022 Hermes Solenzol

Julio and Cecilia make their kinky fantasies real in the park in Paris where Story of O begins Excerpt of my novel Games of Love and Kink From the Porte d’Orleans, Boulevard Jourdan climbed up a long incline to the Park of Montsouris. The sky was full of puffy clouds that hid the sun from time to time, carried by a light wind. Cecilia took Julio by the arm and hummed a melody. “What a beautiful tune! What is it?” “Don’t you remember?” “Not really.” “It’s the theme of Story of O.” “You have quite a memory! You only listened to it once, in that movie.” “I have an excellent memory for music. When I hear something I like, it stays with me.” She kept on humming while she danced around Julio, making her skirt fly. He laughed, took her hands and whirled with her. They ventured into the park through a gate in its corner. It was nice and well-tended. The grass shone with the green freshness of summer. There were a variety of trees: oaks, chestnuts, pines, firs and others whose names she didn’t know. A deep trench split the park in two. They followed it to a small bridge that crossed it. At the bottom of the trench there were railways and the platforms of a train station under construction. On the other side, stairs and ramps descended to a large pond. Wild ducks swam in it, taking flight with a noisy beating of wings, skidding on the water when they landed. They walked around the pond holding hands. There was a sculpture of a group of men carrying a dead lion on their shoulders. Further down there was another statue of a faun caressing the hair of a shepherdess with naked breasts. The faun and the girl looked at each other with mischievous smiles. “I wish we had erotic statues like this in Madrid,” she said. “Instead of fascist symbols and generals on horses.” Julio span her around by pulling on her hair and kissed her. At the end of the pond there was a man-made brook, which began in a beautiful waterfall between rocks and trees. They went up a semicircular ramp that surrounded the rocks and the waterfall to a wide terrace overlooking the pond. “Everything is so sensual in this park!” she said. “No wonder they chose it for the beginning of Story of O.” “And look! There come O and René.” Julio pointed with his chin to a young couple. The girl wore a tight miniskirt and high heels; the man, a light summer suit. He had taken off his tie and undone the top buttons of his shirt. In his hand he carried a switch. From time to time, he hit the naked legs of the girl with it, who hopped in pain and then laughed. She put her arm around Julio’s waist, her eyes fixed on the couple. “We are not the only ones to have this idea. Do you think you can get a switch like that?” “I don’t think that it would be too difficult.” They continued on a path that led back to the future train station. Looking over a handrail imitating tree branches, they saw a much deeper trench, also with rails at the bottom. They seemed abandoned. Julio considered the steep slope of dirt and rocks that descended to its edge. He took her by the hand and led her back down the trail to a place where the slope was less steep. He jumped over the handrail. “Come.” “Hey, are you sure? It must be forbidden to jump the handrail.” “Don’t worry, we won’t be seen down there. Come on, hurry up!” They went down the slope between some large trees. She stepped over fallen branches, careful not to slip on the dry leaves that covered the ground. To the right, stone blocks covered with moss and ferns formed an irregular wall under the trail, with deep gushes and odd corners. “Wait for me here.” Julio left her in a place where the rocks made a roof over her head, hiding her from the trail above. Lush trees and bushes hid them in all other directions. Julio walked into the bushes. She saw him select a long straight branch, cut it with his pocket knife, and strip the leaves and side sprouts. The result was a three foot long switch. He returned to her side and made the switch whistle in the air to test its suppleness. “That looks like it will hurt a lot!” Her heart raced. “Didn’t you want me to get a switch like the one that guy had? And look, this place looks like a dungeon!” “Yes, this is just what we were looking for.” She tried to sound braver than she felt. Julio hugged her, whispering in her ear: “Give me your panties.” They had done that before, but even so, her heart quivered in her chest. Still, she obeyed, pulling down her panties with shaking hands. Julio stuffed them in his pocket. He opened his switchblade. She took a step back. “Don’t be afraid, I am not going to cut you!” “I know! It’s just that knives freak me out.” “This is what they did to O in that car.” He undid two buttons of her blouse. She felt the cold steel touch her shoulder; a snap when he cut the strap of her bra. He did the same on the other shoulder, then slid the knife between her breasts to cut the bra there. Pulling on one of the cups, he got it out from under her shirt. Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her chest. “My shirt is see-through.” “No big deal, the French are used to that. Shall we go on?” “No, wait! Hug me first.” “You are trembling, girl! Come on, calm down.” He hugged her, stroking her back. “Don’t worry, I won’t chicken out… Just give me a moment… Everything is happening so fast!” “Take your time, we have all afternoon.” Julio lifted the back of her skirt. She felt his avid hands on her naked buns. She pushed against him to feel the bump of his hard-on. “I think I’m ready,” she muttered. Julio tucked her skirt into the waistband to leave her bottom exposed. “Turn around, put your hand on the wall, and stick your bottom out.” She found a place for her hands in the coarse rock in front of her, put her feet slightly apart and lifted her bottom. She didn’t want to disappoint him. The cold air on her buttocks made her acutely aware of her vulnerability. She heard the whistle of the switch cutting through the air. A searing line cut across her butt. The next lash came almost immediately, the pain adding to the previous one. It took her breath away. Involuntarily, she swung her hips forward to escape the switch, stomping her feet. “Ow! No, please! Not so fast!” she moaned. “Okay, I’m sorry… Let me know when you are ready.” It was harder now that she knew what was coming. “All right… Now.” The third lash was less hard. Fear and pain gave way to excitement about her nakedness, her indecent posture, and having to endure Julio’s whims. After six lashes, she lost count. Although Julio was hitting her less hard and spaced the strokes, it still hurt. It hurt a lot! Several times she had to break her stance, pushed forward by the searing pain. But then she stuck out her bottom again. Because she didn’t want to disappoint him. Because she liked that he could hurt her so much. Especially in the lower part of her buttocks, near her thighs, where she felt most vulnerable. It was exciting, but she didn’t know how long she could endure. “Well, I think that’s enough,” said Julio. He hugged her and pulled down her skirt, hiding a map of stinging lines crisscrossing her bottom. He kissed her. She responded passionately. “It hurt, didn’t it?” “A lot.” “I noticed. But I liked the way you accepted it, the way you surrendered to me. I love you, Cecilia. I love you a lot!” “And I love you! I want you to make me yours. Please take my virginity. I’ve made you wait far too long.” “Not here. In the hotel.” “Of course.” He whispered in her ear: “Before I take your virginity, I will whip you with this switch again. I want your bottom to be in flames when I enter you for the first time.” “Yes, that’s what I deserve! To feel pain while you enjoy me.” “I’m very proud of you. How you endure the pain and give yourself to me.” Julio took her hand and helped her climb back the slope and jump over the fence. They strolled in the park, Julio’s arm around her waist, the switch in his other hand. She shook a little, even though it wasn’t cold. She felt naked and her bottom smarted, particularly where Julio’s hand laid on her skirt, possessively. Her erect nipples pushed against the thin fabric of her shirt and attracted the looks of the men that crossed their path. She was just a sexual being, tamed, exposed, meant for pleasure. It had been like being in Roissy, a harsh lashing that left her soft and compliant. She didn’t expect that Julio was going to hurt her so much. She didn’t expect that she was going to like it so much. She could barely wait to arrive at the hotel, so that Julio could finish taking possession of her. They had waited far too long, but it was worth it, to have this marvelous experience, in this magical place, on such a perfect summer day.

Excerpt of my novel The tribe of Cecilia. In BDSM, mind-fucking is game that takes the submissive to a state of vulnerability using emotions like sexual desire, fear and shame. Madrid, Saturday October 27, 1979 Martina walked decidedly to a bar around the corner. It was one of the thousands of bars in Madrid, the kind that smelled of grilled prawns, with the floor perpetually covered with sawdust, paper napkins, and toothpicks. Marina sat on a stool at the bar and ordered two beers, without even asking her what she wanted. Elena sat next to her, looking around her uncomfortably. There were several older men and a middle-aged couple. A young boy was viciously destroying aliens in a video game, with an annoying whine of lasers and explosions of space grenades. Except for him, everyone seemed to look at them, averting their eyes at the last moment. Martina looked at her calmly. “You seem a little nervous, princess. What's up? You don't go to bars much?” “Oh yes, quite often! But I don't know what we're doing here.” “Do you want to go back to the meeting?” “No… I think it was a good idea to leave.” “Yes, there was a storm brewing. I don't know if you noticed, but they all were staring at you with wolf eyes.” Elena giggled. “I think they were doing that from the moment I stepped into the room.” “They're just not used to seeing little princesses like you in those meetings.” “This business of calling me princess is starting to get old.” “But you like it, don't you?” “How can you be so sure?” “I can tell.” “What’s the matter? Are you trying to pick me up? You know I'm married.” Martina grabbed her chin and looked into her eyes. “You have to make up your mind, princess. Who do you want to be, a married lady or a sadomasochistic lesbian?” Elena shook her head to get free. “A sadomasochistic lesbian, then,” she said, looking at Martina with what she wanted to be an insolent expression. “Well, then don't tell me that story about being married, damn it! We're just talking nicely, like sadomasochistic lesbians, right? Don't complicate things!” “Okay, let's talk about lesbianism, then. Are you dating a girl?” “I have several friends who let me tie them up, spank them and eat their pussy… But I don't call anybody my girlfriend. I don’t like to be in a formal couple. How about you? Have you ever cheated on your husband with a woman?” “Of course I have.” “With a girl as pretty as you?” “Yes, she is very pretty, although she doesn’t look like me at all.” “So, I have a tough competition.” Elena laughed, amazed at her boldness. “Hey, what are you up to? Are you hitting on me? I know you like me; you've made it plenty clear. But I don't like you.” “Of course! No one likes the fatso of Martina," she said without any bitterness. "I've heard it a thousand times… And yet, many end up falling for me. I can't explain it.” “Well, I'm not going to fall for you. So get used to that.” Martina shrugged. “No problem. I am happy. Here I am, having a beer with a beautiful blonde who is smart and tells me amazing things. That already is quite an experience.” “I'm glad you see it that way. I also like talking to you.” They brought them the beers. Martina took a long sip of hers. Elena drank hers slowly. The guy had finished killing aliens, so now the radio could be heard. A Dire Straits song that she knew: Six Blade Knife. Martina took her wallet out of her leather jacket. She left two bills on the bar and picked up a third, a green bill of one thousand pesetas. She held it out in front of her face. “I'll give you a thousand pesetas for your panties.” She choked on the beer, spitting it in a stream that just missed Martina's leg. “You are crazy!” she said hoarsely when she finished coughing. “I'm completely serious,” she said, waving the bill. “Quite likely, we won't see each other again. I want to have a souvenir of you.” “And it has to be my panties!” "Well, as you can imagine, I have weird tastes." They weren't all that weird. Elena had once played a similar game. She could see the desire in Martina's eyes. The same compelling desire that she had felt at that time. It touched her to feel wanted. “I understand. I've also played that game once. But I don't need your money.” “That's the problem with you rich chicks. You don't need anything.” The song Six Blade Knife gave her an idea. “Well, there is something of yours that I would like to have. Your knife.” Martina raised her eyebrows and slowly nodded her head. She pushed away her leather jacket and ran her hand over the hunting knife she wore hanging from her belt. “My knife! That’s fucked up! You know how to go straight for the jugular, don’t you? Just so you know, baby, this knife is worth much more than a thousand pesetas.” “What did you think, that I was going to settle for any trinket? If you want something from me, it will cost you.” “You don't understand. This is not just a knife. It says who I am. It is my identity.” “I’ve noticed. That's why I want it. I also want a souvenir of you.” “Besides, he has its history… Let's just say that it has sentimental value for me.” “Well, so do my panties. Isn't that why you want them?” Martina frowned, doubtful. At last, she seemed to come to a decision. “Okay, my knife in exchange for your panties. But you have to let me take them from you.” Elena didn't know if she was flattered or suspicious. “Here? In the middle of the bar?” “In the toilets… Make up your mind, princess? Deal or no deal?” Her heart was beating fast. What kind of adventure had she gotten into? But, after all that haggling, she was going to look like a fool if she backed down. “Okay, deal.” “Well, then go to the toilets and wait for me there. Don't latch the door. I'll be there in a couple of minutes.” She picked up her bag and her jacket with a determination and headed to the ladies' room. It was a tiny, smelly little room with neon lighting, a sink and a toilet. She put her coat and bag on the floor and closed the door without latching it. She hugged herself nervously, looking at herself in the faded mirror. Was she doing something crazy? Could she trust Martina? After all, she didn't know her at all. What if she hurt her? No, that was unlikely… But she surely could take advantage of her. Clearly, Marina liked her. And she knew how to handle women. But the prospect of Martina using her for her own pleasure did not scare her. On the contrary, it turned her on. And the fact that she didn’t find Martina attractive made her even more horny. She could hear the pounding of her heart in her ears. She rubbed her arms, though she really wasn't cold. Martina came into the bathroom. She closed the door behind her and bolted it. Elena took a step back. “What's up, princess? Are you going to chicken out?” “No.” “If you want, we can pretend that it was a joke and leave it at that. I keep my knife and you your panties.” Elena looked at her defiantly. “If you think this is a rotten deal, keep your knife. But don’t blame it on me.” “Fine. But we're going to do it my way.” “And what is your way?” “Lift your skirt.” Elena did as she asked. She saw Martina's eyes linger on her shapely knees and her white thighs as she hiked up her skirt. The edge of the fabric reached her crotch. Martina could now appreciate her black lace panties, so thin that you could see the hair of her pussy. But Martina was not easily satisfied. “Higher. All the way to your waist!” she demanded. “That's it!” Martina dropped to one knee in front of her and calmly inspected her, apparently determined to get the most for the price she was paying for the show. Elena didn't dare to rush her, feeling her pulse quicken and moisture invading her crotch. Finally, Martina brought her face closer to her belly, hooked her fingers under the black lace at her waist, and slowly lowered her panties. First, her smooth belly was revealed. Then the hair on her pubis. Martina pulled her panties down her thighs, past her knees, until they were at her ankles. A thorough lowering of panties. With all the required ceremony. She lifted one foot, then the other, to allow Martina to remove the garment from her shoes. When Martina had them in her hands, she focused on carefully inspecting her panties, appreciating the roughness of the lace between her fingers, stretching them to check their transparency, sniffing the crotch. Elena watched her, fascinated. Martina didn't seem to be in any hurry to get up. There she was, on one knee on the ground, splitting her attention between her panties and the nakedness of her pussy. She wondered how she should react if Martina touched her. Whether she should protest, drop her skirt and step back. Or let her do it and look like a slut. But Martina did not touch her. Looking at her, perhaps smelling her, seemed to be enough. “You have a pretty pussy, princess,” she finally said. “Blonde… You don’t dye your hair.” “With all those romantic compliments, you're going to melt me away,” she said sarcastically. Martina stuffed her panties into her pocket and slowly got up. There was strength and deliberation in her movements. “You think you're funny, don't you babe?” She was staring at her. Elena stepped back and let her skirt fall. “Did I tell you that you could lower your skirt, hum? Did I give you permission?” Elena shook her head, flustered. “So come on, then! Get it back up! Now!” Elena grabbed her skirt and pulled it back up to her waist. Something inside her searched for the words to say enough, that the game had gone too far. But a stronger part of herself wanted to keep playing it. Martina took a step towards her. “And now I suppose you'll want my knife… Very well, here it is.” She released the strap that held it in its sheath and took it out, pointing the blade at her belly. “Don't you even think about dropping your skirt until I tell you. Understood?” Elena nodded and took another step back. Her back hit the wall. “I'm going to show you why this knife has so much sentimental value to me. This is what I like to do to my girls.” She lowered the knife, placing the point gently on the inside of her knee. Then Elena realized what Martina was going to do to her, and knowing it made her feel even more afraid. She felt paralyzed. Martina's stocky body was barely a few inches from hers, her back pressed against the wall. The edge of the knife ran along the inside of one thigh first, then the other, leaving what she guessed were thin white lines, bloodless but painful enough to make her tense up and clench her fists on her skirt, which now she found impossible to release. The knife tickled her pubic hairs. An icy, steely edge parted her labia and wedged itself between them, pressing up, sliding back until its tip dug into the wall behind her butt. Its sharp edge now threatened her from her anus to her clit, pressing upward slowly but inexorably, until her terror forced her onto her toes, her legs tensing from buttocks to toes. “Will you kiss me?” asked Martina, as if nothing was happening. Elena nodded quickly many times. Martina's lips touched hers, but she barely felt them. Her tongue slipped into her mouth, and she let it in, hardly paying any attention, her entire attention focused on the cold, sharp blade that threatened to split her body in two at the slightest movement. Martina's hand grabbed her ass, caressing her soft skin, squeezing her buttocks, but all her concern was not to drop her weight on the sharp steel. Her calves ached from standing on her toes. She felt her legs becoming weaker. The thought that at any moment her strength would fail her, and that she would fall on the edge of her knife, filled her with terror. “Stop, please! I can’t stand it anymore!” Martina released her. Her knife left her pussy. She dropped back on her heels to ease the excruciating strain in her calves. She leaned her head on the wall and closed her eyes, trying fighting to catch her breath. “You may lower your skirt now, princess.” She had forgotten that she was still holding the skirt up to her waist. When she opened her hands to let it fall, her fingers ached from clenching her fists. She was dizzy. Martina hugged her, gently stroking her hair. Leaning on her was like falling on a solid heap of welcoming flesh. The fact that Martina was fat and ugly was no longer important, because she had satisfied her desire to experience violence, to feel victimized. She had conquered her and now she wanted nothing more than to abandon herself to her. Martina released her. She held the knife by the blade, offering her the hilt. “Here, take it! Don’t be afraid. It's yours, you've earned it.” Elena took the knife reluctantly. It felt solid and heavy. Martina unfastened her belt, removed it from the loops of her jeans. Elena thought that she was going to hit her with it, but Martina just took the sheath of her knife out and offered it to her. She fastened her belt again. That's all? You aren’t going to do anything else to me? Are you going to leave me like this? Without her panties, she felt naked and vulnerable. The knife had left her pussy open and soaked. “You'd better put the knife in your bag. If you hold it in your hand, people at the bar are going to will think that you're mugging them.” Elena agreed. She sheathed the knife, picked up her bag from the floor and put it inside. Martina caressed her cheek. “I'll wait for you at the bar.” Elena looked at herself in the mirror, fixing her hair with her fingers. Her skirt was wrinkled. She smoothed it out. On a sudden impulse, she pulled it up. She inspected