Come as You Are (9 page)

When I think about someone I find sexually attractive or when I fantasize about sex, I easily become sexually aroused.

Certain hormonal changes (e.g., my menstrual cycle) definitely increase my sexual arousal.

I get very turned on when someone wants me sexually.

Total (out of 24) ____

Scoring

Low SIS (0–6)

You’re not so sensitive to all the reasons not to be sexually aroused. You tend not to worry about your own sexual functioning, and body image issues don’t interfere too much with your sexuality. When you’re sexually engaged, your attention is not very distractible, and you aren’t inclined to describe yourself as “sexually shy.” Most circumstances can be sexual for you. You may find that your main challenge around sexual functioning is holding yourself back, reining yourself in. Staying aware of potential consequences can help with this. Around 15 percent of the women I’ve asked are in this range.

Medium SIS (7–13)

You’re right in the middle, along with more than half the women I’ve asked. This means that whether your sexual brakes engage is largely dependent on context. Risky or novel situations, such as a new partner, might increase your concerns about your own sexual functioning, shyness, or distractibility from sex. Contexts that easily arouse you are likely to be low risk and more familiar, and anytime your stress levels—including anxiety, overwhelm, and exhaustion—escalate, your brakes will reduce your interest in and response to sexual signals.

High SIS (14–20)

You’re pretty sensitive to all the reasons not to be sexually aroused. You need a setting of trust and relaxation in order to be aroused, and it’s best if you don’t feel rushed or pressured in any way. You might be easily
distracted from sex. High SIS, regardless of SES, is the most strongly correlated factor with sexual problems, so if this is you, pay close attention to the “sexy contexts” worksheets in the chapters that follow. About a quarter of the women I’ve asked fall into this range.

Low SES (0–7)

You’re not so sensitive to sexually relevant stimuli and need to make a more deliberate effort to tune your attention in that direction. Novel situations are less likely than familiar ones to be sexy to you. Your sexual functioning will benefit from increasing stimulation (for instance, using a vibrator) and daily practice of paying attention to sensations. Lower SES is also associated with asexuality, so if you’re very low SES, you might resonate with some components of the asexual identity. The women I ask are probably higher SES than the overall population—they’re interested enough in sex to take a class, attend a workshop, or read a sex blog—but still about 8 percent of those women fall into this range.

Medium SES (8–15)

You’re right in the middle, so whether you’re sensitive to sexual stimuli probably depends on the context. In situations of high romance or eroticism, you tune in readily to sexual stimuli; in situations of low romance or eroticism, it may be pretty challenging to move your attention to sexual things. Recognize the role that context plays in your arousal and pleasure, and take steps to increase the sexiness of your life’s contexts. Seventy percent of the women I’ve asked fall into this range.

High SES (16–24)

You’re pretty sensitive to sexually relevant stimuli, maybe even to things most of us aren’t generally very sensitive to, like smell and taste. A fairly wide range of contexts can be sexual for you, and novelty may be really exciting. You may like having sex as a way to de-stress—higher SES is correlated with greater risk for sexual compulsivity, so you may want to pay attention to the ways you manage stress. Make sure you create lots of
time and space for your partner; because you’re sensitive, you can derive intense satisfaction from your partner’s pleasure, so you’ll both benefit! About 16 percent of the women I ask fall into this group.

What “Medium” Means

Did you score right in the middle on both? More than half of people do. Scoring very high or very low on these traits is comparatively rare, so for the majority of people the value of the dual control model lies not in the discovery that, “Wow, my brain is extra sensitive/not sensitive to this kind of stimulation, so I need to pay attention to that!” The value instead lies in the insight that the brakes and the accelerator are
two separate systems
. Some things in the world activate your accelerator, which makes you all sticky and eager. Other things hit your brakes and slow down your arousal process. Some things even hit both at once! One blog reader emailed me that “brakes and accelerator at the same time” exactly described her experience while reading the best-selling sexually explicit novel
Fifty Shades of Grey
.

Medium means you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m normal!” and start thinking about what hits your brakes or activates your accelerator, and how to recalibrate your life to suit your brain. I’ll discuss how to do that in chapters 3, 4, and 5.

If you scored high or low on either scale—especially if your score is at an extreme end—you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m normal and also comparatively rare!” And as you consider what engages your brakes and accelerator, you’ll begin to realize that you relate to the sexual world around you in ways most other women don’t experience.

Camilla, the artist, is smart—smart and curious. One of the things she’s curious about is sex. She doesn’t just read books about it; she reads the original research.

And she has struggled to reconcile her intellectual hunger for knowledge about sex with her contrastingly small desire to actually have any sex. That day when we were talking about images of women, she mentioned this puzzle, especially noting that she never seemed to experience “out of the blue” desire.

I wondered if she might have a sensitive brake, so I asked her “inhibitors” questions: Do things have to be “just right” in order for you to get aroused? Do you need total trust in your partner? Do you worry about sex while you’re having it?

Not really, not really, and not really.

