So yes. Culture is a part of the context, and I think changing the culture to be more welcoming of sexual variety and autonomy would allow more women to experience more spontaneous desire.
Alas, culture is not a part of the context that you have a lot of control over—and I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to wait until I live in a sex-positive culture to have the sex life I want. This book is about activating the science to help you, as an individual, improve your sex life, and I hope you’ve learned by now that you can have an amazing sex life right now, without waiting for the culture around you to change.
One little warning here, though: I’ve heard lots of people say, “If we had a more sex-positive culture, women’s desire would be more like men’s!” which is the same men-as-default myth that causes women to feel broken. I think that in a more sex-positive culture, men would be more like women, too—more responsive, less concordant, more context sensitive.
And whether or not that’s right, let’s make sure we’re not falling into the trap of assuming that the way men’s sexuality works is the way women’s is “supposed to.”
Remember the tomatoes and the aloes. Our expectation that people are supposed to be all one way will only make some people “right” and other people “wrong,” when there’s nothing wrong that a different context wouldn’t fix—and nothing right that the wrong context couldn’t break. it might be the chasing dynamic “Low desire” is, by definition, a relationship issue. The partner with low desire is the one who wants sex too infrequently for the other partner’s satisfaction. It’s not that one person’s desire for sex is somehow inherently “too low” or the other’s is “too high.” They’re just different—at least in the current context.
This differential in desire is the single most common sexual dysfunction —but it’s not the differential itself that causes the issue; it’s how the couple manages it. Problematic dynamics emerge when the partners have different levels of desire and they believe that one person’s level of desire is “better” than the other person’s. For example, let’s say Person A has a spontaneous desire style and Person B has a responsive style. In this scenario, Person A may feel rejected and undesirable because they almost always do the initiating, and then Person B may start to feel pushed and will resist more.
Person A asks and asks and asks and feels rejected and hurt and resentful because Person B keeps saying no, no, no; and Person B feels defensive but