her pussy. She slipped her fingers between her labia, expecting to find blood. Nothing. There was no trace of the sharpness of the knife, just heat and wetness and an intense desire to rub her clit until she came, right there! But, if she made Martina wait, she would guess that she had been playing with herself. She didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing to what extent she had turned her on. So she picked up her bag and left the restroom. Martina was waiting for her at one of the tables along the wall. She had brought there two beers and a wedge of Spanish tortilla. “Are you alright, princess?” “Yes.” Martina offered her a glass of beer. Elena downed it in one gulp. Her throat was parched. She found the bitterness of the beer quite comforting. “Come on, eat! You must be hungry.” Elena cut a piece of the tortilla with her fork and ate it. It was good. It was true, she was hungry. “You got a little scared in there, huh?” “Yes. Quite a bit.” “But you liked it.” “You went way too far, Martina! At the very least, you should have asked my permission before doing that with the knife.” “Oh, but I never ask permission. That would have spoiled everything. A few times I have had to ask for forgiveness. But permission, never!” “So, are you going to apologize to me?” Martina grabbed her chin and glared into her eyes. “Apologize? For giving you what you wanted? Are you fucking kidding me, baby? I know you already. At least, have the honesty to admit that yes, you enjoyed it.” “Yes, I liked it, Martina,” she told her meekly. “You are a very good dominant.” “That's much better!” “You had me completely in your hands. You could have done to me anything you wanted.” “You are such a slut, little princess! Yes, I know that I left you wanting. That’s good. That way, you'll come back for more.” That made her rebel. “Now, look here, Martina! You may be a good dominant, but you're not the only one. I have people who love me, who respect me, and who know how to satisfy my needs. I don't need you.” “Yes, I know. But, precisely because they love you, they can't give you what I can.” “You know what? You are arrogant and shameless! I don't have to put up with you rudeness. You should thank me for letting you enjoy me!” “The arrogant one is you, baby! You are the one who brags about being rich, smart and sexy. One of these days I'm going to bring you down a notch or two. And you’ll thank me for it!” She didn't know which was worse, that she irritated her so much or that she turned her on so much. She had no doubt that, if she fell into her hands, Martina was capable of bringing her down and turning her into the most docile of her servants. That tempted and scared her at the same time. She opened her bag, took out her wallet and put five hundred pesetas on the table. “I’m leaving. Here you go. I’m paying for the beer and the tortilla.” “Good idea, go home. Elena, it has been a real pleasure meeting you!” She extended her hand across the table. Elena looked for any sign of mockery on her face, but Martina's expression was honest and kind. She shook her hand. She got up, grabbed her bag, and headed for the door. Another guy was killing aliens at the video game, raising one hell of a ruckus. “Hey, princess!” she heard Martina calling her above the din. She turned to look at her. “Forgive me, baby!” She was smiling at her, waving goodbye with a handkerchief. Only it wasn't a handkerchief. It was her panties. She stormed out of the door. Note: Before you try to repeat this scene and end up cutting your girlfriend in the crotch, there is something you should know. Martina's knife, like almost all hunting knives, has an edge only on one side of the blade. It was the other edge, the blunt one, that Martina inserted into Elena's pussy, so there was never any danger of cutting it. Since Martina first scratched Elena's thighs with the sharp edge, she was convinced that what she felt was the sharp edge. The illusion was maintained until the end. This is called mind-fucking.

Can mind-fucking trigger flashbacks, break consent or induce learned helplessness? Safety Establishing when mind-fucking in BDSM is safe, sane and consensual can be particularly tricky. While these things are pretty clear when it comes to physical activities like impact play or bondage, when we deal with metal stuff, we are on mushy territory. What is perfectly okay for one person could be traumatic for another. Mind-fucking presents unique challenges and safety issues that should not be taken lightly. If things go wrong, it can produce a great deal of emotional harm. While physical damage usually heals, emotional damage can last a lifetime. The main danger is to awake old trauma by hitting emotional landmines. These are triggers that cause the submissive to flash back to traumatic or abusive situations. Often, the submissive is not aware of what those triggers are, so they cannot be tagged as limits during the negotiation of the scene. In the hypersensitive state induced by mind-fucking, anything can become a trigger: a certain act, a phrase, an object, clothing, etc. Should people with psychological trauma do mind-fucking? People with a history of abuse and psychological trauma would do best to refrain from undergoing mind-fucking. At least, they should proceed gradually, with mind-fucking sessions that are short and mild. Even people without a history of trauma should be mindful of the effects that mind-fucking is having on them, not just during the scene, but in their emotional life afterwards. Are they becoming more resilient or more sensitive? Are they acquiring a docility that is sapping into their professional and social lives? All this places a big responsibility on the dominant who does the mind-fucking. The dominant has to be fully empathic with the submissive, constantly reading their state of mind. Mind-fucking can and elicit completely unexpected responses from the submissive. The dominant has to be ready to stop the mind-fucking and bring the submissive back to reality when there are signs of trouble. Consent According to Planned Parenthood, consent should be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific (remembered with the acronym FRIES). Mind-fucking presents some problems concerning ‘informed’ and ‘specific’ because they would require that the submissive is fully informed of anything that will happen in the scene. But, since mind-fucking is often based on deception, providing some of this information would give away the game. Since mind-fucking is negotiated without the submissive knowing what is going to happen, it could be considered to involve a certain amount of consensual non-consent (CNC), because submissives have to give blanket consent about things they don’t know about. However, this is not necessarily true since the submissive still has the ability to set up limits about what may and may not be included in the mind-fucking. Submissives should be informed that the scene will include surprises, tricks, misinformation and lies. They can still give a list of limits, which should be discussed in terms of emotional boundaries. It is highly advisable to use a safeword that the submissive can use in case his or her emotional distress become overwhelming. Still, safewords are not completely reliable in mind-fucking because, to use them, the bottom has to know what is going on, and that is often not the case. This doesn’t mean that safewords are useless. Together with negotiation and limits, they should be considered as layers of protection. Negotiation should focus on any triggers, emotional landmines and past trauma of the submissive. Consent is not valid if the submissive has a warped view of reality. This means that the submissive needs to be brought out of mind fucking before negotiating the next scene. This is why I think that prolonged mind-fucking (lasting several days) present ethical problems. The ability of the submissive to withdraw consent may be compromised. It could be ethical in a consensual non-consent set up. Still, there are concerns regarding learned helplessness that I will discuss below. For the dominant, mind control can be a tremendous power trip and a temptation for abuse. Even when the dominant has the best intentions, he may lapse into emotional abuse out of ignorance. The dominant should do some introspection on his or her motives to engage in mind-fucking, considering how it would feel if it was done to them. Some reading on psychological abuse and emotional well-being can be of help. Any deception should be disclosed at the end of the scene to fully rescue the submissive from any remaining state of confusion - see the section on aftercare below. Here are some of the problems that may happen with a mind-fucking scene. Panic attacks A panic attack is a state of severe emotional distress often accompanied by difficulty in breathing, uncontrolled movements, exaggerated reactions and inability to speak. In another article, I explored panic attacks in BDSM and how to deal with them. If the submissive had panic attacks in the past, he or she should explain to the dominant how they happened and what are the possible triggers. They should plan what to do if they happen. However, panic attacks may occur even in people who have not experienced them before. Mind-fucking creates a state of emotional sensitivity that they may have not experienced before. Freezing Freezing behavior is a stress reaction present in many animals that consists of becoming unable to move. It’s not a real paralysis. Rather, it is felt as a deep aversion to move or say anything. In the most extreme case, the person feels a block, an inability to decide how to move. Its evolutionary origin is to hide and camouflage an animal that is being stalked by a predator. Freezing is different from ‘tonic immobility’, which happens when an animal has been caught by a predator and gives up struggling and trying to escape. It is also different from fainting, which is a ‘vasovagal syncope’ triggered by strong emotions, physical stress, visceral pain and blood loss (Carli and Farabollini, 2021). Freezing is the opposite of the fight-flight reaction, although both are responses to stress and fear. Freezing activates the parasympathetic system and decreases heart rate, whereas fight/flight activates the sympathetic system and releases adrenaline into the blood, which increases the heart rate (Roelofs, 2017). Freezing is not very useful in humans, since it prevents reacting to imminent danger and communicating. When freezing, people stop whatever they are doing and become immobile and unresponsive. They cannot say a safeword, much less explain what is happening to them. Freezing may signal an imminent panic attack, especially if it’s accompanied by difficulty in breathing. This should be taken seriously and the scene stopped. However, freezing is not always a bad thing. It is mediated by a neural pathway linking pain pathways in the parabrachial nucleus with the amygdala - the fear center - (Sato et al., 2015) and the amygdala with the periaqueductal gray (PAG) (Roelofs, 2017), which is the beginning of the neural pathway that releases endorphins to inhibit pain. Different parts of the PAG are involved in fight/flight and freezing (Morgan et al., 1998; McDannald, 2010). Hence, freezing may be a precursor to the endorphin sub-space. However, freezing is different from sub space. A frozen person tends to be rigid and dead-silent, while a person in sub-space is relaxed and makes incoherent sounds. Freezing happens in mind-fucking when the stimulation or the task that the submissive is doing becomes overwhelming. Strong emotions, like fear, pain and shame, can trigger freezing. The mind becomes unable to perform the task or process the stimuli and shuts down. Freezing is easy to detect in mind-fucking scenes that involve the active participation of the submissive, like mental games, humiliating or impossible tasks, and humor. If the submissive stops doing the task, then something is wrong. When the submissives play a passive role, like in deception games or predicaments, the dominant needs to pay constant attention to them to see if they go into freezing. Learned helplessness Learned helplessness occurs when an animal is repeatedly exposed to an aversive stimulus over which it has no control. The usual aversive stimulus is an electric shock, which is unpleasant but not painful - think of the shock you get when you touch your car after acquiring a static charge. Much less painful than the Violet Wand used in BDSM, for sure. The initial experiments on learned helplessness were conducted by Martin Seligman in 1967 on dogs (Seligman, 1972). However, most subsequent studies were done in rats and mice. In the basic experiment, animals are tested in ‘yoked pairs’, which means that both animals receive shocks of the same intensity and duration. The only difference is that one of the animals can press a lever to stop the shock when a warning light or sound announces that it’s coming, while the other animal has no control and hence it is subjected to the whims of the first animal. This second animal develops learned helplessness, which consists in that it learns not to try to avoid unpleasant stimuli. Even when placed in a setting different from the first one in which is easy to escape the nasty sensation, the animal doesn’t try to do it. Importantly, animals with learned helplessness showed a decline in their ability to learn. This would be a great idea for a mind-fucking experiment, wouldn’t it? We would have two yoked submissives. One decides what implement they are going to be hit with, and how hard. The other gets the same strokes as the first, but has no control. Clearly, the second submissive would be mind-fucked by both the dominant and the first submissive, who may decide to get some particularly nasty spanks just to see the second submissive getting them. The learned helplessness studies were interpreted as meaning that the control that an animal has over its environment is key to determine its mental state and its ability to learn. Some scientists thought that this could be a model for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which would be triggered when people have to deal with working or social environments over which they had no control. The modern view is that the helplessness is not learned, but the default mode (Maier and Seligman, 2016). Aversive stimuli cause passivity in the animal, which is mediated by serotonin-releasing neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus (Maier and Watkins, 2005). Helplessness is already there; what the animal actually learns is that it has control over the noxious stimulus, and this motivates the animal to escape it. The realization of having control causes an inhibition of the dorsal raphe by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in decision-making. Learned helplessness does happen in humans, but cognitive processes in the prefrontal cortex play a more important role than in animals. Seligman performed a study in college students with and without depression (Klein et al., 1976). While unsolvable problems caused learning deficits in both groups of students, attributing the failure to the difficulty of the problem instead of the student’s incompetence eliminated this deficit. A more recent study (Taylor et al., 2014) indicated that activating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) reversed the cognitive and motivational deficits produced by lack of control over an aversive stimulus. Evaluating the experience of helplessness afterwards reverses its effects (Cemalcilar et al., 2003), perhaps the most crucial fact to keep in mind when considering whether mind-fucking induces learned helplessness. Does mind-fucking induce learned helplessness? If this were true, it would bring into question the psychological safety of mind-fucking. The objective of mind-fucking is to induce a state of defeat and surrender in the submissive, which is precisely what learned helplessness does. Certainly, during mind-fucking the bottom experiences loss of control and is subjected to aversive stimuli like spankings or bondage. In other BDSM activities, the ability of the bottom to stop the scene and the presence of limits provide a measure of control, but in mind-fucking the loss of control is the objective of the scene. Could mind-fucking trigger depression in submissives? Could this explain the depressive sub-drop that occurs a couple of days after a BDSM scene? Much as I like mind-fucking, all these scientific studies indicate that it may trigger learned helplessness if we are not careful. This may happen with repeated mind-fucking that constantly puts the submissive in a state of defeat and lack of control. However, humans have a sophisticated control of the prefrontal cortex over the dorsal raphe nucleus, which mediates learned helplessness. What this means is that the emotional, social and cognitive context in which a scene happens makes a huge difference. Just like we can immerse ourselves in a story or a movie that is enormously upsetting, we can be in a challenging BDSM scene and emerge unscathed. Aftercare and truth reveal Mind-fucking should not be allowed to create bad emotional habits of being defeated and subjugated. At some point, the submissive has to be allowed to reclaim his or her self-esteem. This can be done by processing the mind-fucking scene in such a way that it gives back control to the submissive and allows the scene to be registered as a win. This means that mind-fucking requires a special type of aftercare whose objective is to restore the submissive’s sense of reality, emotional stability and self-esteem. This involves revealing whatever deception was involved in the mind-fucking, especially if it was something that led the submissive to failure or embarrassment. The submissives should feel good about themselves, because they were ordered to do something difficult or impossible, or to withstand very harsh conditions. This is also the time to analyze things that the submissive could have discovered about himself during the scene, and anything that could be healing and transformative. The dominant should praise the submissive and emphasize the positive elements of the scene. One of the best thing they could do is to have a good laugh about what happened. Resiliency Repeated mind-fucking followed by fully regain of control and disclosure of the deception could create resiliency towards further mind-fucking and build emotional stability to deal with life challenges. This is similar to the way we use the stories in novels and movies as training for life stressors. Since the dawn of our species, humans have used stories for learning and to build resilience to stress. Think of the scary stories we were told as children. How they terrified us at first, and then we gradually became immune to the fear elicited by our own imagination. Not only that, but we started to crave the adrenaline rush that they give us. Similarly, mind-fucking is a simulacrum of emotional abuse that help us build up resilience for when people are mean to us and try to destroy our sense of reality. Conclusions Consent to mind-fucking does not require that the submissive is fully informed of everything that is going to happen in the scene, but it still requires negotiation to set up limits and a safeword. Negotiating mind-fucking should not be done while deception and mind-fucking is taking place. A mind-fucking scene it needs to have a clear beginning and ending. The possibility that the bottom would suffer a panic attack during mind-fucking should be considered. The procedure to follow should be discussed beforehand by the top and the bottom. Freezing behavior in the bottom should be taken as a warning sign of an impending panic attack. During aftercare, the deceptions involved in the mind-fucking need to be fully disclosed. The emotional reactions of the submissives during mind-fucking need to be processed in order for them to be fully rescued from any damage to their self-esteem and emotional integrity. With these precautions, it is likely that learned helplessness can be avoided. Despite these caveats and dangers, mind-fucking can be a fun and healthy BDSM activity. It can increase the resilience of the bottom towards life stresses. References Carli G, Farabollini F (2021) Cardiovascular correlates of human emotional vasovagal syncope differ from those of animal freezing and tonic immobility. Physiology & behavior 238:113463. Cemalcilar Z, Canbeyli R, Sunar D (2003) Learned helplessness, therapy, and personality traits: an experimental study. J Soc Psychol 143:65-81. Klein DC, Fencil-Morse E, Seligman ME (1976) Learned helplessness, depression, and the attribution of failure. Journal of personality and social psychology 33:508-516. Maier SF, Watkins LR (2005) Stressor controllability and learned helplessness: the roles of the dorsal raphe nucleus, serotonin, and corticotropin-releasing factor. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 29:829-841. Maier SF, Seligman ME (2016) Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev 123:349-367. McDannald MA (2010) Contributions of the amygdala central nucleus and ventrolateral periaqueductal grey to freezing and instrumental suppression in Pavlovian fear conditioning. Behav Brain Res 211:111-117. Morgan MM, Whitney PK, Gold MS (1998) Immobility and flight associated with antinociception produced by activation of the ventral and lateral/dorsal regions of the rat periaqueductal gray. Brain Research 804:159-166. Roelofs K (2017) Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 372. Sato M, Ito M, Nagase M, Sugimura YK, Takahashi Y, Watabe AM, Kato F (2015) The lateral parabrachial nucleus is actively involved in the acquisition of fear memory in mice. Molecular brain 8:22. Seligman ME (1972) Learned helplessness. Annual review of medicine 23:407-412. Taylor JJ, Neitzke DJ, Khouri G, Borckardt JJ, Acierno R, Tuerk PW, Schmidt M, George MS (2014) A pilot study to investigate the induction and manipulation of learned helplessness in healthy adults. Psychiatry research 219:631-637.

