Return to Transcripts main page

INSIGHT

Valentine's Day

Aired February 14, 2006 - 18:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: What's love got to do with it? As the world celebrates a day of romance, we take a different approach to intimacy, in the marketplace, the laboratory and the Internet.
Hello and welcome.

If someone brought you flowers or chocolates or did something romantic today, or if you did that for someone else, good for you. Good for you and forgive us.

This is a day of love and loving, and we're going to take the subject and go in the opposite direction, toward what entrepreneurs and experts and the Internet are telling us about our intimate selves.

On our program today, not quite Cupid.

We begin with Tom Foreman's look at a kind of comfort for the lonely that comes at a price and fits in your pocket.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Three things Americans generally agree on when it comes to porn: it's improper, it's immoral and it's impossible for some of us to get enough of it.

And in Miami, at the Mobile Adult Content Congress -- that's a porn convention -- all the talk was about how this business is getting much bigger because porn is getting smaller, with the help of these, personal video players in mobile phones, iPods and PDAs. Call it pocket porn.

TINA SOUTHALL, VODAPHONE GROUP: Oh, it's a huge -- it's a really huge topic.

JOHN CONLON, VIRGIN MEDIA: You talk to people about it, they're like, yes, we really want to get access to it.

HARVEY KAPLAN, XOBILE: It's flesh-colored crack. That's all that really is.

FOREMAN: Harvey Kaplan, a pocket porn marketer, says for the first time ever, consumers aren't being embarrassed by walking into adult video stores, renting movies in hotels or even having porn stored on their home computers. This technology puts downloads into the consumer's pocket, fast and anonymously.

KAPLAN: It's a device where people can download their content, feel safe and secure that no one else is going to gain access to it.

FOREMAN: This is huge. Since the video iPod was unveiled in October, Apple says 12 million regular videos have been downloaded on their Web site. But in the same period, this skin site called Suicide Girls says they saw 10 million downloads, about one a second. Some videos are free, some for sale. So it's not an apples to apples comparison, but how about them apples?

RON JEREMY, PORN STAR: It's between you and your little cell phone, you know? It's kind of like a marriage made in heaven.

FOREMAN: Porn legend Ron Jeremy used to be known only to the late- night adult theater crowd. Not anymore. Pocket porn has him being mobbed.

JEREMY: The market has gotten 10 times bigger and it's affecting a much different group. Now we have a lot of college kids, young couples, that you would not see going to an adult theater.

FOREMAN (on camera): Certainly this is terrible news for those who oppose pornography, who say it degrades people and promotes violence. But this trend is undeniably real. It is unsettlingly rapid and it may be unstoppable.

(voice-over): Because some of the biggest communications companies in the world are getting involved.

KAPLAN: This is about hard, cold dollars.

FOREMAN: And they're expecting profits that are almost obscene.

Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: For more now on flipping open a business that's been traditionally behind closed doors, we go to Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor at Texas A&M; University.

Thanks so much for being with us. Happy Valentine's Day.

Pornography on your cell phone? Is this really where the world is headed?

JONATHAN COOPERSMITH, TEXAS A&M; UNIV.: It's one of the many ways of showing -- it's one of the many way's it's heading, because sex sells.

MANN: How well will this sell? How big a potential market do you see?

COOPERSMITH: As big as the human imagination can take it, which is even though you're getting small resolution, you're getting portability, you're getting the illusion of privacy, and as you're previous report mentioned, you've got a constant supply of people wanting and wanting more.

MANN: Now, this is just beginning in the United States. But I gather elsewhere around the world it is well underway. Do you know much about the worldwide market?

COOPERSMITH: It's very big. Europe and Asia, especially South Korea, opened up, are more advanced in cell phone technology, and therefore they're more advanced in the so-called pocket porn.

It's a wonderful way for suppliers to make money. You don't see this so much in the United States, both because of the technology and reluctance of some of the telecommunication companies to be identified as offering porn.

MANN: Well, I want to ask some more about that in a moment, but let me just ask you still about the shock that a lot of people are going to feel when they see that their cell phones are going to be used for this. You are a historian of many things, among them a historian of pornography. Is this some strange, modern perversion of communications technology? Or does new technology tend to go this way sooner or later, no matter what it is?

COOPERSMITH: Actually, sooner rather than later, almost any major communications technology, whether you're talking about the printed book, movies, cable, quickly finds an outlet in both pornography and religion, two aspects of life that people care about most.

MANN: Why is that?

