3 Components to Sexual Pleasure
Consider these 3 things to facilitate your sexual pleasure
image: Gay Sons Of Poseidon @g_s_o_p
Pleasure as we know it might be something you find enjoyable. Sexual pleasure might be some kind of sexual touch, stimulation, or experience that you find delightful and erotic. You may have heard of the ‘pleasure centre’ of the brain, systems of which lead us to move toward different stimulus that feel good, or move away things that feel bad.
This stimulus can vary depending on each person, and therefore I refer to it as ‘default’. It’s whatever stimulated us at the time that our pleasure centre liked enough to pursue further.
Default stimulus can be over/under eating, sex/porn use, over-working, spending money, using drugs and alcohol, angry outbursts, and other physical releases like self harm. While these behaviours can access the pleasure or reward centre of the brain, pleasure itself is more nuanced than this.
Emily Nagoski identified three functions within the pleasure centre of the brain that contribute to our sexual pleasure.
These include, enjoying, expecting, and eagerness. These functions are intertwined with our emotional processing mechanisms that comprehend emotional states like sex, stress, love, and disgust.
Enjoying system:
Similar to how we understand rewards, it is the “hell yes!” or “hell no!” mechanisms in the brain.
Does it feel good, or bad? How good or bad?
This system manages your experiences of things like the thrill of winning, falling in love, tasting something sweet, and sexual sensations.
Expecting system:
The process of linking what’s happenings now with what should come next.
Implicitly learning to anticipate an experience based on our emotional experiences in the past.
Eagerness system:
Fuels the desire to move toward something or away from it.
When eagerness is activated with the stress response, we search for safety
When it is activated with attachment mechanism, we seek affection
When eagerness is activated with sexual context, we seek sexual stimulation
Moments of yearning, or craving is powered by the eagerness system
Nagoski writes about how the three systems interact to create sexual pleasure;
“The sequence works this way: something sexually relevant happens, and your brain goes ‘hey that’s sexually relevant’. That’s expecting. And if the context is right, your brain also goes, ‘hey that’s nice!”. That’s enjoying. And if the stimulus is nice enough, your brain goes, ‘ooh get more of that!’. That’s eagerness.”
And all three are context dependent. If you’re expecting, eagerness, and enjoying mechanisms are preoccupied with stress, or attachment issues, sexually relevant stimuli won’t be perceived as sexy.
References:
Book: Emily Nagoski, ‘Come As You Are’