How a dominant messes with the mind of the submissive in BDSM What is mind-fucking? You may have heard the expression ‘mind-fucking’ and wonder what it is. Maybe you are turned off by its obscene name. However, it has become commonly accepted. It uniquely describes well-established practices in interrogation techniques, the writing of novels and movies, the abuse of people under the influence of drugs and in BDSM. Many instances of mind-fucking are unethical. It can be a form of psychological torture, or a way to manipulate people in abusive relationships or cults. But it also can be used in a playful way for entertainment in performances, novels and movies. I would define mind-fucking as a psychological manipulation that uses deception, confusion, sensory overload, pranks, predicaments and exhausting tasks to alter a person’s sense of reality. Gaslighting is a particular form of mind-fucking in which somebody is driven to question their sense of reality or their sanity through lies or misinformation, with the goal of emotionally abusing or manipulating them. Mind-fucking and spirituality Mind-fucking is used by some mystical schools as a way to force the mind of the student out of its habitual way of thinking and into new insights, even illumination. This is particularly true in Zen Buddhism. The Rinzai school of Zen uses koans: questions that do not have a logical answer, usually embedded in a shocking story. The koan is handed down by a Zen teacher to the student, who has to meditate on it for hours on end. In sesshins (Zen retreats), each student has a private meeting with the teacher (‘roshi’) during the early morning meditation. The teacher will demand an answer to the koan, and can become quite confrontational if the student is not able to provide one. In these private meetings, the teacher plays tricks with the mind of the student that can well be considered mind-fucking. The objective is to shock the student into a new understanding, at the same time that he is prodded to put more effort into the resolution of his koan. While I was doing a Zen sesshin in a beautiful monastery in the mountains of upstate New York, I was offered the koan mu - the most famous of all koans - by Eido Shimano Roshi. Many of his students meditated on mu. They would sit by the lake at night chanting mu out loud. There was so much power in their voices that it gave me goosebumps. It seemed that the monastery was surrounded by a herd of crazy cows. I had been practicing Soto Zen, without koans, for many years, so I turned down the offer of the roshi, something that I have always regretted. Zen stories about the interaction between teachers and student have examples of impossible task, predicaments and misdirection similar to those used in BDSM. There is mind-fucking in other schools of mysticism. That's why it's so common in cults. Like in BDSM, there is a blurry line between healthy exploration and abuse. Mind-fucking in BDSM In BDSM, mind-fucking consists of mental games that the dominant plays on the submissive to weave a collective fantasy that brings the submissive to a state of defeat and surrender. It should always be done with the full consent of the submissive and in such a way that it does not harm his or her physical and mental safety. Mild mind-fucking plays a role in many BDSM scenes and is quite safe. However, elaborated and prolonged mind-fucking that affects the psychology of the submissive should be considered edge play and done with extreme caution. BDSM encompasses bondage, dominance-submission and sadomasochism. Mind-fucking is more often done in dominance-submission, but it can also be part of sadomasochism and bondage. In these last two cases, the participants should be called ‘top’ and ‘bottom.’ However, I will refer to them as ‘dominant’ and ‘submissive’ throughout this article for simplicity. I consider mind-fucking one of the most difficult things to do in BDSM, because it requires an enormous creativity and intimate knowledge of the submissive from the dominant. Mind-fucking is not so much something that the dominant does to the submissive as something that they create together. Without the willful collaboration of the submissive, the entire process would fail. No matter how skillful the dominant, it is impossible for him to mind-fuck the submissive if he or she doesn’t surrender or lacks the discipline to cooperate. Why do mind-fucking? You may wonder why anybody would want to be mentally manipulated by another person. Playing tricks on the mind of the submissive may be a power trip for the dominant, but why would the submissive agree to that? Do dominants use the commitment of submissives to obey them to force them to undergo mind-fucking? In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The motivation to do mind-fucking often comes from the submissives. Here are some of their reasons: Submissives want to be taken into a separate reality in which the power of the dominant becomes all-encompassing and they experience a deepest state of submission. Many submissives explain that they have hyperactive minds that never shut down, which can be accomplished with a good mind-fuck. They also may have a powerful ego and self-importance, which are defeated by the mind-fuck. This brings a paradoxical feeling of liberation and peacefulness. A good mind-fuck can also induce catharsis: an experience of emotional cleansing in which bottled-up emotions and trauma are released as crying, laughing or screaming. Mind-fucking can be a way to induce sub-space, an altered state of consciousness in which submissives feel euphoric, relaxed and peaceful. For some experienced submissives, mind-fucking is a path of self-discovery, healing and transformation. Mind-fucking brings out hidden emotional habits and defenses of the ego that need to be understood and managed. For dominants, mind-fucking is without doubt a power trip, but they also want to give submissives a nice experience and help them achieve catharsis, healing and self-discovery. Does mind-fucking induce sub-space? We should not take it for granted that mind-fucking will induce sub-space, at least not the sub-space that is mediated by endorphins and feels relaxed and floaty. This type of sub-space requires that the submissive becomes passive, while most mind-fucking games actively engage the submissives by demanding them to take decisions, imagine what will happen next, guess what the dominant is up to, or perform an intellectual task. Still, these activities may induce a different type of sub-space in which pain is inhibited by norepinephrine released and the brain accompanied by an increase of adrenaline in the blood. This sub-space is characterized by an increased alertness and feelings of fear and surprise. Unlike other BDSM activities, mind-fucking may not even inhibit pain, but increase it. The submissive may become more sensitive and emotionally fragile, instead of less. In fact, this could be one of the goals of the mind-fuck. However, mind-fucking may serve as a first step to break some barriers to the induction of the endorphin type of sub-space. As I mentioned before, many submissives are too uptight, concerned about their image or have hyperactive minds. A mind-fuck at the beginning of a scene could wear down their minds and get them to let go. Next, I am going to describe some strategies that can be used for mind-fucking in BDSM. Deception games Websites like Ontario Kink, Fetish.com, Kinky Craft and Kinky World describe mind-fucking as a deception game in which the dominant makes the submissive believe that something is happening to her/him. An example offered in many of these sites is to make the submissive believe that she is being branded with a hot iron. A branding iron in hot embers is on display. The submissive is blindfolded and her skin is touched with ice, perhaps while the branding iron is dipped in water to make a hissing sound. The submissive screams in pain, thinking that she just has been branded. I’m not sure if this can actually work out. Branding is one of the most extreme forms of edge play, so it would be unethical to do it without the submissive’s consent. And that is the kind of consent that needs to be fully informed and mulled over for a long time, because branding is permanent. Besides, pain from cold is quite different from pain from burning. Still, I’m ready to believe that some people are suggestible to this extreme. Other deception can be pretend knife play, using a blunt knife instead of the sharp, scary knife previously shown to the submissive. A warm, viscous liquid can be used to fake that the submissive is bleeding, either with the bottom blindfolded or adding red color for effect. The dominant can also pretend to be angry, disappointed, cruel or sadistic, just to scare the submissive. Vague threats Another mind-fuck that is often mentioned are unspecified threats, such as telling submissives that they are going to be punished in the worst possible way. They are not told what the actual punishment would be, so that their overactive imagination starts churning out ideas about what would happen to them. Sometimes, a vague description of the punishment can be put forward to give starting material to the submissive mind. For example, the dominant could say that they would be punished with “painful bondage” or “horrible sex.” These should not be empty threats, however, because then the submissive will learn not to trust the dominant. But it’s okay if the actual punishment is much less harsh than what the submissive imagined. Then the submissive’s imagination can be blamed. After all, the dominant never actually said what the punishment would be like. Sensory overstimulation and illusions Another form of mind-fucking that is frequently mentioned are threatening noises, like the crack of the belt on the floor around a naked and blindfolded submissive. In my experience, a mild game that can induce a strong sub-space is when a naked submissive, tied-up and blindfolded, is touched by multiple people. Multiple tactile stimuli and trying to keep up what goes on in different parts of the body soon leads to sensory overload. An additional mind-fuck is not knowing who is touching you. As I said before, some people use ice to create the illusion of a burn, but I have my doubts about how effective this is. A much clever way to simulate a burn is to use capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers hot. Capsaicin activates heat receptors, so what would normally feel like mild heat now feels like a burn. There is no actual damage to the skin, but the sensation can go from mild to extremely painful, depending on how much capsaicin is used. On the other end of the spectrum, there is sensory deprivation. Combining a good blindfold with earplugs and enveloping the body in something that provides neutral touch can lead to an altered state of consciousness characterized by daydreaming and loss of the sense of reality. Coming out of that state, a person becomes extremely sensitive and emotionally vulnerable. Humiliation games and embarrassing tasks Shame is a powerful emotion that can be used for mind-fucking. There are plenty of social taboos, like public nudity and sexual arousal, that can be used to mess with somebody’s mind. Here are a few examples: A woman wearing a skirt is made to take off her panties in a public place. Or her panties are pushed down to the top of her thighs and she has to walk around like that. A man is made to put on lipstick and wear it in public. Wearing a butt plug in public. Wearing a vibrator that the top can turn on and off at will. A shy submissive is ordered to sign a song or tell an embarrassing joke. Wearing ridiculous clothes, or garments that are too sexy or revealing. Wearing bunny ears, dog ears or a tail. Being led on a collar and a leash. These are things that are better done at a kinky party or in a similar safe environment. Submissives should not be put in situations that would damage their social or professional images. Also, exposing bystanders to your kinky games is considered a violation of their consent. Things that you do to your partner in public may be triggering to somebody else. Keep in mind that strangers do not have the means to distinguish a kinky game from abuse. Trust games The bottom is put in a vulnerable position in which he or she has to trust the top for protection. The vulnerability can come from danger or embarrassment that is perceived, but not real. An easy way to induce vulnerability is to blindfold somebody in an unknown place. Then, the submissive has to rely on the top for guidance. A nasty twist would be for the top to describe something about their surrounding that is not true, guiding the bottom into an alternate reality full of perceived dangers or rewards. For example, dominants can tell submissives that everybody is staring at them, or that the laugher that they hear is about them. Or he can say that somebody sexually desirable is looking at them with lust. Mental games This type of games consist in giving the submissive a mental task to keep him or her from thinking about anything else. This helps bottoms who cannot shut off their hyperactive minds or who criticize the top inside their heads. To focus the attention of the submissive, there is a penalty to be paid immediately for failing at the mental task. Here is an example. The submissive has to count the strokes of a paddle, backwards from 100 by sevens (serial sevens). The results are 93-86-79-72-65-58-51-44-37-30-23-16-9-2, which the dominant can have in a cheat sheet. The paddling will stop when 2 is reached in the count, but any mistake would reset the count back to 100. If the task is performed correctly, the submissive would receive just 14 strokes with the paddle. However, mistakes will considerably prolong the length of the paddling. As the pain increases, the likelihood of making mistakes becomes higher, so this can go on forever and lead the submissive to desperation. To add to the mind-fuck, the submissive perceives the mistakes as a personal failure, and the prolongation of the paddling as a deserved punishment for it. This leads to loss of self-confidence and to a state of defeat. Keep in mind that mental tasks like this would prevent the bottom from going into sub-space, because endorphin release requires a mental attitude of letting go and relaxation. Hence, the bottom will stay vulnerable to pain and even become more sensitive over time. Impossible tasks In the example above, it is often the case that the submissive is completely unable to perform the task. Here, the mind-fuck could consist in the dominant pretending that this is, in fact, an easy task and that there is no reason why the submissive should not be able to do it. The dominant keeps reassuring the submissive by saying ‘you can do it’ and ‘anybody can do this.’ This is an element of gaslighting: the top is being deceitful about how difficult the task is. Other impossible tasks may be to find a well-hidden object, to follow an elaborate ritual, or to clean something that is impossible to clean. The bottom is made to feel like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain. Of course, the submissive may know very well that the task is impossible. Attempting it, anyway, becomes a proof of submission and commitment. This game also teaches submissives to accept failure with grace, which is an emotional block common in people with demanding careers. Humor Humor is a form of mind-fucking that provides an emotional escape from ego-busting and seriousness. Switching over to humor can be a way for the dominant to rescue the submissive from a state of desperation before it becomes too psychologically hurtful. For example, let’s go back to the ‘serial sevens’ exercise that I described above. At some point, it has become clear that the submissive is never going to take the count all the way down to 2. What I would do to switch over to humor is to say: “This is hopeless. I have beaten your butt so badly already that you won’t be able to sit down tomorrow. So, since you are useless at math, with every stroke of the paddle, you are going to tell me one thing that requires sitting down that you won’t be able to do.” Then I might be able to end the paddling after a few more strokes. Still, the joke is on the submissive, so this continues to be a mind-fuck. There is a humiliation element, and the scene is still centered on the submissive and her/his predicament. Predicament A predicament consists of putting the submissive in a situation in which he or she has to choose between two unpleasant outcomes. Sometimes, the choice itself is deceptive, because one of the choices is better than the other but the bottom doesn’t know that. Even more devilish: the choice that appears to be the best turns out to be the worse. Predicaments are psychologically powerful, inasmuch as they give the submissive a choice but, in fact, the submissive is still choosing to hurt themselves. Self-inflicted pain has been found to be a powerful torture mechanism. Here are some examples of physical predicaments: The bottom is made to straddle a bar placed high enough so that he or she has to stand on tiptoes to avoid a painful pressure on the crotch. As their calves get tired, bottoms are forced to choose between the two forms of pain, which keep increasing. Bondage with a rope system that makes the bottom choose between a painful pull of the nipples or a strappado of the arms. Making the bottom choose between two punishments. The more different the punishments, the better. Choosing between sexual pleasure (for example, a vibrator in the crotch) and pain (a pricking object or an uncomfortable position in bondage). The bottom initially chooses the pleasure, but eventually becomes overstimulated and has to endure the pain. Predicaments can also be psychological. For example, having to choose between apologizing or being punished. Deep mind-fucking The key to a good mind-fucking is to find the points of resistance and inner conflicts of the submissive, and gently push against them. Often, the conflict is so strong that just the threat of confronting it will elicit a strong emotional reaction. Keep in mind that these conflicts will be the limits of the submissive, even if he or she doesn’t realize that they are. When a dominant discovers them, the ethical thing to do is to talk to the submissive about them and find out if he or she wants to confront them in a mind-fucking scene. We all have triggers and emotional landmines. Secret fears. Hidden trauma. Things in our past that we haven’t resolved. Dreams that we have given up. Experienced BDSMers may choose to confront them with a trusted dominant in a deep mind-fucking scene. Deep mind-fucking is to engage in a game that would intentionally bring out our demons so that we can exorcise them. Over time, a dominant gains such an intimate knowledge of the submissive bottom that he knows where those demons are. They may have created an intimate space where they feel safe to explore these dangerous corners of the mind. From the outside, it may not look like much: a certain body position, wearing some particular clothes, a pretend game, a phrase pronounced in a special way. Sometimes, it’s the unknown. We know that something is there, lurking in the dark recesses of our mind, but we don’t know what it is. This requires a lot of attention and skill from the dominant. He needs to have a deep empathy with the submissive throughout the scene, pushing and pulling on their emotional strings, ready to bring them out if there are signs of trouble. If successful, this type of scene can lead to self-discovery and self-transformation. Mind-fucking is edge BDSM Except in its milder, short-term forms, mind-fucking should be considered edge play. It should be done after careful negotiation and with good knowledge of the mental health of the submissive or bottom. In the next article, I will explore in detail the issues of consent and safety in mind-fucking. Copyright 2023 Hermes Solenzol.

