functioning will benefit from increasing stimulation (for instance, using a vibrator) and daily practice of paying attention to sensations. Lower SES is also associated with asexuality, so if you’re very low SES, you might resonate with some components of the asexual identity. The women I ask are probably higher SES than the overall population—they’re interested enough in sex to take a class, attend a workshop, or read a sex blog—but still about 8 percent of those women fall into this range.
Medium SES (8–15) You’re right in the middle, so whether you’re sensitive to sexual stimuli probably depends on the context. In situations of high romance or eroticism, you tune in readily to sexual stimuli; in situations of low romance or eroticism, it may be pretty challenging to move your attention to sexual things. Recognize the role that context plays in your arousal and pleasure, and take steps to increase the sexiness of your life’s contexts. Seventy percent of the women I’ve asked fall into this range.
High SES (16–24) You’re pretty sensitive to sexually relevant stimuli, maybe even to things most of us aren’t generally very sensitive to, like smell and taste. A fairly wide range of contexts can be sexual for you, and novelty may be really exciting. You may like having sex as a way to de-stress—higher SES is correlated with greater risk for sexual compulsivity, so you may want to pay attention to the ways you manage stress. Make sure you create lots of time and space for your partner; because you’re sensitive, you can derive intense satisfaction from your partner’s pleasure, so you’ll both benefit!
About 16 percent of the women I ask fall into this group.
What “Medium” Means Did you score right in the middle on both? More than half of people do.
Scoring very high or very low on these traits is comparatively rare, so for the majority of people the value of the dual control model lies not in the discovery that, “Wow, my brain is extra sensitive/not sensitive to this kind of stimulation, so I need to pay attention to that!” The value instead lies in the insight that the brakes and the accelerator are two separate systems.
Some things in the world activate your accelerator, which makes you all sticky and eager. Other things hit your brakes and slow down your arousal process. Some things even hit both at once! One blog reader emailed me that “brakes and accelerator at the same time” exactly described her experience while reading the best-selling sexually explicit novel Fifty Shades of Grey.
Medium means you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m normal!” and start thinking about what hits your brakes or activates your accelerator, and how to recalibrate your life to suit your brain. I’ll discuss how to do that in chapters 3, 4, and 5.
If you scored high or low on either scale—especially if your score is at an extreme end—you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m normal and also comparatively rare!” And as you consider what engages your brakes and accelerator, you’ll begin to realize that you relate to the sexual world around you in ways most other women don’t experience.
Camilla, the artist, is smart—smart and curious. One of the things she’s curious about is sex. She doesn’t just read books about it; she reads the original research.
And she has struggled to reconcile her intellectual hunger for knowledge about sex with her contrastingly small desire to actually have any sex. That day when we were talking about images of women, she mentioned this puzzle, especially noting that she never seemed to experience “out of the blue” desire.
I wondered if she might have a sensitive brake, so I asked her “inhibitors” questions: Do things have to be “just right” in order for you to get aroused? Do you need total trust in your partner? Do you
worry about sex while you’re having it?
Not really, not really, and not really.
Then I asked “excitors” questions. Do you sometimes get aroused just by watching your partner do something (nonsexual) that he’s good at, or by his smell, or when you feel sexually “wanted”? Are you aroused by new situations? Do you get turned on by fantasies?
Not really, heck no, and . . . what fantasies?
Camilla’s low SES. This doesn’t mean she’s not interested in the idea of sex; it means her body requires a bunch of stimulation in order to cross the threshold into active desire for sex.
I asked about orgasm.
“Few in number and slow to come,” she said, “and they don’t often seem worth the effort.” She finds she’s most reliably orgasmic with a vibrator, and that makes perfect sense—mechanical vibration can provide an intensity of stimulation that no organic stimulation can match. But for her, orgasm is sometimes more of a distraction than a goal with sex. She loves being with her partner, she loves playing and