How Sexual Desire Works
There are countless books on sex and an endless fascination with the subject. Varieties and vagaries of sexual desire have long been documented, but there has been little engagement with cutting-edge scientific research to uncover the biological and psychological bases of sexual desire. Here, Frederick Toates uses the insights of modern science to show how a wide range of desire-related phenomena – fantasy, novelty-seeking, sexual addiction, sex–drug interactions, fetishes, voyeurism, and sexual violence and killing – start to make sense. For example, the role of the brain’s neurochemical dopamine can now be much better understood in terms of wanting, and a distinction between wanting and liking has been established. Also, an understanding of the layered organization of the brain, sometimes described as hierarchical, can be used to explain temptation and conflict. This is a fascinating book with great social relevance to society and its problems with sexuality.
FREDERICK TOATES is Emeritus Professor of Biological Psychology at The Open University and Vice-President of The Open University Psychology Society.
How Sexual Desire Works
The Enigmatic Urge
Frederick ToatesThe Open University United Kingdom
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© Frederick Toates 2014
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First published 2014
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I dedicate this book to my wife, Olga.
Contents
List of figures
Preface
1 What is enigmatic about sexual desire?
2 Explaining desire: multiple perspectives
3 Sexual desire in a broad context
4 An incentive-based model
5 Sex and levels of organization
6 Sexual attraction
7 Shades of desire from simple to complex
8 Details of the brain and desire
9 Arousal
10 The consequences of sexual behaviour and associated expectations
11 Sexual familiarity and novelty
12 Inhibition, conflict and temptation
13 How did sexual desire get here?
14 Setting the trajectory: link to adult sexuality
15 Sexual desire in interaction
16 Representations of sex
17 Sexual addiction
18 Variations in desire: general principles
19 Some forms of desire at the fringes
20 The toxic fusion: violence and sexual desire
21 Sexually associated (serial) murder
22 Concluding remarks
Notes
References
Index
Figures
2.1 Classical conditioning
2.2 Instrumental conditioning. With kind permission from the Open University
2.3 Neurons
2.4 The nervous system. With kind permission from the Open University
2.5 Synapse between neurons
2.6 Some of the glands of the body. With kind permission from the Open University
2.7 The triune brain. From The Triune Brain in Evolution (1990) by P. D. MacLean, published by Plenum Press, with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media B. V.
2.8 The human brain (a) showing the lobes; (b) highlighting the prefrontal cortex
2.9 The human brain showing some of its deep structures. With kind permission from the Open University
2.10 Pathways of neurons that use dopamine. With kind permission from the Open University
2.11 The nucleus accumbens
2.12 The autonomic nervous system. From Outline of Physiology, 2nd edition (1965) by L. L. Langley, with kind permission from McGraw-Hill Education.
Preface
Sexual desire could at times appear to bring pleasure and misery in somewhat equal proportions. It is my firm conviction that a better understanding of it can help to tilt the weight away from misery, the present book being based upon the belief that knowledge is empowering. For example, rightly or wrongly, people sometimes think that their tastes are socially and morally unacceptable and better knowledge could prove valuable in seeing how the taste might have arisen and coming to terms with it. Similarly, couples frequently find that discord arises from divergent tastes or intensities of desire. Insights into how desire works might yield greater tolerance of differences and thereby harmony. To give a full account of the range of desires, Chapters 20–1 describe the nightmare world of sexual violence, for which, of course, there can be no degrees of tolerance. I believe that a greater insight into the causes of sexual violence could help to combat it. However, the reader seeking only insight into harmonious and consensual sex might wish to skip these two chapters.
I have a wide range of different readers in mind, such as neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, counsellors, teachers, social workers, police and probation officers, as well as the general public. I have tried very hard to write it in a style that is accessible to such a spectrum of different readers and I can only hope that I have succeeded. To respect such a spectrum, some information on, for example, details of brain processes is put in footnotes, which can be ignored without losing the story-line.
My attempt has been to give a balanced account using the most relevant sources that I can find. However, without doubt, a massive amount of highly relevant material has been omitted and I can only apologize to the multitude of authors whose work has not been included.
