How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge Read online

  (Millet, 2003, p. 84)

  I would come to a rendezvous already in a state of exacerbated desire. From the very first full-on kisses, from the first moment when his arms crept up under my clothes, the pleasure was violent.

  (Millet, 2003, p. 207)

  For a while there is no such thing as ‘too much’ with the object of desire. The world shrinks down to a universe of two.

  When the dose wears off, however, the sex addict doesn’t need more of the same person, he or she needs a new person.

  (Cheever, 2008, p. 131)

  This raises the topic of whether (a) there is such a thing as sexual addiction and (b) whether women as well as men are vulnerable. If the latter is the case, does this undermine any simple distinction in intensity of desires (‘sex drive’) between men and women? Is the expression ‘addiction’, which is usually framed in comparison to drug addiction, appropriate when it is applied to sex? It will be argued later that this notion with its drug-related connotations gives some valuable insights.

  Moving towards the other end of the spectrum, there is the Scottish author and playwright J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. One of the two boys who were closest to him observed (Chaney, 2005, p. 214):

  Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest, and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex.

  I don’t believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for anyone – man, woman, or child.

  If Walter is at one end of the spectrum and a lack of interest in sex in the middle, at the opposite pole from Walter is the experience of an aversion to sex. This might be in a general sense or specifically in the context of a particular relationship. It is exemplified in the account by the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, which is thought to be autobiographical:

  She threw off her clothes, hastily, brushed out her long hair, and then suddenly looked at the wide, empty bed.

  A feeling of intolerable disgust came over her.

  By Lord Mandeville’s pillow she saw a large bottle of eucalyptus and two clean handkerchiefs. From below in the hall she heard the sound of bolts being drawn – then the electric light switched off…

  She sprang into bed, and suddenly, instinctively with a little childish gesture, she put one arm over her face, as though to hide something hideous and dreadful as her husband’s heavy, ponderous footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  (Mansfield, 2012, p. 543)

  Anonymous reports

  Some use drug-related metaphors to express how their sexual desire feels:

  I view sex as a fun experience and enjoy the thrill of meeting someone and seducing them. The feeling of having a conquest is exhilarating, like a high.

  (Predominantly heterosexual woman; Meston and Buss, 2009, p. 87)

  Falling in love is always a big letdown. It’s like doing cocaine. You get high, but sooner or later you know that you’re going to run out and you’re going to come down. And it’s the same with love: the rush ends after three or four months.

  (Saul, American fashion executive; Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 46)

  Casanovas often view sex as a progression of thrills, each of which must somehow surpass the one before it. When talking with them, one often hears that they are seeking an ‘ultimate sexual experience’.

  (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 56)

  As exemplified by Saul and the insights of Peter Trachtenberg, regular sex can come to yield diminishing returns and then some people make attempts to compensate by increasing the intensity. The drug-related phenomenon of tolerance comes to mind here and later chapters will look at similarities. Walter’s fantasy scenarios (just described) illustrate the same point. This quest can take the form of seeking variety and greater risk in order to attain an elusive super-high.

  Conversely, some people feel no sexual desire at all but are quite happy with this and do not wish to change it (Brotto et al., 2010, p. 611):

  Everyone in the asexual community wants to spread the message that it’s [asexuality] not a disorder and it’s not something that’s a problem and needs to be fixed.

  And from one asexual individual (Brotto et al., 2010, p. 611):

  I’ve never had the interest and so, even if today you could say, ‘Oh here…here’s a pill that will fix you’…no, that’s okay, thanks.

  Fictional depictions of desire

  Her skirts flew up as she fell to the ground, and she choked with laughter, saying she had not hurt herself; but as he felt her burning, sweating body against his face Jean clasped her firmly. The bitter female smell and the violent perfume of beaten hay in the open air intoxicated him and tensed all his muscles in passionate, angry desire.

  (Émile Zola, 1887/1975, p. 63)

  Various sources of publicly available information, accurate or inaccurate, inform us on the triggers to sexual desire and how it appears to be manifest in behaviour. Great writers have portrayed desire, as in the fictional heroines Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary. Film-makers have tried to capture the causes of desire and the settings in which it arises. Some individuals probably get much of their information from pornography, in which case they might absorb the erroneous impression that female desire is ever-ready, uninhibited, indiscriminate, and without complications, restraints or any requirement of reciprocity (Lederer, 1980).

  A desire for pictorial sex

  Casanova and Walter describe undiluted and uninhibited desire. However, we can make things even less complicated by considering desire for visual representations and what they reveal about real desire triggered by another human. Erotica and pornography permit understanding of how sexual desire works, since in some ways ‘art’ imitates the reality of what the consumer desires. Viewing it says something about sexual desire unrestrained by the problems of gaining access and the risk and prospect of rejection, failure and disease.

