BAD SEX
The Second Circle Series Four: BAD SEX
Episode 5: Why don’t I want sex?
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Episode 5: Why don’t I want sex?

The Second Circle Series 4 "BAD SEX"

The Second Circle Series 4: BAD SEX

Episode 5: Why don’t I want sex?

Somewhere along the way we’ve been taught that desire should just exist without any conscious effort, like hunger or thirst. And if it doesn’t – uh oh – that means something is wrong. But this idea of sex as a “drive” is actually a myth. And like so many myths, it’s standing in the way of us having good, fulfilling sex lives. 


The Second Circle is produced, written, hosted by Franki Cookney | Editor: Lucy Douglas | Audio production: Anouszka Tate |

Theme music: Roof /  Big Spoon (Instrumental Version) | Incidental music: From Now On - Small Circuits, Beautiful Minds - Brighter Than Tomorrow, Maybe - The Universe is a Bitch | All music courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com


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S04E05: Why don’t I want sex?

Karen Gurney 00:00

Sex that’s lacking in novelty. Sex that’s lacking in pleasure, sex that feels emotionally unrewarding, for whatever reason, is actually going to reduce desire over time. So having lots of bad sex, it doesn't matter how often you're having it. If it's sex, that doesn't meet your conditions for good sex, sex, it's not life affirming. If it's sex, where you don't feel connected, you don't get pleasure, it will actually disincentivize you over time.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 00:35

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about a couple, let’s call them Ash and Charlie. When they first got together they could hardly keep their hands off each other. 

The attraction between them was strong and it was always there. Desire felt effortless. They went out, they dated and needless to say they had a lot of sex. Entire Saturdays spent in bed, finally rolling out to go for brunch at 2pm, followed by meeting friends in the pub, then back home for more sex. In time they fell in love and decided to build a life together. And that life became full. Work demands, chores and responsibilities started to encroach on their free time. They had kids, they cared for older relatives, supported friends, took the car into the garage, fixed the washing machine… and as their lives together became busier, sex kinda… fell down the list of priorities.

It wasn’t that Ash and Charlie didn’t love each other any more. It wasn’t that the attraction had gone! But the constant juggle meant there was always something else, something more pressing. “We’re out of milk, when did I last go to the dentist? Must get that leaking shower looked at, oh crap it’s mum’s birthday in two weeks, what did my boss mean with that comment today? Oh god, I’m knackered.”

It wasn’t that they didn’t want to have sex… it’s just that… most of the time, when it came down to it, their desire to sleep was stronger than the desire to shag. 

Sound familiar?

[THEME MUSIC]

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 02:02

You’re listening to The Second Circle. This is Series 4: BAD SEX.

I’m Franki Cookney. I’ve spent the last five years writing and reporting on sex and relationships and each time I read a piece on how to make sex better, how to improve, how to spice things up, I get the increasing sense that maybe we’re coming at this from the wrong angle. Instead of papering over the cracks, I say we dig down and have a proper look at the foundations. In this series I’m turning sex advice on its head and exploring what makes sex bad in the first place. 

Needless to say the stories you’ll hear and the language people use to describe their sexual experiences can be pretty explicit so listener discretion is advised. All the sex we discuss in this series was consensual but it wasn’t always enjoyable and some accounts may be distressing.

So far this series we’ve talked about our expectations around sex, discussed the nature of pleasure and interrogated the accepted norms around how sexual bodies should work. Now I want to take a closer look at the thing that underpins it all: sexual desire. 

Whatever their moral or cultural view of sex, most people acknowledge that wanting sex, being drawn to sexual encounters with other people, is part of human nature. So what happens when we don’t want sex? Because that’s part of human nature too.

That story at the beginning, about Ash and Charlie? I made it up. But you might recognise some of the elements. Most of us can relate to feeling too tired, too stressed, too busy, having too much on our minds, to feel sexy. Maybe we’re feeling low, or anxious, or generally apathetic. 

There might also be specific circumstantial reasons why desire has taken a back seat. Maybe we’re in the middle of a big work project, maybe we’ve just had a child, we’re moving house, getting divorced, heck, living through a pandemic! That we don’t always feel horny ought to be a very normal, accepted facet of human sexuality. But what about when that lack of desire persists after the events? What about when the stress, the tiredness, the anxiety don’t go away? What about when apathy towards sex becomes the norm, rather than an occasional feeling?

The idea that healthy sexuality means having a constant well of desire that we can tap into at the drop of a hat is actually a myth. It’s that thing I’ve mentioned before – a script. Somewhere along the way we’ve been taught that desire should just exist without any conscious effort, like hunger or thirst. And if it doesn’t – uh oh – that means something is wrong. Like so many of these scripts, it’s standing in the way of us having good, fulfilling sex lives. 