I would like to express my appreciation of the efforts of Barry Singer, who gave me the initial momentum in this area of research, and of Erick Janssen, whose invitation to speak in Amsterdam was the trigger for a revised model of sexual desire and thereby for the appearance of this book. I am very grateful to Kent Berridge and my wife, Olga Coschug-Toates, for reading and critically commenting upon the whole book. My gratitude is also owed to a number of people who scrutinized one or more chapters: Lesel Dawson, Ellen Laan, Karen Littleton, Jaak Panksepp, Julia Robertson, Mark Spiering, Sandie Taylor, Madeline Watson and Lance Workman, as well as the anonymous referees. For IT help and patience, I wish to thank Stanislav Coschug, Becky Efthimiou, Becky Loake and David Robinson. For their support throughout this project, I am very grateful to Chloé Harries, Hetty Marx, Carrie Parkinson, Sarah Payne and Becky Taylor of Cambridge University Press and to the Open University library staf
f and Giles Clark. Anna Oxbury made a superb and tireless job of editing the work and has vastly improved it. I wish to express my appreciation of her skill and patience.
If anyone has any comments on the book, I would be pleased to hear from you and will do my best to answer.
One What is enigmatic about sexual desire?
Consider the time, I hope recently, when you saw a woman or man (fill in your preference) who awoke in you, within a matter of seconds, a distinct state of lust…The object of origin for that awakening presented itself, in all its glory, probably not whole but in parts. Maybe what first arrested your attention was the shape of an ankle, how it connected with the back of a shoe and how it dissolved into a leg, no longer seen but just imagined, under a skirt….Or maybe it was the shape of a neck sticking up from a shirt. Or maybe it was not a part at all but the carriage, moves, energy, and resolve that propelled a whole body forward.
(Damasio, 2003, p. 93)1
It would be informative to discover how Damasio’s readers (and indeed mine too) have reacted to this invitation to reflection. If they are like the population sampled by sex researchers, some would find it hard to recall any such lust-filled moments, whereas others would be inundated with recent memories jockeying for occupation of the conscious mind. Some would doubtless find their desire triggered instantly by such parts of the whole as an ankle or leg, whereas a number might find it fuelled by the shoes worn. Others would only be excited slowly by a whole speaking and socially interacting personality.
The enormous variation in the reactivity of human sexual desire is why I use the term ‘enigma’ and is a feature that must be accommodated by any attempt to explain desire’s foundations. What are the implications of this wide spectrum of responses? Is there a healthy norm, while deviations to either side indicate that something is wrong? Accounts by individuals, both famous and not, on their experience of desire are invaluable in understanding how it works and they will be used widely throughout the following pages.
Personal anecdotes and explanations
Insight from biographies
I respectfully held out my hand to her and she took it with an air of utter indifference, but she pressed it firmly as she climbed into the carriage. The reader will be able to imagine the flame which this sent racing through my blood.
(Casanova, 1798/1958, p. 192)
Leaning toward the table, she revealed nearly everything I desired. Then, slowly straightening up, she handed me the chemise. I was trembling so violently that I was unable to hold it.
(Casanova, 1798/1958, p. 52)
I was a furnace of desire, and it was becoming impossible for me to resist the flame that was consuming me.
(Casanova, 1798/1958, p. 81)
…but how could I go to sleep? I was still heated from the flame which Lucrezia had ignited in me.
(Casanova, 1798/1958, p. 29)
The squeeze on Casanova’s hand was interpreted by him, rightly or wrongly, as a signal of reciprocity and encouragement. It would appear to exemplify a fundamental feature that can be associated with desire and serve to accentuate it: the resolution of uncertainty. In such terms, the ‘flame racing through the blood’ following the squeeze would have been triggered by a combination of an initial desire and the sudden assessment that desire might shortly be fulfilled. Investigators can now identify changes in the activity of the brain that form the basis of desire. Casanova used the metaphor of heat and flames and he documented the attention-grabbing aspect of desire associated with persistence of erotic images in his conscious mind. He witnessed the ability of erotic thoughts to interfere with sleep, a feature shared with fear and anxiety.
Remaining at the extreme end of the range of sexual desires, a century or so after Casanova there is a special place for a Victorian English autobiographer, known as ‘Walter’. Like Casanova, Walter would have found Damasio’s question very easy to answer, and might only have wondered why the suggested reaction time was as long as ‘a matter of seconds’.
