61: "The process of learning what is sex-related and what is a threat works sort of like learning a language. We're all born with the innate capacity to learn any human language, but we don't learn a random language, right....you learn the language you are surrounded by. Similarly, you learn the sexual language you're surrounded by. Just as there are no innate words, there appear to be almost no innate sexual stimuli. What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture"
Pelvic diaphragm "kegel" muscle
Masters & Johnson research in 1964 mapped orgasm into 4 phases
Helen Kaplan 1970s - desire was missing from dominant theory of human sexual response [because the experiment was just about arousal, participants did not have to want it]
Kaplan created the 'triphasic' model of the sexual response cycle
Desire
Arousal
Orgasm
Her model became the foundation for diagnostic criteria and effective treatments
1990's: question of why people have different desire levels?
What controls whether or when someone is interested in sex?
Problem with brakes, not accelerator
30: vulva's glands
Scenes glands are like male prostrate
Sometimes scenes glands produce fluid 'female ejaculate'
Squirting is a byproduct & people vary
71: things that turn on brakes
-reputation
-partner is a loser
-unwanted pregnancy
-desired vs. used
-intitation style
-feeling accepted
73: context is circumstances & brain state. This is what influences sexual responsiveness
82: explanation of the One Ring - 3 parts intertwined, hedonic brain system, all emotional/motivational systems all emotional responses like sex, stress, love, disgust...compete, interact, and influence
"Liking" - like "reward", assesses "hedonic impact" of a stimulus....does it feel good?
Kinsey institute
Description of brain mechanism that consists of sexual response
Control mechanism that governs sexual arousal, controls when you respond to sexy sights, sounds, sensations, ideas
Nervous system - pairing of sympathetic [accelerator] & parasympathetic nervous system [brakes]
SE [sexual excitator] is a constant scanner of context [includes thoughts, feelings], excitation system]
Inhibition system are the brakes
A foot brake and a car brake [the foot brake in car is potential threats imagined or in the senses "fear of performance consequences, the hand brake is like a chronic, low-level "no thank you" and deals with "performance failure"]
Not lack of accelerator but too much brakes traits, all different sensitivities
High SI - not rushed or pressured
Camilla - most reliably orgasmic with vibrator [mechanical vibrator over organic]
Brain requires a bunch of stimulation for Camilla in order to cross threshold
Attractive men interested in me novelty
Less stressed at that moment in time
Sensory pleasures
Turn ons are from culture
Most like Camilla & Merritt
ONLY variable that seems to impact is partner characteristics
Can change what the mechanism responds to [reduce threat]
Can change what accelerator considers sex-related
Brain learned to associate
Feeling expected to have sex
Positions don't matter when stress is high
Reduce brakes before pushing on accelerator
Context = brain states
Cues for sexual desire factors that McCall & Maston found
Love/emotional bonding
Erotic/explicit cues
Visual/proximity
Romantic/implicit cues [intimate touch]
Blend of erotic & romantic cues
Even if love, trust, attraction is there, can't do it if stress
Context are circumstances of present moment and the brain state in present moment
Laurie had to complete the cycle, not change her external circumstances
89: "Another important consequence of understanding context is that it helps us understand why women are so different from each other. For many women, the most sex-positive contexts may not be the culturally sanctioned or readily available ones - such as hookups when you're in college or the same old sex for the 1,287th time when you've been married for ten years. For some women, those are great contexts, but for other women a great, sex-positive context might be an anonymous one-night hookup against a wall of other people's coasts in a stranger's closet at a party. For others it's the warmly affectionate sex of a long-term, committed relationship. For some women, it's a wide range of contexts, and for others, it's a narrow window. As long as a woman is attending to her wellbeing and her partner's, it doesn't matter what the context is, as long as it brings her pleasure"
114: "what's happening here is that freeze has interrupted the GO! Stress response of fight or flight, leaving all that adrenaline-mediated stress to go stale inside the animal's body. When the animal shakes and shudders and sighs, its body is releasing the brakes and completing the activation process triggered by fight/flight, and purging the reside. Completing the cycle. It's called "self-paced termination"
116: stress blocks sexual pleasure - stress if info overload & about survival, stressed sex feels different from joyful sex
Interest [wanting]
Pleasure [liking]
118: difference between chronic and acute stressors
Chronic is lower intensity
Acute has a clear start, middle, end
120: "Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you're being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run. So when you're stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do? You run...or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state"
122: ways to deal with stress - grooming, massage, hugs, kisses, progressive muscle relaxation
129: how to - mindfulness
2 minutes: attention to breath
Notice mind wandered [return to thoughts when 2 minutes are up] & allow attention to go back
129: "Noticing that your mind wandered and then returning your attention to your breath is the real work of mindfulness. It's not so much about paying attention to your breath as it is about noticing what you're paying attention to without judgment, and making a choice about whether you want to pay attention to it. What you're "mindful" of is both your breath and your attention to your breath"
132: markers that characterize attachment process
Feels good to be around them [liking]
Desiring to be close [wanting]
Attachment object is refuge sex as an attachment behavior
134: why women attach to commitment phobes?
