Getting clear on why sex is MIA
Desire and arousal are often used as if they mean the same thing, but they describe different parts of the sexual experience. Desire is wanting: Interest in sex, motivation to seek it out, or openness to being sexual. It’s mostly psychological.
Arousal is the body’s response and the felt sense of being turned on. Physically, it includes increased blood flow to the genitals, swelling of the clitoris and labia, and vaginal lubrication. Subjectively, it’s the mental experience of feeling excited. However, these don’t always line up. Research by Meredith Chivers and others has found that in cis-females, genital response and subjective arousal often don’t match, a pattern called arousal non-concordance. In other words: Lubrication doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel turned on or want sex, and feeling turned on doesn’t guarantee your body will respond physically.
How desire and arousal relate to each other is central to understanding low libido. The traditional model assumed sex follows a fixed order: Desire comes first, then arousal, then orgasm. Rosemary Basson’s circular model, developed in 2000 from her work with cis-females, showed that for many women the order is reversed. Desire often shows up after arousal begins, in response to touch, closeness, or a sexual context. This is called responsive desire, as opposed to spontaneous desire, which seems to appear out of nowhere. Many women who believe they have low libido actually have responsive desire that’s working just as it should. They rarely think about sex unprompted, but once they’re in a pleasurable, low-pressure situation, interest builds. If you’re waiting to “feel like it” before engaging, you may be waiting for something your desire style was never set up to provide.
Problems with either one can weaken the other. When arousal is hard to reach, for example because of pain, dryness, hormonal changes, medications, or a disconnection from body sensations, sex becomes less rewarding. Over time desire drops, because the brain stops expecting sex to feel good. Emily Nagoski’s popular framing of the dual control model (developed by Bancroft and Janssen) is also helpful here. It describes a sexual “accelerator” that responds to things that turn you on, and “brakes” that respond to stress, body image worries, relationship tension, fear of pain, or exhaustion. For most women with low libido, the problem is too much pressure on the brakes rather than too little accelerator. So rather than trying to force more desire, it often works better to reduce what’s hitting the brakes and build conditions where arousal, and then desire, can follow.
