Come as You Are (11 page)

And that’s what chapter 3 is about.

tl;dr

• Your brain has a sexual “accelerator” that responds to “sexually relevant” stimulation—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain has learned to associate with sexual arousal.

• Your brain also has sexual “brakes” that respond to “potential threats”—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain interprets as a good reason not to be turned on right now. These can be anything from STDs and unwanted pregnancy to relationship issues or social reputation.

• There’s virtually no “innate” sexually relevant stimulus or threat; our accelerators and brakes learn when to respond through experience. And that learning process is different for males and females.

• People vary in how sensitive their brakes and accelerator are. Take the little quiz on
this page
to find out how sensitive yours are—and remember that most people score in the medium range, and all scores are normal.

three

context

AND THE “ONE RING” (TO RULE THEM ALL) IN YOUR EMOTIONAL BRAIN

You’d like Henry if you met him—he’s polite, with a sweet smile and a soft voice, handsome, a little old-fashioned. He stands up when a lady enters the room. Henry is almost as geeky as Camilla, his wife. Their ideal Friday night involves Settlers of Catan, anything by Joss Whedon, or Cards Against Humanity—or possibly all three.

And they have a nice sex life, he and Camilla. Henry is pretty much always the initiator, and though he’d certainly enjoy being the object of his wife’s sexual pursuit, he’s an easygoing guy who feels lucky to have a life partner who shares both his sense of humor and his need to have the bathroom kept organized at all times. They’re careful, thoughtful, introverted sweethearts.

When they first met—I mean, when they first met in person, which doesn’t include the weeks of online flirting—their eyes met and both of them experienced an instantaneous, “Yes. This is it. You’re it.”

But they’re careful, thoughtful people, and they took it slow.

They told each other, “I’m not really ready for a relationship. We should just be friends.”

And they nodded solemnly at each other.

And they became friends.

For a year.

Gradually, Henry began to court her. He brought flowers . . . made of Legos. He commissioned her favorite webcomic artist to draw a portrait of her. He wrote RPG scenarios for her. He wore ties. He held her hand.

By the time they kissed, they were both in love—though neither had said so. And by the time they first made love, they had committed their lives to each other, and they told each other so over and over, urgent whispers in the dark.

Camilla, you’ll remember, is a low SES woman—she represents about 4–8 percent of women whose sensitivity to sexually relevant stimuli is fairly low.
¹
And yet on the day she got married, oh, she was sensitive.

Five years later . . . not so much.

She told me, “It used to be, I’d be in the kitchen and he’d come up behind me and start kissing my neck and I’d just melt instantly. But now he’ll do the same thing and I’ll just be like, ‘I’m trying make dinner.’ I don’t understand what’s wrong with me now.”

“Nothing’s wrong, the context is just different,” I said.

“How is it different? I still love him exactly as much as I did the day we got married; I just seem to have emptied my ‘lust tank.’ Do people have a ‘lust tank’ that can be empty?”

“No . . . well . . . sort of? Not really. It’s not so much a tank as . . . a . . . a shower,” I said. “A shower where sometimes there’s tons of hot water, and the water pressure and the showerhead are great, and other times there’s hardly any water pressure or the showerhead is all gummed up with schmutz. You can always take a shower, but all these contextual factors influence whether that shower is fantastic or frustrating.”

“Contextual factors. So what is that in real life? Candles and flowers?” She was grimacing. “Bodice ripping?”

“Those are circumstances. Situations. That’s part of it, but when I say ‘context,’ I also mean, like, brain states.”

“Oh!” she said, brightening. “That sounds much more interesting than candles.”

It is. And it’s what this chapter is about: how to get the water nice and hot and build up the water pressure.

In their survey research on “cues for sexual desire factors,” Katie McCall and Cindy Meston asked women what turned them on, and found that the results divided into four general categories.
²

Love/Emotional Bonding Cues
, such as feeling a sense of love, security, commitment, emotional closeness, protection, and support in your relationship, and feeling a kind of “special attention” from your partner. Example: A woman told me the extraordinarily romantic story of a boyfriend who flew halfway around the globe to surprise her for their second anniversary of dating. Talk about closeness, commitment, and special attention. Yeah, that man got
laid
.

Explicit/Erotic Cues
, such as watching a sexy movie, reading an erotic story, watching or hearing other people having sex, anticipating having sex, knowing your partner desires you, or noticing your own or your partner’s arousal. Example: A woman in her twenties told me of a time when she woke up in the middle of the night in her boyfriend’s apartment, to the sound of the upstairs neighbors having sex. The rhythmic squeaking and grunting sighs instantly turned her on. She kissed her boyfriend awake and they listened together, then had fast, intense sex.

Visual/Proximity Cues
, such as seeing an attractive, well-dressed potential partner, with a well-toned body and lots of confidence, intelligence, and class. Example: A friend once said to me rhetorically, “What is it about the white cuffs of a shirt peeking out under a suit jacket?” I suggested, “Maybe a marker of a social status?” And she added, “That, and grooming. A man with pristine white cuffs is a man whose skin will taste good.”