  Pornography offers the prospect of heightened bodily arousal and of endless novelty and uncertainty:

  Even though we were having sex nearly every day, I still needed my porn fix. Instead of buying magazines, I switched over to going to adult bookstores. They had these little booths with porn films, so I’d pop my quarters in there. No matter how much sex my wife and I had, I still needed the vicarious thrill and stimulation of watching porn to satisfy me.

  (Rob; Maltz and Maltz, 2010, p. 92)

  Some people derive instantaneous soothing from pornography:

  Porn gives me momentary relief from the pains of life. I don’t care about the future. What matters is I have escaped for now.

  (Albert, a middle-aged American father of three; Maltz and Maltz, 2010, p. 62)

  I turned my sexual attention more to the pornography and less to the relationship with my fiancée. I developed a pattern of masturbating to porn whenever I was feeling lonely, frustrated or bored. Our decision to hold off on sex, coupled with how easy it was to access Internet porn at my job, turned my porn use into an addiction.

  (Corey, an American computer analyst, aged 34; Maltz and Maltz, 2010, p. 56)

  As these quotations illustrate, the expression of sexual desire both in reality and in viewing pornography brings short-term positive mood changes and this would be expected to increase the target’s future potential to attract the person. As with Corey, the virtual world of pornography can sometimes displace real sexual relationships. It becomes a ‘supernormal’ stimulus to sexual desire and triggers an escalation of intensity, a feature shared by some people’s desires directed to real humans.

  Watching Internet porn began as a natural thing but quickly turned into a compulsion. It became a craving, like a drug. It felt unnatural if I didn’t look at porn in the evening.

  When I get really stressed out and feel like a failure in life, it’s like a little movie projector in my brain kicks on and starts showing the porn I’ve already seen to make me feel better. Then I get triggered to go buy and look at more porn.

  (Marie, an American widow, distracting herself from grief; Malt
z and Maltz, 2010, pp. 92 and 200)

  I was looking for the ideal woman, like the ones who exist in porn. Porn hadn’t prepared me to be with a real woman. I wanted perfection or nothing.

  I progressed from Playboy and soft-core magazines to the very edges of child pornography. And the progression was almost unnoticeable to me. It felt natural. I needed different and deeper stimulation. Playboy didn’t satisfy me because it’s too plain, too common. I wanted magazines that were barely legal. I also began using porn in combination with alcohol and other drugs to heighten the effect.

  (Hank; Maltz and Maltz, 2010, pp. 125–6)

  These accounts reveal the phenomenon of escalation in an attempt to find perfection, a feature shared with sexual desire towards real humans. Note Hank’s use of drugs to try to obtain the ‘super-high’. The interaction of drugs and sex gives insight into how desire works, discussed later. We need to ask why only certain individuals are attracted to pornography and experience a need to escalate its intensity. Equally important to understand is the existence of many who view pornography but without its use becoming problematic in any way.

  Linking the objective and subjective

  How does sexual desire work and why does it not work in the same way for everyone? Comparing different people, from where does the enormous variety in desire’s form and intensity arise?

  Personal reports in surveys that ask questions concerning what desire feels like and the conditions most likely to trigger it start to fill in the puzzle. Consider also posing the closely related questions – what does it feel like to experience sexual frustration? What is an orgasm like? Surely, the only source of evidence is to ask the person having such experiences.

  However, valuable as they are, personal reports leave much unexplained, since many factors that contribute to desire lie outside conscious awareness. By simply investigating how sexual desire appears to the individual concerned, there is no way of identifying these additional factors. Consider the following phenomena that call for a very different source of insight:

  Why do some otherwise similar people differ so much in what excites them sexually?

  How do hormones, which are simply chemicals, help to excite a mental state, sexual desire? Why do they not invariably have this effect on everyone?

  Why do some people wish desperately to be fired sexually by a devoted partner but are puzzled that they simply can’t get aroused?

  Why does desire for a given individual often fade over time and how do some hormones and psychoactive drugs boost a flagging desire?

  How can a woman show the objective signs of sexual arousal, measured at the genitals, but report no subjective feeling of desire or sexual arousal?

  How do sexual desire and the pleasure of sex sometimes become uncoupled?

  The answers are not self-evident to the person feeling the sexual desire or wishing that they could feel it.

  How can we understand the desire felt by others? Having no personal experience outside conventional bounds or even with a particular taste that violates these bounds, many people have great difficulty fathoming some of the ‘less regular’ or ‘less acceptable’ forms that other people’s desire can take. For example:

  A devoted spouse who reports a good sex life cannot see why a partner would view pornography or commit adultery.

  Why would a man climb a drainpipe for a brief glimpse of a woman undressing when he could more safely and reliably witness this at a perfectly legal establishment?

  How could an intelligent and well-informed judge or clergyman be so foolish as to be caught downloading illegal pornography?

