assessment of the kind of effort required to attain her goal of trusting herself. The result was not sinking down forever into a state of not wanting sex—on the contrary! Allowing herself to be where she was opened the door to where she wanted to go.
By contrast, Ms. B.’s little monitor is deeply dissatisfied, convinced that there is a wide gulf between where she is and where she ought to be—and furthermore, she feels utterly helpless to do anything about it. She’s in the pit of despair. She has collapsed into the hopeless grief that comes when the little monitor is convinced that a particular goal state is unattainable. Did she try to create change and fail and try again and fail again, or, when her sexuality fell short of the mark (a mark set by cultural standards that have nothing to do with reality) did her body go right to shutdown? I don’t know.
But I do know that the little monitor can learn, and Ms. B. can teach it—if she chooses to. She can change her goal, her effort, or her criterion velocity.
Before she can begin, though, she must recognize that her “map” is
wrong. the map and the terrain For many of us, the goal states we have in mind—such as spontaneous desire or orgasm with intercourse—are not goals we have chosen consciously for ourselves. We absorbed them from our culture in the form of sexual scripts. These scripts provide the structure for the beliefs through which we interpret the sexual world. Becoming aware of your scripts is the first step to changing your meta-emotions.
Over the last few decades, research has followed how sexual scripts have changed in Western culture. Recent cultural scenario scripts may include: • “Men’s sexuality is simple and women’s sexuality is complex.” • “Women don’t have as strong a sex drive as men.” • “Orgasm is central to a positive sexual encounter.”
3• “Sex is more emotional for women than for men.”
The scripts are written into your brain early, by your family and culture —remember the Moral Message, the Medical Message, and the Media Message from Chapter 5?
But scripts aren’t about what we intellectually believe is true. They act as a template for our emotional One Ring and for our little monitor to filter and organize information. You can disagree with a script and still find yourself behaving according to it and interpreting your experience in terms of it.
The technical term for this process of organizing your experience according to a preexisting template is “probabilistic generative model.” It means that information—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, or taste— goes first to your emotional brain, where prior learning (possibly about lemons or little rat jackets, possibly about body image or sexual disgust) plus your present brain state (stress, love, self-criticism, disgust, etc.) combine to shape the initial decisions your brain makes about whether to move toward or away from that information. That initial decision sets off a series of expectations about what else might be true and what might happen next.
A simpler way to understand it, I think, is in terms of maps versus terrains. Your knowledge about sex is a map of the sexual terrain (or garden!) where you experience sexuality.
Sadly, most people’s sexual maps are unreliable. We’re like Brendan Fraser’s character in the movie Blast from the Past. His parents raise him in a bomb shelter, mistakenly believing that there was a nuclear attack in 1962, and when he finally goes out into the world thirty-five years later, he is navigating through a landscape that has almost nothing to do with what he has been taught. Like him, we’ve got this map in our heads and we step into the terrain expecting to find a path in one place, and instead we’re instantly lost.
As we saw in chapter 5, our maps may have places that are way more than thirty-five years out of date.
But perhaps the biggest challenge is that when the map and the terrain don’t match, our brains try to make the map true, forcing our experience into the shape of the map. “No, no, this is the trail,” we say as we stumble through the thicket. “It says so on the map.”
A couple years ago, I talked to a young woman who had learned most of what she knew—or rather, what she thought she knew—about sex by watching porn. She was genuinely surprised when nothing in her first sexual encounters happened the way she expected. She thought orgasms would come easily and often. She thought direct clitoral stimulation would always make her see stars. She thought wrong. But she kept trying to make her experience match the map. She kept behaving the way people in the films behave, assuring herself that because she was doing what she was supposed to be doing, the feeling she was having must be pleasure.
It was months before the dissonance between what she expected to experience and what she was actually experiencing became clear to her.
That’s when she came to me, convinced that she must be broken.
When I told her that women are more likely to have orgasms later in a relationship than the first time they have sex with a new partner, she truly didn’t believe me, so convinced was she that her map was right and her terrain—her body—was wrong.
I also told her that pleasure is context dependent, so that even clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good unless it’s in the right context. “Like tickling,”
I said. “If it doesn’t feel good, that just means you haven’t got the right context yet. When clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good it’s not because your clitoris doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re not turned on enough yet.”
Which brings me to the first step in creating positive meta-emotions.
Olivia is One Big Yes when it comes to sex, which has the potential to create profound ecstasy . . . or profound self-doubt and anxiety, not to mention the chasing dynamic. And it all depends on how she feels about her capacity for Yes.
Way back at the beginning of the first chapter, Olivia found out that her “map” wasn’t true—the story she told herself about wanting sex because of her hormones was a metaphorization that shielded her against the cultural messages that would tell her she’s a bully.
But she drew a new map—grounded in the science and in nonjudgmental attention to her own internal experience. She realized that her sensitive accelerator could team up with her little monitor to create that out-of-control feeling, and they could also team up to create joyful pleasure. She got the out-of-control feeling when she allowed the spiral of stress/self-criticism/stress to escalate. She got the joyful pleasure when she learned to deescalate by allowing the stress to run its course, without hitting either the brakes or the accelerator.
“Slow down. Stay still.” That’s Olivia’s advice for all higher- desire partners. “Don’t chase, don’t push or pull. Be like the person with the broom on a curling team. Clear the path to sex.”
When there’s no pressure to perform, Patrick is creative, curious, playful, and unabashedly experimental. He knows what a gift Olivia’s sensitive accelerator can be, and he’s aware of the challenges it presents.