Authors: Emily Nagoski
Which makes lots of sense for a woman with a sensitive brake. The context—external circumstances and internal brain state—of a fantasy is very different from the context of real life. When you’re alone in bed fantasizing about being dominated by five big, unknown men, you are actually safe, there is no threat to activate your stress response, and the novelty of the fantasy adds fuel to the fire. Great context!
But if in real life you were surrounded by five big, unknown men, your brain would probably react with a stress response—Run! Fight! or Freeze!—and that stress response would most likely hit your sexual brakes. Not a great context.
“So what do we do about that?” Merritt asked me.
“Trust,” I said. “Letting go of the brake is about trust.”
Merritt shook her head and looked at Carol. “I trust you one hundred fifty percent. I’d jump off a cliff blindfolded if you said there was a crash pad at the bottom, no hesitation.”
And then Carol said, “That only leaves one other person for you not to trust, huh?”
Merritt blinked at us both and said, “Me. I don’t trust me. Is that what you’re saying?”
I said, “Do you?”
“I trust myself to pay bills on time. I trust myself as a parent. As a writer. Yeah, I . . . huh.” She stopped and squinted her eyes thoughtfully at me.
“You trust your intellect,” Carol said, “and your heart. But do you trust your body?”
Merritt rubbed a hand hard against her forehead and said, “Honestly, no—and for good reason.”
And then we talked about the good reason.
I’d like to spend some time with the mesolimbic cortex. It gets pretty nerdy right here—in terms of the garden metaphor, these next two sections are like describing how the soil transforms a seed into a seedling. It’s not something the gardener has much control over, and it happens well below the surface, beyond our ability to observe directly. But especially if you have found cultivating your (or your partner’s) sexuality kind of challenging, the next few pages could really enrich your entire understanding of what’s happening in the deep, subconscious parts of your sexual response.
Ready? Okay.
your emotional one ring
You’ve probably read about exciting research findings related to “the pleasure centers of the brain.” Put food in your mouth, and these systems get to work. Drink water, they respond. Listen to music, look at art, shoot heroin, or read a novel, and your mesolimbic cortex is busily evaluating, learning, and motivating. Watch porn, hear your neighbors having sex, or feel your partner’s hand gripping lightly in your hair, and these brain systems answer—assessing, planning, and encouraging you to move closer . . . or farther away.
For those of you who keep a map of the midbrain on your wall and would like to follow along at home, the organs involved in these systems are the ventral pallidum, the nucleus accumbens body and shell (this is the part from the Iggy Pop study), the amygdala, and the brain stem parabrachial nucleus, among others. (There’s a great tidbit for cocktail parties—nothing like the phrase “brain stem parabrachial nucleus” to impress sexy singles over a dirty martini.)
The thing is, these are not really the “pleasure centers”—or not
just
pleasure centers.
What we often describe as the pleasure centers or reward centers of the brain are in fact crucially more subtle and interesting than that. To call it “reward” or “pleasure” is like saying “vagina” when you mean “vulva”: Pleasure is part of it, certainly, but only part, and to deny the other parts their names is to deny their significance and misunderstand the nature of the multifaceted beast.
There are actually three intertwined but separable functions in these deep, old parts of the brain, which I simplify here as
enjoying
,
expecting
, and
eagerness
. These three mechanisms form the universal mammalian hardware of pleasure, learning, and motivation—or, as Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach geekily put it, “One hedonic brain system to mediate them all.”
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This is a reference to the One Ring from
Lord of the Rings
mythology; in the original context, the One Ring has the power to control all
the other Rings of Power. In the context of your emotional brain, the One Ring processes
all
of your emotional/motivational systems, including stress responses (fear, aggression, and shutdown), disgust, all forms of pleasure from physical to artistic, love and social connection, and of course sex.
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All these emotions function, all at once, all in the same place: in your emotional One Ring.
So don’t be too impressed when you read a pop science article that says, “The same parts of your brain light up when you have sex as when you take cocaine.” Of course they do. That’s the One Ring. It mediates them all.
When I say “One Ring” for the rest of the book, I mean this cluster of
enjoying
,
expecting
, and
eagerness
, where all your emotional responses—sex, stress, love, disgust, etc.—compete and interact and influence each other.
Here’s how the three systems work.
The
enjoying
system is perhaps the closest to what we generally think of as “reward.” The
enjoying
mechanism is the “Yes!” or “No!” in your brain—it assesses the “hedonic impact” of a stimulus: Does it feel good? How good? Does it feel bad? How bad? When you put a drop of sugar water on the tongue of a newborn, the infant’s
enjoying
system sets off fireworks; sugar is innately rewarding—we’re born ready to enjoy sweet tastes. Salt is not. Genital sensations are, likewise, innately rewarding—fetuses have been known to masturbate in utero.
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Elbow sensations, not so much. This one system manages all forms of enjoying, including sweet tastes, sexual sensations, the perception of beauty, the joy of love, and the thrill of winning.
Expecting
is the process of linking what’s happening now with what should come next. Pavlov’s dogs salivated when a bell rang because their
expecting
system connected the bell with food. The rats in chapter 2 linked lemons or jackets with sex, and baby Frankie and baby Frannie’s brains coupled genital response, internal sensations, and external environment because of the
expecting
system. This is implicit learning—a different experience from explicit learning. Explicit learning is memorizing
a poem with spaced repetition and conscious effort. Implicit learning is (in part) the
expecting
system linking stimuli across time and space. We don’t have to study or memorize anything to learn which foods taste delicious and which people are mean. We learn these kinds of emotional things implicitly.