  Why does his knowledge of the potential for ruin not deter a seemingly devoted father from seeking sex with one of his own children?

  What kind of brain process would lead someone to risk death through strangulation in a search for the ultimate sexual high?

  Why would a pop star or Hollywood actor having available a devoted following of admirers and financial resources be fired by seemingly sordid illicit sex in a car or public lavatory?

  Why, knowing of the risk of AIDS, would someone deliberately seek unsafe sex with an HIV-infected partner?

  The subjective experience of one’s own desire and what triggers it, as well as a normal experience of fear and disgust, might prove very inadequate guides to understanding such behaviour.

  What is meant by ‘sexual desire’?

  It might seem obvious what the expression ‘sexual desire’ means. However, an attempt to state exactly what we mean by it could prove useful. To Stoléru (2006), it involves ‘a mental representation’ of a goal involving sexual pleasure. One might add that the goal is normally another individual and this conscious experience of desire is emotionally charged. When such desire triggers action, it is on the basis of an expectation of sexual pleasure. A person could articulate this in words. Sometimes hedonistic imagery just pops into consciousness as if from nowhere and forms the focus of attention (Kavanagh et al., 2005), erotic imagery exemplifying this. For such imagery to be used as an index of desire, its immediate consequences might be considered. If a conscious effort is made to elaborate on the imagery so as to enrich it, particularly if to plan future engagement with the individual portrayed, this would constitute a feature of sexual desire in the terms used here.

  How, you might wonder, could things be otherwise? In principle, we might be drawn like iron to a magnet or a moth to a flame with no conscious expectation of an outcome and indeed some aspects of sexual behaviour appear to be understandable in such terms. However, the fact that desire as consciously experienced has the qualities of conscious seeking and wanting in its nature is crucial to its fuller understanding.

  Much processing of information occurs at an unconscious level and forms the basis on which the conscious experience of desire is built. For example, a perfume or a part of town might have formed an association with desire in the past and is currently triggering conscious desire. We might have only the outcome of such processing available to consciousness; that is, the erotic imagery, not the nature of the means by which it was produced.

  One might perform sexual behaviour for reasons other than an expectation of sexual pleasure, for example acting out of fear, sympathy, duty, or for the hope of health, social or financial gain. ‘Sexual desire’ will be used here to mean only desire having the intention of gaining personal sexual pleasure. The desire for pleasure might merge with other motives that are the necessary condition for permitting sexual behaviour, such as a search for emotional oneness or commitment. In other cases, a person might engage in sexual behaviour for an ulterior motive with no expectation of sexual pleasure.

  It might sound perfectly normal for a person to say something like ‘I really desire you’ or ‘my desire is intense’ but slightly odd to walk into a café and say ‘I desire a cucumber sandwich.’ But why, since in each case there is a wanted goal of the desire associated with pleasure and action is taken to reach it? It would seem that ‘desire’ implies a very high hedonic and emotional value, more than for the prospect of a cucumber sandwich, and the choice of the word is designed to convey this meaning (Schroeder, 2004). To say on an erotically charged evening ‘I now desire dark chocolate’ might not sound so odd, since desires can intermingle.

  Consideration of what the word ‘desire’ means raises the possibility of fundamental differences in desire between men and women. It is probably no accident that most of the quotes given here, particularly the more explicit, are from males. The following chapters will address this topic.

  Bringing science and the personal together

  Scientific studies offer insights on how sexual desire arises in the brain. For example, new technology permits the activity of the brain to be scanned while a participant is triggered by sexual stimuli, such as an erotic film. This is called ‘brain imaging’ or ‘functional neuroimaging’. Changes in blood flow in the regions of the brain that occur in response to the film can be measured, sometimes revealing abnormalities in ac
tivity corresponding to abnormal desires. Such a scientific study does not provide better evidence than the subjective witness of the individual. It is just different and, at least in principle, entirely complementary evidence. The description given by the participants is still vital in scientific studies; correspondences between what they report and the activity of the brain can be mapped. For example, the person’s subjective desire triggered by a film clip can be ranked on a scale of one to ten and matched against both activity patterns in the brain and the flow of blood to the genitals.

  Activation or its lack in different brain regions can be linked to how the psychological experience of desire arises and how the brain either translates desire into sexual behaviour or inhibits its expression. Equally insightful is when a person reports an absence of sexual desire even in the presence of what would normally be adequate trigger stimuli, such as erotic images, or when a person resists sexual temptation. The brain activity of an individual who reports low or absent desire can be contrasted with controls having normal desire, with the possibility of better therapeutic interventions. Of course, with the body restrained in a neuroimaging apparatus, the scope for sexual action is somewhat limited, except in the imagination! But this restraint in itself can give useful information and the imagination is a powerful aspect of human sexuality.