Come as You Are (12 page)

I want to warn you ahead of time: This is the nerdiest, scienciest chapter in the book. Dust off your thinking cap. It’s worth it. The payoff is that anytime you hear someone complain, “Women are so complicated—yesterday she liked one thing, today she wants something completely different,” or wonder, “Why don’t I respond the way I used to?” you’ll be able to say, “Context! What a woman wants and likes changes based on her external circumstances and her internal state.” This chapter tells you how to crack the code and make sense of it all.

Laurie’s dissatisfaction with her sex life wasn’t a result of a challenging SIS or SES; it was a result of a challenging context. But she didn’t like my suggestion that she just let herself not want sex for a while. To her, that felt like giving up. She
wanted
to want sex, and, darn it all, she was going try.

So she thought about times in the past when she had pleasurable sex and remembered a particularly excellent pre-baby anniversary vacation at a fancy hotel in the mountains.

“Aha! Context!” she thought, and she and Johnny made a reservation and planned a trip to recapture the passion.

The plan failed utterly. The drive was long and exhausting, they argued on the way there, and by the time they finished dinner, the pressure of expectation was totally overwhelming. Laurie felt herself shut down, and she just said no, no to everything. She took a hot bath, had a glass of wine, and went to sleep. Johnny watched a movie.

And then in the morning, she felt too guilty about the previous night to try again.

So one afternoon soon after that, Laurie and Johnny sat down and tried to figure out what had worked on that first trip that was missing the second time.

Well, their whole lives were different now: They were parents, she had a frustrating job, she was a student . . . They had replicated the external circumstances but not the context.

“Great, so all you have to do is quit your job, quit school, and sell Trevor to the circus. Problem solved,” Johnny teased. More constructively, he said, “Maybe we’re thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe it’s about what it
feels
like, rather than where we are or what we’re doing. When you think about the great sex we had on that anniversary, what did it feel like?”

She thought about it for a minute.

And then she burst into tears.

She began talking about how much she loved him, how she relied on him for her sanity in a life that seemed specifically designed to make her crazy, how she wanted to show him, not just tell him, how important he is to her, but every time she considered initiating sex, she just felt swamped and overwhelmed and her body shut down on her. Undifferentiated grief flowed from her as she talked—grief for her lost sexuality, but also for her lost peace of mind, her lost sense of self, independent of her roles as mother, daughter, wife, boss, employee, student . . .

And then, when the tide of her grief ebbed, they had great sex.

After that, Laurie came to me and said, “What the hell?! We go on a romantic getaway, nothing—worse than nothing! But I ugly cry about how much I love him and how exhausting my life is, and we have hot and dirty sex. This context thing makes no sense!”

So I explained.

sensation in context

Suppose you’re flirting with a certain special someone, and they start tickling you. You can imagine some situations where that’s fun, right? Flirtatious. Potentially leading to some nookie.

Now imagine that you are feeling annoyed with that same special someone and they try to tickle you.

It feels irritating, right? Like maybe you’d want to punch that person in the face.

It’s the same
sensation
, but because the context is different, your
perception
of that sensation is different.

It’s true for all our sensory domains. A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”
⁷
Same smell + different context = different perception. Mood changes your perception of taste, too: feeling sad, as you do at the end of a weepy movie, reduces your ability to taste fat in food.
⁸

It’s true in all your other senses, too, not just the basic five you learned in elementary school. We’ve all experienced it with thermoreception: Imagine your car has run out of gas one mile from the gas station, on a scorching-hot, sauna-humid day. You walk the mile through the sludgy air. You get to the air-conditioned gas station, chilled to seventy-two degrees, and it feels like a frigid blast, a powerful relief from the heat. Now imagine your car runs out of gas in the same place six months later, and it’s a bitterly cold, bitingly windy day, and you trudge the same mile to the gas station. That same seventy-two degrees now feels like a warmed oven, a powerful relief from the painful cold. Context.

It’s also true for equilibrioception (sense of balance): Anyone who’s gotten off a ship after a week-long cruise knows that our brains adapt to movement—you spend two days wondering why the ground is moving under your feet. Nociception (sense of pain): People who’ve experienced serious pain develop a higher tolerance for future pain.
⁹
And chronoception (sense of time): Time does indeed seem to fly when you’re having fun—or rather, when you’re in a state of “flow.”
¹⁰

These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also
have more of the drug in their blood plasma
.
¹¹
Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.

It’s also true for sexual stimuli. In chapter 2, I described how the dual
control mechanism responds to stimuli that are either sexually relevant or a threat, and I talked about how we learn what stimuli goes into which category—remember the rat with a lemon fetish? But just as the smell of cheese or the taste of fat is influenced by our mental state and the external circumstances, whether a particular stimulus is experienced as sexually appealing depends on the context in which we perceive it.