I spoke to Emily Nagoski (we briefly heard from her in Episode 2 and I hinted she’d be back!). She’s a sex educator, researcher, and author of the bestselling book Come As You Are, which unpicks many of the tropes about sexuality. She told me this is a really common misunderstanding of desire.

Emily Nagoski 05:38

I think the idea that sexual desire is supposed to be spontaneous, or else it's broken, comes from the misunderstanding of desire, as a drive as a hunger so drives are our biological systems where your body tells your brain that something is wrong, something is out of whack. It's out of balance. There's a problem it's so it's like a siren or a flashing red light—Awooga! Awooga! There's a problem!—that it pushes your body to go out into the world to go fix that problem. That's a drive. Hunger’s a drive, thirst’s a drive, thermoregulation is a drive, even sleep is a drive. If you are deprived of them, you will literally sick and die, right? 

These are drives. Sex is not one of those. Instead, it is an incentive motivation system. Now I live in the real world, I know that we are never gonna have everybody switched from saying the nice short, easy-to-say “sex drive” over to sexual incentive motivation system. But if we can remember that sex is not analogous to hunger, it is analogous to curiosity. Like if we have that correct, biologically appropriate understanding of how sexual desire functions, we're not going to be worried about people who don't experience spontaneous desire. 

Because if a person is never spontaneously hungry, bad things can happen, that person is sick. But if a person never experiences spontaneous curiosity, I mean, that's just a person who's like very stressed out, we all know that curiosity comes and goes, depending on the context, we can recognise that people are going to be curious about some things and not curious about others, that that diversity, that variety makes a whole lot of sense.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 07:29

It’s kind of unsurprising that we don’t really understand what our desire is. Freud believed that libido is a constant force in all of us and that idea has persisted for a long time. We talked in the last episode about the models of human sexuality that were developed in the middle of the 20th century and which have been pretty much used as a blueprint ever since. These models acknowledged that desire was a primary component of sexuality but didn’t really tell us anything about where that desire comes from, how to stir it or nurture it.

But, in the late 90s, along came sexologists John Bancroft and Erick Janssen, who developed what’s known as the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response – a very unsexy name for, basically, how we get the horn. 

They determined that sexual response (and we include desire in that) is dependent on the balance between sexual excitation – being turned on – and sexual inhibition – being turned off.

Think of it like the movement of a car with two pedals: an accelerator and a brake.

The accelerator gets the car going, and brake slows it down or stops it altogether. And the amount the car moves depends on how much each of the pedals is engaged. 

Bancroft and Janssen have won some pretty prestigious awards for their work. However, anyone who’s familiar with it *outside of psychosexology academia circles* probably heard about it from Emily Nagoski. Come as You Are was a New York Times bestseller. It even got namechecked in the most recent season of Netflix’s critically acclaimed Sex Education. So I thought it was only fair to ask her to lay it out for us. So, Emily, can you explain the Dual Control Model for us regular folks?

Emily Nagoski 09:24

Yes please! So this is the foundation of relearning a script in replacement to all the stuff that you've been lied about for your whole life, which is to understand the foundation of how sex even works in your brain. 

It's a dual control mechanism. Dual means just there's two parts to it. And the first part is the sexual accelerator, which notices all the sex-related information in the environment. So it's everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or crucially, think, belief or imagine - any brain activation that your brain codes is sex related, and it sends the turn-on signal that many of us are familiar with. And it's functioning at a low level all the time, including right now here, we are just barely talking about sex. So you have just a barely a little bit of turn-on signal being sent. 

Unfortunately, at the same time in parallel, your brakes are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. Everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or crucially, think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat, and it sends the turn-off signal. 

So the process of becoming aroused is a dual process of turning on the ons and also turning off the offs. And while knowing that there is a brake is a revelation for lots of people, like it is normal and healthy for there to be situations that keep the brakes on and you're not aroused in that moment. But also it turns out when people are struggling with arousal, desire, orgasm, for sure erection, it is not because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator, it's because there is too much stimulation to the brakes.

You know, the big, classic, virtually universal experience for anyone who's become a parent, when a new human, new baby, dependent human enters your household, your sleep is going to be screwed up, the whole meaning of your body is going to be changed regardless of whether you're a birth parent or not. 

So your partner approaches you and touches you and your brain has spent who knows how long in the state of interpreting a sensation as meaning ‘baby love’. And so traversing from one stage to the other requires time and deliberate effort. And many of us have been taught that if it takes time, or deliberate effort, then you are doing it wrong. You should just be able to instantly switch from Mama mode to black lace lingerie. And in the blink of an eye, be ready for sex. And that is that is not how our brakes work.

