In a lot of discussions about sex, the term ‘sex drive’ comes up. Similar to terms like ‘hunger drive’ and ‘self-preservation drive’, the term implies that sex is something all humans feel drawn to and that it sits alongside hunger, thirst, warmth and sleep as basic physiological needs. But sex – on a technical level – isn’t a drive at all, and on top of that, I think unlearning the idea of sex as a biologically driven need is helpful in understanding the different ways people do (or don’t!) feel sexual desire.
That’s not to say that sex isn’t pleasurable and that a lot of people feel drawn to pleasure – it absolutely is and a lot of people are! But this motivational system isn’t quite the same as a drive. For starters, unlike drives such as hunger, an unfulfilled desire for sex doesn’t lead to death, and fulfilling a desire for sex can be postponed without impacting somebody’s survival.
Uncoupling sexual desire from the idea of a ‘drive’ is important for two big reasons. First, it ends any implication that there is such a thing as a right to sex – a desire for sex that feels urgent does not mean that somebody has a right to sex with another person, while a person feeling hungry does have a right to adequate food. Second, understanding sex as a drive implies that sexual desire is usually or always spontaneous, when in reality a lot of people experience desire in response to arousal.
Spontaneous and responsive desire
So if desire doesn’t function as a drive, how do humans feel it? People who feel sexual desire feel it in one of two ways: spontaneously or responsively. (Some people argue that all desire is actually responsive, but that some desires are more mainstream than others and some people may not even recognize the stimuli that they respond to as stimuli, and so experience some of their desires as if they are spontaneous.) Spontaneous desire is the kind of sexual desire that has most cultural emphasis placed on it, to the point where some people may think it’s the only or ‘normal’ way to feel desire. Spontaneous desire doesn’t exist in response to any kind of stimuli (e.g. being touched in particular ways, or being in a specific kind of environment), and can feel close to a biological drive (which is part of why there’s a lot of confusion around ‘sex drive’). The other kind of desire – responsive – exists, as the name suggests, in response to external pleasurable stimuli, like kissing or touching or even something like wearing particular materials. People often experience both kinds of desire, although they may lean more heavily towards one or the other, and their primary way of experiencing desire may change over time.
Brakes and accelerators
Once we’ve laid the groundwork of sexual desire being a motivational system rather than a drive, and that it is sometimes spontaneous and sometimes responsive, we can talk about alternative models of sexual desire beyond the idea of a single ‘drive’. The dual control model of desire was developed by Erick Janssen and John Bancroft of the Kinsey Institute in the 1990s, although I was introduced to it through Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are. Instead of seeing sexual desire as a single system that ramps up, it sees sexual desire as the result of two systems: the Sexual Excitement System and the Sexual Inhibition System.
The Sexual Excitement System is the accelerator of this metaphor – when it identifies something related to sex (through the senses or in the imagination), it sends signals to the genitals to induce arousal. The Sexual Inhibition System acts as the brakes – if it notices threats in the environment, it sends signals to the genitals to turn off. This isn’t necessarily a complete shut down, and in the presence of low-level brake factors, somebody might choose to continue to have sex, but enjoy it less, feel less present in their body, and experience less pleasure.
Specific accelerators vary from person to person, as do brakes. Some examples of what accelerators could look like include particular smells, particular sounds, wearing specific items of clothing or being in a specific environment. Examples of brakes could include knowing an environment is inappropriate for sex (e.g. a work environment), tiredness, worries about STIs or pregnancy, concerns about looking or feeling a particular way, other obligations we have in our lives, or feeling that we aren’t living up to societal or social expectations.
Creating space for sexual desire, then, isn’t just a case of finding what turns you on (i.e. works as an accelerator), but also finding out what turns you off (i.e. works as a brake). It’s also worth knowing that everyone has different levels of sensitivity when it comes to both functions, and that somebody can have a combination of a sensitive or non-sensitive accelerator with sensitive or non-sensitive brakes, with many shades in between, and that these levels of sensitivity (as well as what functions as a brake or accelerator) aren’t static, and can shift and change many times over during a lifetime.
© 2022 Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.
Reprinted from Trans Sex: A Guide for Adults by Kelvin Sparks. Available on Amazon and Bookshop.