Tabby’s Deep Dives
Desire and Arousal from a Woman’s Point of View
Many people believe that sexual desire is spontaneous and that it hits from the blue, like a bolt of lightning from the gods, but that isn’t true, and differences in the way this subtle mechanism works between men and women have sown the seeds of destruction of a million relationships.
The traditional model of sex goes like this: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
In the trad model, if I have enough positive emotions and thoughts about you I experience desire, as a result of which I become aroused, and once I am aroused enough, then assuming that the circumstances are right, the green light goes on and we do it. I have an orgasm and then we cuddle up and go to sleep.
Unfortunately, in women who have been in relationships for longer, and who are a little older, the cycle doesn’t work like that. The reason why sex is such art is that it isn’t always as easy to connect up that green light as following the traditional model of sex suggests, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The key lies in understanding sex as a natural process, something like breathing, and in the same way that you cannot make me breathe, you cannot make me feel desire—but you can do things that will help me do so.
A complicated equation
Desire in women is a complicated little beast, and one that few people understand really well. The biggest challenge here is that there is a fundamental difference between the sexes — men experience more intense and frequent desire, fantasize more often about sex, masturbate more often, and suffer much less frequently from low levels of desire than women do. Most of this is down to differences between the way the sexes are wired up.
In men, physical arousal and desire are strongly linked, and feedback strongly on each other, with obvious and gratifying results, and in men ejaculation and orgasm are closely linked, although they are controlled by completely different mechanisms.
In women, physical arousal is weakly linked with desire, and orgasm isn’t linked with ejaculation at all (we don’t ejaculate, see the Mazloomdoost paper ref at the end for an excellent and balanced review), the smooth muscle contractions involved in this spinal response instead being rolled into the feelings we enjoy when we come.
Not only are women are mentally and anatomically different to men in the way arousal works for us, we are subjected to all kinds of modulating factors. Society still has mixed feelings about the idea of us feeling too much desire, just in case it makes us stray from relationships.
Sexual scripts are so pervasive in this area that they act as brakes on many women’s ability to feel desire — so much so that a skeptic might say that our sex has been encouraged to suppress its sexuality in order to make us manageable for the purpose of monogamy. Suffice it to say that being aware of potentially interfering scripts is a core part of understanding women’s ability to feel desire. If you are new to this idea, follow the link at the head of this paragraph — it will help a lot.
The desire/arousal split
The primary reason why arousal is complicated in women is our weak link between desire and physical arousal (put simply, how wet we get) than men. If a man has a hard-on, 99% of the time he is experiencing desire too, but a woman can become physically aroused without feeling desire.
Since many women find it hard to distinguish desire from arousal, this split can present a lot of challenges. Women talk about desire in terms of emotion and thought, but 75% of us include the feelings in our puss, our breasts, and elsewhere in our bodies in our descriptions. These are physical arousal sensations.
The reason why so many women have telling desire from arousal is simple — we have two different types of desire
Innate desire is something that comes from within me before we so much as touch (I get horny for you), while responsive desire is something I may begin to feel at some point after foreplay begins. Responsive desire is different to innate desire because it is triggered by physical arousal. To put it another way, women can operate two sexual models:
Traditional model: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
Responsive model: arousal, desire, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
In other words, once I am physically aroused, I may begin to experience desire for you, but that will depend on context, and on the duration and quality of our relationship. The reason why most women confuse arousal with desire is that by the time we have been in a relationship for many years up to half of us are rarely feeling desire. But I would stress that we are having perfectly good sex.
Two entry points to desire
The desire mechanism in women works more or less the same way that it does in men, except that it has two entry points. The first is innate desire, and that progression is easy enough to follow — I have erotic thoughts, get horny and get wet. This is the traditional model, and it is also how sex works for men 99% of the time.
Innate model: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
A tip for guys who want to kick start our innate desire: if you make us feel desired, then a lot of us will be aroused by that feeling. So if you are attentive and make much of us, we become more aroused, and it also increases our physical pleasure when we are having sex with you.
The second entry point is via responsive desire, which is a response to physical arousal — you lick my clit, I get physically aroused and therefore wet, and then I may or may not feel desire, depending on the length and quality of our relationship.
Responsive model: arousal, desire, plateau, (orgasm), and resolution.
Where women and men differ is that after we have been in a relationship for more than about a couple of years, we are much less likely to experience desire out of the blue. We are just as easy to physically arouse as we were when the relationship began, but we take a bit of warming up before we are likely to get the hots for you. The younger a woman is, the less likely she will have been to get to this stage, and the process resets with every new relationship, but any woman in a long-term relationship will be familiar with it.
But in women, responsive arousal can have a missing step — if you lick my clit, I will become physically aroused, but I may not subsequently experience responsive desire. I can’t overemphasize this enough, because a lot of lovers assume that once they have made a woman wet, she is experiencing desire, when in it may not be the case at all. The reason women confuse arousal with desire is that we have a powerful script that tells us that we should feel desire when we are aroused. Here the sexual model is dominated by physical stimulation and it works for us like this:
Physical model: arousal, plateau, (orgasm), and resolution.
