Birds Do It. Bees Do
It. People Seek the Keys to It.
 |
|
Photo: John Hersey |
By NATALIE ANGIER,
NYTimes on the Web. April 10, 2007
Sexual desire. The phrase alone
holds such loaded, voluptuous power that the mere expression of it sounds like a
come-on — a little pungent, a little smutty, a little comical and possibly
indictable.
Everybody with a pair of currently or formerly active gonads knows about sexual
desire. It is a near-universal experience, the invisible clause on one’s
birth certificate stipulating that one will, upon reaching maturity, feel the
urge to engage in activities often associated with the issuance of more birth
certificates.
Yet universal does not mean uniform, and the definitions of sexual desire can be
as quirky and personalized as the very chromosomal combinations that sexual
reproduction will yield. Ask an assortment of men and women, “What is
sexual desire, and how do you know you’re feeling it?” and after some initial
embarrassed mutterings and demands for anonymity, they answer as follows:
“There’s a little bit of adrenaline, a puffing of the chest, a bit of
anticipatory tongue motion,” said a divorced lawyer in his late 40s.
“I feel relaxed, warm and comfortable,” said a designer in her 30s.
“A yearning to kiss or grab someone who might respond,” said a male filmmaker,
50. “Or if I’m alone, to call up exes.”
“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me
on.”
For researchers in the field of human sexuality, the wide variance in how people
characterize sexual desire and describe its most salient features is a source of
challenge and opportunity, pleasure and pain. “We throw around the term ‘sexual
desire’ as though we’re all sure we’re talking about the same thing,” said Lisa
M. Diamond, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Utah.
“But it’s clear from the research that people have very different operational
definitions about what desire is.”
At the same time, the researchers said, it is precisely the complexity of sexual
desire, the depth, richness and tangled spangle of its weave, that call out to
be understood.
An understanding could hardly come too soon. In an era when the rates of
sexually transmitted diseases continue to climb; when schools and parent groups
spar bitterly over curriculums for sex education classes; when the Food and Drug
Administration angers both religious conservatives and women’s groups by
approving the sale of the morning-after pill over the counter but then limiting
those sales to women 18 years or older; and when deviations from the putative
norm of monogamous heterosexuality are presented as threats to the social fabric
— at such a time, scientists argue that the clear-eyed study of sexual desire
and its consequences is vital to public health, public sanity, public comity.
“Sexual desire may be complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s chaotic,” said
Julia R. Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender
and Reproduction in Bloomington, Ind. “We can make an honest attempt to
understand what sexual desire is and what it is not, and that it is important to
do so.”
Meredith L. Chivers, a researcher at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health
in Toronto, concurs. “Sexuality is such a huge part of who we are. How
could we not want to understand it?”
Unabashed about acting on their academic appetites, sexologists have gained a
wealth of new and often surprising insights into the nature and architecture of
sexual desire. They are tracing how men and women diverge in their
experience, and where they converge. They are learning how and why people
pursue the erotic partners they do, and the circumstances under which those
tastes are either fixed or fluid.
Some researchers are delving into the neural, anatomical and emotional
mechanisms that modulate and micromanage sexual desire and sexual arousal;
others are exploring the role that culture plays in plucking or muffling the
strings of desire. The pragmatists in sexology’s ranks are seeking better
bedside medicines — new ways to help people who feel they suffer from an excess
or deficit of sexual desire.
One recent standout discovery upends the canonical model of how the typical sex
act unfolds, particularly for women but very likely for men as well.
According to the sequence put forward in the mid-20th century by the pioneering
sex researchers William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson and Helen Singer Kaplan,
a sexual encounter begins with desire, a craving for sex that arises of its own
accord and prods a person to seek a partner. That encounter then leads to
sexual arousal, followed by sexual excitement, a desperate fumbling with buttons
and related clothing fasteners, a lot of funny noises, climax and resolution (I
will never drink Southern Comfort at the company barbecue again).
A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may
be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the
brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of
physical or subliminal stimulus — a brush on the back of the neck, say, or the
sight of a ripe apple, or wearing a hard hat on a construction site and being
surrounded by other men in similar haberdashery.
In a series of studies at the University of Amsterdam, Ellen Laan, Stephanie
Both and Mark Spiering demonstrated that the body’s entire motor system is
activated almost instantly by exposure to sexual images, and that the more
intensely sexual the visuals, the stronger the electric signals emitted by the
participants’ so-called spinal tendious reflexes. By the looks of it, Dr.
Laan said, the body is primed for sex before the mind has had a moment to leer.