Franki Cookney 12:11

Yeah, absolutely. I think also, this is something that I see coming up a lot on forums and also we're talking to people is that the advice for people when they're like, Oh, I'm not really feeling super horny. I'm kind of got low libido at the moment, is all you just need to sort of have some quality time. So like, you say, you need to get out the lingerie. You need to light the candles, you need to have a glass of wine, and then all of that stuff. That's the cliche, isn't it? You know, like, I've spoken to so many women who have gone to the doctor to talk about their low sex drive and been told, just have a glass of wine.

Emily Nagoski 12:49

And you know what? There's not no reason for that. Alcohol in low doses is disinhibiting. So for some people, one or two drinks actually is really helpful in turning off the noise in their brain, which frees up the accelerator to work. So it's not for nothing. But a glass or two of wine is not going to help you when you've been surviving on five hours of sleep every night for the past three months or three years. What you need is more sleep. It’s not going to help you, when you've been in the midst of an frustrating disagreement with your partner for months, and you're still searching for a solution. A glass of wine cannot counterbalance that. A glass or two of wine cannot counterbalance if you spent the first, I don't know, two decades of your life being taught that sex is dirty, shameful and disgusting. But also, if you're not really good at it, no one will ever love you. A glass or two a wine cannot touch that. A glass or two of wine is not going to touch trauma, if sex has been used as a weapon against you. So like I don't blame doctors for looking for a short answer, because short is all they have time for. And there are certain situations when you know things really aren't that bad, where a glass of wine can facilitate things. But usually when people are struggling for an extended period of time, a glass of wine and lingerie is not going to help. 

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 14:13

Google searches around “low sex drive” have been pretty consistently high over the last decade. Queries such as “why is my sex drive low” and “how to increase sex drive” are easily the most common. Low desire is one of the most common reasons couples seek sex therapy. 

No wonder, then, that everyone from pharmaceutical companies to Elle McPherson and Gwyneth Paltrow has released a product claiming to boost low sex drive. 

The clinical trials around the available drugs (many of which aren’t even licensed for use in the UK) are… not very convincing. And as far as wellness products go, the British Association of Sexual Health & HIV (BASHH) has stated previously: "There is no good quality scientific evidence that supplements work in improving sexual desire in women.”

As it happens, Imperial College London is currently carrying out a study into Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (that’s low sex drive to you and me) looking at the role of the melanocortin-4 receptor, a part of the brain involved in the control of food intake, energy expenditure, erectile function and sexual behaviour. 

The point of the study is, hopefully, to find out whether activating this part of the brain using a drug can help people experience sexual desire.

I actually asked the team from Imperial if they’d come and talk to me for this episode but the results of the study are due to be published sometime in 2022 and at the time of recording we were still in the autumn of 2021 so they said no. Hopefully I might be able to catch up with them at some point. 

I am desperate to know more about this research. But I have to say I am sceptical about the idea of a medical treatment that can make us feel desire. Remember, Emily Nagoski likened desire to curiosity. Is curiosity something you can just... kickstart?

We may well be able to activate sexual arousal. And I’m not saying that’s not useful - think of Viagra! The infamous drug, developed by Pfizer in the 1990s, has helped countless men have sex in that last two and a half decades! But of course Viagra does not treat desire, it treats erectile dysfunction. The people who take it typically feel desire already, they just can’t act on it in the way they’d like to.

It is also well-established that arousal can exist without desire. It’s called arousal non-concordance and the most obvious example if you have a penis is your morning erection! Morning glory – or morning wood – indicates healthy nerves and good blood supply to the penis but it doesn’t really tell us anything about a person’s sex drive. 

There is also a wealth of evidence showing that women in particular, often show signs of physical arousal when presented with sexual stimuli, but that doesn’t always tally with what or whom they’re attracted to. It’s like our bodies just automatically go “Oh hello, this is a sex thing!” regardless of whether our brains are interested. So again, it doesn’t really tell us anything about sex drive.

So we can make people hard and we can make people wet and that’s not without value but… does it solve the issue of desire? Like the numbing gel we talked about last time, that’s supposed to help people with vulvodynia have sex, I can’t help feeling like it’s skirting the issue somehow.

I wanted to talk to someone I know is a genuine expert in this area. Karen Gurney is a clinical psychologist, and psychosexologist who works for both the NHS and as the director of the Havelock Clinic, which is a multidisciplinary sexual problems service based in London. She is also the author of Mind The Gap: The truth about desire and how to future proof your sex life. I asked her what she made of the pharmaceutical approach to treating low desire.