COOPERSMITH: Because people say this is a tool that I can -- both from the supplier's point of view, pornography is very high profit. And from the consumer's point of view, there is a large demand for it. These new technologies, again, whether you're talking about a cell phone or a 1910 movie, offer a way of satisfying your various desires.

MANN: Are kids going to start seeing even more skin than they do now when this moves into cell phones in a big way? We are surrounded by images of erotica or pornographic images in various kinds in our culture. Is that going to get even worse now as children see these images on the cell phones or the iPods of adults or as they use cell phones and iPods on their own?

COOPERSMITH: As they use it on their own, probably not, because something that distinguishes a lot of the cell phone pornography from, say, Internet pornography, is that you usually have to pay for it.

Certainly there will be a lot more casual sightings of what's on somebody else's cell phone or their automobile DVD. Indeed we've seen arrests of people for watching a pornographic movie in their car, because other people can see it.

MANN: In many places, this is going to be regarded as shocking and degrading and clearly inappropriate. Can cell phone porn be stopped, do you think?

COOPERSMITH: No. What you are probably going to find out or find is efforts to restrict its use in public areas, so others, especially minors, are not exposed to it, but the market is just too big for it. The demand is just so great and the profit is so high.

MANN: Jonathan Coopersmith, at Texas A&M;, thanks so much for talking with us.

COOPERSMITH: The pleasure was mine.

MANN: We take a break, and then coming up on INSIGHT, we'll put relationships under the microscope, or more accurately an MRI. Is romance, scientifically speaking, all in your head? We'll find out after the break.

But first, if you're thinking about reaching for your heart-shaped box of chocolates during the commercial break, here are some interesting facts about Valentine's Day to chew on.

One legend says the holiday began in the third century when a priest named Valentine was executed for performing marriages for young soldiers. In the Netherlands, which is a big, big country when it comes to making flowers, it is the day that florists love best. Dutch flower growers say they will sell 50 million roses worldwide this week.

Valentine's is also keeping postal services busy around the world. In the United States alone, about 192 million cards are expected to be exchanged. And it comes in fourth in terms of holiday candy sales, just after Halloween, Easter and Christmas.

Now back to that box of chocolates. In 1968, Richard Cadbury was first to package the candy for Valentine's Day. It's a sweet tradition that has grown into a business as well; 36 million boxes are sold each year.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: You want the picture of romance? Scientists can capture it using a magnetic resonance imaging machine or MRI. People in love actually look different in the regions of the brain associated with reward and pleasure.

Welcome back.

Is there a special someone who has you losing track of time, excited all day and tossing and turning all night? The reason could be a chemical. How about that warm glow of a love that has stood the test of time year after year? Well, there's a chemical associated with that as well.

Is that all that love amounts to, just a lot of chemicals?

Joining us now to talk about that is Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers University and a scientist whose been looking into our chemistry sets.

Thanks so much for being with us. Happy Valentine's Day.

HELEN FISHER, AUTHOR: Happy Valentine's to you.

MANN: Thank you. I bought my wife a bouquet of flowers today. Should I have bought her dopamine instead?

FISHER: Well, you probably are buying her dopamine, actually, because the flowers are a novelty, and novelty drives up dopamine in the brain, and you can feel and that can turn her over the threshold into feeling romantic love for you. So it works.

MANN: Tell us about dopamine. What is it? How do we generate it? Where does it come from?

FISHER: It's a natural stimulant that we all have in the brain, all of the mammals do, all animals do, and it's part of the reward system, the come/go system, the system that makes you want something, and that's what happens when you fall in love. It's this motor in the brain that gets turned on and you begin to want this person, to crave them.

As a matter of fact, the part of the brain that became really active when somebody looks at a picture of their sweetheart is exactly the same brain region that becomes active when you feel that rush of cocaine. So it's a real rush when you fall in love.

MANN: There is another drug, oxytocin. Tell us about that.

FISHER: It's interesting. Oxytocin seems to be associated with a different form of love, really, attachment. You know, I think we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction.

One is the sex drive, of course. The second is romantic love, that elation and focused attention and obsessive thinking of early love. And the third is attachment, that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. And I think that oxytocin and its close relative, vasopressin, are associated with that third brain system, attachment.

MANN: So is that what love is, a chemical delivery system?

FISHER: All things are a chemical delivery system, you know. But that's not all it is. You can know every chemical in a piece of chocolate cake and then still sit down and eat that piece of cake and feel that intense rush. So romantic love is -- sure, it's chemical. Everything is chemical. But it's a very special one. Nobody gets out of love alive, and nobody ever forgets that intense passion.

