Authors: Emily Nagoski
There is about a 50 percent overlap between what a male’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what his brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” And there is about a 10 percent overlap between what a female’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what her brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” Men’s genitals are relatively specific in what they respond to, and so are their brains. Women’s genitals are relatively general in what they respond to, while their brains are more sensitive to context. Note that a stimulus can be “relevant” without being appealing.
What the media coverage has failed to make clear is that women’s genital response is actually very discriminating—compared to other automatic physiological responses. For example, your Achilles tendon reflex, heart rate, and skin conductance (sweating) will all increase after watching a scary segment of the movie
Cujo
and after watching porn. But your genitals have no interest in
Cujo
.
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In fact, women’s genitals don’t respond to any of these videos: waves crashing on a beach, the joyful “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” scene from the movie
Stepmom
, the achingly sad telegram
delivery scene in
A League of Their Own
, or a first-person view of a roller coaster.
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Genital response is specific to sexually
relevant
stimuli—regardless of whether those stimuli are sexually
appealing.
The
genitals
tell you, “That’s sexually
relevant
.”
The
person
tells you, “That turns me on,” or “I am enjoying this,” or “I am eager for more, please.”
For women, there’s about a 10 percent overlap between “sexually relevant” and “sexually appealing.” For men, there’s about a 50 percent overlap.
What we’re seeing in nonconcordance is the difference between
expecting
and
enjoying
, from chapter 3. Genital response is the automatic, trained response to something that’s sexually relevant. Pavlov’s dogs salivated when a bell rang, not because they wanted to eat the bell but because their
expecting
system had linked the bell with food. Similarly, your emotional One Ring has learned what’s sexually relevant (remember babies Frankie and Frannie in chapter 2, and the rats in jackets?), and your
expecting
system activates physiological responses to whatever it has learned is sexually relevant.
A stimulus can be sexually relevant and yet be sexually unappealing, as my college friend from the start of the chapter experienced. And remember the blog reader from chapter 2, who emailed me that “brakes and accelerator at the same time” described her experience reading
Fifty Shades of Grey.
Her genitals responded, but she didn’t feel “turned on”; the book included explicit sex, so it was sexually
relevant
, but it also hit her brakes because she didn’t particularly like the characters or the story, and that made it sexually
unappealing.
What happens when a man takes erectile dysfunction medication?
It increases blood flow to the genitals during sexual stimulation.
What happens when a woman takes erectile dysfunction medication?
Same thing.
And what happens when you increase blood flow to a woman’s genitals?
Not a lot. Because: nonconcordance.
Olivia and Patrick tried it. They took an ED pill together as an experiment in flipping the chasing dynamic—and also, because, Why not? (NB: “Why not?” includes no known medical benefit and unknown medical risk. Taking a prescription medication without a doctor’s supervision is always risky. But let’s be real here. People do it.)
Olivia’s lips—the lips on her face, that is—turned dark, dark red, so that she looked like she was wearing lipstick. Other than that, she didn’t notice any particular effect. For once, Olivia’s experience was typical of most women’s.
Patrick, on the other hand, felt like he’d taken an aphrodisiac. Olivia looked irresistibly beautiful, and his skin felt like the volume had been turned up on his nerve endings, so that every sensation was amplified, magnified. They went out for ice cream after they took the drug, for something to do while they waited for it to kick in, and they had to turn right back around because Patrick couldn’t wait to get Olivia naked.
Erectile dysfunction drugs don’t do any of this; all they do is increase blood flow to the genitals. Such is the power of placebo, as I described in chapter 2. The same thing happened occasionally when Patrick had a few drinks and Olivia was the designated driver.
This rare experience of being the one with the lower sexual interest was revelatory for Olivia. As a woman who always felt driven forward by her sexual interest, pulling her partner along with her, being the one who was standing still and being pulled, as it were, was an inspiring experience. She allowed herself to receive Patrick’s erotic attention. She allowed her arousal to build as slowly as it wanted to.
She allowed it to happen, instead of feeling like it was dragging her forward.
all the same parts, organized in different ways: “this is a restaurant”
Nonconcordance is about the relationship between the peripheral system—the genitals—and the central system—the brain: two separate
but interconnected systems. And the relationship between these systems is different for women and men.
Imagine that the brain and the genitals are a couple of friends on vacation together, wandering down the street trying to decide where to have dinner.
If they’re women, it goes like this: The genitals notice any restaurant they pass, whether it’s Thai food or pub grub, fast food or gourmet (while ignoring all the museums and shops), and say, “This is a restaurant. We could eat here.” She has no strong opinion, she’s just good at spotting restaurants. Meanwhile, the brain is assessing all the contextual factors I described in chapters 4 and 5 to decide whether she wants to try a place. “This place isn’t delicious smelling enough,” or “This place isn’t clean enough,” or “I’m not in the mood for pizza.” The genitals might even notice a pet store and say, “There’s pet food in here, I guess . . .” and the brain rolls her eyes and keeps walking.
They pass a museum, and the brain says, “I heard about a great café in this museum,” and the genitals respond, “This isn’t a restaurant.” But the brain has way more information than the genitals. So suppose the two friends go into the museum, and the genitals see the little café next to the gift shop. Then she says, “Oh, I see, this is a restaurant. We could eat here,” and the brain says, “Yeah, this looks great.” Both relevant
and
appealing!