Karen Gurney 18:18

I think what it comes down to from my perspective is that desire is more than a biological event, it's certainly underpinned by biological events, in terms of hormones, for example. But that is the underpinning of desire. And actually, desire is more psychological. We know it's more of an emotion, or a motivation, than it is a physiological event. And so, yes, it's important to take account of the biological and where there may be challenges there to address those. As you quite rightly point out, the data is not strong for for such drugs. And actually, what is frustrating is that the data is very strong for more psychological or sex therapy, approaches for people's concerns about desire.  But the irony for me around desire is that there are quick fixes. That actually, I believe that just by changing someone's understanding of how desire works, can create a change and can eradicate a problem. That is a quick fix. Just by being able to negotiate sex differently can create a change in desire. Again, a quick fix. Even if it's more complicated than that, the sex therapy that's required, when it's a very kind of long standing challenging picture around a desire discrepancy can take, you know, six sessions? A quick fix, it's a quick fix, and it doesn't rely on a medication or the side effects of medications, I think it's just my perspective is that medications around desire are barking up the wrong tree. And you know, that's also supported by the data. But for some people, it will be an avenue that they're looking for. And lots of people do come in to sexual problems services, wanting a medication. You know, let's keep our minds open if there's something out there that people want to find, but I think it's very unlikely to be the solution that people are hoping for.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 20:16

One of the problems with measuring desire levels - in any context - is that it’s so subjective. Karen tells me that a lot of the clients she sees equate sexual desire with how much sex they’re having. They might say “oh we never have sex any more” and put it down to low libido. But when they get into a deeper discussion about sexual thoughts or fantasies, it turns out the interest is there, they’re just not acting on it. 

Maybe it’s because, as we discussed earlier, their brakes are too firmly pressed. 

Maybe it’s because sexual interest alone isn’t proving to be enough of an incentive. 

This is what I like to call the “faff to fun ratio”. Sure, sex is fun, but it’s also takes some effort - some faff - to make it happen. So on some level, we might be asking ourselves “is it going to be worth it?”

At the start of the show, we heard Karen Gurney explaining that sex without connection, sex without pleasure, will disincentivize you over time.

This brings us on to the other big myth about desire: that it should just… appear out of the blue. We see a sexy picture or imagine a sexy scenario and HELLO! We’re horned up and ready to party.

And honestly, that’s not wrong. It is one way that we feel desire. It’s known as spontaneous desire. But there’s another way. It’s called responsive desire and it tends to show up a little later, once we’re actually in the moment. 

Here’s Emily Nagoski again.

Emily Nagoski 22:05

If spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure, then responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.

That is in fact the way sexual desire is most likely to work in a sexual relationship that sustains across many decades. It's not about people who, like, cannot wait to put their tongues in each other's mouths. It's people who decide it matters enough to their relationship, that they are willing to stop doing all the other things that could be doing—God knows we have plenty of other stuff we could be doing instead—close the door, and just have it be about, like. our bodies connecting and this, you know, frankly, quite undignified, silly, wonderful way that human bodies connect. 

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 22:49

Long before I learnt the term responsive desire I knew that sometimes, the only thing that would get me in the mood for sex was, well, sex!

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve felt like all I wanna do is have a glass of wine, watch an episode of something, and then crash. But I’ll get in bed and cuddle up with my partner, feel the heat of their body against mine, feel their hands on my skin and after a while my brain will go “Oh this is actually pretty nice!”

OK, listen. I get it. The idea that we should start having sex BEFORE we actually feel like doing so is going to sound pretty controversial to a lot of people. But if we’ve learnt anything so far in this podcast series it’s that pleasure is about so much more than the actual act of sex. You might find desire shows up after a sensual shower like the one we heard about in Episode 3, after a massage, after an extended snogging session. You might want to turn off your devices and just have a really good conversation. You might want to read some erotica alone. The possibilities are quite literally endless.

No one is saying you should have sex when you don’t want to. But we can’t just sit around waiting for the lightning bolt to strike. Sometimes we might need to initiate pleasure in order to spark desire.

And, yes, sometimes desire emerges in response to sexual activity itself. This is something my next guest knows all about. Tabitha Rayne is an erotica writer and editor and a sex toy inventor so, for her, feeling horny is a big part of her identity. But like most of us, she experiences ups and downs when it comes to libido. And how she gets it going again  is kind of interesting…

Tabitha Rayne 24:50

So libido, in my life, it's been a fluctuating thing anyway, and I have had a lot of mental health dips, and peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows, what I thought was depression, and everything and I've always turned to orgasms to help with that.

So, I am no stranger to a lack of libido. But I've always tried to use orgasms to lift my libido. Does that make sense? That sounds like a really opposite way round thing. It sounds like you sort of want to raise your libido to enable your orgasms. But sometimes I had to do it backwards, sort of get my sort of mechanically, somebody in one of my project called a perfunctory orgasm, which is quite good. 

