“I want you to!” said Camilla. “Tease my ticking pilot light!
Build up the water pressure!”
So that’s what they decided to do. Henry turned everything into low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him.
Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention.
Like when they were first falling in love—a constant, steady stream of reminders that, “This guy is amazing!”
Henry loves Camilla’s enthusiastic desire, and all it takes to get her there is enough stimulation, built up gradually.
This is not a story we see very much in pop culture because it’s not about tension and ambivalence. But it turns out this is how it works
for a lot of women. not a drive. for real.
A lot of women, on learning that they have a responsive or context- sensitive desire style, feel instantly relieved to know that there’s nothing wrong with them, that they just need more of a reason to have sex than folks with a spontaneous style do. They get busy understanding the contexts that make them hot and talking with their partner about ways to increase access to those contexts.
But some women feel disappointed, and I can understand that. Many of us have been taught that the capacity to want sex in almost any context is not only preferable but actually the only “normal” way to experience desire.
The spontaneous desire style is so privileged in our culture, so valued, that it’s easy to feel disempowered if that’s not your primary style.
And in part, this is the male-as-default myth at work again. Just like concordant arousal, spontaneous desire gets called “normal,” while any other desire style gets called “abnormal,” just because spontaneous desire is typical (though far from universal) in men.
But I think it’s more than that. I think the cultural dominance of spontaneous desire is actually grounded in the myth of sex as a drive.
A drive is a biological mechanism whose job is to keep the organism at a healthy baseline—not too warm, not too cold, not too hungry, not too full.
A traditional metaphor for a drive system is a thermostat: When the temperature drops below a critical point, the thermostat notices and switches on the heat, and then when the temperature gets back in the
desired range, the heat switches off. The temperature bounces around within a few degrees of the set point.
Appetite is the classic example of a drive. Hunger for food drives foraging and eating, and then when you feel full, you stop eating. There are lots of other drives: Thirst drives fluid consumption, fatigue drives sleep, thermoregulation drives shivering, sweating, taking off a sweater, or turning up the thermostat. Hunger and thirst are motivational systems that push you to do the things you have to do in order to avoid dying. The uncomfortable (“aversive”) internal states of thirst, exhaustion, and cold push you out into the world, to go meet a need, so that you can return to a baseline, and that
baseline is all about staying alive.
When you hear “drive,” think “survive.”
“Drive” is how scientists thought about sex for a long time. Helen Singer Kaplan’s triphasic model, discussed in chapter 2, describes sexual desire as one of the “drives or appetites that subserves individual or species 7 survival.”For centuries, scientists thought sex was a “hunger.” It’s probably how you think about it, too. It’s how I thought about it for a long
time.
8Turns out, no.
It’s easy to prove that sex is not a drive: As animal behaviorist Frank Beach put it in 1956, “No one has ever suffered tissue damage for lack of 9 sex.”We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died because of not being able to get laid.
Maybe they wanted to, but that’s different (and the topic of a later section).
There is no baseline to return to and no physical damage that results from not “feeding” your sexual desire.
Instead, sex is an “incentive motivation system.”
Most people associate the word “incentive” with the idea of a prize, something worth working for. The biological meaning is similar. Instead of feeling pushed by an uncomfortable internal experience, like hunger, incentive motivation systems are all about being pulled by an attractive external stimulus.
When you hear “incentive motivation,” think “thrive.”
Drive survive. Pushed by an unpleasant internal state, which ends when you return to baseline.
Incentive thrive. Pulled by an attractive external stimulus (the incentive). It ends when you’ve obtained the incentive.