I was maddened by desire…at the sight of the fresh, modest, naked girls cleaning themselves so unsuspectingly…
(Walter, 1995, p. 328)
Then a thrill of desire shot through me and staggered me. I trembled as the want overtook me, and drew her closer to me…
(Walter, 1995, p. 400)
Casanova and Walter document the power of the visual image to trigger their desire, a tendency to approach the source of desire, accompanied by a powerful emotional bodily reaction. Subsequent chapters will address the role of bodily changes, such as an accelerated heart rate and knotted stomach, in sexual desire. Are they simply the consequence of the desire or a contributory trigger to its intensity? Are they necessary for the experience of desire and can they act as a measure of its intensity? These bodily reactions seem similar to those associated with fear and anxiety. It will be suggested that this similarity is a key to understanding features of sexual desire.
I sicken with carnal passion, pining for as yet unseen, unknown women…My life is almost unbearable from unsatisfied lust…It is constantly on me, depresses me, and urges me to yield.
(Walter cited by Kronhausen and Kronhausen, 1967, p. 184)
Here Walter reveals the role of the imagination in inventing scenarios to trigger sexual desire, their motivating power and the tension that is created when the goal of the associated craving is not attained. Later chapters will explore the link between sexual fantasy and sexual behaviour.
The mysterious author, only ever known to us as ‘Walter’, endowed the world with a vivid depiction of his series of sexual adventures in Victorian London, a study entitled My Secret Life. The quest for sexual novelty was enough to sustain the intrepid author’s fascination and vigour during a life that seemed to feature precious little else. Whether the vicarious re-living of this life is sufficient to hold the average reader’s attention through Walter’s 11 volumes, consisting of no fewer than 4,000 pages of unremitting graphic detail, is perhaps a moot point. By contrast, Casanova is at least a relatively short read, interspersed liberally with commentary on eighteenth-century European social history. Walter’s writing gives insight into the role of fantasy and novelty in inflaming desire and preventing the onset of psychological fatigue by escalating the intensity of the content:
I wish to refresh my memory by repeating the amorous exercises.…it rather seems as if it were strong animal want which is stimulating my desires and exercising my brain to invent even [more] voluptuous combinations.
(Walter, cited by Marcus, 1966, p. 180)
Influential books and learned chapters have been written about Walter, where his exploits are scrutinized, surely the ultimate accolade for any writer of autobiography. Experts tend to agree that Walter’s is not a work of fiction and that he can be used as evidence for the notions of sexual addiction and ‘excessive appetite’ (Orford, 2001), important topics when trying to understand so-called normal desires. Walter is an extreme case but a valuable one to study, since he illustrates how sexual desire can sometimes work, given ready availability and opportunity. Somewhat lacking subtlety and finesse in his approach, totally unrestrained and undeterred by threats such as sexually-transmitted diseases, it appears that Walter’s desire was fired simply and instantly by the physical characteristics of the women to whom he was attracted. The variation in levels of restraint shown between individuals is another feature of desire that is central to its understanding.
Because of its relative simplicity, his life is like a laboratory for the study of exaggerated and undiluted lust. Born into a well-to-do family, social class meant little or nothing to Walter. Indeed, most of his liaisons appeared to have been greased by the woman’s prospect of financial gain, which in most cases doubtless provided her with a temporary respite from grinding poverty. Although Casanova and Walter represent an extreme end of the spectrum, they are, of course, by no means unique in their instantaneous excitation and quest for novelty. A twentieth-century life illustrates this:
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p; When I met a woman, my desire for her was immediate and crippling – a hammer blow to the heart…In the beginning there was just that longing, and the sense of myself as a starved orphan gazing through a window at a room where a happy family is sitting down to dinner.
(Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 16)
As a measure of its intensity, the American author Peter Trachtenberg relates desire triggered by an attractive other to the associated bodily reaction:
Once more I was intolerably drawn to other women – some I knew and some I just glimpsed across a subway platform on my way to work. I say ‘intolerably’ because what overcame me in their presence left me trembling and labouring for breath and sometimes brought tears to my eyes. God knows what those women thought when they saw a strange man gazing at them with such waif-like yearning.
(Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 262)
The author of autobiographical detail expressed at such intensity is most commonly a male but females are also represented, albeit with not quite such an abundance or shade of desperation, as illustrated by the French writer Catherine Millet and the American writer Susan Cheever:
crossing the huge lobby of an International hotel; the elegant and distinguished assistant who has been travelling across the country with me for two weeks catches hold of my arm when we have just said goodnight to each other, pulls me to him and kisses me on the mouth. ‘In the morning, I’ll come and see you in your room.’ I can feel the spasm rising right up to my stomach.
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