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different places in the brain in the sexes.
When you understand that your urges and feelings are controlled by chemical responses in the brain, you can learn to work with rather than against them.
     

Chapter 2
Straight Talk on Sex and Love
     

     
    Some things haven’t changed in a million years
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    S o why do we even have sex in the first place? You might think either that there is a blindingly obvious answer or that it’s a stupid question. Think about it—sex, romance, and love affairs are all time-consuming and expensive pursuits. Dinners, holidays, endless phone calls and texts, lavish gifts, marriage, separation, and divorce all take time and cost money. And for what? The reason is the continuation of your genetic line—and that’s about it. It’s all to perpetuate your DNA. For humans, sex, which is hardwired, also serves several side purposes—it’s used to gain power and status and to play or to bond with others, as is the case with other primates, such as bonobo monkeys. But not all living things have sex to reproduce. Some plants, bacteria, and simple invertebrates, such as worms, don’t have sex—they simply clone themselvesto reproduce. This is known as being asexual. The problem is that cloning produces offspring that are identical to the parent but are not stronger or better adapted; the offspring are therefore less likely to survive changing environments. An asexual female’s offspring can survive only in the same habitat their mother was adapted to, 1 but environments are always changing. By mixing the genes of two individuals, you can produce offspring that are stronger and fitter than both parents.
    Sex is hereditary. If your parents didn’t have it, you won’t either .
     
     
    This phenomenon was demonstrated in 2007 by Matthew Goddard at Auckland University in New Zealand. He compared two types of wheat—one that reproduced sexually and one that cloned itself. In stable environmental conditions, both wheat strains reproduced at about the same rate, but when the scientists increased the room temperature to create a harsher environment, the sexually produced strain did much better. Over 300 generations, its growth rate increased by 94%, versus 80% for the cloned wheat.
    Sex can be enjoyable and fun, but it is also time-consuming and exhausting. Ultimately, it produces a stronger, fitter species, and that’s the main reason we have it .
     
     

How Times Have Changed
     
    Up until the 1940s, age forty-two was considered to be middle-aged. People aged fifty had only their retirement to look forwardto, and a sixty-year-old was considered to be old. These stereotypes were challenged by Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Sean Connery, David Bowie, Cher, Hugh Hefner, Madonna, Joan Collins, and Paul McCartney, to name just a few.
    The twenty-first century will be a good time for people aged forty-plus as they were the ones who were born or lived through the 1960s and the 1970s, which have had an enormous impact on modern living and culture. This is the generation that is exploring health and longevity and learning how to turn back the clock on the aging process. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, a typical forty-plus woman was seen as settled, domesticated, and married and was more likely to use a bread slicer than a vibrator. Her life was considered boring and mundane, devoid of romance, sex, and excitement, just like in the Victorian era. Now the role models for women over forty reveal bodies and attitudes more like those of women in their thirties. This is the first generation of humans who refuse to acknowledge aging.
    Here are some statistics on the changes in some of today’s societies. These were assembled in 2008 and taken from the various bureaus of statistics and data and national centers of health in up to thirty Western and European countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, and Spain:
The average age