Terms for mental sexual activity

The terms suggested below not only describe our mental sexual activities, but also imply corresponding distinctions that may be helpful in understanding sexual experience.  They have nothing to do with how you have sex — who does what to what part of whom — but only with what happens in the mind as you're doing it. 

"self-arousal"

Self-arousal is what you do in your mind when you engage in lone-sex (when you masturbate by yourself). 

For most people, this involves the use of what we call "fantasy" or "masturbatory fantasy."  Such fantasies are a kind of daydream we create specifically to turn ourselves on (see the Sexual Fantasies page).  We usually create them to stimulate both triggered arousal and fear arousal (described below), and although some of their features can be simple and obvious, they often contain complicated stories that are tailored to our own individual psyches in sophisticated ways. 

Although self-arousal is a skill that most people first learn and practice in lone-sex, it also plays an important part in sex with partners.  To make your sexual experiences work for you, especially after the wild excitement of courtship wears off, you have to know your own responses, not only in terms of what feels good physically but also in terms of how to trigger your own mental arousal.  Being able to turn yourself on is a very useful ability! 

"triggered arousal"

The idea of triggered arousal is an obvious one, but it's also often neglected and/or misunderstood in our culture.  Like most other living creatures, we've evolved to respond to fairly simple reproductive cues or triggers — things that turn us on without a lot of effort on our part.  In the case of humans, many of these triggers are learned during childhood and adolescence, but some seem based at least in part on hard-wired reflexes. 

Depending on our sexual orientation and hormonal setup, these triggers usually cluster around one physical gender or the other — most of us are primarily turned on either by males or by females of our species.  Like other primates and monkeys, we're highly visual, so many of our triggers are things we see.  Everyone is attracted to a pretty or handsome face.  Straight men are attracted by the sight of a female "figure" (breasts, wide hips, buttocks), and many men, in company with males of other primate species, are instinctively, viscerally turned on by a glimpse of female labia.

For women, who have much lower testosterone levels on average, such cues are not usually as urgently compelling as they are for men.  Nonetheless, for a straight woman looking at a man, broad shoulders, a handsome face, well-formed buttocks, and even for some people a big cock can be viscerally attractive.  What makes a "hunk" may vary a great deal from person to person and culture to culture, but there's no denying that women too experience strong visceral sexual attractions based on a person's looks.

Triggered arousal seems to play a significant part in most people's experience of sex, even with a much beloved partner.  We are animals, and even when we're having sex with a mate we know and love better than anyone else, there's a part of us that is also fucking a generic male or female, and in a broader sense, a generic other. 

In this sense, despite the great diversity of sizes and shapes of people's bodies and the even greater diversity of their sexual preferences and patterns of response, there is in each of us a primitive animal part that doesn't care about such differences — for which there is only one male, only one set of cock and balls, or only one female, one set of tits, ass and cunt.  The specific individuals who embody these platonic ideals at any given moment are invisible to that primitive animal in us. 

When I say "primitive," I mean primitive by comparison to most of our other animal responses — the part of us that sees partners as generic operates at a level of deep, blind reproductive instinct, a level as direct and simple as what makes flowers open to the sun. 

Many people in our culture are disconcerted to encounter this kind of primitive artifact of triggered arousal in themselves or in others.  It seems to ignore many things that are very important to us — all the care we put into selecting a mate, for example, or all the significance we attach to our own and other people's individuality. 

At the same time, even the most primitive parts of triggered arousal are beautiful, important ingredient in most recipes for good sex.  They add power and spice to all our other feelings and desires, without in any way diminishing them.  If your partner stirs you at a visceral level as a primal male or female, that in no way diminishes the connection you can have with the human individual, nor (if you see it that way) with their spirit, which is equally comfortable in either physical gender.  (See the Sex, the Goddess and the God page for a pagan perspective on some of the spiritual implications).

When men engage in lone-sex, they often use photographs to provide visual triggers to turn themselves on.  Opponents of "pornography," particularly women, tend to believe that the triggered arousal produced by such pictures results in the "objectification" of the female — that the pictures encourage men to see women as nothing but female bodies without individuality, power or humanity.  In addition, women often feel that photographs of young, beautiful and apparently wildly wanton women make their own bodies, scruples and inhibitions come off badly by comparison. 

Such fears are understandable, but they put the cart before the horse.  Men don't objectify women because of jerking off to pictures but because they, like women, have primitive animal responses.  Women objectify men too, though generally somewhat differently, out of the same kind of instinct.  We don't have to fear these instincts or the objectification that results, because it co-exists easily with a lot of other instincts and desires that draw us to be intimate with individual people, fall in love, bond, and be romantic.  If men in our culture have difficulty dealing with their own feelings, it's not because of their triggered arousal but because of destructive messages that the culture gives them about sex and courtship — messages that many opponents of pornography would like to intensify. 

And yes, we are all in sexual competition based on primitive triggers and cues — everyone wants to have sex with the most "beautiful" person possible (women too!) — but nature is also wise.  At an even more primitive level, as I observed above, we understand that all bodies are in some sense the same.  Most men do get this on a gut level — they express it with crude locker-room wisdom in saying, "It's not the face you fuck."  And in the end, it's always the individual person, not the face or body, whom you love, when you're lucky enough to love. 

"fear arousal"

One of the most complicated and interesting ways we arouse ourselves is by using our own fear.  Most people are now familiar with the idea that fear releases adrenalin in our bodies, which produces a "fight-or-flight" response — the fear is transformed either into a savage aggression, or into panic that makes us run away as fast as we can. 

In the sexual realm, however, the "fight" side of an adrenaline reaction translates not into aggression but into equally fierce arousal.  If something sexual is too scary, or scary in the wrong way, it's a huge turn-off, but if it's scary in the "right" way, it's wildly exciting. 