A list of duties that derive from the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ rules of ethical BDSM Answering a question from a friend new to BDSM, I wrote a quick summary of the responsibilities that a dominant and a submissive have to each other. This was not easy, since there are many types of D/s relationships. Also, there are fundamental differences between relationships in which the participants are ‘in role’ all the time, and the more common case in which the dominant and submissive roles are only adopted temporarily during a scene. The following lists could serve as general guidelines that could apply to most relationships. They are based on the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ rules that delimit BDSM from abuse. Responsibilities of the dominant To know and respect the limits of the submissive (‘consent’). To know and fulfill the fantasies and needs of the submissive. To negotiate the relationship and the scenes with the submissive, establishing limits and a safeword. To create scenes that meet the submissive's needs, and not just your own. To stop the scene and take care of the submissive if he/she says the safeword (‘consent’). The dominant should not retaliate against the submissive for using the safeword. Respect and protect the physical safety of the submissive (‘safe’). Refrain from practices that may cause psychological or emotional harm to the submissive (‘sane’). Do not use mind-fucking or other forms of psychological manipulation, unless the submissive has been fully informed, had an opportunity to freely discuss them and has agreed with them (‘sane’). To provide aftercare to the submissive after the scene. To not unduly interfere with the submissive's life, including her work, financial, family or friendship environment. Do not socially isolate the submissive. Do not spy on, stalk or violate the submissive's privacy. Control your own emotions, avoiding acting as a dominant out of anger, jealousy and other destructive emotions. To take responsibility if something goes wrong in a scene, apologize to the submissive and do everything possible to remedy any hurt done. In case the submissive suffers physical harm, panic attack or any other type of emergency, stay with him or her, helping and doing everything possible to remedy the problem, including seeking help and making an emergency call. If punishments have been agreed upon, use them fairly and in moderation. To respect the privacy, intimacy and reputation of the submissive in conversations with other people. Unless the relationship is full time, to treat the submissive as an equal outside the scene, with respect and kindness. The power of the dominant role should not be used to exploit the submissive. To care for the submissive's health, well-being and happiness. Responsibilities of the submissive To negotiate the relationship and the scenes honestly and in good faith. To tell his/her limits to the dominant. To know his/her BDSM fantasies and needs, and to tell them to the dominant. To be willing to serve and obey the dominant within the established limits, or to face the consequences. To use the safeword when necessary to protect his/her physical and mental safety. The safeword should not be used to manipulate the dominant. To take responsibility if something goes wrong in a scene because of not using the safeword, not making the limits clear, or not negotiating the session well. Do not usurp the dominant's authority by giving instructions during the session (‘topping from bottom’), unless previously agreed. Do not use emotional blackmail, unfounded accusations of abuse, or other forms of manipulation. At the end of the scene, contribute to aftercare and provide feedback to the dominant. To keep destructive emotions such as anger or jealousy at bay, stopping the scene if they become uncontrollable. Unless the relationship is full time, to recognize that, outside the scene, the dominant does not act as such and is not responsible for the submissive, who will be treated as an equal. To not behave as a submissive when the dominant has not agreed to play his role (‘consent’). To not spy on, stalk or violate the privacy of the dominant. If punishments have been agreed upon, to comply with them honestly, using the safeword if the punishment endangers the physical or mental safety. To respect the dominant's work, financial, family and friendship life. To respect the privacy, intimacy and reputation of the dominant in conversations with other people. To care for the dominant's health, well-being, and happiness.

Following the orders of Julio, her dominant, Cecilia pays a visit to his fiancé, Laura, who has a few surprises in store for her. Excerpt from my novel Amores imposibles. Madrid, Saturday January 27, 1979 At ten before five, Cecilia got out of the elevator on the third floor, her heart pounding furiously as she stood in front of Laura's apartment door. She wondered why she was so nervous. Laura had told her that she had a surprise that she would enjoy. She doubted it. Perhaps she wanted to start a fight, which would break her deal with Julio. But she was determined not to fall for her provocations. As Julio had ordered her, she wore flats and a gray skirt. No stockings, despite the cold wind blowing down the street. But the most important detail was missing. She took her leather collar out of her handbag and put it on. She held her finger on the doorbell for a moment before pressing it. She heard the clicking of high heels inside. The door opened. Laura was more dazzling than ever. She was wearing a cream knit dress, short and tight, with white lace stockings and pumps. Yes, you're pretty as a princess, Laura, but deep down you're a witch. “Cecilia!” said Laura, smiling. “Hello gorgeous! Please, come in!” “Hello, Laura,” she said as she unbuttoned her coat. Laura kissed her on both cheeks, took her coat and hung it on the coat rack. She smiled non-stop, but her quick movements betrayed her nervousness. Her hair was done in perfect amber waves, as if she had just stepped out of the salon. A pearl necklace and matching earrings completed an elegant outfit with a white theme. Laura took her by both hands and didn't let go until they reached the living room. On the coffee table, Laura had neatly served tea: an immaculate placemat and napkins, two cups, a steaming kettle, and a plate of delicious-looking pastries, some with green and red cherries, others with chocolate. She watched it all with some relief. So that's all! Laura just wants to have tea with me and pretend that we are friends again. With a little luck, I'll be able to get out of here soon, forget about the whole thing and tell Julio that I've obeyed him. “I'm going to play some music,” said Laura, going over to the record player. “Do you like Supertramp?” “Yes, a lot.” Laura picked up a record with a snow-covered piano silhouetted against a blue sky on the cover. She knew it well. She had bought it for herself last summer. “I prefer French music, but I know that Julio and you like this type of rock. I want you to make you feel at home. Please sit down.” Laura’s smile was friendly, but in her manners there was a certain affectation. She paid visits to her as she does to a stranger, to a person from whom one wants to get something, not to an old friend. The first song on the album began to play: Give a little bit. She translated the lyrics to Spanish in her mind as she sat on a corner of the sofa. Someone was asking for a little bit of her time, a little bit of her life, a little bit of her love. Laura had sat on the other corner of the sofa and inspected her carefully. Cecilia realized that she had barely opened her mouth since she had come into her house. “What do you want with me, Laura?” “That we become friends again! Besides, I have prepared a couple of surprises that I’m sure you will enjoy. We are going to have so much fun this evening!” She detected a touch of sarcasm in her voice. “Friends, huh? Look, I want to make one thing crystal clear from the start. I'm only going to tell you once, so that later you won't say that I was rude. We are not friends, Laura, nor will we ever be. Is it clear?” Laura's face showed dismay for an instant. Then her expression turned thoughtful. “Yes, that's clear,” she said quietly. “I hope that you will change your mind. Until then, please don't tell me that again.” She uncovered the sugar bowl. “How many tablespoons do you want?” “Two, please… I came because Julio ordered me to. Only because of that.” Laura served her the sugar in his tea. “Yes, I know. I see you're wearing his collar, and that means you're here under his command. I know that it is very important for you to obey him.” “What has he told you about what we have been doing?” Laura fixed her ice-blue eyes on her. “He’s told me everything, Cecilia. Do you fancy some pastries?” she added, offering her the plate. Cecilia picked up a small cake with a green icing on it and chewed on it thoughtfully. It was delicious. “So, he’s told you everything… Of course! You always manage to find out about my intimacies, Laura. I guess I'll have to get used to it.” “Don't worry, Cecilia. Julio won't leave again. Of course, you’ll have to behave and fulfill your part of the deal: to be respectful and obedient to me.” “Obedient? No way! The deal was that I would treat you with respect, nothing more.” “Didn't he tell you to obey me when he called you on Monday?” “Possibly…” she admitted. Things were starting to take a turn that she didn't like at all, but she didn't want to contradict Laura. Laura put her hand on her knee. “So, you’ll have to shallow your pride and obey me. But don't worry, darling, I won’t be mean… If you behave, of course.” “What are you going to do to me, if I may know?” “You will find out in due time. For now, treat me politely and respectfully. I won’t ask you to pretend to be my friend, but neither I want angry answers, solemn silences, or long faces. Understood?” “Understood.” Cecilia sighed, seeing her hopes vanish that all this would end soon. * * * Laura took her teacup delicately by the handle and took a sip, staring at her. “Then, if you don't mind, I'd like to see your diary. And don't give me any excuses, I know you have it in your bag. Julio ordered you to bring it.” “What? Of course I mind! That diary is intimate, something that I share only with Julio.” “No, Cecilia, you are very wrong… Look, I'll prove it to you.” She got up, opened a drawer, took out some papers and gave them to her. Cecilia turned the pages, incredulous. “You recognize them, don’t you? They are photocopies of your diary. If Julio didn't want me to read it, then why did he give them to me?” She felt a sinking feeling. How could have Julio done that to her? How could he have betrayed her? He had promised her that no one else would read the diary. She rose unsteadily. She could only think of one thing: to get out of there and never see Julio or Laura again. She picked up her bag and ran to the door. She reached for the latch to open it, but she stopped. She remembered what she had promised herself before coming in: that she would put up with anything and do what Julio had ordered her to do. * * * She returned to the living room. Laura had her head in her hands, fingers buried in her hair, her gaze lost in her teacup. She looked up with relief when she saw that she’d come back. “Alright, we're going to play this game to the end,” Cecilia said, plopping down on the couch. “I don't like what you have done, but I'm going to stay until I know exactly what you two are up to.” Laura smiled at her, stroking her knee. “You already know what we are up to. It's what you've been doing with Julio all along. Only now you know that I'm also in on it. It’s not as terrible as it looks, you’ll see. You won’t regret it. Come on! Are you going to give me that diary or not?” She took it out of the bag with trembling fingers and handed it to Laura. “You've already read it, anyway,” she said with feigned indifference. “Not all of it…” Laura undid the clasp and opened the diary to the first page, the one that had been dampened with her tears and stained with her blood. The paragraphs below recounted in her own handwriting what happened in that hostel in Toledo. Laura stopped briefly to read it, then she turned several pages until she came to the last thing she had written. “There we go! I hadn't read this part yet. Pour me more tea, please.” Cecilia filled her cup. “Thank you,” said Laura, and she dove into the journal, drinking her tea in small sips. * * * Cecilia finished her cup of tea and ate a couple of pastries, not knowing what else to do. She didn't dare interrupt Laura's reading. “Take off your panties,” said Laura casually, without lifting her gaze from the diary. “What?!” Laura looked up from the diary and glared at her. “You heard me. I want you to take off your panties. And don’t give me any excuses.” She is dominating me! The bitch wants to dominate me! And she’s doing it well! Well, let's see how far she’ll go! Cecilia rose a little to pull down her panties under her skirt. Her hands were still shaking. Laura glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. She slid her panties down her legs. She struggled for a moment to untangle them from her shoes. “Put them here, on the table.” Laura moved aside the teapot and the plate of biscuits to make room right in the middle of the coffee table. Cecilia bunched her panties in a ball and tossed them on the table. Laura stared at her severely. “No, not like that! Spread them out, so they look nice.” Cecilia unfolded the panties on the table, smoothing them out with her hand. They were simple black cotton panties, not the fine lingerie that Laura liked. They struck a shocking note in the middle of the plush tea set. “Like this?” “Perfect. They are cute.” Laura plunged back into her reading, as if nothing had happened. Cecilia did not dare to interrupt her. She felt doubly naked and vulnerable. By the absence of clothes under her skirt, and by recalling the intimate things she had written on the pages Laura was reading. She picked up another cookie and nibbled on it. Obviously, this was not going to be a courtesy visit, but an ordeal of humiliation at the hands of Laura. She was going to play with her like a cat with a mouse. Strangely, that thought filled her with a strange thrill. A tremble in Laura's hands when she turned the pages betrayed her nervousness. Or was it also excitement? Finally, Laura left the diary on the table next to her panties. Cecilia reached out to take it back, but a stern look from Laura dissuaded her. “I see that you want to dominate me, but it won't be that easy. I have a lot of experience in these things.” “You finally got it, huh? Well, don't worry. I think I'll know how to rise to the occasion. For now, I'm having a great time, watching you squirm, wondering what I'm going to do to you. Knowing that you are naked under your skirt,” she gestured to her panties in the middle of the table. “Another pastry?” she offered her the plate. Cecilia accepted the cookie. She had to admit it: Laura was not bad at that game. “Thank you. They are very good. You shouldn't have gone to so much trouble for me.” “You mean the tea and what I've dressed up?” Laura gave her a mischievous