We can understand women’s sexual wellbeing only if we take context into account—and most of that context has nothing to do with sex itself.
Which means we can improve our sexual wellbeing and expand our sexual pleasure without directly changing anything about our sex lives! What I’ve included in this chapter and the next are the contextual factors that research has shown are consistently associated with changes in women’s sexual wellbeing. Improve your context, and your sexual pleasure will expand all on its own. the stress response cycle: fight, flight, and freeze Let’s first separate your stressors from your stress. Your stressors are the things that activate the stress response—bills, family, work, fretting about your sex life, all of that.
Your stress is the system of changes activated in your brain and body in response to those stressors. It’s an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that allows you to respond to perceived threats. Or it was evolutionarily adaptive, back when our stressors had claws and teeth and could run thirty miles per hour. These days we are almost never chased by lions, and yet our body’s response to, say, an incompetent boss, is largely the same as it would be to a lion. Your physiology doesn’t differentiate much. This fact will have important implications for your sex life, as we’ll soon see.
Stress is usually taught as the fight-or-flight response, but it’s vastly more helpful—and accurate—to call it by its full description: fight/flight/freeze. Here’s how it works: When your brain perceives a threat in the environment, you experience a massive biochemical change, characterized by floods of adrenaline and cortisol to your bloodstream and a cascade of physiological events, such as increased heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure; suppressed immune and digestive functioning; dilation of the pupils and shifting of attention to a vigilant state, focused on the here and now. All these changes are like revving your engine before a race, or taking a deep breath before you duck underwater—preparation for the action to come.
What action that will be depends on the nature of the perceived threat— that is, it’s context dependent.
Suppose the threat is a lion—the kind of threat we were dealing with in the environment where the mechanism evolved in our early ancestors. The stress response cycle notices the lion and shouts, “I’m at risk! What do I
do?” A lion, your brain informs you in much less than a second, is the kind of threat that you are most likely to survive by trying to escape.
So what do you do when you see a lion coming after you?
You feel fear, and you run.
And then what happens?
There are only two possible outcomes, right? Either you get killed by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape and live. So imagine that you successfully run back to your village and scream for help, and everyone helps you slaughter the lion, and then you all eat it for dinner, and in the morning you have a respectful burial service for the parts of the carcass you won’t be using, giving reverent thanks for the lion’s
sacrifice.
And how do you feel now?
Relieved! Grateful to be alive! You love your friends and family!
And that is the complete stress response cycle, with beginning (“I’m at risk!”), middle (action), and end (“I’m safe!”). • • • Or suppose the threat is a person with an angry expression on his face, who’s sneaking up behind your best friend, with a little knife in his hand?
Your brain may decide this is a threat you can best survive by conquering.
You feel anger (“I’m at risk!”—as we’ll see in the attachment section, the people we love get counted as “ourselves”), and you fight.
And again, you can fight and die or you can fight and live; either way, you complete the stress response cycle by engaging in a behavior that eliminates the stressor and the stress.
These two responses, fight and flight, are both accelerator stress—the sympathetic nervous system, the “GO!” of the stress response. Fight emerges when your emotional One Ring determines that a stressor should be conquered. Flight emerges when your One Ring determines a stressor should be escaped.
But suppose the stressor is one that your brain determines you can’t survive by escaping and you can’t survive by conquering—you feel the teeth of the lion bite into you from behind. This is when you get the brakes stress response—the parasympathetic nervous system, the “STOP!” activated by the most extreme distress. Your body shuts down; you may even experience “tonic immobility,” where you can’t move, or can move only sluggishly. Animals in the wild freeze and fall to the ground as a last-