The arousal cycle
The next important point to understand is that the higher the level of my arousal, the more receptive I will be to erotic stimuli that previously wouldn’t have worked as well, or even at all.
In other words, the more aroused I am, the more erogenous zones I am likely to develop and the more sensitive they will be.
I have never seen anything written about this before, and only a single research paper even touches on it, but I have spent many years working it out and it fits with the physiology.
Effectively, there are a series of gates limiting a woman’s arousal level, and if you don’t appreciate that the gates exist, you will stop when she reaches the first one. Most couples never reach the second gate, because they don’t know it is there. Once you get hold of the concept, and get her past the first gate, the lock on every subsequent gate become easier to pick, but helping her to reach each new gate will involve engaging with her newly fired up erogenous zones. You can’t keep on doing the same thing, which is my problem with a lot of sex guides — you have to keep changing your stimulation site, pace of stimulation, pressure, and so forth.
Arousal is a cycle that women can go around more than once — a place where we depart completely from men’s experience of sex.
A patient and experienced lover who isn’t hell bent on the physical arousal ‘lick her clit and give her orgasms’ approach can aim instead to unlock the first gate, and then every subsequent gate after that, running me repeatedly through the cycle until I reach the point where I am extremely aroused. At this point, my responsive desire will be off the clock and almost any stimulus will cause me to have an orgasm. For want of a better description, I am going to call this the cyclical model of sex and it is the best way to fully engage a woman who has been in a relationship for a while. It works really well when you have only just met, too, but you will wake the neighbors.
Cyclical model in a new relationship: desire, arousal, plateau, more desire, more arousal, higher plateau, (rinse and repeat), orgasm, resolution.
or…
Cyclical model in an old relationship: arousal, desire, plateau, more arousal, more desire, higher plateau, (rinse and repeat), orgasm, resolution.
A single lick of my nipple has been known to do it, once I have been cycled a few times, but when I reach this state my whole body becomes an erogenous zone and it is literally anybody’s guess what will tip me over the edge. Because my mental arousal level is through the roof these are catastrophic orgasms, which last 20 or 30 seconds, and take at least three times as long to recover — the house could fall down while I am having one.
Responsive arousal and orgasm quality
Now you have seen where you can take me if you are any good at sex, let’s look at what happens if you follow the traditional orgasm centered route.
Orgasm centered physical model: arousal, orgasm, and resolution.
The shortened cycle of this script here has been followed a thousand times, you kiss me some, peck at my breasts, lick my clit until I am wet, stick your fingers in my puss and rub them in and out, make me come a few times, and then cycle through various positions until you blow your top and we are done.
The reason why this approach underachieves is this: because our responsive arousal is decoupled from our mental arousal, women in long term relationships can have sex perfectly well without feeling any desire at all.
One of the most important rules of sex is that — as I wrote above — it is a natural process. The best way to ruin sex is to do it by numbers, because that makes one or both partners focus on outcomes like orgasms, instead of on sensations and feelings. This leads to self-monitoring, the clear and present danger of which is that the more you are willing a thing to happen in sex, the less it is likely to happen. Ironically, the reason why so many women end up faking orgasms is that they end up trying too hard to have natural ones, the solution being to relax, enjoy the sex and the orgasms will come to you. However, there is another problem.
Women who have been in long-term relationships for a couple of years and who have orgasms will confirm that it is perfectly possible to have one without experiencing any desire at all. In this situation orgasms are nowhere near as good as ones fueled by rampant lust, and nothing like the ones that occur after being repeatedly cycled by a really caring, attentive and talented lover who can take us to a peak of desire. The cyclical model requires engagement in every part of a relationship as well as good sexual technique, and even after having it explained to them, many men find it is beyond them.
Responsive desire orgasms come a decent second to innate desire orgasms, while ‘no desire’ mechanical orgasms are a noticeable third. Although all orgasms are generated by the same mechanism — starting with the clitoral complex — there is a potential candidate for why this ranking exists, in the form of a hormone called prolactin.
Prolactin release following orgasmic penetrative sex is a staggering 400% greater than the amount released after masturbatory orgasm, and since prolactin reflects sexual satiety, it might well explain why using a vibrator doesn’t produce such a good feeling as real sex (tm).
In other words, there is something about having a cock pampering our puss that activates an additional gear as far as our orgasms are concerned, and this could account for all kinds of things, such as why anal sex is never quite as good as vaginal sex. But hey, they are all orgasms, and I haven’t experienced a bad one yet.
Desire and the length of a relationship
By now you will realize that the reason why great sex is such an art is that our level of desire varies according to how long we have been having sex with you. You will also have locked on to the second take home point, which is that while women frequently experience desire leading up to sex in new relationships, we experience it much more rarely in long term partnerships.
