Desire

Sometimes a sexiness just rises up in you without any outside reason.  You want... what is it?  ...sex? ...orgasm? ...the touch of fingers? ...the scent of grass and flowers?  Everything!  You feel full of life, libidinous, horny like a goat. 

On the one hand, what a great feeling! 

On the other hand, it can be distracting, frustrating, even embarrassing.  You're in class, and you totally space out because you're daydreaming about some completely outlandish fantasy.  You're in a meeting at work, and suddenly you can't stop thinking about rolling around naked with a married person across from you whom you hardly know and don't really like.  You're driving somewhere and you start fantasizing a bit and the next thing you know you're so horny you have to pull over and masturbate.  How annoying these animal needs can be...  to have to eat, sleep, defecate and...  have sex!  You poor thing. 

Okay, I'll say it: Your body is your temple,  Your body is you!  Don't resent its needs — honor them, enjoy them, be grateful for them!  They connect you through the physical world to the divinity of life.

Visceral Attraction: Look at that butt! 

We all experience visceral attractions to people based simply on the way they look — on their facial features and the shapes of their bodies.  There's evidence that the intensity of this kind of attraction is correlated with testosterone levels — FtM (female-to-male) transsexuals, for example, have eloquently testified to the unfamiliar intensity of involuntary sexual attractions they experience when they start to take testosterone supplements.  It's ironic that men have long complained about how women are supposedly "at the mercy of their hormones," when men are actually so much more in the thrall of testosterone. 

All the same, differences between the genders in this area are ones of degree — there's no question that many women regularly experience strong visceral attractions to good looks too. 

It may be that we actually developed our current shapes in order to look more attractive to members of the opposite sex.  Other great apes don't have the large breasts, buttocks and penises that humans do.  One theory is that we developed these attributes after we started walking upright.  As long as we went about on all fours as other apes do, we were content to be turned on by the pleasant sight of female labia protruding back between the thighs, but when we stood up, poof, those magic lips vanished between the legs.  To get a boy's attention, you had to have other assets, and some people have suggested that our unusually large breasts and buttocks developed precisely for that purpose (since their form is demonstrably not required by their function). 

The same is true of male genitalia — ours are considerably larger than they need to be or than those of other apes.  Again, the argument goes that when a male is standing up, his penis is more obvious and visible to females than it would be if he were crouching over, and since females preferred the look of bigger cocks, that's what wound up being selected for. 

Complex Attraction: Love at first sight

Our attractions are by no means just visceral, though.  On the contrary, we seem to be able to size up potential mates with amazing subtlety and speed.  Whether you call it intuition or social intelligence, it's nonetheless a remarkable talent. 

Think how much you know about someone just by chatting with them for ten minutes.  I'd argue that this kind of "people sense" evolved specifically to help us choose the right mate, because the more we came to rely on intelligence as well as strength for our survival, the more important it became to be able to evaluate this new factor when choosing a mate.  The children of people who made good choices undoubtedly survived better than those of people who didn't. 

Think how well we can "read" other people, effortlessly interpreting all the hints contained in their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and how they talk about the simplest things.  It's not by accident that we developed that ability. 

It's even interesting to consider how astrology and many other systems for psychic reading provide readers with a sort of intellectual net that can be cast into their unconscious minds to pull up an assortment of intuitions that would otherwise have remained inaccessible to them.  We gather so much information about other people all the time, without even realizing it! 

So when you just "know" that someone is right for you, when you experience "love at first sight," you should take that intuition very seriously, because it's quite likely founded on a lot of accurate observation. 

Unfortunately, for some folks it's consistently right in exactly the wrong way.  Many people report an uncanny ability to pick out the one person in a crowded room who harbors the same secret abusive pathology they themselves grew up with.  How on earth they do it is a mystery to everyone, especially to themselves, and yet, time after time they find themselves unconsciously attracted to exactly the wrong kind of lover. 

On the other hand, many other people meet "soul mates" with an immediate and equally inexplicable sense of certainty.  "I knew within minutes," is a surprisingly common refrain among couples who have, in fact, turned out to be deeply compatible over many years. 

Desire: Lust! 

When attraction, especially attraction that happens on more than one level, combines with horniness, we experience a thing like hunger, a wanting.  What it is we "want," what we feel would satisfy the hunger, usually seems to be some kind of orgasmic sex with the object of our attraction. 

"Object" here is a loaded word.  Many women find it offensive the way men "objectify" them in this area of desire.  Remember, however, that men's visceral attraction is generally quite a bit stronger than women's — women can have a hard time understanding how powerfully a man is attracted by a pretty face, the curve of a breast, the sight of a pussy.  To get to the same state of lust, many women have to combine complex attraction with visceral attraction, and it offends them that men often don't need to go beyond the visceral, at least at first.  It makes them feel unseen, unappreciated, nothing more than "tits and ass."

