Free Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski Page A

with great potential for awesomeness.
    what turns you on?
Huge, beautiful bathtubs at a B and B
Watching a partner put the kids to bed
“Slash fiction” of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy
A fantasy about having sex in public
Actually having sex in public
    No one was born responding sexually to any of these, but they’re all things that women have told me turn them on. The dual control model tidily explains how the brain responds to stimuli, to increase or decrease your arousal. The brain notices sexually relevant stimuli (like fantasies or an attractive partner) and potential threats (like an unappreciative audience), and sends signals accordingly; arousal is the process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how your brain figures out what counts as a sexually relevant stimulus or a potential threat.
    The process of learning what is sexually relevant and what is a threat works sort of like learning a language. We’re all born with the innate capacity to learn any human language, but we don’t learn a random language, right? If you grow up surrounded by people who speak only English, there is no way you’ll get to kindergarten speaking French. You learn the language you are surrounded by.
    Similarly, you learn the sexual language you’re surrounded by. Just as there are no innate words, there appear to be almost no innate sexualstimuli. What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.
    I’ll illustrate this with three rat studies from the lab of researcher Jim Pfaus.
    Imagine you’re a male lab rat. Your mother raises you with everything a young rat needs, normal and healthy. In addition to that normal, healthy development, the researchers train you to associate the smell of lemons with sexual activity. 10 Ordinarily, lemons mean as much to rat sexuality as they do to human sexuality: nothing. But you’ve been trained to link lemons and sex in your brain. So when you’re presented with two receptive female rats, one of whom smells like a healthy, receptive female rat and the other smells like a healthy, receptive female rat plus lemons, you’ll prefer the one who smells like lemons—and by “prefer,” I mean you’ll copulate with both females, but 80 percent of your ejaculations will be with the lemony partner, and only about 20 percent of your ejaculations will be with the nonlemony partner. Your ratty SES learned that lemons are sexually relevant, so the lemony partner hits your accelerator more.
    Let’s look at another experiment. This time, imagine that your brother was raised in the normal, healthy rat way, without the lemon thing. But during his first opportunity to copulate with a receptive female, the researchers put him into a rodent harness, a comfortable little jacket. 11
    If your brother is wearing his little rat jacket the first time he copulates with the receptive female, then the next time he’s with a receptive female but not wearing the jacket, he’ll actually self-inhibit. His brakes will stay on because during that single first experience, his brain learned that “jacket + female in estrus = sexytimes.” It did not learn simply “female in estrus = sexytimes.”
    What these two experiments show us is that both the accelerator and the brakes learn what to respond to based on experience. Neither lemons nor jackets are innate; both were learned.
    But it gets even more basic:
    Now imagine once more that you’re a male lab rat, raised healthyand happy by your mother. Then when you get to late adolescence and are still “sexually naïve” (aka a virgin), the experimenters introduce you to a female rat in estrus. This is about as erotic as it gets for a male rat on his first venture! But the researchers don’t give you an opportunity to copulate with her. 12 You never actually get to have sex with this ready and willing female.
    Result: You don’t develop a