Now, if the friends are men, it goes like this: The genitals notice only specific restaurants—diners, say—and don’t notice any restaurants that aren’t diners. Once they find a diner, the brain says, “A diner! I love diners,” and the genitals agree, “This is a restaurant, we could eat here,” unless there’s some pretty compelling reason not to, like a bunch of drunks brawling outside.
You should be able to chant this in your sleep by now: We’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. The relationship between the brain and genitals follows the same principle. The male genital system has strong, quite specific opinions about what counts as sexually relevant, while the female genital system is good at recognizing a broad
category of things that generally qualify as sexually relevant. If our two women on vacation came across that diner with a brawl outside, the genitals would still say, “This is a restaurant,” even as the brain dragged her away, shouting, “Let’s get out of here! Call the cops!”
In other words, women’s genitals learn to associate certain stimuli with certain physiological responses that have nothing to do with pleasure or even interest. The pressure on my college friend’s vulva—the bar between her legs while she was tied up—triggered an automatic genital response without triggering arousal. “This is a restaurant,” said her genitals, but her brain wasn’t interested.
nonconcordance in other emotions
Nonconcordance is not just a sex thing. It shows up in all kinds of emotional experiences and is a puzzle to all kinds of emotion researchers.
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For example, suppose I show you a picture of an emotionally intense scenario—maybe the face of a viciously snarling dog, or a wounded child sitting alone—and it causes you to experience an emotion, a physiological response. And then I ask you to say a fact about the scenario or else to say how the picture makes you feel. Which of those, saying the fact or saying the feeling, will reduce your physiological response?
When researchers did this experiment, people reported that saying a fact about an emotional situation helped to reduce the emotion, more than saying the feeling they were experiencing—and the tension in their voice reflected that.
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But their skin conductance (a reliable measure of the stress response) went down when they named the feeling, not when they named a fact. That is, their physiological stress response was nonconcordant with their experienced emotion. Normal.
Ross Buck, professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut, has a handy way of thinking about emotion that will help us to understand nonconcordance.
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He describes three levels of emotion:
Emotion I
is the involuntary physiological response—your heart rate and blood pressure, pupil dilation, digestion, sweating, immune
functioning. Genital response falls into this category, and my college friend who got wet while she was bored, tied up waiting for her partner to come back, experienced this kind of response . . . but nothing else.
Emotion II
is involuntary expressive response to a feeling. It’s body language—or, more accurately, “paralanguage”—things like vocal inflection, posture, and facial expression—all the cues we use to infer another person’s internal state. A great dinner date will be full of Emotion II, as you find yourself putting your hand on your date’s arm, gazing into their eyes, and smiling. These are often influenced by culture, but have a great deal of universality, and they can be intentionally controlled to some degree, but not as much as you might think. Did you choose the expression on your face right now?
Emotion III
is your subjective experience of a feeling. If someone asks you how you feel and you check in with yourself to find the answer, what you’re noticing is Emotion III. This is subjective arousal—the conscious experience of “I want you so much I can hardly stand it”—which may or may not be accompanied by genital response (Emotion I) or eye contact (Emotion II).
It might even be true that there are stable gender differences in nonconcordance between physiological response and subjective experience for emotions other than sexual arousal.
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For whatever reason—cultural, biological, or both (probably both)—women have more overlap between their facial expressions (Emotion II) and their subjective experience (Emotion III), while men have more overlap between their skin conductance (Emotion I) and their subjective experience (Emotion III).
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What this research suggests is that a woman’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with her facial expression and her vocal inflection, while a man’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with his heart rate and blood flow.
Whether or not there’s a gender difference, it’s fair to say that what you experience as your emotional life doesn’t necessarily line up neatly with what your brain and body are doing. That doesn’t make you a liar, it doesn’t make you crazy, and it doesn’t mean you’re in denial. It means
you’re a human being, whose emotional and motivational responses may be more complex than any other species’. Nonconcordance shows up in many kinds of emotional experiences, and men and women experience nonconcordance differently in those emotions. It’s not a sex thing; it’s a human thing.
You have to relax before you can trust. But women who are slow to trust, like Merritt, can’t relax until they feel trust. It’s a problem.
The solution came when she was trying to solve a different problem.
As a woman in her forties, entering menopause, lack of lubrication just seemed like a part of life for Merritt. Her concern was more for her partner. Carol was the birth mom of their teenage daughter, and she had struggled with intermittent genital pain ever since the birth. I recommended lube to make manual sex more comfortable.
Merritt was into it. All I had to say was, “There are a bunch of different kinds of lube, so you might—” and she was online, browsing for a variety pack.
The box arrived in the mail. They set a date—Friday night, with the teenager away on a camping trip—and when the night arrived, they split a half bottle of wine and got started.
They took the importance of context seriously and started with a romantic movie and then took turns retelling each other their “Story of Us.”
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This is a trick they adapted from John Gottman’s relationship research—they narrate to each other how they met and fell in love, to remind each other (and themselves) of the meaning of their shared life, their affection and admiration for each other. It works differently for each of them; it activates Carol’s accelerator by making her feel in love, and it deactivates Merritt’s brake by making her feel trusting of her partner.