Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski

Author:Emily Nagoski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

lubrication error #3: nonconcordance is a problem

The third way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to decide that it’s a symptom of something.

Suppose you recognize that nonconcordance exists, you acknowledge that it’s expecting without necessarily indicating enjoying or eagerness, and then you read the research that shows there is a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunctions related to desire and arousal.21 And so you decide that, because nonconcordance is associated with dysfunction, nonconcordance must be a problem.

Which brings me to a sentence every undergraduate who takes a research methods class will memorize: “Correlation does not imply causation.” It refers to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—“with this, therefore because of this”—which means that just because two things happen together doesn’t mean that one thing caused the other thing.

The quintessential example in the twenty-first century is the relationship between pirates and global warming.22 This is a joke made by Bobby Henderson, as part of the belief system of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Henderson wanted to make a point about the difference between causation and correlation, so he drew a graph that apparently plotted increase in global temperature with the precipitous drop in the number of seafaring pirates.

Did the loss of pirates cause global climate change?

Of course not. It’s absurd, right? That’s the point.

Actually, we can hypothesize a third variable that influenced both the reduction in pirates and the change in global climate: the Industrial Revolution.

Like this putative correlation between pirates and global temperature, there’s also a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction. The correlation makes it easy to think that the nonconcordance is causing the sexual dysfunction, or that the dysfunction is causing the nonconcordance.

Turns out, no. Just as pirates and global temperature can be linked together by the Industrial Revolution, nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction are linked together by a third variable: context.

How does context link sexual functioning and concordance?

Sexually functional women have brakes that are sensitive to context, turning off the offs when they’re in the right context—which, remember, means both external circumstances and internal mental state. Sexually dysfunctional women’s brakes stay on, even in contexts where you would expect them to turn off.

I’ll illustrate this with an extraordinarily clever study published in 2010. Dutch researchers built an “ambulatory laboratory”—a take-home kit of plethysmograph, laptop computer, and handheld control unit.23 Participants completed tests in the lab similar to other nonconcordance research—viewing erotic stimuli and testing various automatic and conscious responses—and they took the ambulatory lab home with them and tested themselves there, too. This way researchers could measure how being in the lab influenced the results, compared to being at home. In other words, they measured the effect of context. They studied two groups: eight women with healthy sexual functioning (the control group) and eight women who met the diagnostic criteria for “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” (the “low-desire” group).

Result: The control group’s genital response and subjective arousal more than doubled when tested at home, compared to in the lab. Plus they reported feeling “less inhibited” and “more at ease” at home.

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