“We think that sexual desire emerges from sexual stimulation, the activation of
one’s sexual system,” she said in a telephone interview.
Moreover, she said, arousal is not necessarily a conscious process. In
other experiments, Dr. Spiering and his colleagues showed that when college
students were exposed to sexual images too fleetingly for the subjects to report
having noticed them, the participants were nevertheless much quicker to identify
subsequent sexual images than were the control students who had been flashed
with neutral images.
“Our sexual responsiveness can be activated or enhanced by stimuli we’re not
even aware of,” Dr. Laan said.
By reordering the sexual timeline and placing desire after arousal, rather than
vice versa, the new research fits into the pattern that neurobiologists have
lately observed for other areas of life. Before we are conscious of
wanting to do anything — wave at a friend, open a book — the brain regions
needed to perform the activity are already ablaze. The notion that any of
us is the Decider, the proactive plotter of our most lubricious desires,
scientists say, may simply be a happy and perhaps necessary illusion.
The new findings also suggest that in some cases, the best approach for treating
those who suffer from low sex drive may be to focus on enhancing arousability
rather than desire — to forget about sexy thoughts and to emphasize sexy
feelings, the physical cues or activities that arouse one’s sexual circuitry.
The rest will unwind from there, with the ease of a weighted shade.
Researchers have also gathered considerable evidence that the sensations of
sexual arousal, desire and excitement are governed by two basic and
distinctively operating pathways in the brain — one that promotes sexual
enthusiasm, another that inhibits it. An originator of this novel concept,
Erick Janssen of the Kinsey Institute, compares these mechanisms to the pedals
of a car.
“If you let go of the gas pedal, you’ll slow down,” he said, “but that’s not the
same as stepping on the brakes.”
In any given individual, each pedal may be easier or harder to press. One
person may be quick to become aroused, but equally quick to stifle that response
at the slightest distraction. Another may be tough to get started, but
once galvanized “will not lose sexual arousal even if the ceiling comes down,”
Dr. Janssen said. Still another may be saddled with both a feeble sexual
accelerator and an overzealous sexual inhibitor, an unenviable pairing most
likely correlated with a taste for beige pantsuits and the music of Loggins and
Messina.
Dr. Janssen and his colleagues have developed extensive questionnaires to
measure individual differences in sexual excitability and inhibition, asking
participants how strongly they agree or disagree with statements like “When I am
taking a shower or a bath, I easily become sexually aroused” and “If there is a
risk of unwanted pregnancy, I am unlikely to get sexually aroused.”
The researchers have also explored the physiological, emotional and cognitive
underpinnings associated with high scores and low. In one recent study,
they recruited 40 male undergraduates and determined by questionnaire the
subjects’ relative degree of sexual excitability and inhibition. Each
participant was then ushered into a plush, private room with low lighting, a
comfortable recliner and a television monitor and instructed in how to place the
aptly named Rigiscan device on his genitals.
Thus outfitted, the student s watched a series of erotic film clips, some
classified as “nonthreatening” and depicting couples engaged in mutually
animated consensual sex, others of a “threatening” variety featuring coercive,
violent sex.
Analyzing the excitability and inhibition variables separately, the researchers
found that the men who had scored high on the questionnaire in sexual
excitability showed, on average, a swifter and more robust penile response to
all the erotic films than did the low scorers, regardless of the comparative
violence or charm of the material viewed.
More intriguing still were the divergent sexual responses between men who ranked
high on the inhibition scale and those who scored low. Whereas both groups
reacted to the nonthreatening sex scenes with an equivalently hearty degree of
tumescence, only the low scorers — those whose answers to the questionnaire
indicated they had scant sexual inhibition — maintained an enthusiastic
physiological response when confronted with film clips of sexual brutality.
The results suggest that having a good set of sexual brakes not only dampens the
willingness to commit rape or sexual abuse, but the desire as well, giving the
lie to notions that “all men are the same” and would be likely to rape their way
through the local maiden population if they thought they could get away with it.
The researchers have also found a link between sexual inhibition and sexual
risk-taking: men who are low in inhibition do not necessarily engage in
more or kinkier sex than do their high-inhibition counterparts, but the odds are
greater that they will forgo condoms if they indulge.
Most of the studies on the autonomy of sexual brakes and accelerators have been
done on men, but scientists lately have begun applying the dual-control model to
their studies of female sexuality as well. At first they used a slightly
modified version of the excitement/inhibition questionnaire that had proved
valuable for assessing men, but they soon realized that their menu of sex
situations and checklist of physical arousal cues might be missing large swaths
of a woman’s sexual persona.