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 25:41

In summer 2021, Tabitha was in a motorcycle accident, which left her with serious injuries to her arm and hand. She also had a pretty big bump to the pelvis. Nothing was broken but the fuel tank on her bike was left with this massive dent from where she’d been thrown groin-first onto it… is anyone else wincing right now?

Ten days later she had surgery on her arm and wrist before being sent home with a big ol’ bag of painkillers.

It is not at all surprising that an experience like this would send Tabitha’s sex drive into hibernation. She had just gone through a serious trauma – both physical and psychological. Something like that is definitely going to slam on the brakes. And Tabitha herself would acknowledge that sex was not exactly a priority in those early weeks.

But on top of her lost libido, she had also lost sensation in her genitals. And that presented a challenge because, as she already explained, having orgasms had always been her way of firing up her sex drive.

Tabitha Rayne 26:48

The lack of sensation worried me instantly. Because one of the big things is, I love orgasms. That's just like the basic element of me. I love an orgasm, Franki. And the thought of that going… because because I'm also a catastrophist, and an end of, you know, the worst case scenario, my brain will jump to that eventually. So, no, my brain didn't say give it time, give it time, it's going to be fine. You've just had an accident, it was pretty heavy. You've seen the dent on your tank. You know, that was a big hit. Give yourself time. No, my brain went, I'll never have an orgasm ever again!! My career is over everything's gone down the panny! What we gonna do?! And also, I was pan... I think I was in panic mode. Like I kind of felt like, you know, my hand may or may not recover. But if I can't have an orgasm again, how am I gonna work in the sex industry? It was kind of like my brain just having a super catastrophic ending to this accident.

So that was something quite interesting and worrying for me. But because I also think feel that orgasms and libido are a thing that you do have to work on. And I really also believe that you can very easily slip into a life without them. And you can slip into a very satisfactory, functional life without them, you know, that's fine. But I just feel like there is an added dimension to being a human. 

Lucky for me, I work in this industry. So I'm actually forced most days to do something erotic, like work on something erotic, whether that's editing someone else's story, or writing an erotic blog, or you know, watching a porno film to do the SEO for, you know, I'm forced to have that in my life. And I wonder, sometimes I feel like that's a blessing because it means that it's at the forefront. So it's easier, it's a lot easier for me to address my lack of libido and lack of sexual abundance, if you like, it’s much easier for me to explore that, I think, than somebody who maybe isn't exposed to all those things everyday. So I do come to this as a compassion and understanding that I am in a unique and special situation within this field, within this realm of talking about the sexuality and libido. So if I find that difficult sometimes, then I can easily see how people can let their sense of sexual wonder disappear.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 29:36

We’re going to take a quick break now but stay with me because when we come back we’re going to hear more from Tabitha about how she did manage to recover her libido. Back in a tick.

[AD BREAK]

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 29:49

The Second Circle Series 4 is sponsored by iPlaySafe

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Franki Cookney [voiceover] 30:14

This episode of The Second Circle is also sponsored by The Pleasure Garden

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In The Pleasure Garden, pleasure is important – well, it is right there is in the name – that’s why they carefully choose every product they sell, stocking the highest quality, body-safe sex toys around. 

Every order is shipped in discreet packaging and UK postage is free when you spend £50. Second Circle listeners can also get a 10% discount on any order with the offer code BADSEX. Shop now at pleasuregardenshop.co.uk 

[END OF AD BREAK]

Franki Cookney 31:01

I think that's really interesting what you said about sort of using pleasure to kickstart your libido again, I think, like you said, a lot of people wouldn't think of it working that way around with they. It's almost like you're sort of reminding your body, hey, it feels good to feel good, right? Like, maybe this is the thing we should want and seek more often. But then I'm just interested to know how that works for you. In reality, do you sort of have to be like, right, come on, we're gonna do this. You're gonna you'll get into it once we're going, like, you know, what do you How does it work? It's a bit like going to the gym? In that situation where you're like, come on, it'll feel good once you're there.

Tabitha Rayne 31:38

That's a really interesting analogy, isn't it? Like, come on, you'll get the endorphins you'll feel good. you know, you're gonna unblock that thing, that frustration, or whatever it is you need to feel at that time you know, you're gonna do it. So just get your hand on your pants. Take one for the team you know, it's gonna work out alright in the end,

Franki Cookney 31:59

The team being who? You and your sex drive?

Tabitha Rayne 32:03

You, yourself and your sex drive. So, yeah, but it is such a strange psychological barrier as well like having feeling like your libido is low and forcing yourself to feels so counterintuitive. I mean, it really does. There’s so much in there and I can just completely understand why people can just let that go.