The underlying issue is probably not really "objectification," because desire by its very nature always has an object, just as much for women as for men. Rather, the problem is the difference in the way men and women often arrive at their desires.  The strength of men's visceral responses can be scary to women for good and not-so-good reasons. 

The strength of their visceral attractions is a problem for the men, too.  Especially in North American culture, men have few good models for dealing with the outrageous surge of testosterone they experience as adolescents, and they often fall into patterns that not only offend the women they court, but are also very destructive of their own self-respect. 

The good news is, given an opportunity, both sexes learn over time how to cope with their emotional balance so as to honor all the parts of themselves.  If the stereotypical young girl thinks more about marriage than visceral sex, and the stereotypical young boy thinks more about visceral sex than marriage, both sides tend to "round out" as they get older.  Grown men really do want to pair-bond, and grown women really do want to have hot sex, even if both sides may initially have a somewhat one-sided focus.  And of course, for every stereotype, there are millions of exceptions anyway.

The movie, Bull Durham, presents a nice model of the kind of relationship between men and women in which women are able to use their sexual power and wisdom to enjoy men's intense lust while showing the men how to place that lust in a context of integrity.  This is in many ways the archetype of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who tamed the wild god Enki and taught him civilization. 

Lust in itself is not bad — on the contrary! — but it's powerful enough that we need a good deal of practice before we can join its dance safely and gracefully.

Longing and Obsession

Obsession is an emotional pattern that's by no means restricted to sexual areas, but it certainly figures strongly there.  When our desire is thwarted, we often find that obsession steps in to help us achieve what we want (or suffer for a long time while failing).  Oh, that hopeless longing, the agonized romantic yearning of unrequited love or breaking up, the coin of poets and songwriters for as long as poems and songs have existed... that's obsession collaborating with desire.  For what it's worth, Helen Fisher reports in Why We Love that obsession is associated with and perhaps caused by low serotonin levels. 

We all know that obsession can be destructive, as in the case of stalking and other unpleasant behaviors of thwarted suitors, partners and ex-partners, but there's also a different form of obsessive behavior that can be quite pleasant, namely what people call fetishes.  You know, like smelling bicycle seats.  In this case, a particular idea or activity becomes strongly associated with sexual arousal in a your mind, so you keep thinking about it or doing it so as to get turned on. 

If you use the word fetish dismissively, though, all you're saying is that you don't happen to share other people's turn-ons.  Most of us have fantasies that excite us, and these fantasies have the most amazing diversity.  Not only that, they generally change over time — we wear one out and have to move on to a new one to get the same charge (for more about how and why we fantasize, see the page about fantasy).

Some arousal patterns are more persistent, though, and it's interesting to consider why that might be.  Here is my opinion:  When people go into therapy, they very often find themselves struggling with old hurts and old habits of thought that date back to one of two periods in their lives, namely the ages of roughly 3 to 5, and roughly 12 to 15.  These are two periods in childhood when it turns out that your brain undergoes a huge growth spurt, and it's as if your experiences and patterns from those periods get "hard-wired" into you in a way that doesn't happen at other times.  It usually takes a great deal more focus and effort to get over hurts and to change habits from those periods than it does to deal with other problems that might intrinsically seem much more difficult. 

A lot of persistent sexual arousal patterns seem to date from one of those brain-growth periods, including some of the sexual patterns that are truly destructive.  Think about your own life, and the fantasies that keep coming back to you with a lot of force over the decades.  Do they seem to have roots in one of those two times in your life? 

If so, this is a very good argument for paying more attention to making sure that our children's experiences during those times are as positive and healthy as possible.  Neither one is easy because of the huge changes the child is making.  All the same, if we understand how important it is to support children through them, perhaps as parents and relatives we can do more to help heal the hurts as they arise and make the habits of mind our children develop ones that they will later be glad to have.  This includes a positive attitude towards sex, with an emphasis on safety, personal adequacy and trust. 

Especially in early teens, so many children are given to feel by their peers and even by their families that they may not be sexually adequate.  Girls aren't thin enough, pretty enough, or don't have big enough breasts.  Boys aren't tough enough, strong enough, aren't good enough at sports, don't have big enough cocks.  These adolescent insecurities have a way of following us just beneath the surface all through our later lives, long after we have the wisdom and experience to know how silly they really are.  Also, adults seem so scared of sex (often as a result of their own teen-age experience) that kids feel even more worried about possible failure. 

Still, as adults, here we are, for better or for worse — and one obligation we should take seriously is to enjoy our own sex lives deeply, without harm to ourselves or to anyone else.