This can be true of very simple turn-ons having to do with breaking social taboos, doing things that are "naughty" or "forbidden."  People who are quite shy, for instance, sometimes go wild over the idea of having sex in a public place where they might be discovered by a stranger.  People who imagine "orgies" to be transgressive often find the thought of going to one incredibly sexy and terribly dangerous at the same time.  Luckily, when we start out as teenagers, everything sexual seems dangerous and therefore potentially exciting.

And in fact, all through our lives, no matter how many fears we put to rest, we all seem to continue to find sex both scary and exciting.

Fear arousal helps explain why some of our fantasies take such weird forms — we often seem to get turned on by thinking about the very last things we'd want to have happen to us.  Many women fantasize about being raped, for example, often gang-raped, sometimes brutally — does this mean they actually want to be raped?  Not at all — but they've found how to transform the strong visceral fear they feel about being raped into an equally strong fight/arousal response that turns them on a lot. 

Similarly, some men have intense erotic fantasies about being castrated, sometimes brutally and very painfully.  Does this mean they actually want to be castrated?  No, again the answer is that such a powerful fear can turn into a correspondingly powerful aphrodisiac. 

Fear arousal can be quite confusing, especially when it leads us to experiment with acting out our fear-based fantasies.  Needless to say, a literal translation into reality of the things you fear the most is seldom erotic at all.  Going back to Roman times for an example (though plenty of comparable examples exist today), the poet Catullus wrote a poem about the depression and despair experienced by a young friend of his who castrated himself in erotic frenzy during the rites of Cybele and woke up the next morning with nothing but regrets.  Similarly, the glorious Annie Sprinkle has described how she set up a scene some years ago in which a small group of good-looking men were to hold her down and "rape" her, and how she actually found the experience very unpleasant and unsettling rather than the turn-on she anticipated. 

All the same, playing with fear is one of the most reliable and intense forms of self-arousal for almost all of us.  Since we tend to fear different things, and since our fears change and shift over time, these fantasies take an infinite variety of forms, very few of which have universal appeal. 

There certainly can be safe and effective ways of "acting out" parts of fear-based fantasies so as to use their potent eroticism in love-making, but it takes experience, good judgment and a great deal of care to do so successfully.  Too much fear is merely terrifying; too little makes enactment seem silly rather than exciting.  See the Sexual Fantasies page for further discussion of finding a balance. 

"connective arousal"

When you have sex with someone you trust enough that you open up to them and let yourself be emotionally vulnerable, you experience a kind of arousal that feels quite different from self-arousal — this is what I call connective arousal. 

It's worth pointing out right away that sex between two people doesn't necessarily have to involve connective arousal on either person's part.  If you regard someone you're having sex with primarily as a role in a fantasy you're acting out, then emotionally speaking you're having sex by yourself, and the arousal you feel is self-arousal. 

There's nothing wrong with that — when people stage "scenes" and engage in role-playing, they are explicitly and by mutual agreement working with each others' fantasies, in what may be a complex and exciting kind of collaborative self-arousal that never actually involves connecting with the other person on an emotional level.  When sexual experience becomes very intense, though, almost all of us seem to long for emotional connection and find connective arousal more satisfying than self-arousal.

"Casual" sex is a classic place where both parties initially intend to engage only in self-arousal using the other person as a prop, but where a real mutual connection often arises unbidden for one or both at the end, leading to an unanticipated bond that is not in the least casual. 

This, of course, makes evolutionary sense — if connective arousal wasn't very compelling to us, we'd feel safer and happier having lone-sex than having sex with each other, and even when triggered arousal got us together, we'd fail to develop those strong pair bonds that give offspring a better chance of survival.

I've noticed that sex between long-term pair-bonded partners often starts off with both parties engaging in self-arousal, and then gradually phases into connective arousal as the sex continues.  This has been true for me, my partners, and also for many other people I've talked to.  This is not surprising — once the heat of courtship romance is past, your partner usually has far less information about how to turn you on at a given moment than you do yourself.  It's important and liberating to be able to take responsibility for your own sexual arousal! 

So for a while at the beginning, you think sexy thoughts and obtain the right kind of physical stimulation just as you would if you were by yourself.  You may not even be thinking about the person you're with at all then — you may be fantasizing about someone you hardly know whom you find attractive, or some kinky story like being captured by sex-crazed outlaws and tied down and forced to... hmm.  You try to make sure that the other person is doing things to you that feel great, but at that point the other person is functioning mainly as a biological sex toy in your self-arousal focus. 

Later, as you become really turned on, your focus shifts and your love for your partner comes rushing to the fore.  The fantasy that got you there may still be in the background, but the familiar person collaborating with you suddenly seems incredibly dear, and their arousal seems incredibly sexy.  An orgasm that I experience in this connected state is quite different from an orgasm I have when focused on my own fantasy and sensation (see the ecstasy page for more thoughts on different components of orgasmic ecstasy). 

There are, of course, plenty of people who do really enjoy "sport sex" which entirely avoids connective arousal from start to finish.  There's nothing wrong with such sex, as long as all parties involved understand the terms of interaction and explicitly choose to participate on that basis.  However, when one partner is seeking mutual connective arousal and the other is seeking to avoid it, deceit, pain, anger and deep injury can result — truly a situation to avoid!

For me, the intimacy of connective arousal is so deeply appealing that I always want to enjoy it with any partner I'm with, even if we do collaborate on complex mutual self-arousal beforehand.  For pure fantasy enactment without connective arousal, I'd much rather be by myself — it's less messy, and I don't constantly have to explain what I want.  This is a matters of personal taste, of course, and depends on the kind of sexual relationship you are in — see the relationships page for further examples.