Miswanting
What is it you want when you want sex?
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
I want to share with you an interesting idea I came across when, a while ago, I conducted a completely unscientific internet survey of my Twitter followers.
I asked them questions like “what is it that you want, when you want sex?” and “What is it that you like, when you like sex?”
Now, the first thing we need to get clear is the difference between “wanting” (or desire) and “liking” (or pleasure). They are different, neurologically and experientially, even though we very often treat them as if they are the same thing. At the level of the emotional, mammalian brain, pleasure and desire are known as “wanting” or “incentive salience” and “liking” or “hedonic impact.”[1]
“Wanting,” in the brain, is a vast network of dopamine-related circuitry that mediates how motivated we are to pursue a goal.
“Liking,” by contrast, is a set of smaller “hedonic hotspots” where opioids and endocannabinoids mediate how good a sensation feels.
For sure, they are related to each other, but you can want more of something without liking it, and you can like something without wanting more of it. You can want to keep scrolling through your social media feed, you can feel almost compelled to keep going, without getting any particular pleasure from it. You can like to exercise without ever wanting to exercise. You can, in fact, dread it, procrastinate, not want to put on your shoes, but once you get going you’re like, “Wow, this actually feels so much better, why don’t I do it more often?”
So in my survey, I asked people what they wanted when they wanted sex, and also what they liked when they liked sex.
To help me get a sense of what people want and what they like when they want and like sex, I conducted this unscientific survey of a few hundred strangers on the internet.
The answers were… confused. Because people are confused about the difference between desire and pleasure. One respondent said that what they want, when they want sex, is “full body touching, a sense of real desire.”
To me that sounds like “pleasure so enjoyable I intensely want more,” but maybe it means “I want two things: I want full body touching and I want to feel desire.” Or it could mean “a sense of my partner’s desire for me.” I’m not sure.
So. The results were interesting in a variety of ways, but there was one pattern I found truly fascinating. A difference emerged between what people said they wanted and what they said they liked: They wanted orgasm. It was the third most frequent answer, after “connection with partner” and “pleasure.” People want connection, pleasure, and orgasm.
Yet only five people included “orgasm” as something they liked—and one of those wrote, “I like that good sex feels like everything else disappears and there’s only this moment of having sex. (I mean, orgasms are pretty great, too.)” These were open-ended questions; I let people write as much as they wanted. So really four people, about 1%, named orgasm among the things they liked about sex, and one added it parenthetically.
Orgasm may well be something you want, when you want sex; it may motivate you to initiate or to say yes to sex. But it seems that for a lot of people, all the experiences both before and after orgasm are at least as pleasurable, if not more so. Dr. Shemeka Thorpe’s research on sexual pleasure in Southern Black women found that orgasm was one among a variety of pleasure experiences people valued. Her research participants also reported the feeling of wellbeing, peace, and relaxation that followed sex as among the key experiences that made sex pleasurable.
Dr. Shemeka Thorpe is an incredible researcher.
Social psychologist and happiness expert Laurie Santos might call our wanting for orgasms “miswanting,” where people want something that isn’t really what will bring them happiness or satisfaction.
What message or tip should you take away from this? Just notice. Notice what it is you want, when you want sex. And after you have it, notice what was most pleasurable about it in your memory. You might find something interesting in the similarities or differences in your two answers.
[1] Dear fellow nerds, yes indeed, there’s a huge difference between the subjective experience of pleasure and the neurological process of hedonic impact, as there is between the subjective experience of desire and the neurological process of incentive salience. If you know what the difference is, rest assured that I know too, but this distinction between pleasure and desire is already really difficult for people to wrap their heads around, without going into a discussion of interactions across levels of analysis, and I’ve found that teaching about levels of analysis doesn’t help people have better sex lives, which is the purpose of this newsletter. The science is functioning as a metaphor. This is one of many, many shortcuts I take, in the name of helping people have better sex lives. Feel free to be frustrated by it, if you like, and then remind yourself that you’re reading this newsletter to make your sex life better, and this metaphor helps with that. And hey, look up Kent Berridge if you want the science itself.
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