All of this is bound up in the way we think about sex: we have many non-sexual reasons for going to bed, and we are much more likely to have sex for emotional reasons than men.
In other words, after we have lived with you for a few years, most of the time we won’t be having sex with you because innate desire is involved on our side
Two examples:
A 20-year-old woman in a new relationship will almost certainly have erotic thoughts about her partner, which will trigger subjective arousal, followed by innate desire aka lust. Odds on she will become physically aroused before the first touch, and she will have wonderful sex including — assuming she is capable of them — orgasms, almost regardless of how good you are in bed. The reason why a lot of men are decidedly average in bed is that they rely on the innate model because it works pretty well when you have first met someone, but the cyclical model would be much better from the woman’s point of view.
Innate model: desire, arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
Cyclical model-new relationship: desire, arousal, plateau, more desire, more arousal, higher plateau, (rinse and repeat), orgasm, resolution.
Now imagine a 30-year-old woman who is having sex for practical reasons in a long-term relationship, who very probably won’t have any erotic thoughts because she is used to you. She won’t become subjectively aroused, won’t experience innate desire, and may not even experience responsive desire. She will become responsively physically aroused, but if you aren’t really skilled at relationships, although the sex will be satisfying for her on an emotional level, and she won’t come. Effectively, the sex means something very different to her than it does to you, and although it will be perfectly good for her, it won’t be earth-shattering. To her, it will be going like this:
Physical model: arousal, plateau, and resolution.
Every piece of research shows that the model above is how sex works for women in many long term relationships — it even has a name among women that has made its way into research language ‘sexual care work’. However, if your relationship is good, and her sex life doesn’t end up falling through the cracks of a busy life, and you are a moderately good lover, then the way she experiences sex could be like this:
Responsive model: arousal, desire, plateau, orgasm, and resolution.
Much better — although she might not want to have an orgasm every time, they are there as an option, and if she is even moderately good at focusing on her own feelings during sex, then a good time is guaranteed for the pair of you. However, you have the option of this:
Cyclical model old relationship: arousal, desire, plateau, more arousal, more desire, higher plateau, (rinse and repeat), orgasm, resolution.
She may not want to go for the cyclical option every time, but if she does, it will feel just as good as when you did it the very first time.
So what does desire feel like for a woman?
The best way I have of describing it is that it is a physical sensation: a deep-seated buzzing in my pelvis, radiating little electric shocks upwards into my tummy and downwards into my pussy. If it is extreme, I actually feel hot, but most of the time it manifests as a deliciously warm tingly feeling that spreads all over my body, affecting my breasts, my tummy, my neck, and even my toes. I experience varying degrees of the jitters as if I have drunk a cup of espresso too many, my chest feels a little tight, and the overall effect is incredibly pleasurable. I want to hold a cock, suck it, feel it inside me, and to experience orgasm in all the molten purity of its infinite pleasure. All it takes is the right situation and I am your baby — but you will walk away thinking you are a great lover because my responses are primed by thousands of years of evolution to confirm it.
However, after we have been living together for five years, and maybe have a house full of kids, plus a few financial headaches, then you are going to have to up your emotional, supportive, romantic, and sexual games very considerably to take me to the same level you once did. Why? Because I am a very, very sophisticated piece of machinery, and I wasn’t really designed to be where I find myself.
The message here is that a woman’s capacity for desire varies across the timeline of a relationship. The longer you have known her, the more difficult is will become to engage her desire, and — it is crucial to understand this — if you don’t change the way you approach to sex, then it will become steadily less good for her with every passing year. Why? Nature didn’t build her for a situation where she was going to end up living with one guy until the end of time, and her biology has conspired to make her get used to you.
Although many couples never reach the end stage, for a lot of relationships, the crunch comes when a woman’s desire falls so low that she can only have sex because of the physical arousal-desire split in her brain. The danger comes if she begins to have arousal problems, because then your sex life is cooked — except that it isn’t, if you have digested everything that you have just read.
Are all monogamous relationships fated to end in the sexual doldrums? No, they are not, and I know couples who have had perfectly happy sex lives for 60 or 70 years, but achieving that requires an ability to adapt around the ever-changing and infinitely absorbing subject of desire. The short answer is that it is perfectly possible to decide to have sex instead of waiting to feel horny, but it is only possible if you dump a lot of outmoded and obstructive old ideas.
Get it right and the rewards are endless.
Tabby
If you want to read more about related subjects in sex, follow this link.
Basson, Rosemary. “Women’s Sexual Function and Dysfunction: Current Uncertainties, Future Directions.” International journal of impotence research 20 (2008): 466–78.
Mazloomdoost, Donna, and Rachel N. Pauls. “A Comprehensive Review of the Clitoris and Its Role in Female Sexual Function.” Sexual Medicine Reviews 3, no. 4 (2015): 245–63.
