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This is Sex Ed Debunked, a cross-generational podcast hosted by mother-daughter duo Christine and Shannon Curley, where we talk about all the things you learned
or didn't learn
in sex ed
and where it all went wrong.
From the abstinence curriculum to the monogamy myth and the vast
spectrum of rainbow
representation, we'll get real about sex positivity and catch you up on everything from proper anatomy to the
holistic benefits of a great sex life. Tune in to Sex Ed Debunked wherever you get your podcasts and follow us at Sex Ed Debunked on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter Hi, and welcome to another episode of Sex Ed Debunked, a podcast about sex ed for life, sex positivity, and the cross-generational sex appeal of Enrique Iglesias.
What a man, right?
We love him.
Anyway, we're your hosts, Christine and Shannon Curley. We digress. Good morning. Thanks for tuning in. Today we'll be talking about the myth that either you're turned on or you're not, or as I like to say, the myth of spontaneous desire. Yeah, but the myth of spontaneous desire
sounds like a romantic novel with Fabio on the cover. Exactly. Is that exactly? That's why it's a myth. Right, because all of Fabio's novels are myths. As a reminder, last episode we talked about asking for what you want, and we debunked the myth that asking for what you want isn't sexy. It's actually really sexy to ask for what you want, and much sexier than having to play a guessing game. So true.
Well, today's myth is based on two fundamental misconceptions about sex. The first one, that being sexually aroused or feeling sexual desire is supposed to be automatic or spontaneous. The second part of that myth is that if you do not experience spontaneous arousal or desire, you're somehow broken or need fixing. So this is sort of combating
the myth that I think is really hyper present in media, especially where it's like it's that rip off your clothes sex that that is somehow indicative of real desire. Like if you're not immediately jumping each other's bones as soon as you see each other, then like let's just call the whole thing off.
Exactly, exactly. And it truly is a myth because it's based on this whole misperception that we're always ready for sex. We're always ready. And if someone's hot and attractive, we're supposed to be ready. And if we're not, there's something wrong with us. So I want to talk. for a minute. We're going to go back into academia to talk a little bit about these models. So the first part of the myth is that we're supposed to have spontaneous desire.
And part of that started back in the day, some of you may be familiar with Masters and Johnson. There was a show, I think it was Netflix or Showtime, called Masters of Sex. And what Masters and Johnson did, and this was actually a man and a woman team, which is very unusual for the time, they brought a number of of participants into the lab, and they actually measured and tracked their sexual arousal.
Part of the flaw, obviously, is people who go to a sexual arousal study are people who tend to have spontaneous arousal anyway. But what they figured out was that they wanted to explain the sexual response for both men and women. So first flaw, Shannon? That it's only looking at cis men and women? Uh-huh. And also assuming that all of us are the same in our desire.
Yeah.
Yeah. So wait, I want to pause real quick because what you just said threw up a flag for me. So saying that by participating, they're already predisposed to spontaneous desire. Is that Well,
what happens oftentimes in studies about sexuality is that when they do an open recruitment, like in a class back then, it was in the 60s and 70s, they do a classified ad. And then what you get is people who are interested in sex. So you're getting a population that's already predisposed to be very sex positive and sexually open. But I have to push back because
our myth is that spontaneous desire. So can't you be interested in sex and be sex positive without experiencing spontaneous desire?
Yes, but the foundation for this belief that we're supposed to have spontaneous desire started with the Masters and Johnson research. And that's where there's the flaw because when they're researching, they were assuming that what they found in their study was going to be generalized to everyone. even though their study participants were kind of very sexual people to begin with. Okay, so tell me more about this study because I think it'll make more sense when you talk about the actual results.
Yeah, so what they did is they brought people in the lab and they measured their body's responses to sexual stimuli. And what they came up with was they came up with four phases. And what they assumed that was really a flaw is that Our arousal always comes in a straight line. And I don't know anything that we do in life that's completely linear without taking sidetracks here or backtracking or going in circles. But the model that they developed is a four-phase model.
And what they assumed was first phase is excitation. So you're going to get sexual stimuli and you're going to be excited. Second phase is what they call plateau. So when you're at that level of excitement, it's kind of that buzz energy feeling. Third phase, orgasm. Fourth phase, resolution. Resolution. This
is like the story narrative model of like rising action.
