Critical Reflection

4 Human Sexual Response: Understanding Arousal and Orgasm88

Introduction

If you have ever looked at the magazines sitting beside the checkout line at the grocery store, you have probably noticed that at least half of them feature stories about “how to turn him on” or “what you need to know to drive her wild.” To be perfectly honest, these stories are usually garbage: they are not always based upon sound scientific research, they are not necessarily written by experts, and they tend to reinforce gender stereotypes. Such articles drive psycholo- gists crazy, and not in a good way.

The purpose of this chapter is to tell you what you really need to know about the topic of sex- ual arousal. We will explore the biological, psychological, and social factors that lead to arousal and consider the accompanying changes that occur in the male and female body during sexual activity. Knowledge of the factors that generate arousal and an appreciation of how the body normally reacts to sexual stimuli are both vital for understanding the basis of sexual difficul- ties and the ways in which a sex therapist might go about treating them (chapter 13 will cover sexual dysfunction and therapy in detail). This information is also important for understanding similarities and differences in male and female sexuality. This chapter will give you far more valuable insight than you could get from any magazine at the supermarket and will hopefully serve as a valuable reference guide for you in the future.

Factors That Influence Sexual Arousal

Is your brain really your biggest sex organ? It most certainly is! Sexual arousal is contingent upon the way your brain perceives a given sexual stimulus. It does not matter whether the most sensitive parts of your body are being touched, or how little clothing the person in front of you is wearing, because if your brain does not interpret that stimulus as arousing, you are unlikely to have a sexual response. We will therefore begin our discussion of sexual arousal with the brain and our senses, and subsequently consider the myriad other factors that can affect arousal, including hormones and substances.

The Brain

The brain is the control center for sexual arousal. Through cognitions, mood states, and fanta- sies, we are able to turn ourselves off and on, independent of any sensory input. However, the degree of control a person has, as well as the way that person responds to sexual stimuli, varies considerably across individuals. For example, emotions such as depression and anger can make sexual arousal difficult in some people, but pose little problem for others. Likewise, some peo- ple may not notice the sound of traffic outside the window while they are having sex, but others may find the same noise so distracting that it kills the mood. In addition, neuroscience research has found that some people’s brains are just more sensitive to sexual cues than others (Prause et al., 2014). What this means is that some people have a low threshold for sexual arousal—it might not take much to get them interested in sex; by contrast, the threshold for others is set much higher—they might only be responsive to really potent sexual cues.

In this section, we will consider the sections of the brain that are most important for arousal. First is the limbic system, a set of structures deep within the brain that exerts a profound influence on both animal and human sexual behavior. The limbic system is composed of sev- eral important elements, including the hypothalamus (which controls autonomic processes and sexual responses), hippocampus (which assists in learning and memory), and amygdala (which plays a role in emotion regulation and the processing of social information). As early as

Lehmiller, J. J. (2017). The psychology of human sexuality. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from umuc on 2020-11-16 03:02:55.

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