The Biological Reality: Living in Holographic Hypersexual Hyperspace

Dr. Abramowitz highlights the relentless and often ruinous constancy of the male drive.

• Overt Alertness: Biology focuses men’s attention like a laser beam from adolescence, constructing what he terms a “holographic hypersexual hyperspace”. This involves overt alertness, the ability to constantly scan a visual field for sexual opportunity.
• Neuroscience: This behavior is supported by the fact that the medial pre-optic area (the brain area that spots sexual opportunities) is two and a half times bigger in men than in women, creating a heightened dopamine reward “just by looking”.
• The Power of Fantasy: The brain is formatted by the testosterone tsunami administered around age 12 or 13. The practice of ejaculation becomes affiliated with fantasy, establishing a repeated cycle of stimulation and visualization while the brain is forming.
• The Craving Constant: The constancy of this drive is difficult for women to understand. Dr. Abramowitz uses the analogy of a pregnant woman’s uncontrollable craving: for men and sex, the craving often persists, whereas the pregnancy craving usually resolves after the third trimester.

Redefining Desire: INQ and the Intoxicated Entitlement

A core issue identified is the male tendency toward “intoxicated entitlement,” which partially explains the misunderstanding men have regarding a right to someone who looks attractive.

Abramowitz contrasts male and female desire:

• Male Fantasy: Men tend to fantasize about a specific body part of a woman (a breast, a leg, etc.).
• Female Fantasy: Women’s fantasies are far more contextual and often revolve around a romantic occurrence. Furthermore, women’s sexual physiology is “far more complex” than men’s, requiring a warm-up phase that involves all that happens in the build up to sex – during the day, counting toward sex in the evening.

This difference often leads men to misread cues. To bridge this gap, men must increase their “Intimacy Quotient” (INQ). INQ represents the ability to be immersive, focused, and present, without expecting an outcome or rigid adherence to a script.

The Pathway to Transformation

The pathway to self-mastery involves transitioning from using sex for “entertainment” to embracing it as a potentially “profoundly transformative experience”.

• Sexual Energy as a “Spiritual Healing Balm”: During adolescence, the ability to ejaculate becomes imprinted as a way to combat anxiety, boredom, insomnia, or what he calls restless sex energy.
• Gaining Awareness: The first step is awareness: men seeking change come to recognize how and why they are using sexual energy to find peace in their lives. This awareness allows men to address questions like: “Is it something I’m doing or not doing?” if a partner doesn’t want to have sex, or if the drive is compensating for anger or stress.
• The Unmet Need: Dr. Abramowitz quotes Peggy Kleinplatz, who posits that some women’s low desire may stem from the fact that the sex they are having is often “dismal, disappointing, and lackluster”. When sex is reduced to meeting the “very much more simple requirement of a man, which is often just to ejaculate,” the complexity of a woman’s desire is ignored.

The Modern Threat: Pornography and Distraction

The easy access to streaming pornography (p*) is described as “the largest human experiment,” and is “devastating and incredibly destructive,” and “dystopian”.

• Dopamine Deficiency: Seeing hundreds of images of different women means that a man’s dopamine levels will not be able to be reproduced when he is with just one woman.
• Loss of Intimacy: “If you’re looking for intimacy, do not expect porn to be an ally for you,” as it is a choreographed performance that diminishes our ability to “truly see the whole woman”.

Beyond the Honeymoon Phase: Reconstituting Love

The final stage of the work involves moving past the “romantic industrial complex” and the “happily-ever-after-Disney-Hollywood fairytale” that cuts off before the real work of maintaining a partnership begins.

The goal is to “reconstituting that ideology into a new format of love,” moving into a new phase of curiosity-based research. This requires individuals to learn to “own your stuff, see your patterns, notice what hooks you”, which is generally referred to as “doing the work”.

The ultimate aim is to become “fit for human consumption,” building a relationship based on fierce, daily examination and deep, generative appreciation for who one’s partner truly.  Integrating an awareness of the profound  intelligence of the bodies we live in – with our relational understanding – invites a new way of living in the rare air of an evolutionary Heterosexual relationship. We are called upon to understand the Honeymoon phase for what it truly is – a constructed dance set up by our biology. It is a doorway that invites us  to a more realistic – sustained connection – but can never itself be the fuel that powers the more long lasting , passionate , kind and generative long term HS relationship .