But I'm just going back to after the crash in the sense of panic, that I couldn't feel the sensation. I mean, I knew I wasn't feeling sexy. Like as I didn't want to have sex or have an orgasm. Like I kind of felt like I don't I'm not really feeling horny, which is fine. Understandable, but the lack of sensation did make me panic. 

And so everyone is saying, give yourself time, you know, it's only been a week it's only been two weeks only been three weeks. Give yourself time. It's only been four weeks. Give yourself time. It's only been five weeks. Come on, it's only been six weeks. And like, looking back now of course six weeks is nothing but when you're in it and panicking, it's stressful. 

Franki Cookney 33:36

So is that is that basically the the advice that you got was just give it time? Give it time?

Tabitha Rayne 33:31

Yeah, give it time. How much time how much time do you mean you know I'm not that much time left you know in terms of work every every orgasm counts now!

Franki Cookney 33:47

How long has it been now since the crash it's been three months, four months?

Tabitha Rayne 33:45

Coming up for three months. But the great news is Frankie, I just want to make sure that we get in somewhere. That one day I got the feeling back. I got the feeling back. It was about eight weeks in. And it was like, I was saying this in my tips like, if you do get the little feeling a little twinge you got oh, oh, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. That was Oh my god. Try and nurture that little tiny little ember, even even holding it in your mind that that happened. And you might not have a chance to deal with it or do anything more, but just acknowledge that you've had that little spark. And, oh, it's happened. I've got the little spark, I've got the spark. And then managed to hold on to it for long enough. But I put on a I put on a sexy movie, just to sort of get some visuals because reading the words, I couldn't concentrate on words, because usually I would read some erotica, or listen to erotica, but I couldn't concentrate on words. So I watched some visual erotica to try to kickstart it and I did get got a nice wee feeling. But using my non-dominant hand wasn't working out so well. So whilst nothing came of it, as it were, I got, I got that feeling. It was like, I got that swell of an intention, of potential pleasure. And so that was a big relief, just to even get that tiny, tiny, little, tiny little spark. And then I got and then at least I knew I've got something to work on. And it's not. And then when I did eventually did have an orgasm, like there was it was like, so cathartic, like the tears, the joy, the relief.

I wouldn't say it's really kickstarted my libido properly. Because I'm still needing to seek out external stimulation in terms of what I consume, erotically. 

Like, I might spot something that just will stimulate something that then happens makes me go Oh right, here we go. But like, it doesn't come spontaneously, just like all of a sudden, you've got wet panties and it’s like ‘Wahey let's go!’ It's like, there will be something that triggers it somewhere, like a smell or something I've noticed going on around me. That's just rung that bell for that split little second. And then I've sort of jumped on that. And then tried to ignite it and fanned the flames a little bit. Yeah, I'm not magically and sexually charged all the time. That's just not what it’s like at all. But yeah, but just recognising the little spark. And trying to make something of it.

Franki Cookney 36:23

That makes total sense to me. And I think what I'm hearing, which I think is quite inspiring is how much attention you're paying to yourself and to your body. How are you feeling now?

Tabitha Rayne 36:35

In the past week, I've managed to feel like my sex drive is coming back a little bit like I'm being able to, I'm getting that initial spark by myself. And it's coming and I'm, I'm feeling much, and feeling that libido will return. And I'm looking forward to some great shagging and great orgasms. But again, you know, it's a slow journey, and also and using masturbation as a way to help myself recover. It's been really, really important for me. And I know that some people might find masturbation within a relationship a little bit taboo or a little bit funny. And but I think it's important to know yourself, and know what you can manage and cope with. But I think the main reason I'm getting there is due to immersive been immersing myself in sexy stuff and erotic stuff and eroticism and not just sex, eroticism, but you know, like art and flavours and things that I knew build that in me, so I just feel really lucky that I've got the space to explore that. And then the knowledge that that's what I need to explore, if you know what I mean. So I feel very, very lucky.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 37:55

Obviously this is great news for Tabitha. Through a lot of hard work and nurturing the embers of her desire as she puts it, she has rediscovered her libido.

But she found it frustrating to be told, you just need to wait, give it time – and I totally get that frustration. It’s not that that wasn’t good advice, particularly after something as awful as a motorbike crash, but as she discovered, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to just sit about waiting for desire to pop up again out of nowhere, she had to actively engage with it. Her accident had removed all the power from her sexual accelerator, and put it all on the brake – and redressing that balance took work. 

I think a lot of us can learn something from Tabitha’s experience, even if you’re not dealing with a major trauma like an accident. Maybe you’re struggling with desire because, like Charlie and Ash, our fictional couple at the top of the episode, you’re in a long term relationship. 

