when, in college back in the ’90s, a friend told me about her first experiences with power play in a sexual relationship: “I let him tie my wrists above my head while I was standing up, and he positioned me so that I was straddling this bar that pressed against my vulva, you know, like a broomstick. And then he went away! He just left, and it was totally boring, and when he came back I was like, ‘I’m not into this.’ He looked at the bar and he looked at me and he said, ‘Then why are you wet?’ And I was so confused because I definitely wasn’t into it, but my body was definitely responding.”
Like everyone who has ever read a sexy romance novel, I was sure that wet equaled aroused. Desirous. Wanting it. “Ready” for sex. So what could it mean that my friend’s genitals were responding, when she really didn’t
feel turned on or desirous at all?
What was going on?
Nonconcordance is what was going on.
In this chapter, I’ll describe the research on nonconcordance, including answering questions like, Who experiences nonconcordance? (Everyone, actually.) How do you know your partner is turned on, if you can’t use their genitals as a gauge? (Pay better attention!) And how can you help your partner understand your nonconcordance? I’ll also address three wrong but beguiling myths about nonconcordance—and these myths aren’t just wrong, they’re dangerously wrong.
I want everyone who reads this chapter to go on a spree of telling the whole world about nonconcordance—that it’s normal, that everyone experiences it, and that you must pay attention to your partner’s words,
rather than their genitals. measuring and defining nonconcordance Put on your sex researcher hat again and imagine conducting an 1experiment like this: A guy comes to the lab. You lead him into a quiet room, sit him down in a comfortable chair, and leave him alone in front of a television. He straps a “strain gauge” (which is exactly what it sounds like) to his penis, puts a tray over his lap, and takes hold of a dial that he can tune up and down to register his arousal (“I feel a little aroused,” “I feel a lot aroused,” etc.).
Then he starts watching a variety of porn segments. Some of it is romantic, some is violent, some features two men, some features two women, and some features a man and a woman. He rates his level of arousal on the dial as he watches, and the device on his penis measures his erection. Then you look at the data to see how much of a match there is between how aroused
he felt—his “subjective arousal”—and how erect he got—his “genital response.”
Result: There will be about a 50 percent overlap between his genital response and his subjective arousal. It’s far from a perfect one-to-one correlation, but in behavioral science it’s exciting to find a relationship that strong. It’s highly statistically significant.
For the most part, both our research subject and his penis will respond most to the porn that matches his sexual orientation: a gay man’s genitals respond most to porn featuring two men, and he’ll report the highest levels of arousal in response to it; a straight man’s genitals respond most to porn featuring a man and a woman or else two women, and he’ll report the highest level of arousal in response to it, etc.
Now let’s run the same experiment with a woman. Put her in that quiet room, in that comfortable chair, and let her insert a vaginal photoplethysmograph (essentially a tiny flashlight that measures genital blood flow), and give her the tray and the dial and the variety of porn.
Result: There will be about a 10 percent overlap between what her genitals are doing and what she dials in as her arousal.
10 percent.
It turns out that there is no predictive relationship between how aroused she feels and how much her genitals respond—statistically insignificant.
Her genital response will be about the same no matter what kind of porn she’s shown, and her genital response might match her sexual 2orientation . . . or it might not.
3It’s called “arousal nonconcordance” and it’s totally a thing.
This research has been in the media a lot. For example, Meredith Chivers’s nonconcordance research was described in the New York Times 4 and in a number of popular books recently.Chivers’s work builds on the research of, among others, Ellen Laan, whose nonconcordance studies were 5 also covered in the New York Times a decade earlier.Chivers replicated Laan’s finding of greater arousal nonconcordance in women compared to men, with the innovation of showing research participants not only a variety of porn and nonsexual videos but also videos of nonhuman primates— bonobos, to be specific—copulating. It turns out women’s genitals respond to bonobo sex, too, though not as much as to porn.