Exactly. Climax. And this is part of the issue, right? We're one, assuming that we all experience our sexual arousal and our sexual response the same way. And also, it's very... male-oriented because of this resolution phase, because obviously women often experience multiple orgasms. We don't need a resolution. But we also, at the front end, don't experience excitement and desire in the same way.
Nevertheless, Masters and Johnson did a really good thing because they at least acknowledged that there is a pattern of response that's out there. Their flaw was that they assumed it was the only pattern.
Right.
So the real flaw in terms of this myth of you always have to be turned on and you often have to have spontaneous desire is there's other things in life that get in the way, right, Shannon? Right. Yeah, no, I mean,
that makes sense. There's all these other, you know, factors of stress, of, you know, mental and physical drain, of being overwhelmed, of being tired. It's not easy to just be on. Even when we think about having an off day. People have off days or they're just in an off mood or whatever. And I think sex is such a highly personal act and it does require a lot of energy. It requires emotional energy. It requires mental energy. It requires physical energy, obviously.
So to expect that someone could be on all the time in that capacity isn't realistic with the reality of life.
And so what kind of happened after Masters and Johnson is that there became this feeling that if you didn't have and experience desire and arousal in that way, there was something not quite right with you, which led to all of this medicalization around sex and low arousal, low desire, all of those things. So In the early 1990s at the Kinsey Institute, two researchers at the Kinsey Institute came up with a different model.
And that's a really important part of what I want to talk about today is this different model called the dual control model. It started at the Kinsey Institute. It's kind of been made a bit more popular by Emily Nagoski, who has a TED Talk, and we'll link to that after this episode. But what they recognized is that our brains do not work in one mode. There's two modes. One is excitation. The other is inhibition. And those are working at the same time in our brains.
So to give you kind of a visual image, We have accelerators. If you think of a car, right, you have an accelerators. You have things that turn you on around the world. Smells, sounds, hot body nearby. Those things are your accelerators and they exist and they work. But you also have, each one of us have brakes. And the brakes could be stress. It could be a deadline. It could be You know, waking up just not feeling quite right. Could be kids. Could be a million things. It could be context.
And those brakes and those accelerators are working at the same time. And that interplay, so if you think about a car, no matter how much you put on the accelerator, if that emergency brake is still on, is that car going to go? Nope. Nope. Not at all. And that's how our sexual response works. If the brakes are on, the car won't go. And we...
allow that for so many other things that are not sexual right like you cannot be in the mood for other things or you know like for me it's like sometimes I don't want to go to my soccer game at nine o'clock at night because I'm tired and I had a long day and I know that I'm not going to have the energy to do it and that's acceptable but for some reason there's oh I think because this is such a you know hyper personal and intimate topic but with sex it seems to be that it's more of a quote
unquote problem that you think there's something wrong with yourself. You don't think there's anything wrong with yourself when you're tired and don't want to go to soccer or when you order takeout instead of cooking dinner because you had a long day. But there's something about it that because it's a vulnerable and intimate and personal experience, I think people have the tendency to say, well, there's something wrong with me if I can't just get excited, if I can't just be turned on.
I love my partner or I know this thing usually works for me. I know that, you know, watching porn I know that doing whatever usually gets me going but it's not is there something wrong with me and the answer is no because just like with anything else in your life you can have that sort of cognitive dissonance between I'd like to be into this right now but I'm just not because there's a hundred other things that I'm thinking
about and Shannon you hit the nail on the head is that we have to be kind to ourselves around sexual desire as well as all the other things we're learning to be kind and compassionate with ourselves about. And much like any other learning about ourselves, learning about our sexuality and learning what our breaks are makes us feel more compassionate to ourselves and also to our partner. So if you have a partner telling them what your breaks are.
So maybe the stress is, I might be getting a little personal here, but coming home to a cluttered house, even though I'm away for four days, you know, going to school at UConn, and I should have spontaneous desire the minute I walk in the door to want to hug and kiss and touch and be close with my husband. If I walk in the door and there's dishes in the sink and there's a hockey bag on the floor, that spontaneous desire This is personal. because we've been away for four days.
No, that's my break. It's legitimate. Take it away and then my accelerator can
work. So what's the opposite of spontaneous desire or is there a more realistic version of desire?
