six
arousal LUBRICATION IS NOT CAUSATION
When you’re a sex educator, you get phone calls like this one: “Hey, it’s Camilla. Can I ask you a sex question?”
“Sure.”
“You won’t be grossed out?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay, so Henry and I were messing around and I said, ‘I’m ready, I want you,’ and he said, ‘No, you’re not wet, you’re just humoring me.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m totally ready!’ And he didn’t believe me because I wasn’t wet. So . . . should I see a doctor? Is it hormonal? What’s wrong?”
“If you’re having pain you should see a doctor, but otherwise you’re probably fine. Sometimes bodies don’t respond with genital arousal in a way that matches mental experience. Tell him to pay attention to your words, not your fluids, and also buy some lube.”
“That’s it? Genital response doesn’t always match experience, so
buy some lube?”
“Yep. It’s called nonconcordance.”
“But that’s not what . . . I mean, is this some new scientific discovery?”
“It’s kinda new. The earliest psychophysiological research I’ve read that explicitly measures sexual arousal nonconcordance is maybe thirty years old, though that—”
“Thirty years? Why did no one tell me this before?”
This chapter answers that question, and a whole lot more.
The idea that genital response doesn’t necessarily match a person’s experience of arousal runs contrary to the “standard narrative” about sex.
As far as most porn, romance novels, and even sex education texts are concerned, genital response and sexual arousal are one and the same.
For a long time, I thought the standard narrative was right—of course I did, I believed what I was taught. We all do. So I had no idea what to think