category of things that generally qualify as sexually relevant. If our two women on vacation came across that diner with a brawl outside, the genitals would still say, “This is a restaurant,” even as the brain dragged her away, shouting, “Let’s get out of here! Call the cops!”
In other words, women’s genitals learn to associate certain stimuli with certain physiological responses that have nothing to do with pleasure or even interest. The pressure on my college friend’s vulva—the bar between her legs while she was tied up—triggered an automatic genital response without triggering arousal. “This is a restaurant,” said her genitals, but her
brain wasn’t interested. nonconcordance in other emotions Nonconcordance is not just a sex thing. It shows up in all kinds of 8emotional experiences and is a puzzle to all kinds of emotion researchers.
For example, suppose I show you a picture of an emotionally intense scenario—maybe the face of a viciously snarling dog, or a wounded child sitting alone—and it causes you to experience an emotion, a physiological response. And then I ask you to say a fact about the scenario or else to say how the picture makes you feel. Which of those, saying the fact or saying the feeling, will reduce your physiological response?
When researchers did this experiment, people reported that saying a fact about an emotional situation helped to reduce the emotion, more than saying the feeling they were experiencing—and the tension in their voice 9 reflected that.But their skin conductance (a reliable measure of the stress response) went down when they named the feeling, not when they named a fact. That is, their physiological stress response was nonconcordant with their experienced emotion. Normal.
Ross Buck, professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut, has a handy way of thinking about emotion that will help us to 10 understand nonconcordance.He describes three levels of emotion: Emotion I is the involuntary physiological response—your heart rate and blood pressure, pupil dilation, digestion, sweating, immune functioning.
Genital response falls into this category, and my college friend who got wet while she was bored, tied up waiting for her partner to come back, experienced this kind of response . . . but nothing else.
Emotion II is involuntary expressive response to a feeling. It’s body language—or, more accurately, “paralanguage”—things like vocal inflection, posture, and facial expression—all the cues we use to infer
another person’s internal state. A great dinner date will be full of Emotion II, as you find yourself putting your hand on your date’s arm, gazing into their eyes, and smiling. These are often influenced by culture, but have a great deal of universality, and they can be intentionally controlled to some degree, but not as much as you might think. Did you choose the expression on your face right now?
Emotion III is your subjective experience of a feeling. If someone asks you how you feel and you check in with yourself to find the answer, what you’re noticing is Emotion III. This is subjective arousal—the conscious experience of “I want you so much I can hardly stand it”—which may or may not be accompanied by genital response (Emotion I) or eye contact (Emotion II).
It might even be true that there are stable gender differences in nonconcordance between physiological response and subjective experience 11 for emotions other than sexual arousal.For whatever reason—cultural, biological, or both (probably both)—women have more overlap between their facial expressions (Emotion II) and their subjective experience (Emotion III), while men have more overlap between their skin 12conductance (Emotion I) and their subjective experience (Emotion III).
What this research suggests is that a woman’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with her facial expression and her vocal inflection, while a man’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with his heart rate and blood flow.
Whether or not there’s a gender difference, it’s fair to say that what you experience as your emotional life doesn’t necessarily line up neatly with what your brain and body are doing. That doesn’t make you a liar, it doesn’t make you crazy, and it doesn’t mean you’re in denial. It means you’re a human being, whose emotional and motivational responses may be more complex than any other species’. Nonconcordance shows up in many kinds of emotional experiences, and men and women experience nonconcordance differently in those emotions. It’s not a sex thing; it’s a human thing.
You have to relax before you can trust. But women who are slow to trust, like Merritt, can’t relax until they feel trust. It’s a problem.
The solution came when she was trying to solve a different problem.
As a woman in her forties, entering menopause, lack of lubrication just seemed like a part of life for Merritt. Her concern was
more for her partner. Carol was the birth mom of their teenage daughter, and she had struggled with intermittent genital pain ever since the birth. I recommended lube to make manual sex more comfortable.
Merritt was into it. All I had to say was, “There are a bunch of different kinds of lube, so you might—” and she was online, browsing for a variety pack.
The box arrived in the mail. They set a date—Friday night, with the teenager away on a camping trip—and when the night arrived, they split a half bottle of wine and got started.
They took the importance of context seriously and started with a romantic movie and then took turns retelling each other their “Story of 13 Us.” This is a trick they adapted from John Gottman’s relationship research—they narrate to each other how they met and fell in love, to remind each other (and themselves) of the meaning of their shared life, their affection and admiration for each other. It works differently for each of them; it activates Carol’s accelerator by making her feel in love, and it deactivates Merritt’s brake by making her feel trusting of her partner.
But Merritt’s difficulty wasn’t trusting her partner, it was trusting herself. And what she learned this night is that it becomes easier to trust herself when she can see how her body brings pleasure to her partner.
Trying out the different kinds of lube turned sex into play, instead of a problem, which switched her from what she calls “noisy brain,” where everything is perceived as a threat, to “quiet brain,” where everything is perceived with curiosity and pleasure. (Remember the rat who didn’t like Iggy Pop.) She paid close attention to how Carol experienced each type of lube.
As she relaxed into the pleasure of observing her partner’s pleasure, she found that when she connected with the experience of giving pleasure, her own pleasure could expand inside her, without all
the brakes and worries and fretting.
She swam in the water.
And it happened when she moved her focus away from her own worries and onto the task of increasing her partner’s pleasure.