How Sexual Desire Works
Our experience of sexual desire varies widely from person to person, but can generally be broken down into two categories: spontaneous and responsive sexual desire. Spontaneous desire is exactly what it sounds like - it shows up instantly, with or without stimulation. The desire in our minds comes before the physical arousal in our bodies. And this is typically what people imagine when they think about their “sex drive” - how often they feel a spontaneous desire for sex.
But according to sex educator and author Emily Nagoski, our sex drive is...well, not even a drive at all! Instead, it’s an incentive motivation system. But what’s the difference?
Well, your brain has two complementary systems that facilitate arousal and desire: the Sexual Excitation System and the Sexual Inhibition System. Nagoski refers to them as the accelerator and the brake.
The accelerator notices all the arousing things in your environment – the beautiful woman in line at the grocery store, your partner in a sexy outfit, the sex toy on your bedside table - and sends signals that facilitate arousal and turn you on. At the same time, the brake is looking for any potential threats in the environment – anything from lack of emotional safety with your partner to forgetting you left the oven on - that would make it a very bad idea to be aroused right now, sending signals turning you off.
And desire emerges when the turn-ons outweigh the turn-offs and a person can feel motivated to pursue sexual stimulation. So the process of becoming aroused isn’t actually based on an innate need to engage sexually – it's the process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs.
But it’s not so simple. Because some people experience sexual desire spontaneously – their accelerator is very sensitive, or maybe they don’t have much that hits their mental brakes – but for others, desire is responsive. It only emerges in response to enough sexual stimulation to let the proverbial foot off the breaks and let the accelerator do its thing.
According to Nagoski, approximately 75% of men and 15% of women experience spontaneous desire. And because much of the research on sexual arousal and desire has been based on men, spontaneous desire has been thought of as the norm. However, about 25% of men and the vast majority of women (85%) experience responsive desire - which is problematic if we see spontaneous desire as the default for everyone!
In learning more about cultivating arousal and desire, it’s important to understand that there is immense variability in how this looks for people. Everyone has a different desire threshold—some people require more pleasurable sensation than others to experience desire. Notably, spontaneous desire doesn’t equate to more interest in sex, nor does responsive desire equate to less interest in sex. These descriptions are simply used to describe how different people come to experience desire, and this can change from person to person, context to context, and even over time.
