Authors: Emily Nagoski
But Merritt’s difficulty wasn’t trusting her partner, it was trusting herself. And what she learned this night is that it becomes easier to trust herself when she can see how her body brings pleasure to her partner.
Trying out the different kinds of lube turned sex into play, instead of a problem, which switched her from what she calls “noisy brain,” where everything is perceived as a threat, to “quiet brain,” where everything is perceived with curiosity and pleasure. (Remember the rat who didn’t like Iggy Pop.) She paid close attention to how Carol experienced each type of lube.
As she relaxed into the pleasure of observing her partner’s pleasure, she found that when she connected with the experience of giving pleasure, her own pleasure could expand inside her, without all the brakes and worries and fretting.
She swam in the water.
And it happened when she moved her focus away from her own worries and onto the task of increasing her partner’s pleasure.
The next step, of course, was to be able to enjoy her own pleasure. But before she could get there, she had to knock down a wall in her own mind. She’ll do that in chapter 7.
lubrication error #1: genital response = “turned on”
I’ve noticed three errors about nonconcordance that perpetuate dangerous cultural myths about women’s sexuality. Let’s do away with them, okay?
The first way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is failing to recognize that it exists in the first place. Let’s call this Lubrication Error #1.
Nonconcordance isn’t news—or it shouldn’t be. Sex researchers have had an increasingly clear idea that nonconcordance is a thing for a decade or two now. It’s been in the news, it’s been described in mainstream sex books . . . and yet my students and blog readers are routinely surprised to learn about it, and both porn and mainstream culture continue to perpetuate the myth that genital response = sexual arousal. Now that you know about nonconcordance, you’ll see people getting it wrong all over the place.
So what gives? Why does it feel so new, when every other year a book comes out that talks about it?
When I asked this question in my class, a student raised her hand and said with comic sourness: “patriarchy.”
Totally.
For centuries, male sexuality has been the “default” sexuality, so that where women differ from men, women get labeled “broken.” Even men who differ from the standard narrative get labeled “broken.” Men have, on average, a 50 percent overlap between their genital response and their subjective arousal, and therefore, the patriarchal myth goes, everyone should have a 50 percent overlap.
But women aren’t broken versions of men; they’re
women.
If it weren’t about men-as-default, then we’d all be just as likely to wonder, “What’s up with men, that they have so
much
overlap?” as we are to wonder, “What’s up with women, that they have so
little
overlap?” But no one asks about men. No student, no blog reader, no fellow sex educator, no one anywhere has ever asked me, “Why are men so concordant? Isn’t that kind of . . . ?” The only people who ask that question are the sex researchers.
So I’m going to fight patriarchy with patriarchy. Let’s make nonconcordance universally acknowledged, by understanding how it affects men.
Every guy, at some point in his life, has the experience of wanting sex, wanting an erection, and the erection just isn’t there. In that moment, the erection (or lack of erection) isn’t a measure of his interest—he might even wake up the very next morning with an erection, when it’s nothing but an inconvenience.
Guys sometimes wake up with erections, not because they’re turned on but because they’re waking up out of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and one of the things that happens during REM is “nocturnal penile tumescence.” Erections come and go throughout the sleep cycle, whether or not you’re dreaming about sex. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just an erection. It’s nonconcordant.
Most boys, around adolescence, experienced unwanted genital response—sitting at the back of the bus, noticing a teacher’s body, his own ill-fitting pants, or even just general excitement about nonsexual things (driving a car, eating a donut, really
anything
) can activate the relevant pathways and generate the physiological response in a teenage boy.
But genital response is not desire; response isn’t even pleasure. It is simply response. For everyone, regardless of their genitals. Just because a male body responds to a particular idea or sight or story doesn’t mean that he necessarily likes it or wants it. It just means it activated the relevant pathways—
expecting.
“This is a restaurant.” (Remember: Men’s 50 percent overlap between genital response and arousal is highly statistically significant . . . but it’s still just 50 percent.)
Sometimes guys notice their bodies responding to something even when their brains are saying, “That’s not okay.” And they feel conflicted, because on the one hand it’s clearly sexual, but on the other hand it’s
Seriously Not Okay.
I’ll give you an example (and feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you’re triggered by sexual-assault-related things).
When I was in college, I was hanging out with a group of guy friends, and one of them—I’ll call him Paul—told a story about a buddy of his. At the end of a party, when there were people sleeping or passed out all over the house, Paul found his buddy having sex with a girl who was passed out drunk, unresponsive, and clearly unaware of what was happening. I say “having sex with,” but the technical term is “raping.” And the buddy says, “Hey, you want to try this?” And my friend telling the story says, “Nah. We gotta go.”
The reason that’s all he said, Paul told us, rather than, “What are you doing, you douchebag? Get the hell away from her,” was that he felt torn between his gut instinct that what his friend was doing was
Seriously Not Okay
and the automatic reaction of his body to the sight of sexual intercourse. He got an erection. He was horrified at himself, at the idea that any part of him might interpret this
Seriously Not Okay
situation as erotic.
Back when I heard this story, I had no idea what was going on.
Genital response was arousal, I thought. It was similar to my other friend’s story about being wet even though she was bored—though in this case, the guy was not bored but actively horrified!
What was going on?
What was going on was
expecting
without either
eagerness
or
enjoying.
His body recognized the sight before him as sexually relevant and, either because he was disinhibited by alcohol or else was just a low-brakes kind of guy, his brakes did not prevent his body from responding to the sexually relevant stimulation. “This is a restaurant,” his penis told him, even though there was a brawl happening.
Let’s imagine a different story, in a world where everyone knows about nonconcordance.
