Authors: Emily Nagoski
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 researchers put him into a rodent harness, a comfortable little jacket.
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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 her.
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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 pleasure. We’ll hear more about the cause of Merritt’s challenge in chapter 4, and a great deal about the solution in chapter 8.
all the same parts, organized in different ways
It’s true for us, too. Humans go through a learning process similar to (though much more complex than) rats. And that learning process is different depending on whether you’re a boy or a girl. There are several theories about how this works, but I’m going to tell you the one I like best.
Let’s imagine those fraternal twins from chapter 1, the brother and sister. Born on the same day, having developed in the same hormonal environment in the womb, they’re as similar as different-sex siblings can be.
The little boy—let’s call him Frankie—soon begins to notice (in his preverbal infant way) that some significant changes happen to part of his body—his penis grows and changes and feel tingly! His infant brain begins to link that change in his body to the external stimuli in the environment and to the internal sensations and emotions that accompany it. And so from the earliest moment, his brain is linking his environment with his erections. In boys, then, the process of teaching their accelerator what constitutes a sexually relevant stimulus is a fairly straightforward process
of categorizing as “sexy” those things that are associated with erection.
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The little girl—we’ll call her Frannie—doesn’t have that obligingly obvious physiological response to her environment. As a result, her brain links “sexually relevant” not to her internal state or genital response but to the
social context
. The “sexy” category in a little girl’s mind is populated not with erection-related stimuli but with social stimuli.
Here’s how that works:
Have you ever seen a toddler learning to walk? When toddlers fall down, their first reaction is to look up at the faces of the adults around them, as though to say, “Something unexpected just happened! How should I feel about it?” And when the adults are calm and chirp, “You fell down. You’re okay!” the toddlers get back up and keep going. But if the adults panic and run over, exclaiming, “Be careful, you could get hurt!” the toddlers panic, too, and burst into tears.
In the same way, girls learn what’s sexually relevant not because their genitals do something so obvious and new that they can’t help learning from it, but rather by paying attention to their
environment
, especially to the other person there with them in the sexually relevant situation.
When I say “learn,” I don’t mean explicit learning, like how you learn all the state capitals or the Pythagorean theorem. I mean it in the way those rats learned about lemons and jackets, the way Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate when a bell rang, or the way you learned to ride a bicycle. None of these can be learned from a book but only from experience.
And this is another way that it’s different for girls: Hormones influence the functioning of this learning mechanism. Your brain’s readiness to link external cues to internal arousal processes is different at different stages of the menstrual cycle, whereas it’s more stable in men, who don’t have the monthly oscillation of their hormones.
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As a result of both their different genitals and their different hormone cycles, girls’ learning about sexually relevant stimuli is
• likely to begin later in their development
• more influenced than boys’ by social and emotional context
• more likely to generate a mismatch between their genital response and their experience of sexual arousal (as I’ll describe in chapter 6)
In other words, girls and boys are different. Shocking, I know.
But this is actually a pretty radical thing to say—as I described in the introduction, most of what our culture teaches us about women’s sexuality is Men’s Sexuality Lite—basically the same but not quite as good. The science is telling us that the process of growing from a baby girl into a woman is—at least in terms of sexual response—just not the same as the process of growing from a baby boy into a man. Because the way male and female bodies learn about sex is not the same.
So by the time Frannie and Frankie reach adulthood, both have developed fundamental frameworks about what things are sexually relevant and what things are potential threats. These frameworks will continue to change as they experience new things. And these frameworks will be different from each other, yes they will.
So that’s how we learn what counts as a sexually relevant stimulus.
can you change your SIS or SES?
Let’s go back to that puzzle of erectile dysfunction drugs not helping women.
If a woman is experiencing sexual difficulties, the dual control model demands that we ask four questions:
• How sensitive is her accelerator?
• What’s activating it?
• How sensitive are her brakes?
• What’s hitting them?
So far in this chapter, you’ve been a sex researcher in the ’60s, a sex therapist in the ’70s, a pharmaceutical researcher in the late ’90s, and a
male lab rat with a lemon fetish. Now imagine you’re a sex educator, armed with the dual control model to help people understand how their sexuality works. People ask you frustrated questions, dissatisfied with their sexual response mechanism—it doesn’t behave the way they want or expect it to, and they want to change it.
So can we change it?
The answer has two parts, both equally important.
First, SIS and SES are traits you’re born with that remain more or less stable over your life span, and no one knows precisely which factors cause them to change. In general, though, changing your SIS and SES is probably a bit like changing your IQ: You’re born with a range of potential, and as you develop, your life experience shapes that potential and lands you somewhere within that range. SIS and SES are way more flexible than IQ, but we know very little about what factors are involved in changing them, whether they can be changed deliberately, or if they respond only to changes in environmental factors beyond our control. But so far, it seems there’s very little we can do to deliberately change SIS or SES.
And anyway, for most people SIS and SES are “medium”—neither overly sensitive nor problematically insensitive. Changing SIS and SES if you’re medium isn’t even desirable.
But then there’s the second part of the answer: You may not be able to change the mechanism itself, but you probably can change what the mechanism responds to. You can often change what your brake considers a potential threat, and you can certainly reduce those threats, like unwanted pregnancy, STIs, stress, etc.
You also can change what your accelerator considers sexually relevant, and you can increase the sexually relevant things in your life. In other words, you can change the context—your external circumstances and your internal state. The why and how of these changes is the main topic of the next three chapters, but here’s the short version:
You know that almost nothing your SIS and SES respond to is innate; your brain learned to associate particular stimuli with arousal or
inhibition. Through a process of “tuning” your context—both your brain and your environment—you can maximize your sexual potential.
I thought Laurie, with her low desire, might be high SIS. We wrote a list of things that activate her brakes: kid, full-time job with a rotten boss, her parents—not to mention the ways her body had changed since her pregnancy, which made her unhappy, and she also felt unhappy
about
feeling unhappy, since the feminist in her made her judge herself for not being able to let go of the arbitrary cultural ideal and just Love Her Body. Oh, and also? She was going back to school for a master’s degree. So no big deal.
She didn’t have a particularly sensitive brake—she had an avalanche of stuff constantly putting pressure on a very average brake.
“Just seeing all this written down makes me need a massage,” she groaned.
“So ask Johnny to give you a massage,” I suggested.
“Sure, and then I feel guilty if we don’t have sex after that.”
“Oooh, good insight! Add that to the list of things that hit your brakes: feeling like you’re expected to have sex.”
She did. And that’s when I saw the lights go on for her. She said, “So all the toys and games were hitting the accelerator, but at the same time all these things in my life were hitting the sexual brake in my brain . . . and it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the accelerator if the brake is on the floor. Huh.”
“Right.”
“So how do I stop hitting brake?”
The million-dollar question.
The short answer is: Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works.
The full answer is . . . what the rest of this book is about.
My suggestion to Laurie was to stop trying to make herself want sex for a while. Take away the performance pressure.
She did not follow my advice—not right away, anyway. What she tried instead was a clever shift in context, which is what the next chapter is about.
To put it in terms of the garden metaphor I used in chapter 1, your SIS and SES are characteristics of the soil in your garden. So are your genitals and the rest of your body and brain. The innate sensitivity of your SIS and SES influences how your garden grows—which species of plants will thrive, how densely you can plant them—but other factors can have at least as much influence. Water, sun, choice of plants, even the addition of fertilizer—in other words, everything from stress to love to trust to a vibrator—can all influence the abundance of your garden. You can’t change the soil itself, but you can augment it and you can make smart decisions about how to manage it.