those experiences what they were, in terms of both external circumstances and your internal state. Do take the time to do this. Thinking through even just one amazing experience and one not-so-great experience can give you a sense of which contexts increase your brain’s tendency to interpret the world as sexy and which reduce that tendency.
Painful or Erotic?
If your partner spanks your butt while you’re in the middle of tying your toddler’s shoes, it’s annoying. But if your partner spanks your butt in the middle of sex, it can feel very, very sexy indeed. Context can cause sensations that are typically perceived as painful, like spanking or whipping, to be erotic. Sexual “submission” requires relaxing into trust— turning off the offs—and allowing your partner to take control. In this explicitly erotic, highly trusting, and consensual context, your brain is open and receptive, ready to interpret any and all sensations as erotic. And in a culture where women have to spend so much time with the brakes on, saying no, it’s no wonder we have fantasies about abandoning all control, relaxing into absolute trust (turning off the brakes) and allowing ourselves to experience sensation. sex, rats, and rock ’n’ roll What is the ultimate nerd evidence of the power of context to influence your brain’s perception of a sensation? Look at what happens to rat brains when you play them Iggy Pop: 12 Imagine you’re a lab rat, and you’re in a three-chambered box.The researchers have painlessly implanted a tiny probe in your brain so that they can zap your nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is a tiny region deep within your brain; its job is to tell you which direction to go—toward or away from something in the environment. In the first chamber, you’re surrounded by the ordinary setup that you always encounter in the lab—the lights are on, but it’s fairly quiet. Here, if the researcher zaps the top region of the NAc, you engage in approach behaviors, like sniffing and exploration.
13 Psychologist John Gottman calls these “What’s this? ” behaviors.Curious.
Exploring. Moving toward. And when the researchers stimulate the bottom region of your NAc, you exhibit avoidance—“What the hell is this? ” behaviors, like stamping your paws and turning away your head. Fearful.
Avoidant. Moving away. And all of that is normal and exactly what you would expect, as a sort of bionic, semiremote-controlled rat.
So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it’s quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it’s like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens—approach behaviors. But this is where it gets crazy: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc . . . approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation!
As soon as you move into the third chamber, ultrabright lights turn on and suddenly Iggy Pop is blaring—imagine “Lust for Life” playing at randomly varying volumes, so you can’t even get used to it. Everything
about this environment stresses you out. You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub. Now when the researchers zap your top NAc, it doesn’t activate curiosity or approach behaviors, as it has in the previous environments; no, in the new, stressful environment, zapping almost anywhere on the NAc generates avoidant, “What the hell is this? ” behavior.
When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that phylogenetically old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are 14 functioning.In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire. And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread.
“Context changes how your brain responds to sex,” doesn’t just mean, “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—either external circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience.
In chapter 4 I’ll describe the evolutionary reasons for this, but for now just know: It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive
sensations. It’s just how brains work.
Here’s a puzzle: Merritt, with her sensitive brake, struggled mightily with sex in real life. Yet she had an active sexual imagination and had been both reader and author of erotic fiction for a decade. Her favorite stories to read and to write were gay male BDSM—she jokingly calls it, “Fifty Shades of Gay.” There just seemed to be something about the idea of two men tangled in an intense power dynamic that really captured her erotic imagination.
“Getting turned on by stories about two men having kinky sex, but being so easily shut down during sex with the woman I love? How does that make sense? A noise. A fingernail when I’m not expecting it.
A stray thought, even. And yet I spend hours every day writing about men having sex in public or on a rack or tied to trees.”
Learning about her sexual brake helped some, but it was when she and Carol talked about context—What contexts arouse you? What contexts hit the brakes?—that they discovered that fantasies were great for Merritt, while real life was . . . a challenge.
Which makes lots of sense for a woman with a sensitive brake.
The context—external circumstances and internal brain state—of a fantasy is very different from the context of real life. When you’re alone in bed fantasizing about being dominated by five big, unknown men, you are actually safe, there is no threat to activate your stress response, and the novelty of the fantasy adds fuel to the fire. Great context!
But if in real life you were surrounded by five big, unknown men, your brain would probably react with a stress response—Run! Fight! or Freeze!—and that stress response would most likely hit your sexual brakes. Not a great context.
“So what do we do about that?” Merritt asked me.
“Trust,” I said. “Letting go of the brake is about trust.”
Merritt shook her head and looked at Carol. “I trust you one hundred fifty percent. I’d jump off a cliff blindfolded if you said there was a crash pad at the bottom, no hesitation.”
And then Carol said, “That only leaves one other person for you not to trust, huh?”
Merritt blinked at us both and said, “Me. I don’t trust me. Is that
what you’re saying?”
I said, “Do you?”
“I trust myself to pay bills on time. I trust myself as a parent. As a writer. Yeah, I . . . huh.” She stopped and squinted her eyes thoughtfully at me.
“You trust your intellect,” Carol said, “and your heart. But do you trust your body?”
Merritt rubbed a hand hard against her forehead and said, “Honestly, no—and for good reason.”
And then we talked about the good reason.
I’d like to spend some time with the mesolimbic cortex. It gets pretty nerdy right here—in terms of the garden metaphor, these next two sections are like describing how the soil transforms a seed into a seedling. It’s not something the gardener has much control over, and it happens well below