Then I asked “excitors” questions. Do you sometimes get aroused just by watching your partner do something (nonsexual) that he’s good at, or by his smell, or when you feel sexually “wanted”? Are you aroused by new situations? Do you get turned on by fantasies?

Not really, heck no, and . . . what fantasies?

Camilla’s low SES. This doesn’t mean she’s not interested in the idea of sex; it means her body requires a bunch of stimulation in order to cross the threshold into active desire for sex.

I asked about orgasm.

“Few in number and slow to come,” she said, “and they don’t often seem worth the effort.” She finds she’s most reliably orgasmic with a vibrator, and that makes perfect sense—mechanical vibration can provide an intensity of stimulation that no organic stimulation can match. But for her, orgasm is sometimes more of a distraction than a goal with sex. She loves being with her partner, she loves playing and exploring. But sometimes she’s just as happy cooking with him as having sex.

“Henry isn’t the most sexually driven guy in the world,” she said. (Henry is her husband. He’s a super-nice guy.) “But he’d love it if I initiated sex a little more often. Is this something a person can change?”

Yes it is.

Part of Camilla’s solution is in chapter 3, but we’ll have to wait until chapter 7 to get to the heart of it.

different for girls . . . but not necessarily

If you had to guess which group, men or women, has higher SES on average—a more sensitive accelerator—which would you pick?

Men, right? Yep. At the population level, on average, men have a more sensitive accelerator.
⁷

And which group has higher SIS—more sensitive brakes?

Uh-huh. Women, on average, tend to have more sensitive brakes.

But remember from chapter 1 how height varies between men and women, but it varies more within each group than between the groups? Women in particular vary from one another in terms of their brakes and accelerator. A lot. Ask a thousand women how often they would ideally like to have sex and their answers will range from never to five times a day, and all of those answers are normal.

A more important difference than simply the sensitivity of the accelerators and brakes of men and women is the relationships of these two mechanisms with other aspects of men’s and women’s psychologies—especially mood and anxiety.

For example, about 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report an increase in their sexual interest when they’re anxious or depressed.
⁸
But a guy who wants sex more when he’s anxious or depressed probably has
less sensitive brakes
. In contrast, a woman who wants sex more when she’s anxious or depressed is likely to have a
more sensitive accelerator
.

What this shows us is that there’s more than just a population-level difference in the average sensitivities of SIS and SES between men and women; there also seem to be a difference in how these two systems relate to the other motivational systems in the brain, particularly the stress response system. (We’ll really get into this is chapter 4.)

But hey, look: It’s all too easy to metaphorize the population-level differences in SIS and SES, the way previous generations metaphorized our genitals. Like, “Women are easily turned off and difficult to turn on.” Or, “Women want sex less than men.” As we’ll see in the chapters that
follow, it’s nothing like that—for most people, arousability depends as much on
context
as on brain mechanism.

Your own SIS and SES, and their relationship to your mood or anxiety, are unique and individual.
⁹
The goal of understanding your brake and accelerator is not to understand “what men are like” versus “what women are like,” but to understand what
you
are like. Unique, with great potential for awesomeness.

what turns you on?

Huge, beautiful bathtubs at a B and B

Watching a partner put the kids to bed

“Slash fiction” of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy

A fantasy about having sex in public

Actually
having sex in public

No one was born responding sexually to any of these, but they’re all things that women have told me turn them on. The dual control model tidily explains how the brain responds to stimuli, to increase or decrease your arousal. The brain notices sexually relevant stimuli (like fantasies or an attractive partner) and potential threats (like an unappreciative audience), and sends signals accordingly; arousal is the process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how your brain figures out what counts as a sexually relevant stimulus or a potential threat.

The process of learning what is sexually relevant and what is a threat works sort of like learning a language. We’re all born with the innate capacity to learn any human language, but we don’t learn a random language, right? If you grow up surrounded by people who speak only English, there is no way you’ll get to kindergarten speaking French. You learn the language you are surrounded by.

Similarly, you learn the
sexual
language you’re surrounded by. Just as there are no innate words, there appear to be almost no innate sexual
stimuli. What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.

I’ll illustrate this with three rat studies from the lab of researcher Jim Pfaus.

Imagine you’re a male lab rat. Your mother raises you with everything a young rat needs, normal and healthy. In addition to that normal, healthy development, the researchers train you to associate the smell of lemons with sexual activity.
¹⁰
Ordinarily, lemons mean as much to rat sexuality as they do to human sexuality: nothing. But you’ve been trained to link lemons and sex in your brain. So when you’re presented with two receptive female rats, one of whom smells like a healthy, receptive female rat and the other smells like a healthy, receptive female rat plus lemons, you’ll prefer the one who smells like lemons—and by “prefer,” I mean you’ll copulate with both females, but 80 percent of your ejaculations will be with the lemony partner, and only about 20 percent of your ejaculations will be with the nonlemony partner. Your ratty SES learned that lemons are sexually relevant, so the lemony partner hits your accelerator more.