When I say “learn,” I don’t mean explicit learning, like how you learn all the state capitals or the Pythagorean theorem. I mean it in the way those rats learned about lemons and jackets, the way Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate when a bell rang, or the way you learned to ride a bicycle. None of these can be learned from a book but only from experience.
And this is another way that it’s different for girls: Hormones influence the functioning of this learning mechanism. Your brain’s readiness to link external cues to internal arousal processes is different at different stages of the menstrual cycle, whereas it’s more stable in men, who don’t have the 14monthly oscillation of their hormones.
As a result of both their different genitals and their different hormone cycles, girls’ learning about sexually relevant stimuli is • likely to begin later in their development • more influenced than boys’ by social and emotional context • more likely to generate a mismatch between their genital response and their experience of sexual arousal (as I’ll describe in chapter 6) In other words, girls and boys are different. Shocking, I know.
But this is actually a pretty radical thing to say—as I described in the introduction, most of what our culture teaches us about women’s sexuality is Men’s Sexuality Lite—basically the same but not quite as good. The science is telling us that the process of growing from a baby girl into a woman is—at least in terms of sexual response—just not the same as the process of growing from a baby boy into a man. Because the way male and female bodies learn about sex is not the same.
So by the time Frannie and Frankie reach adulthood, both have developed fundamental frameworks about what things are sexually relevant and what things are potential threats. These frameworks will continue to change as they experience new things. And these frameworks will be different from each other, yes they will.
So that’s how we learn what counts as a sexually relevant stimulus. can you change your SIS or SES?
Let’s go back to that puzzle of erectile dysfunction drugs not helping women.
If a woman is experiencing sexual difficulties, the dual control model
demands that we ask four questions:
• How sensitive is her accelerator?
• What’s activating it?
• How sensitive are her brakes? • What’s hitting them?
So far in this chapter, you’ve been a sex researcher in the ’60s, a sex therapist in the ’70s, a pharmaceutical researcher in the late ’90s, and a male lab rat with a lemon fetish. Now imagine you’re a sex educator, armed with the dual control model to help people understand how their sexuality works. People ask you frustrated questions, dissatisfied with their sexual response mechanism—it doesn’t behave the way they want or expect it to,
and they want to change it.
So can we change it?
The answer has two parts, both equally important.
First, SIS and SES are traits you’re born with that remain more or less stable over your life span, and no one knows precisely which factors cause them to change. In general, though, changing your SIS and SES is probably a bit like changing your IQ: You’re born with a range of potential, and as you develop, your life experience shapes that potential and lands you somewhere within that range. SIS and SES are way more flexible than IQ, but we know very little about what factors are involved in changing them, whether they can be changed deliberately, or if they respond only to changes in environmental factors beyond our control. But so far, it seems there’s very little we can do to deliberately change SIS or SES.
And anyway, for most people SIS and SES are “medium”—neither overly sensitive nor problematically insensitive. Changing SIS and SES if you’re medium isn’t even desirable.
But then there’s the second part of the answer: You may not be able to change the mechanism itself, but you probably can change what the mechanism responds to. You can often change what your brake considers a potential threat, and you can certainly reduce those threats, like unwanted pregnancy, STIs, stress, etc.
You also can change what your accelerator considers sexually relevant, and you can increase the sexually relevant things in your life. In other words, you can change the context—your external circumstances and your internal state. The why and how of these changes is the main topic of the next three chapters, but here’s the short version: You know that almost nothing your SIS and SES respond to is innate; your brain learned to associate particular stimuli with arousal or inhibition.
Through a process of “tuning” your context—both your brain and your environment—you can maximize your sexual potential.
I thought Laurie, with her low desire, might be high SIS. We wrote a list of things that activate her brakes: kid, full-time job with a rotten boss, her parents—not to mention the ways her body had changed since her pregnancy, which made her unhappy, and she also felt unhappy about feeling unhappy, since the feminist in her made her judge herself for not being able to let go of the arbitrary cultural ideal and just Love Her Body. Oh, and also? She was going back to school for a master’s degree. So no big deal.
She didn’t have a particularly sensitive brake—she had an avalanche of stuff constantly putting pressure on a very average brake.
“Just seeing all this written down makes me need a massage,” she groaned.
“So ask Johnny to give you a massage,” I suggested.
“Sure, and then I feel guilty if we don’t have sex after that.”
“Oooh, good insight! Add that to the list of things that hit your brakes: feeling like you’re expected to have sex.”
She did. And that’s when I saw the lights go on for her. She said, “So all the toys and games were hitting the accelerator, but at the same time all these things in my life were hitting the sexual brake in my brain . . . and it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the accelerator if
the brake is on the floor. Huh.”
“Right.”
“So how do I stop hitting brake?”
The million-dollar question.
The short answer is: Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works.
The full answer is . . . what the rest of this book is about.
My suggestion to Laurie was to stop trying to make herself want sex for a while. Take away the performance pressure.
She did not follow my advice—not right away, anyway. What she tried instead was a clever shift in context, which is what the next chapter is about.
To put it in terms of the garden metaphor I used in chapter 1, your SIS and SES are characteristics of the soil in your garden. So are your genitals and the rest of your body and brain. The innate sensitivity of your SIS and SES influences how your garden grows—which species of plants will
thrive, how densely you can plant them—but other factors can have at least as much influence. Water, sun, choice of plants, even the addition of fertilizer—in other words, everything from stress to love to trust to a vibrator—can all influence the abundance of your garden. You can’t change the soil itself, but you can augment it and you can make smart decisions
about how to manage it.
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.