In the end, Lubrication Error #1—Genital Response = “Turned On”—is actually just old school metaphorization, like the medieval anatomists from chapter 1 (“pudendum,” because shame!), though maybe without the moral message.
You know that the size of a phallus (clitoris or penis) doesn’t say anything about how ashamed a person is (or should be) of their genitals. At most, phallus size often—not always—predicts whether they have ovaries or testicles. Similarly, blood flow to the genitals doesn’t say anything about what they want or like (or should want or like). No. At most, blood flow to the genitals often—not always—is simply information about whether they have been exposed to something that their brain interpreted as sexually relevant—with no information about whether they liked it. lubrication error #2: genital response is enjoying A second, more science-y way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to pay attention to the science and then tell the wrong story about it, to decide that women’s genitals are the “honest indicator” of what really turns them on, and the women are lying, in denial, or just culturally oppressed out of awareness of their own deep desires. Let’s call this Lubrication Error #2.
This tempting—and wrong—explanation for nonconcordance lines up neatly with various cultural misconceptions about women’s sexuality, like the Moral, Medical, and Media Messages that I described in chapter 5 and like the man-as-default myth. Here’s a common misconception: Women have been socially programmed not to admit that they’re actually turned on by certain things (like violent sex or lesbian porn), so when they report their perceived arousal, they’re lying or in denial about their hidden desires, or possibly both. But what their genitals are doing is what’s really true.
Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire begins with a description of nonconcordance research, followed immediately by a description of lie detector research. The conclusion readers are forced to draw is that women are lying—or possibly just in denial—about their arousal. Here’s how Amanda Hess summarized it in her review at Slate.com: “Straight women claimed to respond to straight sex more than they really did; lesbian women claimed to respond to straight sex far less than they really did; nobody admitted a response to the bonobo 14sex.”
Note the “claimed” and the “really” and the “admitted.”
Of course you know that women’s genitals were just reacting automatically to a sexually relevant cue—“This is a restaurant”—which has only a passing acquaintance with what a woman “really” likes or wants.
Readers of What Do Women Want? didn’t get that lesson, though. They got Lubrication Error #2.
Sex-positive feminists like writer Amanda Hess embrace the idea that women’s bodies could be contradicting the outdated morality-based cultural narratives about women being “less sexual” than men: Look how much our genitals respond to stuff! Look how sexual we really are!
Right? That’s an appealing story—as if our bodies are showing us a secret, wildly sexual self that could be into anything if we just gave ourselves the permission that our culture has been denying us for centuries!
And after all, women have been subjected to oppressive cultural messages that made it shameful for them to acknowledge and pay affectionate attention to their own sexuality—that’s what chapter 5 was about. In fact this whole book is about paying attention to your own internal experience and trusting your body. And what could be more “trust your body” than “Your genitals are telling you what you like, even when you don’t know it”?
Ah. It’s that word “like” that’s the problem. Like, enjoying.
But genital response isn’t enjoying. It’s expecting.
Your genitals are telling you something, and you can trust them.
They’re telling you that something is sexually relevant, based on their experience of Pavlovian conditioning. “This a restaurant.” But that’s not the same as sexually appealing.
Do, absolutely, trust your body. And interpret its signals accurately.
Genital response, which happens between your legs, is expecting.
Arousal, which happens between your ears, includes enjoying.
We see this myth—that a woman’s genitals can tell us more about how she feels than she can—everywhere. For example, as part of my research for this book, I read the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L.
James. (Is that what everyone says? “Oh, it’s for research”?) And there it was. Arousal nonconcordance in the first spanking scene. During the spanking, heroine Anastasia tries to move away, she screams in pain, and 15 her “face hurts, it’s screwed up so tight.”There is not one word about her liking the spanking as it’s happening.
Afterward, hero/spanker Christian Grey puts his fingers in her vagina.
Now, knowing what you know about nonconcordance, listen to what Grey tells Ana: “Feel this. See how much your body likes this, Anastasia”
16(emphasis mine).
Yeah, I wanted to spank him when I read that, and not in the sexy way.
It gets worse, though, because Ana believes him, instead of believing her own internal experience, which she describes as, “demeaned, debased, 17and abused.”
Certainly there are women who are turned on by being consensually debased, but the whole plot pivots on the fact that Ana isn’t one of them.
So, E. L. James, if you’re reading this: Lubrication means it was sexually relevant, which tells us nothing about whether it was sexually appealing. Therefore I humbly request that in the next edition, Grey says to Ana, “Feel this. See how sexually relevant your body considers physical contact with your buttocks and genitals, Anastasia. That gives me no information about whether or not you liked it. Did you like it? No? Double crap, let me make it up to you by reading Emily Nagoski’s book about women’s sexual wellbeing, so that I have a clue next time.”
Thank you. • • • If you’re ever in doubt that genital response is about expecting, without necessarily any connection to enjoying or eagerness, just remember this: Lubrication Error #2 wants to claim that we can know what women really are turned on by when we measure what their genitals respond to. That would mean that women whose genitals respond to images of bonobos copulating really are, deep down, almost as interested in watching nonhuman primates copulating as they are in watching porn.
Really? Come on.
Even in the face of such absurdities, it’s an incredibly persistent myth.
Alain de Botton, in How to Think More about Sex, goes so far as to describe lubricating vaginas and tumescent penises as “unambiguous agents of sincerity,” because they are automatic rather than intentional, which means they can’t be “faked.”
If that’s true, then when your doctor taps your knee’s patellar tendon and your leg kicks out, that must mean you actually want to kick your doctor.
Or when you have an allergic reaction to pollen, you must hate flowers.
Or when your mouth waters around a mouthful of moldy, bruised peach, you must find it delicious.
Don’t get me wrong—you might want to kick your doctor and you might hate flowers and you might enjoy moldy, bruised peaches. But your automatic physiological processes are not how we would know that. No.
Automatic physiological processes are, ya know, automatic, not sincere.
But it gets worse—it gets less funny and more dangerous.
If we persist in the false belief that women’s genital response reflects what they “really” want or like, then we have to conclude that if their genitals respond during sexual assault, it means they “really” wanted or
liked the assault.
Which isn’t just nuts, it’s dangerous.
“You said no but your body said yes” is an idea that shows up both in the lyrics of pop songs and in the images at Project Unbreakable, an online gallery of sexual assault survivors holding signs with phrases said by their 18 rapists, their families, or even police responders.But you know by now that bodies don’t say yes or no, they only say, “That’s sexually relevant,” without any comment on whether it’s appealing, much less whether it’s wanted. A penis in a vagina is sexually relevant, though it may be unappealing, unwanted, and unwelcome. There is no wanting necessary for genital response. It’s just, “This is a restaurant,” with no comment on whether it might be a good place to have dinner. • • • It’s an ancient fallacy, this notion that physiology can prove whether someone likes something sexual. Until the 1700s, people believed that conception was the pleasurable part of sex for a woman, so if a woman got pregnant, she must have experienced pleasure, and if she experienced 19 pleasure, then the sex could not have been unwanted.Because, “She said no but her ovaries said yes.”
This myth has its own degree of traction, showing up in the public discourse as recently as the 2012 Senate race in Missouri, when Republican candidate Todd Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down,” which even Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney described as, “insulting, inexcusable and, frankly, 20wrong.”
Sex researcher Meredith Chivers often says, “Genital response is not consent.” Let’s add to that, “And neither is pregnancy.”