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The drums were pounding. The beat, getting louder and louder, was on the upswing. The sun made its mark for noon in the sky, and well-worn trails were lined with throngs of worshipers who would snake toward the flat open spaces where a festival would take place. Hundreds would gather near gigantic structures built for the occasion. Those who weren't engaged in work were engaged in play.
The ground was littered with small naked running children, mothers and babies nursing on blankets, and yapping dogs festooned with red strips of cloth. In an adjacent field, men naked to the waist except for the beadsaround their necks passed around a bamboo smoking tube and danced and laughed and shouted. Men and women, their long hair decorated with flowers and rawhide bands, started swaying in unison, and some seemed to be hallucinating. The drums were inside them now, in their brains and bones.
The lone drums and flutes were drowned out by instruments with strings; bigger, louder drums; and singing that would go on night and day for three days. The physicality of union on many levels, from eating to bathingand mating, may have been the true purpose of the gathering.
Some of the fervid splashed naked in the small pond. Others, in pairs or groups, copulated openly. They stroked and petted each other and continuously displayed grooming behavior like combing hair, rubbing backs, and stroking one another's arms and feet. Finally, on the third day, the gods hosed them down. The skies cracked wide open, and a flood of near-biblical proportions ensued, the ultimate cosmic release at the end of the frenzy, an orgasm of nature. The place: Upstate New York. The tribe described is us, and the scene is from a documentary called Woodstock. We thought we invented music, love, and sex.
We were so young.
Since time began, men and women have heard music and been driven to sexual ecstasy. It's common knowledge that listening to music can be a religious experience -- especially loud music. For many in Western culture, until the Renaissance, God was actually conceived of as only sound or a vibration. The scientific reason for this is that in the software controlling hearing and balance in your brain, a small organ called the sacculus, part of the balance-regulating system in the inner ear, is "tickled" at certain decibel levels.
Loud music can activate the sacculus and create the feeling of movement or floating. That's why listening to music above 70 decibels sends a pleasurable buzz through the sacculus that ends up at the hypothalamus, a buzz that thrills the listener in the way bungee jumping or swinging very high does, a simultaneous flying and falling feeling.It's no coincidence that the distribution of frequencies typical of rock concerts and dance clubs is at exactly the right decibel level to make listeners feel as if they're floating. Your sacculus also speaks to the part of your brain that controls drives like hunger, sex, and more than a few other hedonistic responses -- the hypothalamus.
That's part of the reason sex, drugs, and rock and roll go so well together. Of course, the drugs we take now -- Prozac, Paxil, Klonopin, Ambien, Tamoxifen, Vioxx, Claritin, or Lipitor, Beta-blockers or ACE Inhibitors, notto mention Advil and Tylenol PM, just aren't as much fun.
Talkin' About My Generation
Only about thirty-five of the seventy-five million of us born between 1948 and 1952 made it to college, where most of us were introduced to the principles of self-medication. By 1969, according to a Gallup survey of fifty-seven college campuses, 31 percent of students had smoked pot andbetween 10 and 15 percent admitted to using LSD. To clarify: At least ten to twelve million of us smoked marijuana and between three and five million of us dropped acid. Today we get a kick out of loading up on nutritional supplements at the health food store.
It's just not the same.
We're just not radical anymore. But we should be. Our very lives are at stake, because half of all of the women today have already been on synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and we're not even sure of the damage it's done. And on the opposite side of the coin, most of us aren't really sure that we want to give up our drugs (HRT).
Is living without hormones really living?
We need to find out how much harm has been done and whether or not we should ever put our hormones back at all. Most of us would admit that without them we don't really feel good -- no matter how many supplements we buy or how many miles we jog or how little fat we eat. But, at the same time, we're all scared of heart disease, strokes, and cancer. We face the same inevitable health condition that made our parents obstinate, obdurate, and obsolete -- a condition called aging, characterized by being stubborn, hardened, and out of date. None of us want to look and feel "old," but most of us are in menopause.
In 2002, forty-six million women will reach the age of menopause.
Menopause is the hallmark of aging in women.
There exists today more than a few of us who once fought the good fight for personal freedom, but now sit back and spout the party line of our generation about menopause being natural. Of course it's "natural."
So is pregnancy in the wake of free love, but that didn't stop us from taking hormones to avoid it in our youth. Those miracle drugs -- contraceptives -- were the hormones that kept us in school or going to work every day while having all the sex we wanted, without the natural consequence of childbirth and breast-feeding ...
This book contains advice and information relating to health care.It is not intended to replace medical advice and should be used to supplement rather than replace regular care by your doctor. It is recommended that you seek your physician’s advice before embarking on any medical program or treatment. All efforts have been made to assure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date of publication. The publisher and the author disclaim liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.
Excerpted from Sex, Lies, and Menopause: The Shocking Truth about Hormone Replacement Therapy by T. S. Wiley, Julie Taguchi, Bent Formby All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