Romantic/Implicit Cues
include intimate behaviors such as dancing closely, sharing a hot tub or massages or other intimate touch (like touching the face or hair), watching a sunset, laughing or whispering together, or smelling pleasant. Example: A woman in her thirties told me that she and her husband were saving up to remodel their bathroom, after they
realized that a reason she was so keen for sex when they went on vacation was that they took long, hot (in every sense) baths together in the giant tubs at the B and Bs where they stayed. More baths, more sex.

•  •  •

None of this is too surprising, but it’s always great to have data to back up our intuitions: A blend of erotic and romantic cues increases desire in women. McCall and Meston’s work tells us what activates the accelerator of women’s sexual response.

In a series of nine focus groups with eighty women, Cynthia Graham, Stephanie Sanders, Robin Milhausen, and Kimberly McBride cataloged women’s thoughts on things that cause them to turn on or to “keep the brakes on.”
³
These researchers found themes that have interesting parallels with McCall and Meston’s work. Here are the themes, with a quote from the research participants to illustrate each:

• 
Feelings About One’s Body
. “It’s much easier for me to feel aroused when I’m feeling really comfortable with myself . . . it’s not as easy to feel aroused when I’m not feeling good about myself and my body.”

• 
Concerns About Reputation
. “Being single and you know, wanting to be sexual with another person and thinking ‘okay, am I going to be too much?’ or ‘am I going to be not enough?’ or ‘what are they going to think of me because I’m doing these things?’ . . .”

• 
Putting on the Brakes
. “I think it’s like you might have some inclinations and then you’re like, ‘wait a minute, you can’t do that,’ you’re in a relationship or that guy’s a loser . . . and all of a sudden you just [think] ‘okay, fine, forget it, I can’t. That’s a bad idea,’ and just walk away from it.”

• 
Unwanted Pregnancy/Contraception
. “Unwanted pregnancy is a big turn off and if you’re with a partner who seems unconcerned about that, then it really feels like a danger.”

• 
Feeling Desired Versus Feeling Used by Partner
. “I like it when [men] caress not only, like, your body parts that get sexually aroused but just, like, your arms . . . it feels like he’s encompassing you and appreciating your whole body.”

• 
Feeling “Accepted” by Partner
. “Even with my second husband, and we were together 16 years, he was not accepting of my sexual responses . . . I make a lot of noise or [with] my favorite way to orgasm, he felt left out . . . That was just the beginning of just really shutting down.”

• 
Style of Approach/Initiation and Timing
. “His ‘game’ . . . you know, how the man approached you, how did he get me to talk to him longer than like, five minutes? . . . [It’s] the ways he went about it.”

• 
Negative Mood
. “If you’re very upset with your intended sexual partner, if you’re very upset with him about something, there’s no way that you are going to be aroused.”

These two studies help us begin to understand that women’s sexual interest depends on a wide range of factors. When we ask them, “What gets you in the mood?” women tell us:

• Having an attractive partner who respects them and accepts them as they are

• Feeling trusting and affectionate in their relationship

• Being confident and healthy—both emotionally and physically

• Feeling desired by their partner, being approached in a way that makes them feel special

• Explicit erotic cues, like erotica or porn, or hearing or seeing other people having sex

But what these answers tell us, too, is that
it depends
. A woman who feels confident in herself, and who is in a great relationship with a partner she loves, trusts, and feels attracted to, still may not want sex if she has the flu, worked seventy hours that week, or prefers that both she and her partner be freshly showered before sex and they’ve just come in from doing yard work together.

Another thing these answers tell us is that what women say on surveys and in focus groups can’t tell us everything that happens in real life. In
The Science of Trust
, relationship researcher John Gottman recounts the stories of women in abusive relationships, in which they habitually were targets of physical violence.
⁴
These women astonished him and his research partner by telling them that some of the best sex they had followed immediately after the acts of violence. And in
What Do Women Want?
Daniel Bergner describes Isabel, who couldn’t get herself into a hot and bothered state about her respectful, cherishing boyfriend, yet she had felt magnetically drawn to the objectifying jerk who wanted her to dress trashy and, she knew, would never commit to a relationship with her.
⁵
I’ve heard similar stories from many women, and nothing in this research explains it. Nothing tells us why makeup and breakup sex have earned a reputation for intensity.

So what gives?

What gives is the dual control mechanism’s relationship with your many other motivational systems. What gives is
context
.

Context is made of two things: the circumstances of the present moment—whom you’re with, where you are, whether the situation is novel or familiar, risky or safe, etc.—and your brain state in the present moment—whether you’re relaxed or stressed, trusting or not, loving or not, right now, in this moment. The evidence is mounting that women’s sexual response is more sensitive than men’s to context, including mood and relationship factors, and women vary more from each other in how much such factors influence their sexual response.
⁶

So this chapter is about context: how your external circumstances and your internal brain state can influence your sexual responsiveness.

We’ll start with the idea that your experience or perception of all kinds of sensations varies, depending on a number of factors, including external circumstances, mood, trust, and life history. Then we’ll get deep into the nitty-gritty of why this is true and unchangeable: When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat. And then I’ll show you the specific brain mechanism that governs
this whole process. Understanding this mechanism—I call it your emotional “One Ring”—is central to figuring out how context affects your sexual responsiveness.