Tickling is one example of this. Suppose you’re watching your partner do laundry. If you feel overall supported and connected in your relationship, then seeing your partner doing the laundry may act as a cue for erotic thoughts. But if you’ve been feeling resentful because you’ve been doing a disproportionate amount of the laundry lately, then seeing your partner do laundry may feel satisfying—“It’s about time!”—without feeling sexy.

The same goes for whether something hits the brakes. For example, the extent to which a person’s sexual brakes are engaged because of fear of an STI changes depending on the perceived likelihood of infection and the perceived impact of that STI. Using a condom? Know your partner’s health history and sexual history? Trust that you’re both being monogamous? Less threat. No condom? No history? Potential for betrayal? More threat. It’s the same with social consequences, too: Potential damage to your social status, your reputation, or your relationship all act as threats, depending on how likely they seem and how negative they would be if they happened.

Learning to recognize the contexts that increase your brain’s perception of the world as a sexy place, and having skills to maximize the sexy contexts, is key to increasing your sexual satisfaction. At the end of this chapter, you’ll find worksheets to help you think through what aspects of context influence your perception of sensations. On those worksheets, you recall three amazing sexual experiences you’ve had and three not-so-great sexual experiences, and think concretely and specifically about what made those experiences what they were, in terms of both external circumstances and your internal state. Do take the time to do this. Thinking through even just one amazing experience and one not-so-great
experience can give you a sense of which contexts increase your brain’s tendency to interpret the world as sexy and which reduce that tendency.

Painful or Erotic?

If your partner spanks your butt while you’re in the middle of tying your toddler’s shoes, it’s annoying. But if your partner spanks your butt in the middle of sex, it can feel very, very sexy indeed. Context can cause sensations that are typically perceived as painful, like spanking or whipping, to be erotic. Sexual “submission” requires relaxing into trust—turning off the offs—and allowing your partner to take control. In this explicitly erotic, highly trusting, and consensual context, your brain is open and receptive, ready to interpret any and all sensations as erotic. And in a culture where women have to spend so much time with the brakes on, saying no, it’s no wonder we have fantasies about abandoning all control, relaxing into absolute trust (turning off the brakes) and allowing ourselves to experience sensation.

sex, rats, and rock ’n’ roll

What is the ultimate nerd evidence of the power of context to influence your brain’s perception of a sensation? Look at what happens to rat brains when you play them Iggy Pop:

Imagine you’re a lab rat, and you’re in a three-chambered box.
¹²
The researchers have painlessly implanted a tiny probe in your brain so that they can zap your nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is a tiny region deep within your brain; its job is to tell you which direction to go—toward or away from something in the environment. In the first chamber, you’re surrounded by the ordinary setup that you always encounter in the lab—the lights are on, but it’s fairly quiet. Here, if the researcher zaps the top region of the NAc, you engage in approach behaviors, like sniffing and exploration. Psychologist John Gottman calls these “
What’s this? 
” behaviors.
¹³
Curious. Exploring. Moving toward. And when the researchers stimulate the bottom region of your NAc, you exhibit avoidance—“
What the hell is this? 
” behaviors, like stamping your paws and turning away your head. Fearful. Avoidant. Moving away. And all of that is normal and exactly what you would expect, as a sort of bionic, semiremote-controlled rat.

So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it’s quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it’s like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens—approach behaviors. But this is where it gets crazy: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc . . . approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation!

As soon as you move into the third chamber, ultrabright lights turn on and suddenly Iggy Pop is blaring—imagine “Lust for Life” playing at randomly varying volumes, so you can’t even get used to it. Everything about this environment stresses you out. You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub. Now when the researchers zap your top NAc, it doesn’t activate curiosity or approach behaviors, as it has in the previous environments; no, in the new, stressful environment, zapping almost anywhere on the NAc generates avoidant, “
What the hell is this? 
” behavior.

When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that phylogenetically old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are functioning.
¹⁴
In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity,
desire
. And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety,
dread
.

“Context changes how your brain responds to sex,” doesn’t just mean, “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—either
external circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience.

In chapter 4 I’ll describe the evolutionary reasons for this, but for now just know: It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive sensations. It’s just how brains work.

Here’s a puzzle:

Merritt, with her sensitive brake, struggled mightily with sex in real life. Yet she had an active sexual imagination and had been both reader and author of erotic fiction for a decade. Her favorite stories to read and to write were gay male BDSM—she jokingly calls it, “Fifty Shades of Gay.” There just seemed to be something about the idea of two men tangled in an intense power dynamic that really captured her erotic imagination.

“Getting turned on by stories about two men having kinky sex, but being so easily shut down during sex with the woman I love? How does that make sense? A noise. A fingernail when I’m not expecting it. A stray thought, even. And yet I spend hours every day writing about men having sex in public or on a rack or tied to trees.”

Learning about her sexual brake helped some, but it was when she and Carol talked about context—What contexts arouse you? What contexts hit the brakes?—that they discovered that fantasies were great for Merritt, while real life was . . . a challenge.