MANN: Is there a predictable way to generate those chemicals, like buying a bouquet of dopamine?

FISHER: Well, there are a lot of things you can do. The most important thing to do, probably, if you want to sustain that feeling of intense romance in a long-term relationship, is to do novel things together. Novelty drives up dopamine in the brain and its close chemical relative, norepinephrine, that gives you that pounding heart and the sweaty palms. So do something novel tonight. Go to a different kind of restaurant. Do something even slightly dangerous. Take a Pedi cab through the streets of a big city. Anything that is novel and different and exciting can sustain feelings of romantic love.

MANN: Less romantically, could we just take dopamine and oxytocin, the way cocaine users take cocaine?

FISHER: I don't think so, because there is a huge cultural component. I mean, we tend to fall in love with somebody who is from our same background, from our same general level of intelligence, from the same level of good looks. We tend to fall for somebody with the same religious values, with the same interests, and I actually think we have some chemical complimentary reasons that we fall in love with people.

In fact, I have started a new relationship site, a spin off from Match.com, called Chemistry.com, because I think that as much as 50 percent of your being drawn to one person rather than another is basic chemistry, but, no.

MANN: Personality, you're saying -- personality is based on chemistry as well?

FISHER: Oh, yes, absolutely. We're beginning to learn more about it. We know some of the genetic behind conscientiousness, how agreeable you are. We know some of the chemistry behind trust, about religiosity, about calm, about novelty seeking, about sympathy, about altruism. Yeah, as much as 50 percent of your personality is based in some way on chemistry, and that's a big part of love, just being drawn to somebody that has a chemistry that's complimentary to you, so that you can not only fall in love with that person, but your chemistry keeps working together to sustain that feeling.

MANN: Let me ask you about one very simple experiment we can do, and I believe it's drawn from your research, so we'll footnote it appropriately, that you can do just by looking at your hand and using your hand you can measure the chemistry that was or is inside your brain. What's the test here?

FISHER: Well, what this is is, if you take a look at your fourth finger, your ring finger, as opposed to your second finger, your pointing finger, fetal testosterone in the womb rushes over the brain and also the body and actually builds this fourth finger so that it is quite long, if you've got a lot of fetal testosterone.

So this relationship between how much estrogen and how much testosterone you have in your body and some of the patterns in the brain are associated with, you can look at your finger and know something about not only the length of your finger but basic aspects of personality.

MANN: And that will affect who you fall in love with. So you're not just telling me about myself, you're telling me about my mate, actual or potential.

FISHER: Yes, absolutely. Don't forget that we can fall in love with a lot of different types of people, but they're going to be different kinds of relationships.

I mean, I'm the explorer type, for example. I probably have extremely high levels of dopamine in my brain. So am I going to fall for somebody like that? Well, in my case, probably. But other people might be drawn to somebody with high activity of serotonin, somebody whose calm and, oh, I don't know, social and somewhat religious.

Yes, absolutely, I think that as much as 50 percent of that spark in the brain of romantic love is triggered simply by complimentary chemical parts.

MANN: I'll ask you one last question, then. Your literally in the business. Could you do the chemistry for someone? Could you make people fall in love by either manipulating their chemistry or by reading it properly?

FISHER: I think that what I could do is -- I mean, there is magic to love. And nobody is ever going to get to know it perfectly. But you can certainly -- we're getting to the point now with science so that we can begin to profile the way a person is and then begin to predict what other kinds of chemical profiles they would be attracted to, as well as, very definitely, we fall in love for social and psychological and religious and spiritual reasons as well. But definitely chemistry is involved, and we're getting to understand that thing called love.

MANN: Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, thanks so much for talking with us.

FISHER: Thank you.

MANN: I'm still measuring my fingers, and I'll do that during the break, but when we come back, the highs and lows of high tech love.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: Can you find love on your laptop? A lot of people think so. In the United States alone more than 50 million people are estimated to have had a date with someone they met on the Internet, and one Web site alone boasts that it has been the catalyst to 33,000 marriages.

Welcome back.

If pornographers sell sex and scientists offer understanding, the 21st century still has the prospect of love itself, though in a whole new way: via computer. It's no secret now that you can find a mate on the Internet. You can find a friend there too. You can also find your kids being a little too open.

Dan Lothian reports on that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STACY YANOFSKY, WEB USER: Anna, this is Stacy.