Soothing stress object
Secure base because of separation anxiety/distress
Dopamine and oxytocin influences wanting system
Stress + attachment
Sue Johnson calls it "solace sex"
"I am lost" doesn't ignite desire with new relationship. It doesn't feel good. Solution? Sex that advances the plot!
Romance novels have the narrative of stressed attachment
Sex you crave often isn't sex that feels good
Liking & wanting are not the same!
"Solace sex" eases fear
No loss if you are missing this relief & intense craving for sex!
Easier to crave sex in an unstable relationship
The solution is to be "just safe enough"
136: "The first good new is that sex you crave often isn't sex that feels good - remember, liking and wanting are not the same thing. This is "solace sex," which is "soothing but unerotic, " in contrast to "sealed-off sex," which is "erotic but empty." Solace sex can feel like a relief, because you're easing fear. But let's not mistake relief for pleasure"
136: "The bad news is that, yes, most of us will find it easier to crave sex, for what that's worth, when our relationships are unstable - either new or threatened, whether in reality or imagination. But the second good news is that there's a bunch of spectacular research on people who have great sex over multiple decades. The key is to be "just safe enough"
141: sleepy hedgehog metaphor - for communication. The hedgehog, discovered in different places, is difficult feelings.
143: "Where stress and attachment overlap, the message of your emotional One Ring is, "I am lost!" And when you escape the lion and run to your attachment object, the message is, "I am home." If you've ever found yourself checking your email obsessively when you're stressed, or scrolling endlessly through social media, or texting your partner just to say, "Hey," or calling all your friends one after the next....you have experienced the tend and befriend stress response. Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as "completing the cycle"
144: "But in modern culture, there's a contradiction built in to the social remedies to stress. On the one hand, being around other people is often a core part of allowing our stress response to complete. On the other hand, we put the brakes on, self-inhibiting our stress response, in order to stay socially appropriate and not make other people uncomfortable. We hold on to our incomplete stress response in order to access the security of being with our tribe"
146: "The key to managing stress so that it doesn't interfere with sexual pleasure is learning to complete the cycle - unlock freeze, escape the predator, conquer the enemy. Celebrate, like glitter settling in a snow globe"
149: "Sex that brings you closer to your partner "advances the plot," as opposed to gratuitous sex, for no reason other than that you can. To have more and better sex, give yourself a compelling reason to have sex, something important to move toward"
162: "When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress...when we think, "I am an inadequate person!" That's like saying, "I am the lion!" Literally, our stress hormone levels increase. Your body reacts to negative self-evaluations as if you're under attack. The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness"
168: "Fortunately, research has provided me with a science knife designed to slice through that particular knot: Moral Foundations Theory. Jonathan Haidt and his team have found that there are six "moral foundations" in the human brain, each of which is solution to a particular evolutionary problem our species has faced....in the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draw attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response"
176: "Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others. Self-compassion, by contrast is unconditional and non-evaluative. We can have self-compassion when we're doing well and when we're struggling"
176: def of self-indulgence= = numbing emotional pain rather than allow it to complete cycle [a form of freeze, sedating instead of escaping or conquering lion]
181: "By limiting your exposure to media that makes you feel worse about yourself, you're not just improving your own sex life, you're also voting with your eyeballs, your ears, and your cash. You're joining an audience that will pay attention only to things that make women feel better about themselves. Wouldn't it be amazing to live in a world where performers and artists and media outlets were competing to make the largest number of women feel fantastic about their bodies right now?"