Well, the realistic version of desire is called responsive desire. And responsive desire gets a bad rap. In fact, really only 15% or so of us have spontaneous desire. Responsive desire is what happens when we ease that break slowly and we ease it and maybe maybe we've had a stressed out day so you start with easing the break by let's just hold hands this is kind of like shifting it is you gotta slowly release the break while you push down the clutch
and
then you can shift gears and you're shifting gears from letting go of the brakes and letting the accelerator do its thing letting the turn-ons that are in your life be able to take more prominence and understanding that this is good responsive desire is good response Yeah. It's feeling good.
Well, that's funny because in a slight way, it feels like accelerator is almost a misnomer because it doesn't have to be quickly. It's a slow acceleration. Sometimes it's building up to the point where you're able to feel that you know release and feel like okay deep breath you know big sigh of relief now I can open myself up to this because all of these other breaks are out of the way or all these other blockages are out of the way
and the other sigh of relief is knowing that it's okay to be responsive and to slowly heat up and to slowly get in the mood to to Throw away that myth that if you're not hot and heavy in an instant, there's something wrong and there's something wrong. Oh my gosh, maybe we're not attracted to each other anymore. Maybe there's something wrong with me. That slow burn. That slow burn is a beautiful thing.
Right. Because it can, you know, as much as we talk about reversible consent and saying you're into something and then saying, never mind, I'm not into it and that being totally acceptable. The other can also happen where you're like, I'm not really in the mood, but you snuggle and you cuddle and your walls come down a little bit. And you're like, actually, yeah, I am in the mood now because we took the time and I was able to release the break.
Right.
And, you know, this is true across sexual orientations, across genders. And I think I think in some ways the myth of spontaneous desire is even harder for men in the society because they're always supposed to be turned on. Right. Right. And so we're talking to the men out there, too, that it's OK for you to say, let's take it slow. I had a rough day. You know, the boss was a jerk or I had a deadline that was really stressful. It's OK for all of us to say I'm tired
or I'm stressed or anything at all. And that's for any gender. That's not just for men and women. That's for every person is entitled to have breaks. Exactly.
I only refer to men because the culture tells men that they're supposed to be ready on. Yeah.
So that's that kind of leads to the second part of this myth, though, which is that physical sexual responses indicate readiness or willingness or desire necessarily because on the one hand we don't want people to think that just because you don't you know you don't appear as turned on whether that's an erection or whether that's getting wet or whatever it is that you're not interested in sex but also on the other hand there can be physical arousal without actually wanting to have sex
Yeah. Yeah. There's some fascinating, fascinating research on that, actually. It's called in the literature arousal non-concordance. So that's when
your genital behavior doesn't necessarily predict your subjective experience of actually liking or wanting or desiring. Exactly.
And so what they did is they actually took people in the lab and they measured their – what they do is they measure the blood flow to the genitalia and they also do brain scans at the same time and they show participants – sexual stimuli, erotic images intended to bring on arousal and desire.
And what they have found in this research, when they're looking at the brain at the same time they are looking at what's happening in the genitals, is oftentimes they don't match, which means in simple terms, your body might be If you have a penis owner, you might be hard. If you're a woman, you might have all the owner, all of that blood flow, but your brain is not firing. And just the opposite.
Oftentimes, and this is the part that's huge and it's important for all of us to understand, your brain might be firing arousal, excitement, desire, but your body might not be firing yet. And
that's okay. Yeah. So we mentioned Emily Nagoski earlier, and Emily Nagoski is a sex educator who has done a series of TED Talks about sexual relationships and sexual arousal. And one of the topics she talks about is this arousal non-concordance. And there's a really funny example she gives when she's talking about someone that she was explaining this arousal non-concordance to.
And they basically said, oh, gosh, this makes so much sense because I still remember this time when I was in eighth grade and someone said the word donut hole and I got an erection. And I You know, middle schooler, how embarrassing, right? But the point that this person was making was like, well, obviously, I wasn't sexually attracted to a donut hole, but, you know, I had an erection and people were like, what the hell is wrong with this guy?
So, but the point, you know, again, like this is what we're talking about is that there isn't, it doesn't necessarily translate, you know, your physical expression of attraction doesn't necessarily correlate to your actual desire and vice versa. You could have all the desire and the wanting and the liking in the world, but still not. get an erection or still not get wet or whatever.
And so that's what we're saying here is that this myth is that, you know, physical sexual response doesn't necessarily indicate one way or the other.
Exactly. And the thing too, you know, sadly, it has happened in the area of like sexual assault, that if a woman is wet or has an orgasm, even though she's been sexually assaulted, it somehow means that she wanted it and shows that she actually did give consent.
