Food and sex are inextricably connected with one another. While food ensures an individual’s survival, sex ensures the survival of a species. Eating and making love have the same psychological impact. Each one offers great pleasure, comfort, a sense of nurturing and being loved. Interestingly, both can drive a sense of shame and guilt. Hence, you will always crave for both. This answers the question, can restaurants ever go out of fashion? The reply is a big ‘NO’ as what gives you pleasure, stays.
When it comes to science, eating and mating are quite similar. The brain is the center of all thoughts and emotions. It is also the operating hub for a complicated network of neuroendocrine systems and neurotransmitters. These hormones, nerves and other chemicals are responsible for not just sexual cravings, but also other responses like taste and reactions to food. We can thus conclude that good food and sex have the same neural pathways.
In the brain’s limbic system, sex and food are also physically related, which usually controls emotional activity. Working on similar lines, they bring out dopamine, making way for cravings. Dopamine is what urges humans to eat and reproduce.
Attraction is the Keyword
In several cases, sex is the result of desire and affection (at least that is what you want to believe) and the performance of sex is an unwinding experience. The same type of feeling goes for tasty food. Eating involves a process of relaxing and unwinding with your dining partner. For instance, how does your mouth react when you see a cake going to the table or a video of it somewhere? Does it not water with craving? For both acts, you need a pleasurable atmosphere.
They Utilize Your Senses
Human beings make use of a variety of senses while having sex and eating food. We perceive the sense of smell, sight and touch on both occasions. When it comes to smell, everyone has their unique experiences. Sex and food have an impact on your deepest pleasure points – getting aroused, sustaining that and nourishing the most important parts of yourself.
The smell of heating a cheese burst pizza is enough to entice me to the dining table. What about you? The picture of a delicious black forest cake can bring the urge in you to eat one yourself. And, what about holding an ice cream cup in the summer? You are not even touching the food inside, just the cup.
Pain or Pleasure?
Sigmund Freud believed that the requirement to bring your sexuality under control and make one’s sexual impulses social form the primary cause of psychological anxiety. He opined that sexual feelings start when a child is born. He explained sexual response in infants through the flushing of the skin and the sleep that follows after a satisfying session of feeding.
In some cultures, gaining weight via overeating can reduce the self-worth of a person and make it difficult to find a preferred sexual partner. In the same manner, when a love affair ends, it leads to great pain. Do you want more similarities? People who love eating, overeat in secret and most of the time, sex too happens behind closed doors.
Improves with Changes
The appetite and urge for both food and sex enhance with variety to a certain extent. Some popular diets make their way into the preference list, albeit for a short span of time, owing to the reduced quantity of permitted food. We all know what happens when we get a chance to eat unhealthy, yet tasty food. Yes, we keep eating; binge eating. Burgers, fiery red pieces of chicken, just name it!
On the contrary, people often ingest less when they have to eat healthy and permitted food. Say, a bowl of boiled leafy veggies without salt. A new sexual partner sometimes gives rise to sexual appetite and can even stimulate a sexually non-performing individual. This is because monogamous relationships that have lasted for years lose flavor and suppress sexual appetite.
Prevalent Across Cultures
The interest of anthropologists about the relationship between sex and food in developing cultures is not new. Among the Malay island culture of the Langkawi, family connections are defined by incorporating a person to the family of another person. This is how the people in that culture bring an end to the differences between people. The most common method of incorporation is to take some of the food, foreign substance or sexual fluid through the rituals of wedding or feasting. In New Guinea’s Hua society, a deep relationship exists between sexual intercourse and feeding. One partner feeds the other to transfer the vital essence.
When we share food, we establish a closeness. In this practice, there exist deep differences among cultures. Existing research is on heterosexuals, but the same principles might apply to homosexual couples. If you go to France and try to share the food with a person of the opposite gender, believe it or not, it has a sexual hint. Eating out of each other’s plate is a common way of flirting in which each partner tests how far the other partner can go in creating sexual intimacy.
It’s humane
Has there been a day when you have not thought or spoken about sex and food? While you might be a shy person, keeping yourself away from discussing sex openly, there is definitely no harm in thinking about it. And living in a generation where there is no bound in choosing the food that you like and eating it as much as you like or having as much sex as you wish to indulge yourself in has opened a world of abundance for us. I know people who can talk and sleep food any hour of the day.
The desire for human beings to have sex and food is basic and is embedded in our nature for time immemorial. Hence, if you consider someone to be impure or bad based on his or her need to do sex, you might be a wrong judge of character. On the other hand, these things are normal and make us what we are.
Would you judge a person’s character based on her eating habits? If you do, you are probably drowning in a sea of meanness. No offense please.
Sex and Food Nourish Intimacy
In some countries, variations in sharing food reveal the extent of intimacy among college students. If they watch videotapes of the other gender, sharing food in the following ways, a lot of things go on in their minds
- Passing a dish.
- Feeding the partner by a utensil or hand from his or her plate.
- Offering food that has been licked or taken a bite from.
The students when asked what they deduce from the 3 instances had the below-mentioned answers.
- The couples who participated in simple sharing activities like passing the plate were nonsexual friends.
- On the contrary, the couples that fed each other or gave each other food from which they had already taken a bite were considered sexually involved.
There is no second opinion on the fact that eating from or offering food that has already been sampled is perceived as exposed to germs and saliva and is shared by only those who are intimate with each other. This is because of another commonly perceived notion that when you do not know someone, the chances of his or her saliva being more dangerous to get high.
The disclaimer here is that with all their similarities and connections, your body does not function the same way when you eat or have sex. When you are getting turned on or chewing a burger, we have reason to believe that even though the response in your brain is similar, the actions are quite different. However, whether you consume food or sexual pleasures, the body thinks it to be awesome. Thus, it conclude that food, sex, and social interaction are the basic fundamental of human life.So when you eat with your partner at a restaurant or gossip with your friends about sex while enjoying a hearty meal, you welcome sync of common features.