smile. “I have to confess that I have done it for me. I like to do things with elegance. My style is very different from Julio's. He treats you roughly, almost brutally. I believe that these perverse acts are more powerful when they are done with refinement. In that, I think I can count on you, because you know how to preserve your dignity, Cecilia. It's one of the things I like about you. You will fight to maintain your dignity and that will ensure that what happens here this evening will be of the strictest good taste.” “I see…” she couldn't help but smile. She had to admit that she liked that. Laura had managed to keep her in suspense. To take her to the edge and bring her back again when she was about to bolt. She had even managed to turn her on a little. Still, now that she knew what the game was about, she wasn't going to give in. However, she realized that Laura was using her own resistance against her. By forcing her to be always on the defensive, every concession she got from her became a victory for Laura and a defeat for her. “Do you want more cookies?” “No, thanks.” “Then take all this to the kitchen. Except your panties. Leave them where they are. I like to see them.” Laura picked up the diary, making it clear that she wasn't going to help her. Cecilia piled up the cups and plates and placed them on her arm, also picking up the teapot and sugar bowl. Laura looked at her sideways. “Do not carry everything at once. You’ll drop something.” “I’ve been a waitress,” she replied defiantly. “Ah, yeah, sure! I’d forgotten about that,” she said absently. She turned her attention back to her journal. She put the cups in the sink and placed the teapot and dish of pastries in the middle of the kitchen table. She picked up one of the remaining cookies and chewed on it thoughtfully. Falling into the trap that Julio and Laura had set for her was as sweet as the pastry she was eating. She was tempted by a strange meekness, a desire to indulge in whatever they had planned to do to her. * * * “Cecilia, what are you doing?” Laura called from the living room. “Come here! I have something to show you.” She was waiting for her, standing by the chest of drawers. She opened a drawer and brought out a hairbrush. “Do you remember this?” she said, turning it around in front of her face. Of course she remembered! The realization of what was coming froze her with embarrassment. She felt a tingle of anticipation in her bottom. “Yes, of course! How could I forget?” she said defiantly. “It must have hurt you a lot! From the way you complained.” “There are things that hurt much more than a simple spanking.” “Damn, don't get philosophical on me! You're going to spoil all the fun!” “I don’t care… But have it your way. If you want to hit me with the hairbrush, go right ahead. You know I can't refuse.” “Yes, that’s precisely what I’m going to do. But I wanted you to know that I’m going to spank you with the same hairbrush that Julio used that time. These things have an important symbolism, don't you think? Hitting you with this hairbrush is not the same as hitting you with something else.” Yes, symbolism was important. Using that hairbrush meant that Laura was going to usurp Julio's role as the administrator of punishments. “I know… But why do you want to spank me? You don't like that. You are not a sadist.” “Well, maybe I am a sadist. The idea of spanking you has fascinated me for a while. But, yes, I had some qualms. The thought of hurting somebody horrified me. However, I no longer have those scruples, so I'm going to hit your cute little butt with this brush until it turns red as a tomato. I’m drenching my panties just thinking about it.” Cecilia swallowed. She knew quite well that, when applied harshly, that hairbrush could do a lot of damage. The only way to deal with the pain was to bring out her masochism, but that meant making herself docile and vulnerable. The idea that Laura could arouse those feelings in her was revolting. “Well, that's enough, okay? You’ve gone far enough, Laura!” she said quietly, but wanting to sound determined. “You’ve gotten what you wanted. You have humiliated and scared me.” “Scared you? Are you kidding? You are not afraid of anything, Cecilia! And surely not of a few smacks on your behind… I’m not doing this to hurt you. I just want to see how masochistic you are. I want to see you enjoying a spanking.” She was right. It wasn’t like her to whine to Laura. She had to show her that she was stronger than her. She would endure the pain and then go home with her head held high. “You have no fucking idea what masochism is all about, Laura! Whether I enjoy it or not depends on who hits me, and why. Spank me if that amuses you, but let me feel whatever I want.” “You are so stubborn, Cecilia! Why do you have to make everything so difficult? But I think I know the way to stop all this nonsense. Come here!” Laura took her by the elbow and led her to the sofa. She let her do it. Everything was beginning to seem unreal, like in a dream. Her panties and her diary were still on the table. He had prepared her well. She would only have to lift her skirt to gain access to her bare bottom. “Take off your shoes.” She kicked them off with her feet. Laura sat in the center of the sofa, clutching the hairbrush. She crossed her legs and smoothed her dress over them. She patted her thigh. “Come on! Lie down here.” Cecilia kneeled on the sofa to her right, full of apprehension. For a moment, their gazes met. Laura's face showed excitement and a certain anxiety. Resigned, she dropped into her lap. She smelled the subtle rose perfume Laura was wearing, mixed with the musky scent of her body. Laura's crossed legs forced her to lift her bottom. She pressed on her hips with her hand, forcing her to arch her back even more to further accentuate that ignominious posture. “Pull up your skirt,” Laura ordered her. Apparently, Laura was not going to miss the slightest opportunity to humiliate her. Cecilia gritted her teeth and buried her face in the sofa. She grabbed the fabric of her skirt in her fists and yanked it up to her hips. The cold air on her buttocks made her feel exposed. “What a delicious ass you have, Cecilia! No wonder it drives Julio crazy!” * * * Laura's fingers brushed her bottom, caressing her bare skin, outlining the provocative curve of her buttocks. Her prodding became more daring, opening her crack to expose her asshole and her pussy. One of her fingers opened her lips, soaking in her moisture, which she immediately felt wetting her anus. She squeezed her buttocks to put an end to that demeaning invasion. “You don't like my caresses, huh? Well, then I'll have to start with the spanks. How about this one?” She gave her a gentle tap with the brush. “You call that a spank? Are you kidding?” “Oh, excuse me!” said Laura sarcastically. “I'm such a beginner that I have no idea how hard I have to hit you. Let me try again. How about this one?” Too late, she realized that she had fallen for her trap. The blow rang like a crack across the room and caused a considerable sting in her bottom. “Ow! Didn't you say you weren't going to hurt me?” “Oops! Sorry, again! I’m so clumsy! It’s so hard for me to judge my strength. No, I don't want to be too hard on you. I just want to warm your butt a bit, so you understand who's in charge here. But you are the expert on spankings, so maybe you’d help me find the right strength.” “It’s not fair making fun of me, on top of spanking me.” “I make fun of whatever I want. How about this one? She hit her hard enough to raise a sting, but it was quite bearable. “How was that? Too hard? Or about right?” “About right,” she admitted grudgingly. “Well, I thought that was a bit soft for a consummate masochist like you… But, okay, we'll start at that level, since I want to spank you for a long time.” And so the show started. Laura gave her a series of quick smacks all over her bottom. That really ignited the skin on her buttocks, drawing all her attention to them. Then the rhythm became more even and the blows more severe, although still bearable. Laura was completely focused on the spanking she was giving her. Each blow was like a message that she wanted to convey. Cecilia's naked butt, displayed in all its glory, became the center of the universe for both of them, each one faithfully fulfilling their role: to spank and to endure the spanking. The force of the blows with the brush increased a bit more, so Cecilia couldn’t help moving her bottom from side to side in a futile effort to dodge the smacks. “Oh! So you're starting to wiggle your butt, huh?” said Laura without stopping spanking her. “Yes, Julio told me about the spanking dance. Come on! Dance for me! And what else can I do, Laura? I hope that my dance will satisfy you soon, and you'll end the spanking. Darn! It’s such an indignity to have to endure this precisely from you! You spank me well, you bitch! You have found that sweet spot that turns me on. And it’s so utterly twisted having to submit to be punished by someone who I despite so much! I’d like to give up, to be able to let go and enjoy your spanking, just like I enjoy Julio’s spankings. And why not? Isn't that what he would like? “Ok, you win. I give up.” “What?” Laura sounded amazed. The blows stopped. “I said that you win. I surrender.” “Why do you say that? Do you think that I'm going to stop hitting you because of that?” “Not at all! I know this is going to go on for a while,” she said, panting a little. “I'm tired of resisting, so I'm going to allow myself to be a masochist. That's what you wanted, right?” * * * Laura giggled in triumph. “Yes! That’s what I wanted to hear! I'm glad you gave in so quickly. I thought that this was going to be a long battle, and I really don't want to hurt you too much. It’s what I told you: I want us both to have a good time. But, before we continue having fun, there are a couple of things that we have to clarify between us.” “Okay, we can talk about whatever you want.” She started to get up, but Laura stopped her with a hand on her back. “No, you stay there! Your bum and the brush are going to be part of this conversation.” “What do you mean?” she said, falling back on Laura's lap with resignation. “There are a few things that you’ve never understood, Cecilia. I think the brush will help to get them into your silly head. To begin with, let’s talk about how rude you were with me when I called you on the phone after Luis attacked you. I was really hurt! I have been turning it in my head, and I still can’t understand how you could be so ungrateful, after everything I’ve done to help you!” “To help me? None of that did me any good!” “Don't talk back, Cecilia! Listen to me! I think it did help… But what I want you to do now is to reflect on those nasty things that you have been saying to me all along. So, with each stroke of the brush, I want you to say ‘for being a bitch.’ Let’s see if that gets into your head that you have to treat me with respect.” “No, Laura! You have to understand that you also… Ow!” The smack of the brush caught her in mid-sentence. It was considerably harder than the ones she’d given her so far. “Now you have to say ‘for being a bitch’, Cecilia. Don't make me ask you again. I hate having to repeat myself.” “For being a bitch,” she said obediently. Only to be rewarded with another hard blow. “Again!” “For being a bitch!” And what did you expect? That we were still going to be friends after you stole my boyfriend? “Ow! For being a bitch!” And today I have been very polite to you… “For being a bitch!” Except when I told you that I we were not going to be friends… “For being a bitch! Ow!” I was going to tell you that I hated you, but I don’t want to hate anyone… “For being a bitch!” “Fuck! These spanks really sting! “For being a bitch!” Okay, yes! It’s true! Sometimes I’ve been very rude to you! “For being a bitch! Laura stopped. “All right. Now you may apologize to me. “Yes… Please forgive me for being so rude to you.” She was surprised at how sincerely her apology came out. “Alright, you're forgiven for that. Let's move on to the next thing…” “What? There's more?” she said with alarm. The spanking, combined with her professions of guilt, was quite an effective punishment. “Yes. There is also the issue of your jealousy, which has hurt you so much. So now you're going to say ‘for being jealous’ with each spank. I don't think that the beating will take away your jealousy, but maybe it will help you realize how much it hurts you. So… take this!” “Ow! For being jealous! But I already know that, Laura!” “Really? Well, I wouldn’t have guessed! If you hadn't been so jealous, we would have shared Julio a year ago. See how stupid you are? Take this! “Ouch! For being jealous!” “And maybe you would have cum that day when we had a threesome. So, here you go!” “For being jealous! You're right, but how could I know? For being jealous! Yes, I wish I could had been able to get rid of this jealousy! Ouch! For being jealous! Other thoughts she kept to herself… How could I not be jealous when you are going to marry Julio? “For being jealous!” How could I not be angry after the treacherous way you took him from me? “For being jealous!” You betrayed me! And you can't change that, no matter how many times you hit me with that brush. “Ow! For being jealous!” “Nice punishment, huh? You deserve it, Cecilia! Let's hope it stops you from acting so foolishly.” “I’m not acting foolishly!” she moaned. “You are the one who took Julio away from me! And, on top of that, you spank me hard! Haven’t you hurt me enough?” “I can’t believe how stubborn you are! Let's see if we can straighten this up once and for all. I didn't take Julio away from you. You managed to lose him all by yourself. I tried my best to get you both back together, but to no avail! Because he’s as stubborn as you are. And, despite all I did, you blame me!" “Of course I blame you! He left me because he wanted you all along!” “You deserved him leaving you, Cecilia! You lied to him and you cheated on him. You were such an idiot! So you're going to get more spanks, and this time you're going to say that: ‘for being an idiot.’ Let’s see if I can drill that into your head.” Again, the brush conveyed its stinging messages. Obediently, she intoned the new litany. “For being an idiot!” Of course I am an idiot! I had to be an idiot to sign up for this beating! “For being an idiot! Yes, I was so stupid for letting you take Julio away! “I told you that we could share him. But, instead, you threw a tantrum and started fighting with me. Take this, you fool!” “Ouch, yes! For being such an idiot!” “And then, on top of everything, you had the genial idea of becoming a whore! What the fuck, Cecilia?” “That’s the one thing I do not regret. Ow! For being an idiot!” “It’s not that I reproach you that, Cecilia. But, if what you wanted was to get Julio back, that’s the worst thing could have done. When he found out that you worked as a prostitute, he gave up on you and asked me to marry him. That's how we arrived at this awful situation, don't you see? So, do you deserve another good smack with the hairbrush?” “Yes, I deserve it! Ouch! Fuck, that hurts! For being so stupid! Maybe one day I’ll learn.” “That’s what I wanted to hear! Yes, I hope that you have learned your lesson.”

