Genital response is no more an expression of pleasure, desire, or consent than the fertilization of an egg is. I hope that is totally obvious to
you by now. • • • We metaphorize our bodies; we use descriptions of our physiology to stand in for descriptions of our states of mind. “I’m so wet” and “I’m so hard” are intended to say, “I’m into this.” These metaphors are so entrenched that people believe they’re literal. Indeed, some people actually want us to believe that women are lying—whether deliberately or because we’ve been culturally oppressed out of the capacity to recognize our own desires—when we say we’re not turned on but our genitals are responding.
I hope that by now, six chapters into this book, you know better. You know that male and female sexualities are made of the same parts, just organized in different ways, and you know that no two people are alike.
You know that what activates your accelerator or hits your brake is context dependent. You know that women’s sexuality is even more context sensitive than men’s, that developmental, cultural, and life history factors all profoundly shape how and when our bodies respond. You know that sexually relevant and sexually appealing are not the same thing.
Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men. lubrication error #3: nonconcordance is a problem The third way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to decide that it’s a symptom of something.
Suppose you recognize that nonconcordance exists, you acknowledge that it’s expecting without necessarily indicating enjoying or eagerness, and then you read the research that shows there is a correlation between 21nonconcordance and sexual dysfunctions related to desire and arousal.
And so you decide that, because nonconcordance is associated with dysfunction, nonconcordance must be a problem.
Which brings me to a sentence every undergraduate who takes a research methods class will memorize: “Correlation does not imply causation.” It refers to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—“with this, therefore because of this”—which means that just because two things happen together doesn’t mean that one thing caused the other thing.
The quintessential example in the twenty-first century is the relationship 22 between pirates and global warming.This is a joke made by Bobby
Henderson, as part of the belief system of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson wanted to make a point about the difference between causation and correlation, so he drew a graph that apparently plotted increase in global temperature with the precipitous drop in the number of seafaring pirates.
Did the loss of pirates cause global climate change?
Of course not. It’s absurd, right? That’s the point.
Actually, we can hypothesize a third variable that influenced both the reduction in pirates and the change in global climate: the Industrial Revolution.
Like this putative correlation between pirates and global temperature, there’s also a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction.
The correlation makes it easy to think that the nonconcordance is causing the sexual dysfunction, or that the dysfunction is causing the nonconcordance.
Turns out, no. Just as pirates and global temperature can be linked together by the Industrial Revolution, nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction are linked together by a third variable: context.
How does context link sexual functioning and concordance?
Sexually functional women have brakes that are sensitive to context, turning off the offs when they’re in the right context—which, remember, means both external circumstances and internal mental state. Sexually dysfunctional women’s brakes stay on, even in contexts where you would expect them to turn off.
I’ll illustrate this with an extraordinarily clever study published in 2010.
Dutch researchers built an “ambulatory laboratory”—a take-home kit of 23 plethysmograph, laptop computer, and handheld control unit.Participants completed tests in the lab similar to other nonconcordance research— viewing erotic stimuli and testing various automatic and conscious responses—and they took the ambulatory lab home with them and tested themselves there, too. This way researchers could measure how being in the lab influenced the results, compared to being at home. In other words, they measured the effect of context. They studied two groups: eight women with healthy sexual functioning (the control group) and eight women who met the diagnostic criteria for “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (the “low- desire” group).