This is really common. Research shows that many of us experience a drop off in spontaneous desire the longer a relationship goes on. There’s an old line, “Show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her.”

But, if we’re gonna get specific, evidence suggests it’s actually women who are more likely to get bored. Anthropologist Wednesday Martin wrote a whole book about how women more than men struggle with sexual monogamy. It’s called Untrue and I very much recommend it if that’s something you’re interested in learning more about. In the meantime, I went back to Karen Gurney to find out more about desire in long-term relationships.

Karen Gurney 39:40

One of the biggest challenges for desire, we know from sex research, is being in a long term relationship, or being in a monogamous long term relationship, particularly. And the reasons for that are multiple. The first is that what generally happens is that, and we see this more for women than men (but again, massive differences in gender is not binary), we see that women often tend to experience a bigger drop in spontaneous desire, when they have sex with the same person over and over again, we see that it can be easier for men to maintain desire for the same person and have higher levels of spontaneous desire, which is partially explained by sex hormones, like higher testosterone, for example. But we know it's not completely, because we see that in research with women with different levels of testosterone, it doesn't really stack up. 

So we know that that's a challenge, maintaining spontaneous desire for the same person, when you have sex over and over again. It's partly down to the lack of novelty, because our brains really like novelty, for sexual arousal, and they look for things and get excited by things that are a bit different. So if we're presented with something that's novel, we generally show more interest in it than something we've seen a million times. And that's a potential risk for all of our sex lives, we have sex with the same person. And it's amplified by our very cisheteronormative sexual scripts in society about what sex should look like. 

So in the book, I write a lot about how, if you ask people, they can pretty much describe a set menu of sex that starts with A and goes on to B, and then goes on to C. And it usually ends in vaginal, penetrative sex. And it often happens in the same way in the same order in the same place.

So one of the things that's really important to think about is novelty. And I think sometimes when we say the word novelty, people get a bit nervous that you're going to be talking about wearing wearing bunny ears. 

Franki Cookney 41:54

Yeah, you’ve got to get the handcuffs out. 

Karen Gurney 41:55

Exactly, and it's fine if that's what you want to do. Obviously, if that's your novelty, then great, but that's not the kind of novelty I'm talking about. I'm talking about people in relationships with the same person, getting typecast and typecasting each other into particular sexual moulds that are then very hard to break free of. So, for example, the novelty you might want in your sex life might be around sometimes you might want to be very assertive and dominant and aggressive sexually. Other times, you might want to be sensual, slow, gentle, subservient. There could be loads of different ways in which you want to express your sexuality across the, you know, the length of your relationship or your life; your sexuality is constantly evolving. And so if our sexual relationships can't evolve with it, we get typecast, we get stuck. And we get set into a particular character, by our partners, by ourselves, whereby our partner expects us to be a certain way sexually, because we're usually that way. And if we try and break free of that, they're like, Oh, what are you doing? This is not like you usually, and then that feels awkward and difficult. That can be easier with a new sexual partner. So we get to be free, we get to be who we want to be, we get to try out new ways. So novelty of who we are, novelty of the connection between us, novelty of how sex looks.

So that's one aspect. The second aspect is something I refer to as sexual currency. So something we see decline in people who've been with the same person for a long period of time, is the amount of sexual currency between them when they're not having sex. So I like to describe this as the sexual charge between you outside of sexual acts. So passionate, kissing, flirting, the looks, the innuendo, the texts that say what you'd like to do with someone, the the bum grabs, whatever it might be.

And it can be more important, the longer we're with someone, because we have all these other ways in which we start to see them. At the beginning, they were just a sexual object. And so we had all this high level of lust and not knowing them, and novelty and sexual currency. But over time, they might become a friend, or housemate, a co-parent. And so the ways in which we see them become diluted.

So typically, especially in the couples I work with, we tend to see a drop in sexual currency. So people stopped passionately kissing they only kiss when they're having sex, for example. And so you start to lose those triggers for desire. And we know that desire is really easily triggered, but not without sexual currency.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 44:31

What Karen is talking about here, about how the more you get to know each other and share your lives and responsibilities, the less exciting they seem, reminded me of that old expression, familiarity breeds contempt. OK, we’re obviously not talking about hating our partners. But what we do seem to be saying is that high levels of intimacy are not automatically conducive to high levels of sexy time.

I know, right? That seems pretty wild, pretty counter to the scripts we’ve been told to follow about monogamous relationships. 

This is precisely what psychotherapist Esther Perel explores in her bestselling book, Mating in Captivity. The book examines sex in committed couples and concludes that contrary to the modern romantic narrative, we can’t have it all! Security, togetherness, partnership, reliability - these things cannot coexist with rip-yer-clothes-off passion and spontaneous lust for one another.