Scientific evidence shows that the majority of women are able to orgasm from vaginal penetration and find it appealing. This will be the first of a series of articles in which I want to debunk some of the most obnoxious dogmas of political correctness. Although some of these beliefs are quite harmful on their own, what I found most appalling is the underlying notion that truth can be sacrificed in the name of political expedience. This degrading of the value of truth translates into the science denialism that we see in both the Left and the Right. The politically correct dogmas of conservatives - like anti-vaccine beliefs and climate change denialism - are frequently debunked by progressives. But I think that we progressives need to clean our own house as well. The consequences of not doing that can endanger our most valuable causes. Not only our lack of intellectual honesty will give good arguments to conservatives, but the confusion we bring to our own actions will render them much less effective. For this article, I picked one of the dogmas most easy to debunk: the myth that women do not orgasm from penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse, and do not like it. Don’t get me wrong, I think clitoral stimulation is great. It’s just that it has become a bit overrated of late. Penis-in-vagina penetration is also great and takes most women to orgasm. Let’s take a look at the evidence. The erroneously cited Herbenick paper It is common to read that most women are not able to have orgasms from penetration. A Google search on “women do not orgasm from penetration” found 780 results. Here are few examples: “The vast majority of women do not orgasm from penetration alone.” Psychology Today. “Research has found that 81.6% of women do not orgasm from intercourse alone, with the majority needing clitoral stimulation to be able to orgasm.” healthnews. “Mintz says we need to first realize that the way we’ve traditionally been taught women orgasm—via penetration—is wrong: 95 percent of women do not orgasm from intercourse alone.” goop Wellness. “This is despite the fact that 75% of women do not orgasm from penetration alone and require direct clitoral stimulation.” Refinery29. “Did you know that over 95% of women who have given birth have never experienced an orgasm from penetration?” The HealthSite.com. “70% of women do not orgasm from penetration and need external stimulation of the clitoris.” Nut Nut. “We now know that plenty of women do not orgasm from penetration alone and that orgasm can occur without penetration at all.” Astroglide. “A study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy surveyed 1000 women aged 18 to 94 and found that 80% of women had never orgasmed from penetrative sex.” Medium. Most of these sites do not offer any evidence for these bold statements. Sometimes, they cite each other, a great way to propagate disinformation. The few that refer back to scientific research cite this the paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy as evidence: Women's Experiences With Genital Touching, Sexual Pleasure, and Orgasm: Results From a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Ages 18 to 94. D. Herbenick, T. J. Fu, J. Arter, S. A. Sanders and B. Dodge. J Sex Marital Ther 2018 Vol. 44 Issue 2 Pages 201-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2017.1346530 Here is the relevant part of the abstract of the paper: "While 18.4% of women reported that intercourse alone was sufficient for orgasm, 36.6% reported clitoral stimulation was necessary for orgasm during intercourse, and an additional 36% indicated that, while clitoral stimulation was not needed, their orgasms feel better if their clitoris is stimulated during intercourse." I guess what happened is that people stop reading after the first line. It says that 18.4% of women had orgasms from intercourse alone, so they subtract that from 100% and come up with 81.6%. There you go! More than 80% of women do not orgasm from penetration! Ever! Those selfish, evil men! But, if you keep reading the abstract - or, the unthinkable, read the entire paper - you find that an additional 36% of women do not need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, but touching their clit made their orgasms better. Which makes total sense. However, since these women were also able to reach orgasm from penetration, we need to add them to the first group: 18.6% + 36% = 54.6% Now, 54.6% is larger than 50%. So we reach an astonishing conclusion! The majority of women are able to orgasm from intercourse. What about the remaining 9.4% of women? Well, “7.5% did not have orgasms during intercourse” and 1.9% achieved orgasm before intercourse with cunnilingus, stimulating the clitoris or other means. Dr. Debby Herbenick is one of the best sex researchers in the USA, with many published surveys like this one. This one used a sample of 1,055 American women interviewed by email. To be clear, ‘intercourse’ here means penis-in-vagina (PIV) penetration. ‘Clitoral stimulation’ means direct stimulation of the clitoris, not the indirect stimulation that may be provided by the penis in certain sexual positions. If you have access to the entire paper, a detailed breakdown of the number of women able to reach orgasm without clitoral stimulation are in Table 2. Only 18.2% of women never achieved orgasm without stimulating their clits. 21.8% of women achieve orgasm less than 25% of the time. 8.2% of women achieved orgasm 25%-50% of the time. 10.5% reached orgasm 50% of the time. 12.3% reached orgasm 51% to 75% of the time. 15.5% reached orgasm more than 75%. And the winners are the amazing 13.5% that always got to the big O, clit-free. With clitoral stimulation, the number of women who always orgasmed with intercourse increased to 22.3%. However, 9.6% never achieved orgasm, even with clitoral stimulation. So 81.8% (100% - 18.2%) of women had an orgasm from intercourse at least once in their lives. This is a curious reversal of the number that is often cited. Much as I admire the work of Dr. Herbenick, I fault her for writing the abstract of her paper in such a confusing way. It would have been more honest if she stated outright that 54.6% of women reached orgasm through penetration alone, and then subdivided this number into those who prefer and do not prefer to add clitoral stimulation. Perhaps she was afraid to make a politically incorrect statement? The Kontula study of Finnish women This study has a bigger sample size than the Herbenick study. It compared women in six different age groups. It also checked changes in orgasms from 1971 to 2015. Spoiler alert: orgasms did not improve during those 44 years. Despite the advances of feminism, sexual techniques, sex education and all the blaming and shaming of men that took place during that time, the frequency of female orgasms stayed the same. It even decreased for the younger generations. Here is the full reference and a link to the PDF of the whole article. Determinants of female sexual orgasms. O. Kontula and A. Miettinen. Socioaffective neuroscience & psychology 2016 Vol. 6 Pages 31624-31624. Link to full article (PDF). The study used data from the FINSEX national surveys, conducted in 1971, 1992, 1999, 2007 and 2015 by randomly sampling the entire population of Finland. It gathered data from “10,613 responders, 4,482 men and 6,155 women.” The data analyzed in this paper were from women only. The sample size for each of these five years was between 1,496 and 2,590 women. Women were divided into 6 age groups: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and 65-74 years of age. The percentage of women who had orgasms “most of the time or always” during intercourse was 30% to 50% for ages 18-24, 40% to 60% for ages 25-54, and 40% to 50% for ages 55-74. Around 60% of women reported having an orgasm during their last intercourse, except in the older group (65-74), where this number decreased to 40% (Figure 2). Curiously, the percentage of women who orgasmed “most of the time or always” during PIV intercourse in the 18-24 age group declined from 50% to 30% from 1999 to 2015. In the age group 25-34, it declined from close to 60% in 1999 to 40% in 2015. For women aged 35-54, it stayed constant around 60%. For the two older groups (55-74), the number was still high, 40% of the women. So, even after menopause, numerous women orgasm during intercourse. In this study, the majority of women (54%) reported that “they usually achieved orgasm via stimulating both the clitoris and the vagina.” Another 34% reported that they did it by stimulating only the clitoris, and only 6% did it by stimulating only the vagina. However, orgasms were more frequent (64%) in the women that achieved them through vaginal stimulation that in those who achieved them via clitoral stimulation (40%). Women who preferred clitoridal stimulation were less likely to achieve orgasm during intercourse. Other interesting findings: Orgasm frequency was higher in women who thought that having an orgasm was important. Women who had intercourse at an earlier age had more frequent orgasms during intercourse. However, age at first masturbation was not correlated with orgasm during intercourse. Masturbation frequency was not related to the frequency of orgasm during intercourse. “Nearly half of women (48%) reported that they achieved orgasm more easily in masturbation than in intercourse” while 14% of the women had an orgasm more easily through intercourse. “Duration of intercourse was strongly associated with women’s ability to experience orgasm.” The cowgirl (women on top) position and using several positions for intercourse were more likely to produce orgasms. Having a stable relationship (married, cohabiting or dating long term) increased the frequency of orgasms during intercourse. Good communication on sexual topics also increased orgasm frequency. Do women like having sexual intercourse? The full politically correct dogma is that women do not experience orgasms during PIV intercourse and, therefore, women do not no like intercourse and only put up with it for the benefit of men. To address the second part of this dogma - whether women enjoy sexual intercourse - I will refer to another paper by Dr. Debbie Herbenick: Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. D. Herbenick, J. Bowling, T. J. Fu, B. Dodge, L. Guerra-Reyes and S. Sanders. PLoS One 2017 Vol. 12 Issue 7 Pages e0181198. Link to full text (PDF). This was a survey done by email with a sample size of 2,021 individuals. Table 5 of this paper is a long list of sexual activities, classified for their appeal for men and for women. The whole table is very interesting, but I will refer only to the line about vaginal intercourse. The numbers for men and women were similar: 72.8% of men and 69.9% of women found vaginal intercourse very appealing. The “somewhat appealing” response was chosen by 16.4% of men and 19.7% of women. Only 3% of men and 3.5% of women found it not appealing, while another 11.6% of men and 7.0% of women responded “not at all appealing.” Table 2 shows that 85.6% of men and 91.1% of women had vaginal intercourse during their lifetime. The percentage that had vaginal intercourse in the last month was 52.1% for men and 52.6% for women. This number increase to over 70% of women in the age groups 25 to 39 years old. Therefore, vaginal intercourse is greatly popular amongst both men and women, both in their stated preference and in practice. Where did the belief that women do not enjoy vaginal intercourse come from? This is a complex historical question that I addressed in another article: The Feminist Sex Wars - Radical Feminism Against Sex Positive Feminism In a nutshell, a puritanical form of feminism arose during the 70s, which targeted pornography, BDSM and prostitution as forms of exploitation of women by men. It was called anti-porn feminism, but today we know it as Radical Feminism. One of its main ideas was that penetration was intrinsically degrading for women, encapsulated in the phrase by Andrea Dworkin “penetration is rape” - found in her book Intercourse - and adopted by many feminists. In 1980, a long war inside feminism started - the Feminist War on Sex - which endures until today and split feminism into Radical Feminism and Sex Positive Feminism. The latest salvo in this war was the book The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan. Purportedly a proposal to end the War on Sex, it insists in its condemnation of pornography and sex work, and says that BDSM is only good when women dominate men. She argues that nobody has a right to sex. Especially men. Many feminists do not want to take sides in the War of Sex, so they endorse a mild condemnation of vaginal intercourse. While they say it’s okay, they insist that cunnilingus, mutual masturbation and other forms of non-penetrative sex are better for women. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that the attack on vaginal intercourse was a power move that sought to subjugate men by depriving them of their favorite sexual act. The fact that this damaged the sex lives of countless women did not seem to bother these radical feminists. Conclusions Most women find vaginal intercourse appealing and enjoyable. Most of them have orgasms from intercourse. Although many women can have orgasms from vaginal stimulation alone, a majority prefers to combine it with clitoral stimulation. Because, why not take advantage of the full power of your body to give yourself pleasure? The politicization of sex by feminism has not helped neither women nor men. The paper by Kontula et al. shows that, in recent years, young women have become less able to orgasm during intercourse. This may be a consequence of the relentless indoctrination about intercourse being bad. It may also result from sex education steeped in ideology. For example, leading to the enthroning of the clitoris as the sole source of female pleasure. The paper indicates that when women masturbate focusing exclusively on the clitoris, their ability to orgasm from intercourse decreases. This may be similar to what death-grip masturbation causes in men. Death-grip and death-grip syndrome are slang terms for suffering adverse effects from one's aggressive and recurrent male masturbation technique, which result in an unsatisfactory experience when engaging in regular sexual intercourse with a partner. A similar condition, dead-vagina syndrome, has been asserted to exist in women. Wikipedia. In fact, orgasms are not triggered exclusive from the clitoris or the vagina, they can also be started from many different areas of the body. Orgasms produced by erotic fantasies without any physical stimulation are also possible. The paper by Kontula et al. underscores the importance of relationships and good sexual communication in getting orgasms. Women vary wildly in their capacity to orgasm and how orgasms are triggered, more so than men. Some women seem to be anorgasmic, while others are able to have multiple orgasms with the slightest stimulation. Perhaps there is a way to turn an anorgasmic women into a multi-orgasmic one, we just haven’t found it yet. It’s up to every woman to explore her body and find what works best for her. What is clear is that ideology, blaming men and political correctness are not the right way to get to the big O. More politically correct bullshit is on its way! This article will be the first of a series of posts debunking politically correct dogmas that nobody dares to question. For example: That there are no psychological differences between men and women. The fragile male ego. The gay gene. Sentience. That hating men is okay. That eating meat is unhealthy. That scientific research with animals is useless.

Denial of free will is based on religious or mystical ideas and can have dire consequences by making it ethical to control the mind. The denial of free will Lately, it seems to have become fashionable to say that humans do not have free will. I have heard this at meetings of the skeptic community and it is also one of the mainstays of writer and podcaster Sam Harris. I see this denial of free will as part of what of I call “modern misanthropy”, an effort to cast human beings as either animals or machines by denying the qualities that we most cherish about ourselves. It is also part of a deterministic view of nature in general, something we could call “radical determinism”. In fact, we do not live in a deterministic world, but that is a problem that I leave for another article. Free will deniers like to claim that theirs is a view that comes from science, when in fact the view from neuroscience is neutral or supportive of free will. Only by assuming a simplistic view of difficult neuroscience problems can they affirm that it denies free will. In my view, the key to whether we have free will resides not so much on what we understand as “free will”, but in what we mean by “I” when we say “I have free will”. If we start with the wrong assumptions about who or what we are, we will end up with the wrong conclusions about free will. I have identified three wrong ideas about the nature of the self that lead to the idea that we do not have free will: The ghost in the machine Derived from old religious dogma, this is the idea that we are an immaterial soul that somehow connects with our brain. The concept of the soul, as found in Christianity and Islam, is that it is the essence of ourselves that survives the death of the body. Many Hindu traditions believe that we are the Atman, an essence that is neither the body nor the mind and that is identical to Brahman, the primal God who created the Universe. The Christian soul or the Hindu Atman is free because it is not material and therefore not subject to the laws of cause-and-effect of the natural world. Paradoxically, many naturalists seem to buy into this idea in the sense that, once we prove that the soul does not exist, free will disappears because the mind is now subjected to the laws of nature. However, this is not true is we redefine free will as the ability of the mind to direct its own behavior, that is, to generate a subsequent mental state from its previous state. The homunculus or the command center Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained, argues that the old-fashion view of the mind is that of a homunculus in a “Cartesian Theatre”. Homunculus means “a little human”, a being in the center of the mind that watches what comes to the mind through the senses as if watching a screen in a movie theater — the Cartesian Theater. The homunculus then presses some levers that make to body move in a particular way. Free will, then, resides in the homunculus or a command center in the middle of the mind. Although there is no soul, there is a part of the brain that is the decision-maker. However, studies of the brain have shown that there is no command center, no privileged brain region that is in charge of making decisions. While it is true that brain areas like the prefrontal cortex or the anterior cingulate cortex play an important role in motivation and decision-making, they can only do this while communicating with other parts of the brain. Emotional states generated in the amygdala and the insula, and motivational/reward pathways linking the ventral tegmental area with the nucleus accumbens, play a large role in directing our actions and our attention. However, the fact that there is no command center in our brain does not mean that we do not have free will, because free will is not a property of a part of our brain but of the entire brain. Identifying the self with consciousness This is perhaps a more subtle version of the idea of the “ghost in the machine” or the “command center”. For example, for Sam Harris, consciousness is the ultimately undeniable reality because we cannot doubt our own experience. This is pretty much the same idea that Descartes put forward when he said “I think, therefore I am” as the starting point of his philosophy. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio debunked this idea in his book Descartes’ Error, and it is also criticized by Dennett in Consciousness Explained. Basically, Sam Harris seems to think is that we are our consciousness. Therefore, if we are influenced by something outside consciousness, like an unconscious drive, then we are not free. Since everything that is now conscious was once unconscious, we are driven by impulses outside our conscious self and, therefore we do not have free will. The problem with this way of thinking is that we are not our consciousness. In this, Harris seems to be overly influenced by Buddhist ideas that give consciousness a mystical importance. However, Buddhism has a contradiction at its core: how to reconcile the idea that we have no souls (‘anatman’ or ‘anatta’, preached by the Buddha himself) with the idea of reincarnation. If we have no soul, what is there to reincarnate? The answer is that karma reincarnates. However, karma is the consequences of our actions, it is not “our self”, so we cannot say that “I” reincarnate. To get around this problem, many Buddhists say that consciousness reincarnates together with karma, “like a flame starting another flame”. We can see how this confers an immaterial attribute to consciousness: since it can survive death to pass from one body to the next, it is independent of the body and the brain. So we are back to the “ghost in the machine”, only that now it is called consciousness. Of course, Sam Harris does not believe in reincarnation, but he seems to believe that consciousness is something immaterial. Like some Buddhists, he thinks that we have no self, but that there can be “pure consciousness”. However, a careful look at what we know about consciousness from brain experiments, like the one taken by Dennett, shows that there is no clear delimitation between the conscious and the unconscious, but a constant flow from one to the other. We are our unconscious The true naturalistic view, firmly anchored in neuroscience, biology and the whole scientific worldview is that we are our brains, nothing more and nothing less. We are what our brain produces, the entirety of our psychological experience that we call our mind. Conscious AND unconscious. Most of the things we enjoy in life, and most of the things that make us suffer, take place unconsciously. That ambient music playing in the background, that subtle smell, that headache that we have successfully pushed out of our attention, they are unconscious and yet have an impact on the quality of our life. If pressed, we would have a hard time separating the things of which we are conscious from those that happen just beyond our consciousness. If we experienced something but then we forgot about it, is it conscious or unconscious? Many sports, like skiing, riding a bike or martial arts, are done unconsciously. Nevertheless, we say that “I” do these things, not that they are done for us by some parts of our brain foreign to ourselves. I propose that “I” am the entirety of my brain, of my mind, conscious and unconscious, and that this I has free will. I am not a puppet of my unconscious because my unconscious is me and I am my unconscious. By free will, I mean that I constantly confront situations in which I must decide between several options, and I choose them based on the state of my mind. Free will does not mean to be able to make choices against the laws of nature. It does not mean that I do not have an origin in the natural world or that I am free from death. I am a living being with a limited life span, and I only have free will during that time. Furthermore, my agency changes depending on my abilities: it increased as I grew from childhood to adulthood and it will decrease as I age. I am also caused, I didn’t come out of nothing. Still, this coalescence of causation that I am can generate its own causes and, therefore, it is free. Agency and free will We could say that free will is a particular case of agency. While free will is the ability to make conscious choices, agency is the property of living beings to internally generate causes according to a pre-programmed goal. We find this idea in the books by Stuart Kauffman (At Home in the Universe, Investigations): life and evolution are algorithms that run with the ultimate outcome of perpetuating themselves. If they fail to perpetuate, they disappear, making room for other algorithms that more effectively perpetuate themselves. So the algorithm which is life makes us believe that living beings have goals: stay alive and reproduce. Living beings become agents as they execute increasingly complex functions to achieve those goals. They are not independent of causation, it is only that causation has divided into two branches: the internal causation that moves them to stay alive and reproduce and external causation that may aid, hinder or be neutral to that goal. Inasmuch as living being are clusters of internal causes, they are agents. Humans are agents and are conscious, which means that we have free will. We have the ability to generate causes from the state of our bodies and brains, to generate one mental state from the previous mental state. We are those flowing mental states that cause each other. We are free. Free will and responsibility Let me end with two ethical implications. The denial of free will is framed in the context of moral responsibility. If humans do not have free will, the reasoning goes, then it is wrong to make them responsible for their actions and reward or punish them for what they do. Instead, people who do wrong should be treated as malfunctioning robots in need of reprogramming. This is cast as a way toward more leniency and compassion towards wrong-doers (there is a great discussion on this in the final chapter of Who's In Charge? by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga). The idea that the perpetrators of the many hideous crimes that plague history are not responsible for them is morally repugnant to most of us. Free will and freedom There is another ethical implication in the denial of free will: the idea that individual freedom is not important. If free will is an illusion, then so is liberty. This is not just an abstract idea. It has practical implications. If freedom is an illusion, it would be ethical to reach into somebody’s mind and tweak it until they behave in an optimal way. Actually, technologies to achieve this are already available in the form of drugs and electrical, magnetic or genetic manipulations that allow the fine control the brain. If people do not have free will, then these forms of mind control would not be taking anything away from them. Denial of free will means that liberty, one of the founding principles of modern democracies, is just an illusion. We should be able to discard it in our way to build the perfect society, right? To be consistent with their ideas, deniers of free will should advocate for benign dictatorships based on mind control as ways to eliminate crime and build the perfect society. I put this idea at the end of the article so that it wouldn’t be the fallacy of arguing from adverse consequences. The idea that free will exists stands on its own, firmly based in neuroscience. My point, however, is that belief in the lack of free can have disastrous consequences for our society by undermining the idea that all human beings should be free. It would provide a moral justification to manipulate the human brain without consent. Who wants to live in a world without freedom?

