In a lot of systems, such as food appetite, both mechanisms are at work, which is why we can want delicious food even when we’re not at all
hungry.
But sex is not a drive. why it matters that it’s not a drive It’s been a debate for a long time. On the one hand, animal researchers like Beach have known sex isn’t a drive since at least the middle of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the model of sexual response used by the American Psychiatric Association until 2013 was a drive model. And on the third hand, there’s the political side of the question: Do people need sex?
I think it matters a lot that we end the debate and just recognize that sex is an incentive motivation system, because look what happens if we think of sex as an appetite that drives survival: If sex were a drive, like food appetite, then the 30 percent of women who rarely or never experience spontaneous desire for sex are . . . well, what would we call a person who never experienced spontaneous hunger for food, even if she hadn’t eaten in days or weeks or months? That person is definitely sick! If sex is a hunger and you never get hungry, then there’s Something Wrong With You. And when you believe there’s something 10 wrong with you, your stress response kicks in.And when your stress response kicks in, your interest in sex evaporates (for most people).
Insisting that sex is a drive is telling a healthy person with responsive desire that she’s sick—say it often enough and eventually she’ll believe you. And when she believes you, suddenly it’s true. The worry makes people sick.
So understanding that sex is an incentive motivation system—that responsive desire is normal and healthy—will give everyone a better sex life. If you have responsive desire and want to experience more active desire, you don’t need to change you, you can just change your context.
But pathologizing responsive desire as low desire isn’t the worst consequence of the sex-as-drive myth. There’s a larger social justice reason for sex educators’ fighting against the myth of sex as a drive for more than 11 a hundred years.A far worse consequence is that when sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men’s sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to “relieve their sexual frustrations” facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls.