At what point did Johnny start experiencing desire? In the car on
the way there.
But it worked out just fine.
It was an expensive night, and it required a significant amount of planning ahead, but it got Laurie all the way out of the parenting- bosslady-student-omg-life state of mind and into a Johnny-and-me- sexytime state of mind that allowed her stressors to slip into the shadows of her attention for a while, while hey-sexy-lady stood in the
spotlight.
And all they changed was the context.
“isn’t it just culture?”
I get asked this a lot. “Wouldn’t women experience more spontaneous desire if our culture weren’t so sex negative?”
Desire is context sensitive, and culture is a part of context, so yes, it influences desire. We learned in chapter 5 just how much women have to overcome when they’re raised in a cultural context that punishes them for celebrating their own bodies, teaches them to fear or be disgusted by sex, and leaves them chronically insecure and anxious about themselves and their partners. It’s a recipe for keeping on the brakes.
So it could easily be true that in a more sex-positive culture, more women would experience spontaneous desire. In fact, I would bet on it, since in a more sex-positive culture there would be fewer things to hit the brakes. And I’d love to see it tested empirically: Let’s raise one hundred girls in a sex-positive culture that teaches them to celebrate and trust their own bodies, that prevents all adverse childhood experience, and that values pleasure, joy, and self-confidence in women. Let’s see what happens to their sexual wellbeing, compared to one hundred random girls raised in our regular, body-shaming, pleasure-shaming, insecure, and coercive sexual culture.
But it’s never “just” culture or “just” biology or “just” anything. It’s always the interaction of all the variables. Even in a sex-positive culture, women with more sensitive brakes and less sensitive accelerators would need extra-sexy stimulation before arousal sparked into desire. And even in the most intensely sex-negative culture, women with low-sensitivity brakes and high-sensitivity accelerators would experience desire before they were 27even aware of being aroused.