Eagerness
, the third system, is the generic gas pedal of the emotional brain.
Eagerness
fuels the desire to move toward something or away from it. When
eagerness
is activated with the stress response mechanism, we search for safety. When
eagerness
is activated with the attachment mechanism (see the next chapter), we seek affection. And of course when
eagerness
is activated with our sexual accelerator, we pursue sexual stimulation.
When
eagerness
is activated, we experience what Kent Berridge calls “a moment of special temptation.”
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The experience of urgent craving or yearning is powered by the
eagerness
system.
And it’s context dependent. Remember the rat in the spa environment versus the nightclub environment. The “
What’s this?
” and “
What the hell is this?
” behaviors triggered by stimulation of the NAc were
eagerness
behaviors—eagerness to get closer . . . or farther away. Which set of behaviors was elicited depended on how calm or stressed the rat was.
How do these systems work in human sexuality? If something activates your sexual accelerator—say, your partner kissing you—
expecting
has done its job. Like the rats with a lemon fetish, your accelerator has learned that kissing is sexually relevant.
Expecting
is neutral, neither nice nor nasty, just . . . relevant. But when the cue that activates
expecting
is not only sexually relevant but also nice (which often depends on context), it activates
enjoying
, too. And when it’s nice enough, it gives rise to
eagerness
.
The sequence works this way: Something sexually relevant happens, and your brain goes, “Hey, that’s sexually relevant.” That’s
expecting
. And if the context is right, your brain also goes, “Hey, that’s nice!” That’s
enjoying
. And if the stimulus is nice enough, your brain goes, “Ooh, go get more of that!” That’s
eagerness
.
• • •
Did you make it? Phew! That was the hard part. Nice job. I’ll be referring to the One Ring of
enjoying
,
expecting
, and
eagerness
throughout the rest of the book—like in chapter 6 we’ll learn that genital response is
expecting
while the psychological experience of sexual arousal is
expecting
plus
enjoying
. And in chapter 8 we’ll learn how focusing the One Ring on sexual pleasure, and releasing it from all other motivations, is the path to ecstatic orgasms.
The research measuring how the three systems function in human sexuality has barely begun. I include them here not because I’ve already seen definitive proof of how they affect sexual wellbeing but because when I teach about them, I see how helpful people find it to know that “desirable,” “pleasurable,” and “sexually relevant” are not always the same thing. Your brain can
enjoy
something without
eagerness
for more. It can
expect
that a kind of stimulation will lead to sex, and
expecting
may activate desire—movement toward—but it may also activate dread—movement away—depending on the context. Your brain can even be
eager
for something without particularly
enjoying
it, as we’ll see with Olivia.
And all three are context dependent: If your
expecting
,
eagerness
, and
enjoying
substrates are busy coping with stress or attachment issues (which are the topic of the next chapter), then sexually relevant stimuli may not be perceived as sexy at all.
Let’s walk through the three systems in different contexts to see how they can change sexual responsiveness:
Context 1: Before you get pregnant. Your partner lies down in bed next to you and you enjoy your usual end-of-the-day cuddle while you talk through plans for tomorrow. Your partner’s hands begin to wander over your body, which activates
expecting
and
enjoying
, since you’re in a relaxed, affectionate state of mind, and pretty soon
eagerness
joins the party. So you start kissing and letting your hands wander, too, and one thing leads to another.
Context 2: Two months after you give birth. Your partner lies down
in bed next to you, waking you up from a rare and precious sound sleep, wanting to cuddle and talk through plans for tomorrow. You turn into your partner’s arms and talk for a while, and their hands begin to wander over your body—your sleep-deprived, lactating, different-shaped body with its still-healing vagina and feet half a size bigger than they were a year ago, a body that has been constantly pawed by little baby hands. Your partner’s touch on this strange new body of yours activates
expecting
. . . which fills you with dread—
eagerness
to avoid sex. So you turn back over and say, “Honey, not tonight.”
And your partner thinks—and maybe you do, too—“I don’t understand. This used to be great.”
Same stimulation, different context. Different response by your emotional One Ring, leading to different outcomes.
We could replace “give birth” in that example with “put your parent into hospice care,” “learn your partner was cheating on you,” or “get laid off from your job,” and get a somewhat similar outcome. On the other hand, we could replace it with “decide to try to get pregnant,” “renew your vows,” or “win the lottery,” and get a pretty different outcome.
As we saw with the rats who had Iggy Pop blasted at them, when your stress levels are high, practically anything will cause your
eagerness
to activate in an avoidant, “What the hell is this?” mode. But if you’re in a sex-positive context, almost anything can activate
eagerness
in curious, “What’s this?” mode.
Exactly what context a woman experiences as sex positive varies both from woman to woman and also across a woman’s life span, but generally it’s a context that’s
• low stress
• high affection
• explicitly erotic
Remember the studies of what women say turns them on, from the start of the chapter. That stuff, and more. Because of the One Ring,
which mediates all of your different emotions at once, binding them together.
Olivia and Patrick are fabulous together—hilarious, charming, the kind of couple whose love is contagious; when you see them together, you fall a little in love yourself. They hug and laugh affectionately even while they’re fighting. Though only in their twenties, you can tell these two will still be making out like teenagers when they’re 103.