The myth of sexual desire per se
A supervisee recently told me about a couple she had begun seeing. “It's the old story. The man wants more sex and the woman has less desire.”
It is an old story; once a relationship gets to a certain point the man desires sex, and the woman doesn't. How useful a story is it?
Rosemary Basson writes
Women’s sexual motivation is far more complex than simply the presence or absence of sexual desire (defined as thinking or fantasizing about sex and yearning for sex between actual sexual encounters)...
At the beginning of a given sexual experience, a woman may well sense no sexual desire per se. Her motivations to be sexual are complex and include increasing emotional closeness with her partner (emotional intimacy) and often increasing her own well-being and self-image (sense of feeling attractive, feminine, appreciated, loved and/or desired, or to reduce her feelings of anxiety or guilt about sexual infrequency).
1327-1328
Basson, “Women’s sexual dysfunction: revised and expanded definition”
For the systemic therapist there can be no such thing as a free-floating sexual desire per se, a sexual desire that exists outside of a context, independent from all the other systems in which a person operates, the bio-psycho-social stew.
Basson pointed out something important about women's desire; that women's desire is highly mediated by context. But what is latent in this observation is that desire is always contextual. We can see that most readily in women, particularly women when they get a little older and have been in relationships for a while. Men may not experience their desire as embedded in their context, but it is. We only see men as having sexual desire per se until the moment we realize that there is no unalloyed, pure, crotch-generated, hormonal surge of desire, totally separate from intrapsychic and interpersonal, social and cultural context.
“Thinking or fantasizing about sex and yearning for sex between actual sexual encounters,” ie desire – for any gender, any sexuality, for any place in the life-cycle or for any moment in the trajectory of a relationship - arises in a set of contexts that give it its shape.
The intensity of early experiences of desire, whether our own or as shown in the culture, mask more or less effectively its contextual nature, leaving us with an impression of some walled-off, pure desire, Basson's posited desire per se. But a fourteen year old boy's first sexual longings are as complex and as bound up with hopes, expectations, wishes as a fifty-two year old woman's. The difference is that in the case of the fourteen-year old boy, all those multi-variate, complex forces align to erase their own footprints as it were, whereas for the fifty-two year old woman the fact of desire being contextual is less self-effacing.
Everyone's desire is contextual. It is an artifact of certain kinds of desire that they are experienced or appear less circumscribed by context. A painting by Jackson Pollock draws attention to its paintedness. But every painting is painted.
