“Sex Drive.”
(WARNING: Big time NERD post ahead.)
Your sexuality is not a drive.
This is contrary to the model of sexual response used in the diagnosis of sexual dysfunction, as well as the theoretical groundwork of most clinical sexology. So if you thought it was a drive, that’s completely understandable.
But it doesn’t make you less wrong.
I’m gonna need more than one post to deal with this question because as I write I realize how terribly complicated (and also how potentially coma-inducingly dull) it is. But let’s start today with the basics:
A DRIVE is a homeostatic motivational mechanism – like hunger, thirst, thermoregulation, and sleep. You need to keep balanced in order to stay afloat. Without food, water, heat or cool, sleep, etc, you will eventually die. And these systems have shut-off switches, i.e., satiety mechanisms that tell you to stop eating or drinking, to stop shivering or sweating, or to wake up or go to sleep. They shut off when your internal state changes.
They are not simple, these internal mechanisms. They’re affected not just by whether or not you’ve eaten, slept, drunk water, or put on a sweater, but by your biological rhythms – across a day, a month, a year, and a lifespan. And they’re affected not just by your internal state but also by the aversiveness (“ew!”) or appetitiveness (“yum!”) of the stimulus. But ultimately they tell you to go and stop based on a change that happens in your body.
Like a thermostat.
Or better: like errand-running. Say you are out of toilet paper, so you drive to the store and buy some and then go home. On the way you might stop elsewhere or you might get some other things while you’re at the store, or you might get totally distracted and forget to buy toilet paper, but essentially you have a need, you meet the need. Drive.
INCENTIVE MOTIVATION SYSTEMS, on the other hand, such as exploration and aggression, have no homeostatic mechanism – there is no baseline to which you must return, and consequently you have no internal shut-off switch. The system turns off when environmental stimuli change, like you successfully beat the shit out of someone or invent a perpetual motion machine.
So it’s not like running errands. It’s like… playing the lottery. You want to win the money, so you buy the tickets, but winning the lottery will not stop you from buying more tickets, because you can always (theoretically) win more money. Some people are more inclined to buy tickets than others, some people will be irresponsible in their gambling and some people have no interest. Incentive motivation.
Here’s the weird thing about sex: it’s an incentive motivation system with an internal shut off switch.
Satiety without homeostasis.
Insert the sound of hundreds of people yawning. Christ, you are all so bored right now, huh? Sorry.
But this is so important!
Why? Why does it matter??
It matters if you’re interested in how sex works, and if you’re interested in what a healthy sex life is. It matters if you want to know why we make some of the mistakes we make about sex.
For example, if there is no homeostasis, that means (roughly) that there is no “normal, healthy” quantity of sex. But because we have a shut-off switch, we might FEEL like sex is seeking homeostasis, so we perceive something that isn’t there – or is it? It’s like the optical illusion of the candlesticks and the profiles. Homeostasis appears to exist in the negative space between satiety and excitatory impulses. We talk about it like it’s real, we diagnose it, we feel like it’s REALLY IMPORTANT. But really it’s just empty space.
As I continue to talk about this extremely nerdy stuff, I’ll explain why it’s interesting and important that sexual arousal is never aversive, what the evolutionary implications are of an incentive motivation system with an off-switch, and how the incentive motivation approach to sexuality helps us understand sexual dysfunction better than the standard model.
I promise to space out these posts with the fun, interesting ones about orgasms and blow jobs and relationships.
Neither nerdy nor dull Emily. I found it all fascinating. Or does that make me a dull nerd too?
Um yes, I think it does! But coming from me that’s a high compliment!
Quit judging yourself so much. This is a very important distinction and one too rarely made. Brava! The whole “drive” thing was too Newtonian-Victorian anyway – one had to have an “impelling force” animating dull matter, to explain things. As Nietzsche said, it was a reduction to the terms of maximal stupidity.
I agree. The drive trope (also Freudian?) seems to have been a convenient way for men to justify their desires: men have drives, women don’t have drives, prostitutes have drives on turbo-charge, and it’s not a man’s fault when he’s a sexual being. Convenient.
I have to say, I didn’t fully understand it, but I’d like to. I’m not sure if it’s nerdy or not, but either way, I’m interested.
Call me crazy, but it sounds to me like it would be more accurate to say that sex is a ‘drive’ AND an ‘incentive motivation system’. On the one hand, if you don’t have a certain amount of it you can be driven to seek it, and when you find it, the drive will temporarily turn itself off. On the other hand, the extent to which you want it can also be affected by your environment.
Then again, isn’t that also true about eating and going to the toilet? See some chocolate cake and you’ll feel hungry. Turn on some water, and you’ll suddenly be desperate for a pee. Is there really a hard distinction between the two? Apart from the distinction between ‘things you need to live’ and ‘things you need to live comfortably’?
And melduckie — ouch. I’m sorry, but it’s true that sex is something I fundamentally need in order to be happy. It’s really not my fault that I’m a sexual being. And apart from the fact that I’m female, what’s the difference between that and the attitude you were criticizing?
No, the crucial distinction is that there is no internal state to which your body must return with sex. That’s what a drive is, and sex isn’t that.
One more time: sex is not a “drive” because drives are motivational systems whose purpose is to return an organism to a baseline state. There is no baseline state for sex. Therefore sex is not a drive.
Got it now?
I’ll deal with the experience of feeling “driven to seek it” in the next post.
This is intentionally provocative, but that’s only because if I put it in terms that LOOK rational, they’ll just mask its provocativeness and make me look passive-aggressive. In any case, I apologize for the provocation in advance.
No, sex ISN’T something you fundamentally need for happiness. I have spent over twenty years believing that, and it just reinforces my unhappiness when I can’t get any, and that’s fucking stupid. Most of the last two years of my life have been celibate (not at ALL by my choice) and I have redirected the energy and learned a lot about myself in the process. It might FEEL like a drive, it might come on like a drive, but it’s not one.
Interesting perspective Patrick, and don’t worry, I’m not offended. Still, it doesn’t necessarily follow that my reactions are the same as yours. I suppose I was wrong to imply that I could never be happy without sex, because if I was forced to go without, I’m sure I’d make the best of it. I don’t think I’d try to tell myself I didn’t miss sex if in fact I did; I’d just feel whatever I felt and do the best I could.
Maybe I need another word for my ‘sex drive’. I suppose there can be different levels of desire for other ‘incentive motivation systems’, such as, say, intellectual stimulus, or socialization. But just as with sex, I treat those things as sort of like ‘drives’ when I organize my life: I set things up so that I can get a certain amount, where possible, because I know that I’ll be happier if I do.
I still find myself questioning the distinction, here. I can see the central idea that some things have an obvious physiological state to which they correspond, and are necessary in order to live, and I can see that sex doesn’t fall into that category. But just like many other things that we don’t actually need in order to live, sex is something that we can want a certain amount of, in order to feel happy; is this post trying to deny that?
Yeah, cool; I took your sentence, spun it through my experience, and responded (which of course may be nothing like your experience).
I don’t think that un-”driving” sex is going to make it less attractive or desirable, but I’m also going to let the sex educator carry on about that.
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