Because Paul knows that what his genitals are doing indicates only what’s sexually relevant, not what’s sexually appealing, not only does he not feel ashamed of himself or wonder if he, too, might be a rapist, but the absence of all that shame creates space in his brain for doing something more proactive to intervene! He can tell his friend to stop because what he’s doing is an act of violence, a crime. Or he can call the cops and have the friend arrested, and he can take the girl to the emergency room to have evidence collected, HIV prophylaxis administered, and emergency contraception offered. Or at the very, very least he can find a friend to help her. He can be a hero.
Genital response doesn’t mean anything but sexually relevant—
expecting
, essentially a conditioned reflex—not
enjoying.
It doesn’t indicate desire or pleasure or anything else. And by carving out space, once and for all, for nonconcordance, we’re actually making the world a better place for
everyone
.
In the end, Lubrication Error #1—Genital Response = “Turned On”—is actually just old school metaphorization, like the medieval anatomists from chapter 1 (“pudendum,” because shame!), though maybe without the moral message.
You know that the size of a phallus (clitoris or penis) doesn’t say anything about how ashamed a person is (or should be) of their genitals.
At most, phallus size often—not always—predicts whether they have ovaries or testicles. Similarly, blood flow to the genitals doesn’t say anything about what they want or like (or should want or like). No. At most, blood flow to the genitals often—not always—is simply information about whether they have been exposed to something that their brain interpreted as sexually relevant—with no information about whether they
liked
it.
lubrication error #2: genital response is
enjoying
A second, more science-y way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to pay attention to the science and then tell the wrong story about it, to decide that women’s genitals are the “honest indicator” of what really turns them on, and the women are lying, in denial, or just culturally oppressed out of awareness of their own deep desires. Let’s call this Lubrication Error #2.
This tempting—and wrong—explanation for nonconcordance lines up neatly with various cultural misconceptions about women’s sexuality, like the Moral, Medical, and Media Messages that I described in chapter 5 and like the man-as-default myth. Here’s a common misconception: Women have been socially programmed not to admit that they’re actually turned on by certain things (like violent sex or lesbian porn), so when they report their perceived arousal, they’re lying or in denial about their hidden desires, or possibly both. But what their genitals are doing is what’s
really
true.
Daniel Bergner’s
What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
begins with a description of nonconcordance research, followed immediately by a description of lie detector research. The conclusion readers are forced to draw is that women are lying—or possibly just in denial—about their arousal. Here’s how Amanda Hess summarized it in her review at Slate.com: “Straight women claimed to respond to straight sex more than they really did; lesbian women claimed to respond
to straight sex far less than they really did; nobody admitted a response to the bonobo sex.”
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Note the “claimed” and the “really” and the “admitted.”
Of course you know that women’s genitals were just reacting automatically to a sexually relevant cue—“This is a restaurant”—which has only a passing acquaintance with what a woman “really” likes or wants. Readers of
What Do Women Want?
didn’t get that lesson, though. They got Lubrication Error #2.
Sex-positive feminists like writer Amanda Hess embrace the idea that women’s bodies could be contradicting the outdated morality-based cultural narratives about women being “less sexual” than men: Look how much our genitals respond to stuff! Look how sexual we
really
are!
Right? That’s an appealing story—as if our bodies are showing us a secret, wildly sexual self that could be into anything if we just gave ourselves the permission that our culture has been denying us for centuries!
And after all, women
have
been subjected to oppressive cultural messages that made it shameful for them to acknowledge and pay affectionate attention to their own sexuality—that’s what chapter 5 was about. In fact this whole book is about paying attention to your own internal experience and trusting your body. And what could be more “trust your body” than “Your genitals are telling you what you like, even when you don’t know it”?
Ah. It’s that word “like” that’s the problem. Like,
enjoying.
But genital response isn’t
enjoying.
It’s
expecting.
Your genitals
are
telling you something, and you can trust them. They’re telling you that something is sexually relevant, based on their experience of Pavlovian conditioning. “This a restaurant.” But that’s not the same as sexually
appealing.
Do, absolutely, trust your body. And interpret its signals accurately.
Genital response, which happens between your legs, is
expecting.
Arousal, which happens between your ears, includes
enjoying.
We see this myth—that a woman’s genitals can tell us more about how she feels than she can—everywhere. For example, as part of my research for this book, I read the bestselling novel
Fifty Shades of Grey
by
E. L. James. (Is that what everyone says? “Oh, it’s for
research
”?) And there it was. Arousal nonconcordance in the first spanking scene. During the spanking, heroine Anastasia tries to move away, she screams in pain, and her “face hurts, it’s screwed up so tight.”
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There is not one word about her liking the spanking as it’s happening.
Afterward, hero/spanker Christian Grey puts his fingers in her vagina. Now, knowing what you know about nonconcordance, listen to what Grey tells Ana: “Feel this. See how much your body
likes this
, Anastasia” (emphasis mine).
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Yeah, I wanted to spank him when I read that, and
not
in the sexy way.
It gets worse, though, because Ana believes him, instead of believing her own internal experience, which she describes as, “demeaned, debased, and abused.”
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Certainly there are women who are turned on by being consensually debased, but the whole plot pivots on the fact that Ana isn’t one of them.
So, E. L. James, if you’re reading this: Lubrication means it was sexually
relevant
, which tells us nothing about whether it was sexually
appealing.
Therefore I humbly request that in the next edition, Grey says to Ana, “Feel this. See how sexually relevant your body considers physical contact with your buttocks and genitals, Anastasia. That gives me no information about whether or not you liked it. Did you like it? No? Double crap, let me make it up to you by reading Emily Nagoski’s book about women’s sexual wellbeing, so that I have a clue next time.”