These properties of the human mind make us experience happiness and suffering in ways that animals do not The question of human primacy One of the cornerstone ideas of the animal rights movement is that there are no fundamental differences between humans and animals: humans are just animals, only more intelligent (Ryder, 1991). Therefore, some argue, since having a larger brain is just another quirk - like elephants having larger tusks - animals should have the same rights as humans. In particular, they should have a right to life, a right to freedom, and a right not to be used by humans. Moreover, the well-being of humans should not be put above the well-being of animals (Singer, 1991). Hence, doing research on animals cannot be justified by improvements in human health, as scientists claim (Ringach, 2011; Bennett and Ringach, 2016). Of course, all of these arguments fly in the face of the values of all human societies from prehistory to date, which have used animals for food, clothing, work and entertainment. No matter, says the animal right activist, using animals is unethical and has to stop (Reagan, 1985). In the past, justification for human primacy over animals came from religions like Christianity, which stated that humans are superior to animals because they have an immortal soul, and that God commanded humans to rule over animals. However, the Theory of Evolution and modern physiology have pushed back against those beliefs, showing that there is an evolutionary continuum between animals and humans, and that there are no fundamental differences between the physiology of the humans and other mammals (Rachels, 1990). Intelligence is not the only difference between the human and the animal mind If the only difference between humans and animals is that of a higher intelligence, does that justify that we treat ourselves better than the animals? Or is this just self-interested behavior? “Speciesism”, as the animal rights proponent Richard Ryder has called it (Ryder, 1991). To argue their case, animal right proponents invoke “marginal cases.” These include infants and persons with significant mental disabilities. Their argument is that, since these persons have an intelligence similar to that of some animals, then they should be treated the same way as we treat animals (Reagan, 1985; Singer, 1991). Otherwise, they argue, we should be prepared to give animals the same rights that we readily give these marginal case humans. However, modern neuroscience has in fact uncovered many differences between humans and the rest of the animals that make us unique. These differences are not limited to a quantitative difference in intelligence but include many other mental abilities that make us completely unique (Penn et al., 2008). Humans are a qualitatively different type of being. Here is a list of the most important of these qualities of the human mind. Theory of Mind Theory of mind is the ability to understand what other people are feeling and thinking [pages 172-178 in (Blackmore, 2004); pages 48-54 in (Gazzaniga, 2008)]. We do that by running inside our heads a model of what is happening in other person’s mind. Of course, the model is not always right, but nevertheless it is extremely valuable because it lets us predict the behavior of people around us. Theory of mind seems to require the right anterior insula, a part of the brain cortex that evolved rapidly in apes. The function of the right anterior insula is to create hypothetical models of the internal state of our body in different circumstances (Craig, 2010, 2011). For example, when we imagine what it would feel like to stab our toe, is the right anterior insula doing that. Likewise, the right anterior insula can make a model of the internal state of the body of another person. Of course, theory of mind is much more than that. It involves the cognitive abilities of many other parts of the brain. Research on theory of mind has revealed it to be uniquely human (Penn and Povinelli, 2007), although some studies claims to have found it in rudimentary form in chimpanzees (Call and Tomasello, 2008; Yamamoto et al., 2013). One negative aspect of theory of mind is that it often creates the delusion of attributing human consciousness to inanimate objects or animals. This is called anthropomorphism. The same way that we project our thoughts and emotions to a person who we see behaving in a way similar to us, we project human thoughts and emotions to an animal or an object we see doing something that resembles human behavior. The anthropomorphizing of animals is extremely common in ancient and modern culture, from the Fables of Aesop to Disney movies. Episodic memory There are two basic forms of memory: procedural and declarative [pages 303-306 in (Gazzaniga, 2008)]. Procedural memory is present in both humans and animals and consists of the retention of perceptual, motor and cognitive skills that are then expressed non-consciously. For example, when we walk, swim, ski, listen to music, type on a keyboard or process the visual information we get from a television screen, we use procedural memory. Declarative memory stores information about facts and beliefs about the world, and can be further divided into semantic and episodic memory. Semantic memory is about facts in the world that stand by themselves, independently of our self, whereas episodic memory is remembering things that happened to us. That is, episodic memory retains events as they were experienced by ourselves in a particular place and time. Episodic memory appears to be uniquely human, because it involves subjective experiences, a concept of self, and subjective time. This is important because it allows us to travel mentally in time through subjective experiences, while animals are locked in the present of their current motivational state. Social emotions Mammals, birds and some other animals have a set of six basic emotions listed by Ekman: anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness and surprise. However, we humans are able to feel many other emotions that regulate our social behavior and the way we view the world: guilt, shame, pride, honor, awe, interest, envy, nostalgia, hope, despair, contempt and many others. While emotions like love and loyalty may be present in mammals that live in hierarchical societies, emotions like guilt, shame - and their counterpart pride and honor - seem to be uniquely human. There is much controversy these days about whether dogs feel guilt and shame. There is evidence that they do not. Alternatively, they may also have gained this emotion as a way to interact with humans. Many of the emotions that we value as being human are not present in animals. Empathy and compassion “Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.” Wikipedia. It is a well-established fact that many animals react to the distress of other animals by showing signs of distress themselves. However, this does not seem to represent true empathy as defined above, but a genetically encoded stress response in anticipation of harm. Since empathy requires feeling what the other person is feeling from their own frame of reference, it would require theory of mind. Only if we stripe the requirement of adopting the other’s frame of reference we can say that animals have empathy. Empathy involves the newly evolved anterior insula in humans (Preis et al., 2013), bonobos and chimpanzees (Rilling et al., 2012). Compassion is currently thought to be different from empathy because it involves many other parts of the brain. It seems to be associated with complex cultural and cognitive elements. Therefore, it seems safe to assume that animals are not able to feel compassion. Language and culture Although animals do communicate with each other using sounds, signs and body language, human language is a qualitative leap from any form of animal communication in its unique ability to convey factual information and not just emotional states. In that, human language is linked to our ability to store huge amounts of semantic and episodic memory, as defined above. The human brain has a unique capacity to quickly learn spoken languages during a portal that closes around 5-6 years of age. Attempts to teach sign languages to apes has produced only limited success and can be attributed to a humanization of the brain of those animals, raised inside human culture. The effectiveness of spoken and written language to store information across many generations gave raise to human cultures. The working of the human brain cannot be understood without taking culture into account. Culture completely shapes the way we think, feel, perceive and behave. Although there are documented cases of transmission of learned information across generations in animals, producing what we could call an animal culture, no animal is as shaped by culture as we are. Esthetic sense The appreciation of beauty also seems to be uniquely human. Of course, animals can produce great beauty in the form of colorful bodies, songs and artful behavior. What seems to be lacking is their ability to appreciate and value that beauty beyond stereotypical mating and territorial behaviors. Attempts to teach chimps to produce art by drawing have failed. Ethics Ethics is the ability to appreciate fairness, justice and rights. It is at the very core of our ability to form stable societies and to cooperate to achieve common goals. It depends on theory of mind; on social emotions like guilt, shame, pride and contempt; on empathy and compassion, and on cultural heritage. Lacking all those mental abilities, animals have no sense of ethics. Even though some studies have shown that monkeys have a primitive sense of fairness (particularly when it applies to their own interest), it is but a pale anticipation of our sense of justice. This simply shows that ethics is rooted in our evolutionary history. The fact that animals cannot even remotely comprehend the concept of rights is a strong argument for why they should not have rights. What sense does it make to give animals something that they do not know that they lack? Extended consciousness The question of what is consciousness has been called by philosophers “the hard problem” due to the difficulty of answering it (Blackmore, 2004). Therefore, the related question of whether animals have consciousness, or what animals have it, remains unanswered in the strict sense. However, based on their behavior, we commonly assume that animals like cats, dogs and horses are conscious and able to make autonomous decisions. On the other hand, unless we invoke some mystical definition of consciousness, it is safe to assume that animals with small nervous systems, like jellyfish, worms, starfish, snails and clams have no consciousness whatsoever. They are like plants: living beings able to react to the environment as automatons. That leaves a lot of animals for which it is hard to guess whether or not they are conscious: insects, fish, octopi, lizards and small mammals like mice and rats. What has been becoming clear is that we humans possess a kind of consciousness that no other animal has: the ability to see ourselves as selves extending from the pass to the future [pages 309-321 (Gazzaniga, 2008)]. This special kind of consciousness has been called extended consciousness by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio [Chapter 7 in (Damasio, 1999)]. It allows us a sort of “mental time travel” to relive events in the past and predict what may happen to us in the future (Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007). Extended consciousness is based on our ability to have episodic memory and theory of mind. Episodic memory configures remembered events around the image of the self, whereas theory of mind allows us to create a model of our own mind as it was during a past event or to hypothesize how it would be in a future event. I should point out that a few animals (apes, dolphins and elephants) may turn out to have episodic memory, theory of mind and hence extended consciousness. However, this is still very much in question. Suffering and happiness It is a common mistake to confuse suffering with pain and happiness with joy. Pain is the representation of a bodily state and the emotion associated with it (Craig, 2003). Likewise, joy is an emotion associated with an excited but pleasant body state in an agreeable environment. Suffering and happiness are much deeper than that, and refer to the totality of a mental state, encompassing cognition, emotion and state of consciousness. Although suffering and happiness are normally associated with certain emotions, there is not always a correspondence with them. For example, one can be happy while feeling scared or sad, or suffer even in the presence of a passing joy. The error of philosophers like Peter Singer (Singer, 1991) and Tom Reagan (Reagan, 1985) is that they consider suffering as something that occurs independently of cognition and other mental abilities, when it does not. Arguably, happiness and suffering require some continuity in time, which would seem to require extended consciousness. Furthermore, conceptions of happiness extending to antiquity refer to lifelong attitudes like hedonism - the quest for pleasure - and eudemonia - working to acquire virtue or to achieve goals that transcend oneself-, pointing to the fact that human happiness depends on cultural values. In view of all this, we need to wonder whether happiness and suffering can exist in beings that have no episodic memory, no extended consciousness, no sense of self, and no culture. Can happiness and suffering really be attributed to animals lacking these mental abilities? Or is this an illusion, an anthropomorphizing caused by the overreaching of our theory of mind? Without going to that extreme, it is quite clear that we humans have a capacity to be happy and to suffer that goes far beyond what animals can experience. Hence, human suffering should count more than any suffering than an animal could have. Shall we value being human? There are many more differences between human and animals. I think that the ones that I list here are important because they give us our special feeling of humaneness. All of them are based on scientific facts about the human mind that are slowly being unraveled by neuroscience, not on religious beliefs or on ideology. However, what cannot be based on science is the value we attribute to those differences. Ultimately, this is a decision based on our ethical intuitions. For most people, what determines how much consideration we should give to a being is its ability to be conscious; to feel empathy; to feel guilt and pride and shame and all other human emotions; to be happy as we are happy and to suffer like we suffer. Rejecting the marginal case argument An important corollary of the ideas I propose here is to refute the “marginal case” argument. Even when a human brain is damaged by disease, accident or old age, most of the properties that I have listed here remain because they are deeply engrained in the way the human brain works. Theory of mind and extended consciousness appear early in human life and are the last things to go in a deteriorating brain. It takes a coma to deprive us of them. A person may have a reduced intelligence or other cognitive disabilities but still have theory of mind, empathy, compassion, extended consciousness and human social emotions. That is why when we encounter people with mental disabilities, we recognize them as humans and we know we should treat them as humans. They are not animals and should never be treated as such. Intelligence is just a tiny part of what it means to be human. Different animals have different ethical status Another important conclusion is that there are vast differences in the mental abilities of animals and, therefore, in the way they should be treated. Many animals, like jellyfish, worms and clams, do not have any mental capabilities at all, do not feel pain, and can be treated the same as plants. On the other side of the mental spectrum, it is possible that we will find that the great apes, dolphins and elephants have some form of theory of mind and extended consciousness, and therefore deserve a special treatment compared to other animals. Dogs and cats have evolved special ways to communicate with humans that make them special in our eyes. Therefore, when it comes to ethical consideration, animals should not be put in a general category, but each species should be assigned its own ethical status. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in the quandary of not being able to rid our dog of fleas because these insects have the same “rights” as the dog. This is, in fact, what we have been doing all along based on our moral intuition. We establish a hierarchy of animals that deserve more or less consideration based on their mental abilities. And we put humans at the top of this hierarchy of ethical status because when we establish the criteria for doing that, we come inevitably at the top. Because, so far, there is no other being that can assign moral status but humans. Speciesism is unavoidable because we cannot treat different species of animals the same way. Animal welfare is based on our humanity Let me finish by saying that this is not an argument to treat animals cruelly or poorly. It is only an argument to treat humans better than animals and to keep using animals for our benefit. We should care about the welfare of animals, even as we try to understand how similar and how different they are from ourselves. What moves us to treat animals well is our empathy, our compassion, our sense of fairness and our cultural values. Things that animals do not have. We must treat animals right, not because of what they are, but because of who we are. References Bennett Allyson J, Ringach Dario L (2016) Animal Research in Neuroscience: A Duty to Engage. Neuron 92:653-657. Blackmore S (2004) Consciousness: An Introduction. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Call J, Tomasello M (2008) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends Cogn Sci 12:187-192. Craig AD (2003) A new view of pain as a homeostatic emotion. Trends Neurosci 26:303-307. Craig AD (2010) The sentient self. Brain Struct Funct 214:563-577. Craig AD (2011) Significance of the insula for the evolution of human awareness of feelings from the body. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1225:72-82. Damasio AR (1999) The Feeling of What Happens. Gazzaniga MS (2008) Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Penn DC, Povinelli DJ (2007) On the lack of evidence that non-human animals possess anything remotely resembling a 'theory of mind'. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological sciences 362:731-744. Penn DC, Holyoak KJ, Povinelli DJ (2008) Darwin's mistake: explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31:109-130; discussion 130-178. Preis MA, Schmidt-Samoa C, Dechent P, Kroener-Herwig B (2013) The effects of prior pain experience on neural correlates of empathy for pain: An fMRI study. Pain 154:411-418. Rachels J (1990) Created from Animals: The Moral Implication of Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reagan T (1985) The Case for Animal Rights. In: In Defence of Animals (Singer P, ed), pp 13-26. New York: Basic Blackwell. Rilling JK, Scholz J, Preuss TM, Glasser MF, Errangi BK, Behrens TE (2012) Differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in neural systems supporting social cognition. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 7:369-379. Ringach DL (2011) The Use of Nonhuman Animals in Biomedical Research. American Journal of Medical Sciences 342:305-313. Ryder R (1991) Speciecism. In: Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues (Baird RM, Rosenbaum SE, eds), pp 24-34. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Singer P (1991) The Significance of Animal Suffering. In: Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues (Baird RM, Rosenbaum M, eds), pp 57-66. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. Suddendorf T, Corballis MC (2007) The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behav Brain Sci 30:299-313; discussion 313-251. Yamamoto S, Humle T, Tanaka M (2013) Basis for cumulative cultural evolution in chimpanzees: social learning of a more efficient tool-use technique. PLoS One 8:e55768.

