On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen

Author:Elise Loehnen [Loehnen, Elise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

WHERE DOES SEXUAL DESIRE LIVE IN OUR BODIES?

As I’ve begun to tease out my feelings, I’ve found some solace in the research of sexologist and psychologist Meredith Chivers, at the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her groundbreaking work examines the way men and women—from straight, to queer, to everything in between—respond to visual and audio sexual stimulation, and how that tracks against what they self-report in arousal. In one study, Chivers showed participants a range of material, from gay sex to straight sex, to exercisers, to masturbators, to humping bonobos.[*10] The men responded in predictable ways, their arousal patterns matching their stated preferences—and neither straight men nor gay men were interested in the primates. Women on the other hand, and specifically women who identified as straight, were physically aroused by almost everything, even when those images were the opposite of what they reported turned them on. Lesbians matched their stated preferences. People have had a field day interpreting this data, arguing that heterosexual women are animalistic and into everything, while men are inhibited. The reality, I think, is that straight women don’t know what they want because they’ve been told they shouldn’t have any sexual wants at all. Our desire is off the charts simply because we haven’t been taught to map it.

We think of sexuality as a physical response from the body. But arousal starts in the mind—the brain is a sex organ too. Ideally, the brain and body are aligned. But just as we don’t instruct our hearts to beat or our lungs to breathe, the body will do what it will, which leads to one of the most important takeaways from Chivers’s research: Physical arousal does not correlate to subjective and stated desire. A wet vagina is not an invitation for unwanted penetration (and in the same way, a dry vagina doesn’t indicate a lack of sexual appetite). Chivers and other scientists believe lubrication during unwanted sex might be protective, to help prevent discomfort and injury. (Men should be able to relate to this amid the anguish of erectile dysfunction and inopportune or uninvited erections.)

So what, then, explains the disconnect between a woman’s body and her mind? Is it that we’re biologically primed for sex as a defense mechanism, that we know to expect unwanted sex and rape? Does the female body apprehend that it’s the object, or vessel, and recognize it might necessarily need to oblige for its own survival? Or are heterosexual women so disconnected from our bodies that we short out and run a “do not compute” message when we see anything we interpret as sexual? I think the confusion Chivers observed in heterosexual women exists in part because we are inexpert in understanding, naming, and talking about our pleasure and desire. Our minds—what we state we find arousing—and the response in the body are not always connected, because it’s a path not well defined, much less well trodden and entrained. Do lesbians track more precisely because they have

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