There is about a 50 percent overlap between what a male’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what his brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” And there is about a 10 percent overlap between what a female’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what her brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” Men’s genitals are relatively specific in what they respond to, and so are their brains. Women’s genitals are relatively general in what they respond to, while their brains are more sensitive to context. Note that a stimulus can be “relevant” without being appealing.
What the media coverage has failed to make clear is that women’s genital response is actually very discriminating—compared to other automatic physiological responses. For example, your Achilles tendon reflex, heart rate, and skin conductance (sweating) will all increase after watching a scary segment of the movie Cujo and after watching porn. But 6 your genitals have no interest in Cujo.In fact, women’s genitals don’t respond to any of these videos: waves crashing on a beach, the joyful “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” scene from the movie Stepmom, the achingly sad telegram delivery scene in A League of Their Own, or a first-person 7 view of a roller coaster.Genital response is specific to sexually relevant stimuli—regardless of whether those stimuli are sexually appealing.
The genitals tell you, “That’s sexually relevant.”
The person tells you, “That turns me on,” or “I am enjoying this,” or “I am eager for more, please.”
For women, there’s about a 10 percent overlap between “sexually relevant” and “sexually appealing.” For men, there’s about a 50 percent overlap.
What we’re seeing in nonconcordance is the difference between expecting and enjoying, from chapter 3. Genital response is the automatic, trained response to something that’s sexually relevant. Pavlov’s dogs salivated when a bell rang, not because they wanted to eat the bell but because their expecting system had linked the bell with food. Similarly, your emotional One Ring has learned what’s sexually relevant (remember babies Frankie and Frannie in chapter 2, and the rats in jackets?), and your expecting system activates physiological responses to whatever it has learned is sexually relevant.
A stimulus can be sexually relevant and yet be sexually unappealing, as my college friend from the start of the chapter experienced. And remember the blog reader from chapter 2, who emailed me that “brakes and accelerator at the same time” described her experience reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Her genitals responded, but she didn’t feel “turned on”; the book included explicit sex, so it was sexually relevant, but it also hit her brakes because she didn’t particularly like the characters or the story, and that made it sexually unappealing.
What happens when a man takes erectile dysfunction medication?
It increases blood flow to the genitals during sexual stimulation.
What happens when a woman takes erectile dysfunction
medication?
Same thing.
And what happens when you increase blood flow to a woman’s
genitals?
Not a lot. Because: nonconcordance.
Olivia and Patrick tried it. They took an ED pill together as an experiment in flipping the chasing dynamic—and also, because, Why not? (NB: “Why not?” includes no known medical benefit and unknown medical risk. Taking a prescription medication without a doctor’s supervision is always risky. But let’s be real here. People do it.) Olivia’s lips—the lips on her face, that is—turned dark, dark red, so that she looked like she was wearing lipstick. Other than that, she didn’t notice any particular effect. For once, Olivia’s experience was typical of most women’s.
Patrick, on the other hand, felt like he’d taken an aphrodisiac.
Olivia looked irresistibly beautiful, and his skin felt like the volume had been turned up on his nerve endings, so that every sensation was amplified, magnified. They went out for ice cream after they took the drug, for something to do while they waited for it to kick in, and they had to turn right back around because Patrick couldn’t wait to get Olivia naked.
Erectile dysfunction drugs don’t do any of this; all they do is increase blood flow to the genitals. Such is the power of placebo, as I described in chapter 2. The same thing happened occasionally when Patrick had a few drinks and Olivia was the designated driver.
This rare experience of being the one with the lower sexual interest was revelatory for Olivia. As a woman who always felt driven forward by her sexual interest, pulling her partner along with her, being the one who was standing still and being pulled, as it were, was an inspiring experience. She allowed herself to receive Patrick’s erotic attention. She allowed her arousal to build as slowly as it wanted to.
She allowed it to happen, instead of feeling like it was dragging her forward.