New genetic techniques like fluorescent reporter genes, optogenetics and DREADD allow scientist to manipulate the functions of individual cells in live animals. Many of my scientists colleagues are thrilled about the new transgenic techniques. Transgenic methods are sophisticated molecular biology techniques that consist of moving genes from one species to another, or in creating artificial genes and expressing them in a living organism. They represent the convergence of decades of work in areas as diverse as molecular biology, protein chemistry, cellular biology, neuroscience, microbiology, virology and animal behavior. Transgenic techniques are likely to be applied to humans in the near future and this will dramatically change medicine, hopefully bringing cures for diseases that we cannot treat today. And yet, the general public appears to be completely unaware of them. Maybe because they are done in animals, and animal research is a modern taboo. Genetic modification is also politically incorrect, so these scientists tend to be shy about explaining what they are doing, even though is one of the most remarkable advances of modern science. It is also true that these techniques are difficult to explain. So, let me give it a shot. What are knock-in genes? The techniques that I describe here are known as genetic knock-in. As you probably know, genes are sequences of DNA that get translated into proteins, which, in turn, are like little machines that carry out most of the cell’s functions. Therefore, by changing a gene we can change the protein that it makes and the functioning of that cell, which eventually shows up as a change in the whole animal. Translation of a gene into protein is initiated by a sort sequence of DNA located just before the gene, called the promoter. Gene knock-out is to manipulate a gene so that it cannot be translated into protein - it becomes non-functional. Gene knock-in is the opposite: making an organism express genes from another organism, or artificial genes that encode novel proteins. In biomedical research, gene knock-in techniques are applied to a few animal species: the worm C. elegans, the fly Drosophila, zebrafish and mice. However, mice are the most relevant for translation to humans because their physiology, nervous systems, and genes are closer to humans than those of flies and fish. Mice are studied instead of rats or other mammals because it is easier to insert genes in their embryos. Germ line and somatic line insertion of the transgenes Gene knock-in can be done in two fundamentally different ways Germ line insertion. The new genes are inserted in the cells used for reproduction, so that they will be present in the sperm and the oocytes when they combine to produce a new animal. Then, the new genes will be present in every cell of the offspring. Since this includes the germ-line cells of the offspring, they will also be present in the descendant of that animal. However, they will not be expressed - translated into protein - in cells that do not activate the promoter of the new gene. Somatic line insertion. The news genes are inserted only into some cells of an animal using a viral vector. For example, the gene may be targeted to particular type of neurons in the brain of the animal. Viral vectors are viruses that have been emptied of their genetic material (DNA or RNA), so they cannot produce a disease. Their genetic material is replaced by the transgenes. The viral vector can still infect the cells that it usually target - for example, a rabies virus vector will infect neurons. However, it will inject them with the transgene instead of the genetic material to make new viruses. Transgenic techniques often combine germ-line and somatic line insertions to administer two genes. Only the cells where the two genes find each other will express the new protein that changes their function. The difference between germ line and somatic line insertion is fundamental for ethical reasons. It is okay to do somatic line insertion in humans, because the genetic change will not be passed to the descendants of that person. However, germ line insertions will be passed to new generations, permanently altering the human genome. That’s a Pandora's Box that scientists are reluctant to open. Cell-selective gene knock-out An important feature of these transgenic methods is that the expression of the artificial proteins is cell-selective, that is, it can be targeted to a particular population of cells inside a tissue, even if they are mixed up with other cells types. This is done by taking advantage of the fact that a particular cell type expresses genes that are not expressed in other cell types. This is because each cell type activates a different set of promoters in their DNA. The selection of which promoters are activated is part of the cell differentiation during the development of the embryo and the fetus - the process that produces the different organs and tissues of the body. The gene encoding the artificial protein that we want to express is put after the promoter of a gene that is exclusive of that cell type. More specificity is achieved by using a technique called Cre-lox recombination (Heldt and Ressler, 2009). Cre is an enzyme derived from a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) that recognizes portions of DNA flanked by two sequences called lox and deletes them. Hence, when Cre is expressed in a cell with a gene flanked by lox - ‘floxed’ - that gene is deleted. The simplest way to use Cre-lox recombination is to selectively knock-out a gene in a particular cell type. Cre is expressed under the promoter of a gene exclusive of that cell type, either in the germ line or delivered with a viral vector. The gene that we want to delete is floxed. When Cre and the floxed gene meet in a cell, the floxed gene is deleted (Figure 3). Cell-selective gene knock-in Knocking-in a gene encoding an artificial protein requires a modification of Cre-lox recombination called DIO (Double-floxed Inverse Open reading frame). The gene encoding for the artificial protein is introduced in the DNA in reverse order, so that it cannot be translated into protein. The enzymes that transcribe DNA to messenger RNA cannot read inverted sequences, just like you cannot read cinegsnart as transgenic. That inverted gene sequence is flanked by two sets of lox - it’s double-floxed. Cutting and pasting by Cre on these two sets of lox sequences results in turning around the gene, so that now it can be read and translated into protein. Hence, only cells that have both Cre and the double-floxed inverted gene are able to express the artificial protein. It is usually expressed together with a fluorescent protein - a reporter gene -, to let us know that the expression has been successful. Fluorescent proteins Fluorescent proteins occur naturally in jellyfish and corals. They make them glow - fluoresce - when they are illuminated by light of certain colors. Scientists have extracted the genes that encode for these fluorescent proteins and inserted them in the mouse genome preceded by the promoter of a certain gene. This way, only the cells that activate that promoter to express that particular gene get loaded with the fluorescent protein. This allows them to label specific types of cells in a given tissue with bright colors. The resulting images are amazingly cool! When used in neurons, fluorescent proteins allow the visualization of very small features, like neurons (Figure 1) axons (Figure 2) or dendritic spines (Figure 4). By labeling neurons that activate different promoters with different fluorescent proteins, scientists were able to create the “brainbow” shown in Figure 5. The first fluorescent protein to be used was green fluorescent protein (GFP), extracted from a jellyfish. It was followed by others that were given names of fruits representative of their colors (mCherry, mOrange, mRaspberry and tdTomato) or exotic names like Venus, Citrine, mRuby or FusionRed. The use of fluorescent proteins has transformed the fields of physiology and anatomy by vastly improving our ability to identify and locate specific cell types. Until now, this was done using a technique called immunohistochemistry, based on the use of antibodies against specific proteins. However, fluorescent proteins provide much higher resolution and avoid many of the artifacts produced by the antibodies. But the way fluorescent proteins are mostly used is as reporter genes. They are expressed under the same promoter as another transgene, so we can now identify the cells expressing the transgene by the bright color provided by the fluorescent protein. The brightness of the cell also serves as a measure of the level of expression of the transgene. I have used fluorescent proteins as reporter genes in my own lab. You can see the results in some of the figures, which are images taken by me with a confocal microscope. Humanized mice Groups that oppose research on animal argue that animal research has no predictive value because animal physiology and human physiology are radically different, which is completely false. All mammals use the same set of proteins for the same functions. What is true, however, is that small changes in the amino acid sequence of a protein can cause a drug that binds well to a mouse protein to perform poorly on the same protein in humans. This has slowed down the translation of discoveries from animal research to clinical application. This problem can be solved by replacing the mouse gene with the human gene for the same protein. For example, we could replace the gene for the mouse mu-opioid receptor (which binds opioid drugs like morphine) with the human gene for the mu-opioid receptor. This does not result in monsters that are half-mouse, half-human, as in some horror movie, but in mice that are entirely normal in their looks and behavior, but in which we can test new opioid drugs for their effects on humans. Calcium indicators The calcium ion Ca2+ is one of the most important conveyors of information inside cells, what scientists call intracellular signals. Together with compounds like cyclic-AMP, diacylglycerol and inositol triphosphate, calcium ions are called second messengers. The first messengers are hormones and neurotransmitters that convey signals outside the cell. These signals are picked up by receptors in the cellular membrane or inside the cell and transformed into signals by the second messengers. Concentrations of calcium inside the cells are 10,000 times lower than outside the cells. They increase 10 to 100 times by opening calcium channels in the cell membrane or in intracellular calcium stores. This conveys a signal that turns on or off different proteins, the machines that perform the various tasks inside the cell. That way, calcium ions regulate cell function. In the 1980s, biochemist Roger Tsien invented several compounds (like Fura-2 and Fluo-3) that can be used to measure the concentration of calcium inside cells through changes in their fluorescence. These calcium indicators perform very well in cell cultures, but their use in tissue slices is problematic because cells absorb them randomly. The solution was to fuse the gene for green fluorescent protein with the gene encoding calmodulin, a protein that binds calcium inside the cells, to create a genetically-encoded calcium indicators called GCaMP. Like the fluorescent proteins, genetically encoded calcium indicators can be selectively expressed in particular cell types by associating their gene with a particular promoter in the DNA. This allowed scientists to observe cell activation as changes in in intracellular calcium live mice. This is done by mounting tiny microscopes on the mice that they carry while they move freely in their cages - another technological feat. These tiny microscopes have digital cameras connected to a computer. Chemogenetics Chemogenetics allows controlling the functioning of specific cell types in live animals. If calcium imaging lets us know how a cell is functioning, chemogenetics allows to change the function of precisely defined groups of cells. The most popular chemogenetic method was named DREADD by its inventor, Dr. Bryan Roth, an acronym for Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drug (Sternson and Roth, 2014; Roth, 2016). The name caught on, perhaps because of its humorous association with the word dread, and it is frequently used instead of chemogenetics. The Roth’s lab started with the genes for neurotransmitters receptors that inhibit cell function - like the M4 muscarinic receptor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine - or receptors that increase cell function - like the M3 muscarinic receptor for acetylcholine. Then they altered these genes to modify binding site in the receptor protein so that it no longer bound acetylcholine, but an artificial compound, clozapine-N-oxide (CNO), that has no effect on mammals. This way, the new DREADD receptor cannot be activated by acetylcholine and to many drugs, but responds to CNO. Inhibitory DREADDs, like the one derived from the M4 muscarinic receptors, can be triggered by CNO to decrease the firing of action potentials in neurons that express it. Excitatory DREADDs, like the one derived from the M3 muscarinic receptors, when triggered by CNO, increase the firing of action potentials in neurons that express it. Other DREADDs are neither excitatory nor inhibitory, but activate different second messengers pathways. This allows fine-tuning the function of any cell in the body in ways that are much more specific for the cell type and the function than any drug used in medicine today. CNO can be given to mice with a simple subcutaneous injection. Its effect lasts more than four hours. The activation and inhibition of neurons by DREADD in mice can then be observed as changes in their behavior. Optogenetics Optogenetics (Kravitz and Kreitzer, 2011; Yizhar et al., 2011) is similar to chemogenetics in that an artificial protein is expressed in neurons to turn them on or off. However, instead of an artificial drug like CNO, optogenetics uses light. This was done by starting with the gene of a light-sensitive protein like channelrhodopsin (which activates cells) or halorhodopsin (which inhibits cells). The advantage of optogenetics over chemogenetics is that its effect on cells is extremely fast. Its main disadvantage is that it requires the use of light guides: small fiber-optic strings that have to be precisely inserted in the brain or other organs of the animal. There are now tiny light sources that can be mounted over the head of the mouse and activated by radio waves, so that the mouse doesn’t need to be tethered by cable for the experiment. Still, this is more invasive than DREADD. How we eliminated stress in mice in my lab using DREADD In my lab, we used DREADD to control stress in mice. We did this by manipulating the amygdala, a brain region that induces fear and distress. Some of the neurons in the amygdala produce corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a neuropeptide that increases stress (Andreoli et al., 2017). We bought transgenic mice that express Cre under the CRF promoter, so that Cre would be expressed in the CRF neurons of the amygdala. This provided one of the elements for Cre-lox recombination. The other element for Cre-lox recombination was packaged inside a viral vector, which we also bought. As I explained above, viral vectors attach to cells and inject the artificial genes into them. Inside the viral capsid there was a highly sophisticated genetic construct: a DIO (Double-floxed Inverse Open reading frame) inhibitory DREADD and a reporter gene, the red fluorescent protein mCherry. The most difficult part of the experiment was to inject the viral vector into the amygdala of the small brain of the mouse. This was done using a stereotactic injection, a method consisting of placing a small needle inside the brain of the mouse at the coordinates of a particular region, using a three-dimensional set of micro-manipulators and a computerized atlas of the mouse brain. Then the needle is used to inject minuscule amounts of solution containing the viral vector. The vector delivers the transgenes into all the neurons of the amygdala, but only the CRF neurons that express Cre can turn the DREADD-mCherry genes around so that they can be translated into proteins. Figure 6 shows the result: CRF neurons in the amygdala expressing the mCherry reporter gene. But how did we know that the DREADD is working? We took the mouse and made it swim in a bucket of water for 6 minutes. It got stressed and became more sensitive to pain. We measured its pain sensitivity by gently poking its paw with nylon filaments and measuring how long it took it to withdraw the paw. Then we took the same mouse and activated the inhibitory DREADD with an injection of CNO. When be put the mouse in the bucket of water for 6 minutes, it didn’t get stressed and did not develop pain sensitivity. Can transgenic methods be applied to humans? The experiment in my lab that I just described indicates that it is possible to inhibit stress in humans using DREADD. Similarly, we could use inhibitory DREADD to inhibit the neurons that transmit pain in chronic pain disorders to make the patients feel better. Or we could use excitatory DREADD to stimulate the neurons in the substantia nigra that release dopamine to counter the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Basically, we could pick up any population of neurons in the brain and turn them on or off to fine tune any function of the brain. And we can do the same with any cell of the body. This will create a new type of medicine that selectively targets specific cells to fine-tune their function, instead of administering drugs that affect the whole body and thus create a bunch of side effects. Application for brain-computer interface As for optogenetics, it may one day allow fast communication with individual neurons using fiber optics. That way, we could use light instead of electrodes to have the computer stimulate specific neurons in a brain-computer interface. This would serve to input information from the computer into the brain. To output information from the brain to the computer, we could use calcium indicators, which would monitor the activity of single neurons. Ethical barriers The main obstacle to apply transgenic techniques to humans is that it is currently forbidden to alter the germ line of a human being. As I explained before, any changes in the germ line will be transmitted to our descendants, permanently altering the human genome. As the genetic modifications start piling up, we would create a new human species. We have transgenic mice, but we cannot have transgenic humans. I don’t think that the gene knock-in modifications that have been done in mice will be harmful to humans. Transgenic mice expressing Cre or floxed genes are healthy. They behave normally until these genes are activated. This problem can be overcome if we keep the genetic modifications to the somatic line, leaving the germ line untouched. This could be done by giving the Cre gene and the floxed genes in two separate viral vectors. We are already doing this in mice, but more animal work would be needed before we know how to do it safely in humans. Research on animals is more necessary than ever DREADD (Nagai et al., 2016) and optogenetics (Chernov et al., 2018) are already being used in monkeys, a necessary step to adapt these techniques to humans. However, any experiments done in monkeys are fought tooth and nail by animal liberationists. In fact, these new transgenic techniques are exactly the opposite of what was expected from future developments in biomedical research. It was believed that research with animal would eventually become a thing of the past, a necessary evil that would eventually be eliminated by replacing lab animals with in vitro methods, cell cultures, computer models and clinical studies. However, transgenic techniques are moving science in the opposite direction. Experiments that could only be done in vitro or in cell culture now can be done inside live animals. This means that in a single experiment now we can gather information about interlinked molecular, cellular, physiological and behavioral events, providing valuable insights into the relationships between them. Far from replacing animal research, cell culture and in vitro methods are the ones that risk becoming obsolete. The use of transgenic animals today represents the cutting edge of science. Any country that curtails animal research with onerous and unnecessary regulations risks being left behind in the race to develop these exciting new technologies. 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