DAN LOTHIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When 14-year-old Stacy Yanofsky signed up for a popular teen Web site...

STACY YANOFSKY: You can put on your interests. You can put on your pictures, things like that.

LOTHIAN: . she never imagined her innocent adventure could actually be dangerous.

STACY YANOFSKY: It wasn't just I was going along with the crowd, I just -- I thought it sounded cool, because everyone else, like, they had fun with it.

LOTHIAN: Her classmates at this suburban Boston middle school were creating personal pages on MySpace.com, a trendy social network popular with millions of teens nationwide, where anyone claiming to be at least 14 can blog, chat and post pictures. Sounds innocent enough, except...

HANK VAN PUTTON, MIDDLE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: They were identifying themselves as what school they went, they were identifying themselves as what town they lived in, they had their pictures posted there. And they were talking about what grade they had been in.

LOTHIAN: Even though the site explicitly warns against that. More disturbing, he says, some pictures were like these, provocative. And school computers were being used to logon.

Concerned that predators could find easy targets, Van Putton sent out a warning letter to parents.

CINDY YANOFSKY, MOTHER OF STACY: When Stacy came home from school that day, I asked her about it and she told me please don't be angry with me, Mom, I was one of the kids that had a MySpace. And she told me all what she had put on and that she was taking it off.

LOTHIAN: Stacy says unlike some of her friends, she only posted sketches and non-identifiable information.

STACY YANOFSKY: I really didn't think about the dangers of being -- of posting something online.

CINDY YANOFSKY: That's the fear of every parent, that your kid will get in trouble because they are too innocent.

LOTHIAN: Like the case of a 16-year-old Port Washington, New York girl, allegedly molested in September by a 37-year-old man police say tracked her from MySpace.

(on camera): From coast to coast, several other schools are sending home warning letters and some are taking extreme measures, like threatening suspension for students caught posting personal pages on the site.

(voice-over): Or other sites popular with teens. But young bloggers say the danger is overblown and that it's a great place to keep in touch and to spread the latest gossip.

Some parents like Phoebe Ramler, whose home computer is right next to her 16-year-old daughter's, aren't pulling the plug.

PHOEBE RAMLER, WEB USER: She has reassured me and I feel confident because I have a presence there, that she is utilizing it in a safe way.

LOTHIAN: Stacy, however, decided to pull her page.

STACY YANOFSKY: Because it's just so putting yourself out there and risking all these things, like the chance of something happening.

LOTHIAN: A chance the Yanofskys aren't willing to take.

Dan Lothian, CNN, Boston.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Say you're too old to be seeking romance with teens. Well, there are high hopes for another Internet site for frequent flyers who want to maximize the dating potential of their seat assignments.

For those who like to flirt and fly, here's Kyung Lah.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KYUNG LAH (voice-over): Each day 1.5 million Americans fly somewhere. The jet set a lonely set at times.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's probably why I'm single.

LAH: Meet Linda Dickerhoff (ph), PR exec, frequent flyer, single, and user of a Web site called AirTroductions.com.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's pretty interesting. It's kind of networking for the skies.

LAH (on camera): Dickerhoff's (ph) profile is one of thousands on the Web site. Here is how it works. You enter your flight information to see if there is anyone on the plane who could be a new friend. Then somewhere at the airport, before your flight, you decide to meet, and if there is a connection, then you ask the other passengers around you if they'd be willing to trade seats.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They've got people all over the world. You know, why not. You can meet someone on AirTroductions just as easily as you could meet someone at the supermarket or, you know, anywhere else.

LAH (voice-over): There are other dating services, like eHarmony, Match.com and Yahoo! Personals. But AirTroductions only deals with matchmaking in the skies. Good idea?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why not? It's a new way. It sounds exciting. Something different than going to a bar.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The problem there is that you have no out. If it's not going well, you're stuck.

LAH: The service is free until you want to meet someone, then it's $5 per meet or $19.95 a month, a small price say the lonely if love takes off.

In Washington, Kyung Lah, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: One final thing before we go. What do you like about the people you love? Does a good sense of human matter? Well, of course it does, and differently it turns out to men and women. A pair of researchers in Canada and the United States found that a sense of humor is more important to women in choosing between men, probably not that big a surprise.

But a second segment of the study in a survey of 150 students found that to a woman a man with a sense of humor is someone who makes her laugh. To a man, a woman with a sense of humor means someone who laughs at his jokes. Maybe that's not entirely a surprise either.

That's INSIGHT for today. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.

END

TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com