Well, and it happens with men too. I mean, there's a lot of stories with, you know, with men or with people who have a penis of, well, they got hard. So, you know, and they got hard because you touched them. They didn't get hard because they wanted it.
Right. And there's a physical reaction doesn't match the mental or emotional reaction, particularly, though, in issues of women and sexual assault. There's a lot of evolutionary thoughts that women get wet and have orgasm to protect themselves, to protect from being much more physically harmed by, you know, lack of a better word for penetrations. for violent penetration.
So all that aside, one of the things that we really want to stress is that even though you've been taught and we've been taught in our culture that some type of physical arousal and it is a lot for people with penises that you have to be ready and you have to be going and you have to be on. Clearly, it's a myth, both scientifically, emotionally. There's research that shows that you shouldn't stress out about that anymore.
So let's just put that part, and I know we say put to bed at the end of the episode, but I want to put it to bed right now. Don't look at your partner's physical reaction. If your partner tells you they want you, they desire you, and they're attracted to you, please believe them. Well,
and Emily Nagosti again has this great quote that is worth repeating where she says, my genitals do not tell you what I want or like I do. We are communicative sexual beings who deserve to express what we want when we want it and what we don't want when we don't. And our bodies can help us get there. But ultimately, sex positive agency means communicating desire and needs for yourself and with your partners.
So, you know, use your words, use your words, use your words and listen to the words of your partner and trust them because it's not it's not fair. To think that just for that physical response only is the only indicator of sexual desire and sexual want. And if your partner says, yes, I want you, then
they want you. Well, and, you know, that's the other side of what the culture does to especially to women. Like if you're if your partner, your man partner in this case, because a lot of the research, once again, and a lot of the culture does have to do with heterosexual relationships. If the guy you're with isn't hard, you're like, oh, my God, there's something wrong with me. I'm not desirable. I'm not attractive. I don't know.
Is there a corollary in same-sex relationships that you know of, Jen?
I mean, in my personal experience, I think – I don't want to say that women are more perceptive or more intuitive, but that's sort of what my experience has been is it's more like I can tell when you're not into it because I think – In my, you know, relationships with other women, it's been very much like we are so communicative that if it's not if you don't want it, it's clear because it's like we're not talking or you seem distant or you seem, you know, like you're disengaged.
So that's been my experience. I can't obviously speak for all queer relationships by any stretch of the imagination. But my experience has been that I think because and we kind of talked about this on a previous episode that women or at least queer women or lesbian relationships tend to say tend to be more. emotionally connected and sometimes need that physical connection. For me, I've never had the experience of like, oh, you're not physically interested.
It's more been like before we even get to that part on like emotionally, I feel like you're not here. So I think with me, with my experience, it's been that the emotional breaks are a lot more clear than the physical breaks are.
That's really, that's smart. And I think that's smart for mixed sex relationships and heterosexual relationships to hear that message because we're I think there is a cultural expectation around spontaneous desire is physical desire. And without that, you don't have desire. So I think that we're going to go back to what you said before. Use your words. Listen to the words of others because someone tells you that they want you. They do. And you know what?
If someone takes a while to tell you that. That's OK. Yeah. Take your time. Take your time, baby.
So I want to reiterate to like, you know, we try to tie together the themes from all these different episodes that we've done because it's all part of the sexual experience. So, you know, debunking this myth of spontaneous desire, debunking this myth of always being turned on or needing to be turned on, you know, like a Like that, snap. This ties back to sex positivity. This ties back to affirmative consent. This ties back to asking for what you want.
And all of these things lead to a healthier and more fulfilling relationship with sex, with your body, with your partner, with your partners. So there you have it. Another myth. Put to bed. Go to sleep myth. We're done with you. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Sex Ed Debunked. As always, if you have questions, comments, feedback, or another myth you'd like to hear us debunk, reach out to us across social media at sexeddebunked or shoot us an email at sexeddebunked at gmail.com.
Have a great day. Thanks,
y'all.
Thanks for tuning in for this week's episode of Sex Ed Debunked. During the course of our podcast, we have limited time together, which means that unfortunately, many identities, groups, and movements may not be represented each week. The field of sexuality and gender orientations, identities, and behaviors are changing and growing rapidly, and we remain committed to being as inclusive as possible.
Sex Ed Debunked is produced by Trailblaze Media along with myself, Shannon Curley, and Christine Curley. From Trailblaze Media, our engineering is handled by Ezra Winters.
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