nine
meta-emotions THE ULTIMATE SEX-POSITIVE CONTEXT
Laurie and Johnny had tried all the tricks. But in the end, what made the difference was when Laurie chose pleasure—for herself.
Armed with the decision to just start paying attention to what it feels like, Laurie went to a weekend mindfulness retreat called something like Awakening the Feminine Divine. She practiced yoga and slept nine hours a night. She ate mindfully. She breathed mindfully.
She shared her feelings with strangers, made new friends, and found a renewed sense that she was not alone in her struggles. And, let me just emphasize this, because Laurie would want me to: She slept nine hours a night.
She focused for twenty-one hours (the time she wasn’t sleeping) on really noticing what it felt like to be alive and move through the
world.
And she came back a new woman.
“I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself,” she announced. “And what I want, more than anything, is to be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love.”
“Wait a second, Johnny and I and everyone else who loves you, we’ve all been saying that for months,” I said. “What did they do to you at that retreat?”
“I stood in the Divine Gaze of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Auspiciousness, and I felt my own power and beauty,” she recited seriously. Then she cracked a grin and said, “You’ll probably tell me that’s just a metaphor for activating something or other in my mesolimbic whatever, but I don’t give a damn about the science. It frickin’ worked.”
This chapter is about the science Laurie doesn’t give a damn
about.
It frickin’ works.
Here we are in the final chapter. So far we’ve learned that in some important ways women’s sexual response often does not follow the same patterns as men’s sexual response: • Women, as a group, have more sensitive brakes and less sensitive accelerators, though there’s lots of variation. • To a greater degree than men’s, women’s sexual response is sensitive to external circumstances and internal brain state—to context. • Women are less likely than men to experience concordance between their genital response and their subjective arousal. • And more women than men experience responsive or context-sensitive desire.
All of which may come as a surprise to the 10–20 percent of women whose sexual response is similar to the “standard narrative.” We also learned that people, especially women, vary widely from each other and change substantially across their life spans.
This chapter brings all of that together, with a single core truth about what makes the difference in a woman’s sexual wellbeing: How you feel about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself.
Not what you think about it, not what you believe about it, not what you’ve been told about it, not what it’s like, what you do, or even what choices you make—all of those are influenced by how you feel about it, but it’s the “how you feel about it” part that’s the key. Your meta-emotions.
I’ll illustrate this with contrasting examples.
The first is from neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book Hallucinations, in which he describes a patient he calls Gertie C., who told him she sometimes has sexually explicit hallucinations. Gertie C.’s experience is far from typical, but to me that’s what makes it such a fantastic example of meta- emotions. Sacks writes: When she told me about [her erotic hallucinations], she added, anxiously, “You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!” I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humor and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting “a gentleman visitor from out of town” in a few minutes’ time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each 1evening.
Notice that when she was reassured that the hallucinations were “rather a good idea,” their quality became more positive, and so she experienced a kind of pleasure and affection she would otherwise have lacked in her life.
How she felt about it is the only thing that changed, and that change transformed the experience from paranoid to amorous.
I figure if Gertie can enjoy her sex life, surely the rest of us have that potential, too!
Contrast her experience with that of Ms. B., whose story opens a New York Times article about women’s sexual medicine. The article begins: Since Ms. B. entered her mid-40s, she says, sex has been more about smoke and mirrors than thunder and lightning. She is rarely if ever interested enough to initiate it with her partner of 10 years, and she does not reach climax during the act.
2She wishes it were otherwise.
Having gotten this far in the book, you’ll recognize that Ms. B.’s desire style may be responsive or context-sensitive rather than spontaneous, and it sounds like she’s not reliably orgasmic with intercourse. Both of these put
her squarely in the majority.
And she wishes it were otherwise.
Which is perfectly understandable. I imagine she learned (as most of us do) that spontaneous desire and orgasms with penetration are normal, and since that’s not what she’s experiencing, she believes she’s abnormal.
Broken. If I believed I were broken, I would wish it were otherwise, too.
But she’s not broken, she’s normal—in fact, she’s typical. And what effect does wishing her normal sexuality were otherwise have on her sexual wellbeing? Does it activate the accelerator or hit the brakes?
The result is that she herself describes herself as “sexually dead.”
And it doesn’t get much worse than that.
Now, let’s imagine, just hypothetically, that Ms. B. tried on the possibility of, say, feeling curious about her lack of desire, instead of wishing it were different. What if she said to herself, “Huh, I notice I haven’t wanted sex much lately. That’s an interesting little puzzle! It’s normal for my desire to change as my context changes, so I wonder what part of my context has changed, to influence my desire? And I wonder what sort of context my partner and I could create that would cause me to want sex so much that I can’t stop myself from jumping his bones?”
Sometimes it’s as simple as that, like flipping a light switch. But not always. Sometimes, before you can explore your own sexual functioning with curiosity and warmth, you must move through the fear or rage or grief that is standing between you and that warm light. And that’s not easy. But it’s possible. It happens in my classroom and my workshops every time I teach.