194: "What we're seeing in non concordance is the difference between learning and liking, from chapter 3. Genital response is the automatic, trained response to something that's sex-related. Pavlov's dogs salivated when a bell rang, not because they wanted to eat the bell but because their learning system had linked the bell with food. Similarly, your emotional One Ring has learned what's sex-related (remember the rats in jackets?), and you're learning system activates physiological response to whatever it has learned is sex-related"
21: the clit anatomy -
"Like the penis, the clitoris is composed of three chambers: a pair of legs [crura], which are homologous to the corpora cavernosa, and the bulbs of the vestibule, homologous to the corpus spongiosum, including its bulb of the penis. The vestibule is the mouth of the vagina; the bulbs extend from the head of the clitoris, deep inside the tissue of the vulva, then split to straddle the urethra and the vagina"
Crura
Bulbs
Vestibule
209: what is correlation? = Two things happen together & one thing caused other thing
214: what to pay attention to - respirate rate & pulse increases, holding breath, muscle tension, words
220: "But some people find that they begin to want sex only after sexy things are already happening. Rather than eagerly anticipating sex, they might have a pragmatic motivation for showing up at 7 pm on Saturday night, because date night is on their calendar. They put their bodies in the bed, let their skin touch their partner's skin...and their body wake up and says, "Oh, right! I like this person! I enjoy this! That's responsive desire. Where spontaneous desire appears in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure"
221: everyone's desire is responsive!!! [just feels spontaneous made of same parts, different organized parts results in different experiences]
223: "What all this means is that if you want to expand your access to spontaneous desire, all you have to do is look for the contexts that facilitate it. Go back to the worksheets in chapter 3 and consider what partner characteristics, relationship characteristics, setting, ludic factors, and other life circumstances create pleasure that leads to urgent longing. Then see which of those you can alter in your life to create spontaneous desire"
241: "These participants' experiences show us that great sex is not about what you do with your partner, nor about which body parts go where or how often, or for how long, but about how you share sensation in the context of profound trust and connection....turns out desire is not a big part of extraordinary sex. It was not mentioned by the majority of participants, and was only rarely emphasized as a necessary aspect of great sex. "Lust, desire, chemistry, attraction" was, at most, a minor component of optimal sex. Even among people who have extraordinary sex, responsive desire is normal"
242: "But magnificent sex goes further and deeper. As Kleinplatz and Ménard put it, "Magnificent sex requires growing beyond the conventional scripts most people learn in their youth. Disappointing sex lives can change. The goal here is not merely to discard sex guilt, shame, and inhibition. Rather it is to jettison the entire aspirational package of paint-by-numbers sex. People who have magnificent sex odon't just show up and put their bodies in the bed - e.g., good sex. They deliberately cultivate a context that's "just safe enough" to dare the leaps of faith they take into the wild places in their souls. That's magnificent sex. And out-of-the-blue desire has almost nothing to do with it. When people who have magnificent sex want sex, they don't just want the sex we see performed in the mainstream media or porn. They want to know themselves and their partners more fully, and they want to be seen and known more fully, felt more deeply, held more closely. This is what I call "magnificent desire"
244: tell your partner the contexts that activate accelerators and the contexts which hits brakes
246: why sexual desire goes away because context changed, not because someone is broken, desire isn't what matters, pleasure is
252: what to do about spectatoring? Solution to performance anxiety: notice what you are paying attention to, shift it to something you want to focus on [this will help in re-directing attention to bodily sensations]
254: pleasure is a perception of a sensation & perception is context-dependent
254: how orgasm feels depends on context. Orgasm is the sudden release of sexual tension.
256: "An orgasm's value comes not form how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it"
263: the job of the monitor
Is world matching my expectations [informed from previous experience]
Investigates if there is a gap between world & the expectations [is ambiguity resolved, novelty explored, appealed stimulus obtained?]
PURPOSE OF MONITOR: to reduce gap!
3 things:
Goal of closing gap [approach incentive, completing task....?]
Effort investing
Progress
The monitor tallies effort-to-progress ratio
Has an opinion about ratio. This is called "criterion velocity"
Good progress = matching/exceeding criterion velocity
Not making enough progress? The monitor wants you to increase efforts
Culture teaches us to have velocities as small as possible!
265: questions to ask
268: what is integration? Internal states interact and influence each other. There's subtractive & additive intergration.
272: pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems. It's a process, not a state, an interaction, not a specific area in the body & brain
272: patience, a sex-positive context, and practice is how great sex happens. Building patience involves training your monitor to make sure you get right goal, right kind/quality of effort, right criterion velocity
274: how to practice? 20-60 minutes completing the cycle & turning off the offs, self-kindness
275: what Merritt did - she didn't compare her experience with her expectations & allowed experience. Enjoyed the sex she was having instead of worry if she was having the kind of sex she 'should' be having.
283: questions to ask the monitor
285: difference between a map and a terrain
Map = abstract representation of something in reality 'sexual scripts'
Terrain = the real thing in the world
Maps are the problem
Sexual maps are out of date
Brains try to make it true
Map - expectation
Terrain - actual experience
Orgasm happens in your brain, not genitals