3 Essential Things You Need to Know About a Man’s Brain

Fact #2: The sight of the female body triggers an involuntary sexual reaction.

Yes, I know it’s a huge shocker that men think about sex a lot. Check. But that’s not exactly what I mean.

Certain sights are automatically, biologically, sexual in nature to the male brain – which means those sights deliver a dose of pleasure regardless of whether the guy wants them to. For example, even a five-year-old boy, who has no idea what sex is, will have an instantaneous and gut-level feeling of pleasure when he sees the college-age babysitter whose clothes (or lack thereof) draw overt attention to a great figure. Even a fifty-year-old husband who loves and honors his wife, can have an involuntary, instantaneous spike of pleasure in his brain when the image of the provocative lingerie model flashes across the television screen before he can look away.

I’m sure that some of you – like me – are a bit surprised or disturbed at the notion of an involuntary pleasurable reaction. That is because our brain is wired completely differently. Thus, most women have never experienced any kind of involuntary, gut-level, sexually-pleasurable reaction to visual images. So we have no idea that men do. Every day.

There is, however, a brain parallel we can understand. Let’s say you haven’t eaten all day and you walk into a dinner party to find a mouthwatering buffet across the room. In that split-second, a center in the back of your brain called the nucleus accumbens lights up and triggers an instinctive reaction: I want to consume that. Zero thought involved. It’s an automatic response.

Well, the same thing happens to a guy when he sees a woman dressed in a way that calls overt attention to her knockout figure. His nucleus accumbens lights up, triggering an automatic sense of pleasure and desire. He doesn’t desire the person, exactly, but that image.  And it’s critical to remember that his brain did that involuntarily.

He is then very tempted to actually look at that sexy image – to “consume” it, so to speak — because doing so would continue that dose of pleasure in his brain.