What was the feminine equivalent of an erection anyway? Was it vaginal swelling
and lubrication, or something else entirely? Women are generally smaller
and less muscular than men. What might the feeling of being physically
threatened do to enhance or hamper a woman’s sexual appetite?
“We started putting together focus groups, asking women to tell us the various
things that might turn them on and turn them off sexually, and how they know
when they’re sexually aroused,” said Stephanie A. Sanders of the Kinsey
Institute and Indiana University. “They mentioned a heightened sense of
awareness, genital tingling, butterflies in the stomach, increased heart rate
and skin sensitivity, muscle tightness. Then we asked them if they thought
the female parallel to an erection is genital lubrication, and they said no, no,
you can get wet when you’re not aroused, it changes with the menstrual cycle,
it’s not a meaningful measure.”
Through the focus groups, Dr. Sanders and her colleagues compiled a new,
female-friendly but admittedly cumbersome draft questionnaire that they whittled
down into a useful research tool. They asked 655 women, ages 18 to 81, to
complete the draft survey and scrutinized the results in search of areas of
concurrence and variability.
The researchers have identified a number of dimensions on which their beta
testers agreed. For example, 93 to 96 percent of the 655 respondents
strongly endorsed statements that linked sexual arousal to “feeling connected
to” or “loved by” a partner, and to the belief that the partner is “really
interested in me as a person”; they also concurred that they have trouble
getting excited when they are “feeling unattractive.”
But women’s tastes varied widely in many of the finer details of seduction and
setting. “Some women say they find the male body odor attractive, others
repulsive,” Dr. Sanders said. “Some women are turned on by the idea of
having sex in an unusual or unconcealed place where they may be caught in the
act, while others have a hard time getting aroused if they think others may hear
them, or the kids will walk in.”
Conventional wisdom has it that a woman’s libido is stifled by unhappiness,
anxiety or anger, but the survey showed that about 25 percent of women used sex
to lift them out of a bad mood or to resolve a marital spat.
Women also differed in the importance they accorded a man’s physical appearance,
with many expressing a comparatively greater likelihood of being aroused by
evidence of talent or intelligence — say, while watching a man deliver a great
speech.
The researchers are now trying to correlate women’s sexual inhibition and
excitement ratings to their sexual behavior and sexual self-image — whether they
are likely to engage in risky sex, dissatisfying sex or no sex at all.
Other scientists have devised surveys of their own to plumb the depths and
contours of sexual desire. Richard A. Lippa, a professor of psychology at
California State University in Fullerton, for months invited anybody with the
time and interest to take his online survey, in which he asked people to rate
their reactions to statements like “I frequently think about sex,” “It doesn’t
take much to get me sexually excited,” “I fantasize about having sex with men,”
“I think a woman’s body is sexy” and “If I were looking through a catalog with
sexy swimsuits, I’d spend more time looking at the men in the pictures than the
women.”
Dr. Lippa has collected responses from more than 200,000 people around the
world, and, though he has yet to complete his analysis of the data, a number of
salient findings shine through. Whether the test-takers live in North
America, Latin America, Britain, Western Europe or Japan, he said, men on
average report having a higher sex drive than women, and women prove
comparatively more variable in their sex drive.
“Men have a consistently high sex drive,” he said, “while in women you see more
low sex drive and more high sex drive.”
Women’s sexual fluidity extends beyond the strength of desire, he said, to
encompass the objects of that desire. In his survey, heterosexual women
who rated their sex drive as high turned out to have an increased attraction to
women as well as to men.
“This is not to say that all women are bisexual,” Dr. Lippa said. “Most of
the heterosexual women would still describe themselves as more attracted to men
than to women.” Still, the mere presence of a hearty sexual appetite
seemed to expand a heterosexual woman’s appreciation of her fellow women’s
forms. By contrast, the men were more black-and-white in their
predilections. If they were straight and had an especially high sex drive,
that concupiscence applied only to women; if gay, to other men.
Dr. Diamond of the University of Utah also has evidence that women’s sexual
attractions are, as she put it, “more nonexclusive than men’s.”
One factor that may contribute to women’s sexual ambidextrousness, some
researchers suggest, is the intriguing and poorly understood nonspecificity of
women’s physical reactions to sexual stimuli. As Dr. Chivers of the Center
for Addiction and Mental Health and other researchers have found, women and men
show very divergent patterns of genital arousal while viewing material with
sexual content.
