Come as You Are (33 page)

And in part, this is the male-as-default myth at work again. Just like concordant arousal, spontaneous desire gets called “normal,” while any other desire style gets called “abnormal,” just because spontaneous desire is typical (though far from universal) in men.

But I think it’s more than that. I think the cultural dominance of spontaneous desire is actually grounded in the myth of sex as a drive.

A drive is a biological mechanism whose job is to keep the organism at a healthy baseline—not too warm, not too cold, not too hungry, not too full. A traditional metaphor for a drive system is a thermostat: When the temperature drops below a critical point, the thermostat notices and switches on the heat, and then when the temperature gets back in the
desired range, the heat switches off. The temperature bounces around within a few degrees of the set point.

Appetite is the classic example of a drive. Hunger for food drives foraging and eating, and then when you feel full, you stop eating. There are lots of other drives: Thirst drives fluid consumption, fatigue drives sleep, thermoregulation drives shivering, sweating, taking off a sweater, or turning up the thermostat. Hunger and thirst are motivational systems that push you to do the things you have to do in order to avoid dying. The uncomfortable (“aversive”) internal states of thirst, exhaustion, and cold push you out into the world, to go meet a need, so that you can return to a baseline, and that baseline is all about staying alive.

When you hear “drive,” think “survive.”

“Drive” is how scientists thought about sex for a long time. Helen Singer Kaplan’s triphasic model, discussed in chapter 2, describes sexual desire as one of the “drives or appetites that subserves individual or species survival.”
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For centuries, scientists thought sex was a “hunger.” It’s probably how you think about it, too. It’s how I thought about it for a long time.

Turns out, no.
⁸

It’s easy to prove that sex is not a drive: As animal behaviorist Frank Beach put it in 1956, “No one has ever suffered tissue damage for lack of sex.”
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We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died because of not being able to get laid. Maybe they wanted to, but that’s different (and the topic of a later section). There is no baseline to return to and no physical damage that results from not “feeding” your sexual desire.

Instead, sex is an “incentive motivation system.”

Most people associate the word “incentive” with the idea of a prize, something worth working for. The biological meaning is similar. Instead of feeling pushed by an uncomfortable internal experience, like hunger, incentive motivation systems are all about being pulled by an attractive external stimulus.

When you hear “incentive motivation,” think “thrive.”

Drive
survive. Pushed by an unpleasant internal state, which ends when you return to baseline.

Incentive
thrive. Pulled by an attractive external stimulus (the incentive). It ends when you’ve obtained the incentive.

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 wrong with you, your stress response kicks in.
¹⁰
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 a hundred years.
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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. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particular—with their 75 percent spontaneous desire—need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself. Because if sex is a drive, like hunger, then potential partners are like food. Or like animals to be hunted for food.

And that’s both factually incorrect and just
wrong.

This matters. If we think sex is a drive, like hunger, then we might start giving it privilege it doesn’t deserve. But if, on the other hand, we treat it like the incentive motivation system it is, might not the culture change? Might the culture be less tolerant of the suffering of girls, if that suffering isn’t to feed boys’ hunger but only feeds their
interest
? Maybe not, I don’t know. But I do know that men’s sexual entitlement is a primary reason they sexually assault women.
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It seems to me that if you believe your erection means you have a “basic survival need,” then the sex-as-drive myth—combined with long-standing cultural attitudes that women aren’t allowed the same sexual agency as men—turns toxic, fast.

I know everyone has told you that sex is a drive. I know that even the newest sex research sometimes holds fast to the idea of spontaneous desire as a drive.
¹³
And to make it even more confusing, sometimes sex researchers who know better say, “sex drive,” in the same way atheists say, “Thank God.” The language is so embedded in the culture that even
people whose entire knowledge system is contrary to the fact still use the words.

But sex isn’t a drive.

Please tell everyone you know.

“but emily, sometimes it
feels
like a drive!”

Some of you will be wondering, “So how come there are times when sexual desire
feels
like an unpleasant internal state? How come it feels like a drive?”

And the answer is: The same thing that makes
Groundhog Day
a funny movie.

In the movie, Bill Murray’s character wakes up each morning in the same hotel, to the same radio show on his alarm, on the same despairingly familiar day: February 2, Groundhog Day. He is forced to live the day over and over and over again.

After asking for help, to no avail, from his producer, from a doctor, from a psychiatrist, and finally, while drunk at a bowling alley, from two random guys in flannel shirts, he concludes that he can do whatever he wants because there are no consequences. Hijinks ensue. And eventually he decides to seduce his producer, played by Andie MacDowell. Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day, he woos her and courts her and memorizes French poetry, trying to get her into bed and gradually falling in love with her . . . and Groundhog Day after Groundhog Day, he ends up getting slapped in the face. Over. And over. Again. He keeps failing at his goal, a goal that is becoming increasingly important to him, until at last he gives up in despair.

And so he kills himself. Over. And over. Again. He can’t even die.

A bunch of other stuff happens and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I say it has a happy ending. It’s a good movie, I recommend it, but what does it have to do with sexual desire?

The brain mechanism firing Bill Murray’s efforts to find his way out of Groundhog Day, to win Andie MacDowell, and to die is the same brain
mechanism that makes sexual desire feel like a drive. Here’s how it works.

Imagine a little monitor, like a referee, sitting next to your brain’s emotional One Ring.
¹⁴
She’s got two jobs, this monitor:

1. She watches to make sure the world is behaving according to her expectations (expectations set by all her previous experience with the world).

2. She directs the investigation when there is any discrepancy between the world and her expectations.

When the world is meeting her expectations, the monitor feels satisfied. Nothing is lacking. But sometimes there is a gap between the world and the expectations—some ambiguity needs to be resolved, some novelty needs to be explored to see where it fits in the expected order of things, or some very appealing stimulus needs to be approached and obtained.
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When this happens, she goes into command mode. She makes
reducing the discrepancy
her purpose in life. Her entire world is made up of these three things:

• The goal state of closing the gap—which might mean resolve the ambiguity, explore the new thing, approach the incentive, or simply complete the task

• The effort you’re investing in the pursuit of that goal state—the attention, resources, and time you’re allocating to it

• The progress you’re making toward that goal state

In Bill Murray’s case, the goal state is, among other things, Andie MacDowell; the efforts he invests are all the hilarious things he tries, like memorizing her favorite drink and toast (“To world peace”); and the progress he makes is absolutely nil—until the very end, of course.

When sex feels like a drive, the goal state is the sexually appealing incentive—usually a partner, but if you have a very sensitive accelerator, the world might just be a turn-on all the time. The efforts you invest are
all the pitching woo and initiating and seduction you can muster. Exactly what this is varies from culture to culture and from person to person. (There’s the old joke: What’s foreplay to an Irishman? “Brace yourself, Bridget.”) And your progress is how much closer you get to engaging sexually with the appealing incentive.

So the little monitor keeps track of how much progress you’re making in relation to how much effort you’re investing. She tallies your effort-to-progress ratio, and she has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be. This opinion is called “criterion velocity.”
¹⁶
And this is where it gets really interesting.

When the monitor feels that you’re making good progress—when you’re matching or exceeding the criterion velocity—she is satisfied, motivated, eager. But when the monitor feels that you’re not making enough progress, she begins to become frustrated, and she prompts you to increase your efforts to get closer to your goal. If you still aren’t making enough progress to satisfy the little monitor, she begins to get angry . . . and then enraged! And eventually, if you continue to fall short, at a certain point the little monitor gives up and pushes you off an emotional cliff into the “pit of despair,” as the monitor becomes convinced that the goal is unattainable. You give up in hopeless desolation.