But hey, look: It’s all too easy to metaphorize the population-level differences in SIS and SES, the way previous generations metaphorized our genitals. Like, “Women are easily turned off and difficult to turn on.” Or, “Women want sex less than men.” As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, it’s nothing like that—for most people, arousability depends as much on context as on brain mechanism.
Your own SIS and SES, and their relationship to your mood or anxiety, 9 are unique and individual.The goal of understanding your brake and accelerator is not to understand “what men are like” versus “what women are like,” but to understand what you are like. Unique, with great potential
for awesomeness. what turns you on?
Huge, beautiful bathtubs at a B and B Watching a partner put the kids to bed “Slash fiction” of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy
A fantasy about having sex in public Actually having sex in public No one was born responding sexually to any of these, but they’re all things that women have told me turn them on. The dual control model tidily explains how the brain responds to stimuli, to increase or decrease your arousal. The brain notices sexually relevant stimuli (like fantasies or an attractive partner) and potential threats (like an unappreciative audience), and sends signals accordingly; arousal is the process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how your brain figures out what counts as a sexually relevant stimulus or a potential threat.
The process of learning what is sexually relevant and what is a threat works sort of like learning a language. We’re all born with the innate capacity to learn any human language, but we don’t learn a random language, right? If you grow up surrounded by people who speak only English, there is no way you’ll get to kindergarten speaking French. You learn the language you are surrounded by.
Similarly, you learn the sexual language you’re surrounded by. Just as there are no innate words, there appear to be almost no innate sexual stimuli. What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.
I’ll illustrate this with three rat studies from the lab of researcher Jim Pfaus.
Imagine you’re a male lab rat. Your mother raises you with everything a young rat needs, normal and healthy. In addition to that normal, healthy development, the researchers train you to associate the smell of lemons with 10 sexual activity.Ordinarily, lemons mean as much to rat sexuality as they do to human sexuality: nothing. But you’ve been trained to link lemons and sex in your brain. So when you’re presented with two receptive female rats, one of whom smells like a healthy, receptive female rat and the other smells like a healthy, receptive female rat plus lemons, you’ll prefer the one who smells like lemons—and by “prefer,” I mean you’ll copulate with both females, but 80 percent of your ejaculations will be with the lemony partner, and only about 20 percent of your ejaculations will be with the nonlemony partner. Your ratty SES learned that lemons are sexually relevant, so the lemony partner hits your accelerator more.
Let’s look at another experiment. This time, imagine that your brother was raised in the normal, healthy rat way, without the lemon thing. But during his first opportunity to copulate with a receptive female, the 11researchers put him into a rodent harness, a comfortable little jacket.
If your brother is wearing his little rat jacket the first time he copulates with the receptive female, then the next time he’s with a receptive female but not wearing the jacket, he’ll actually self-inhibit. His brakes will stay on because during that single first experience, his brain learned that “jacket + female in estrus = sexytimes.” It did not learn simply “female in estrus = sexytimes.”
What these two experiments show us is that both the accelerator and the brakes learn what to respond to based on experience. Neither lemons nor
jackets are innate; both were learned.
But it gets even more basic: Now imagine once more that you’re a male lab rat, raised healthy and happy by your mother. Then when you get to late adolescence and are still “sexually naïve” (aka a virgin), the experimenters introduce you to a female rat in estrus. This is about as erotic as it gets for a male rat on his first venture! But the researchers don’t give you an opportunity to copulate with 12 her.You never actually get to have sex with this ready and willing female.
Result: You don’t develop a preference for the smell of a fertile female over the smell of an infertile female or even of another male. It requires a
sexy (i.e., copulatory) experience to teach the male rat’s brain that a female in estrus is “sexually relevant.” The instinct to attempt copulation is there, and he’ll attempt copulation with everybody—but if he doesn’t have the experience, he can’t learn how to turn that instinct into successful action.
What is innate is the mechanism by which this learning takes place: ratty SIS and SES and the ability to learn through experience and association. But rats need experience to teach their SIS and SES what’s a threat and what’s sexually relevant.
In a rat’s natural environment, outside the lab, he would never need a jacket in order to feel sexy, and the smell of lemons wouldn’t make him ejaculate. The rats learned these things because humans created an environment where those were salient features of their sexual environment.
But even things you would assume are innate—fertile female rats—must be
learned by experience.
“Years of struggle.”
That’s how Merritt described her sex life. After she graduated, we became friends, which is when she told me that the most important thing she had taken away from my class was that there is a brake, as well as an accelerator. It helped her understand why she felt desire for sex . . . but it seemed to be trapped. She realized she had a sensitive brake: Things had to be “just right” for her to get aroused, and she needed total trust in her partner. And she worried about sex while she was having it. She called this “noisy brain.”
“Yep, totally high SIS. The noise is your sexual brakes, metaphorically squealing,” I said. “It would explain the ‘windmilling on a cliff’ sensation you described to me a million years ago—your accelerator and your brakes are activated at the same time.”
With sensitive brakes, Merritt’s sexual motivation system is the highest risk for problems with desire, arousal, and orgasm—and she had struggled with all three at some point in her life, she told me.
Lately, it was orgasm.
“I can get so close, and then it’s like there’s all this noise in my head.”
She has a great relationship, she and her partner have loving and playful sex on a pretty regular basis, but her arousal bottlenecks inside her and then orgasm just isn’t there for her, and then she gets frustrated, and basically sex is turning into more of a hassle than a