For men, there is a strong concordance between their physiological and
psychological states. If they are looking at images that they describe as
sexually arousing, they get erections. When the images are not to their
expressed taste or sexual orientation, however, their genitals remain unmoved.
For women, the correlation between pelvic and psychic excitement is virtually
nil. Women’s genitals, it seems, respond to all sex, all the time.
Show a woman scenes of a man and a woman having sex, or two women having sex, or
two men, or even two bonobos, Dr. Chivers said, and as a rule her genitals will
become measurably congested and lubricated, although in many cases she may not
be aware of the response.
Ask her what she thinks of the material viewed, however, and she will firmly
declare that she liked this scene, found that one repellent, and, frankly, the
chimpanzee bit didn’t do it for her at all. Regardless of declared sexual
orientation, Dr. Chivers said, “with women, there’s a discrepancy between stated
preference and physiological arousal, and this discrepancy has been seen
consistently across studies.”
Again, the why of it remains a mystery. Dr. Chivers and others have
hypothesized that the mechanism is protective. Women are ever in danger of
being raped, they said, and by automatically lubricating at the mere hint of
sex, they may avoid damage during forced intercourse to that evolutionarily
all-important reproductive tract.
Regardless of gender or relative genital congestion, people attend almost
reflexively to sexual imagery. In an effort to trace that response back to
the body’s premier sex organ, Kim Wallen and his colleagues at Emory University
in Atlanta have performed brain scans on volunteers as the subjects viewed a
series of sexually explicit photographs. The researchers discovered that
men’s and women’s brains reacted differently to the images. Most notably, men
showed far more activity than women did in the amygdala, the almond-contoured
brain sector long associated with powerful emotions like fear and anger rather
than with anything erotic.
Heather Rupp, a graduate student in Dr. Wallen’s lab, tried to determine whether
the divergent brain responses were a result of divergent appraisals, of men and
women focusing on different parts of the same photographs. “We
hypothesized, based on common lore, that women would look at faces, and men at
genitals,” Dr. Wallen said.
But on tracking the eye movements of study participants as they sized up erotic
photographs, Ms. Rupp dashed those prior assumptions. “The big surprise
was that men looked at the faces much more than women did,” Dr. Wallen said,
“and both looked at the genitals comparably.”
The researchers had also predicted that men would be more drawn than women to
close-up views of genitalia, but it turned out that everybody flipped past them
as quickly as possible. Women lingered longer and with greater stated
enjoyment than did their male counterparts on photographs of men performing oral
sex on women; and they noticed more fashion details. “We got spontaneous
reports from the women that we never got from the males, comments like ‘I would
have liked the photos better if the people didn’t have those ridiculous ‘70s
hairstyles,’ ” Dr. Wallen said.
He proposes that one reason men would scrutinize faces in pornographic imagery
is that a man often looks to a woman’s face for cues to her level of sexual
arousal, since her body, unlike a man’s, does not give her away.
Some researchers say that on average, male sexual desire is not only stronger
than women’s, but also more constant from hour to hour, day to day. They
point to a significant body of research suggesting a certain cyclic nature to
female desire, and some say women only begin to attain masculine heights of
lustiness during the few days of the month that they are fertile.
Studies have indicated, for example, that women are likelier to fantasize about
sex, masturbate, initiate sex with their mates, wear provocative clothing and
frequent singles bars right around ovulation than at any other time of the
month. Women obviously can, and do, have sex outside their window of
reproductive opportunity, but it makes good Darwinian sense, Dr. Wallen said,
for them to have some extra oomph while they are fertile.
Men, by contrast, are generally fecund all month long, and they are
theoretically ever anxious to share that bounty with others, a state of
perpetual readiness that Roy F. Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida
State University, described as “the tragedy of the male sex drive.”
Yet some experts argue that such absolutist formulas neglect the importance of
age, experience, culture and circumstance in determining the strength of any
individual’s sexual desire.
“Baumeister’s ideas may have some validity for people in nonmarried
relationships who are under the age of 40,” said Barry W. McCarthy, a sex
therapist in Washington and one of the venerable voices in the field. “But
as men and women age, they become much more alike in so many ways, including in
their sexual desire.”
For women, Dr. McCarthy said, “sex feels more in their control and safer for
them,” while the aging man loses the need to imagine himself the “sexual master
of the universe.”
As one married male photographer and editor in his mid-50s said, “Jeez, when I
was 20, I couldn’t walk straight,” but now he is sexually much looser and
“unconcerned.” And while he considers his libido to be of standard
dimensions for men his age, he also said it “exactly matches that of my
partner.”
Together they walk the line.
|