I’ve thought about Mating in Captivity a lot since the pandemic started, especially during the lockdowns. One of the things I experienced with my husband and that I know a lot of people were experiencing with their partners was this feeling of being in each other's pockets. We were together ALL THE TIME. And neither of was going out and doing anything else with other people to bring back news and inspiration and ideas, it was just the same every day. So feeling horny for each other was… basically impossible.

Let’s go back to Karen Gurney again. 

Karen Gurney 46:21

So some wonderful research by colleagues in Canada, around relationship contexts that support desire, was their concept of self-expanding activities. So what they found is that if they compared groups of couples, couples who spent time together as usual, and couples who spent time doing novel, exciting, or challenging tasks together. So for example, this could be things like learning a new skill together, I don't know, say they went climbing together, or trying to cook a very difficult meal together where they had fun doing it, or planning, planning something that was like a long trip that required them working together on this task. Self-expanding activities showed an increase in desire within that couple context. So couples who spent time together as usual, didn't see that same increase. So it's important for us to notice that the time we spend together is quite important in setting the context for desire. But what was most interesting about that research, I thought, especially for thinking about parents and new parents, particularly, is that the more time-poor, the couple were, the more impact self-expanding activities had. So certainly, if you think about people with busy lives, busy jobs, whether it's dogs or children, whatever it is that kind of keeps them busy, self-expanding activities are good for your sex life. So thinking about how you can break out of the mould of how you spend time together, and if it's Netflix, on the sofa every night, and that's great. But maybe once a week, once a fortnight, once a month, you make time to think about what can we do together, that pushes us both out of our comfort zone, where we have fun, where we connect where we feel like we've learned something new together. 

Franki Cookney 48:15

I wonder whether one of the obstacles here is feeling like your partner ought to be enough, right? 

Karen Gurney 48:24

Absolutely. There are so many societal myths about sex in long term relationships that perpetuate this. So the idea that monogamy is natural and easy? That myth makes people feel as though they should always feel desire for their sexual partner because they had it in the beginning. And they should be able to do long term monogamy and keep sexual desire for the same person. It's just not backed up by science. So if you're planning to have sex with the same person for a long time, without intentional action, for most people desire will decline and sex will become tricky. It requires nurturing, it requires thought. So the idea that you shouldn't have to work at it, that it should just be present as a drive, and that if you're attracted to them, you should just easily be able to get in the gear for sex, it just doesn't hold up. And that's partly why I wrote the book, because it frustrates me so much that how we understand sexual desire in sex therapy, and sex science isn't at all translated in how people talk about and understand desire in society. And it causes so many problems, because it's quite freeing to understand that you're in complete control of how much your desire can feature in your life.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 49:38

One of the reasons it matters to understand how our desire works is that it helps us identify what we want from sex, what we need from our sexual relationships in order to feel curious, excited, responsive, fulfilled. And identifying those things and knowing how to achieve them is part of what keeps desire coming back, it’s what keeps us incentivised! You heard Karen talking about this at the very start of the episode. Here’s the rest of what she said:

Karen Gurney 50:05

I think I'd like people to think about the outcome of acting on desire or being sexual with someone else. And how important that outcome is, in terms of incentivizing us to feel like sex again in the future. Because we know that desire is more of an emotion or a motivation, we have to be incentivized to do it. So we might have the thoughts, the threshold thoughts we talked about. But it has to be rewarding enough for us to want to do it. And there isn't enough attention paid, in my opinion, to the gender politics, and how people have sex, to think about the reward element of sex for a lot of people. So sex that’s lacking in novelty, sex that’s lacking in pleasure, sex that feels emotionally unrewarding, for whatever reason, it's actually going to reduce desire over time. So having lots of bad sex, it doesn't matter how often you're having it. If it's sex that doesn't meet your conditions for good sex, sex that’s not life affirming, if it's sex, where you don't feel connected, you don't get pleasure, it will actually disincentivize you over time. And I think we don't talk enough about that. You know, we talk a lot about the orgasm gap in kind of sex science circles and sex journalism. But I'm not sure that really translates yet to how people have sex. And a lot of people are having sex that meets someone else's needs before it meets their own. And that is a disincentive for desire.

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 52:46

Up til now, we’ve mostly been discussing desire as something we want to experience in our romantic relationships. For those of us who are interested in sex, desire feels important. When it’s lacking, we worry. We want to know how to get it back. And that’s understandable. Hopefully some of what we’ve heard in this episode can help. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s also very normal to not want sex. 

Sex is not a drive. On a fundamental level, we can live without it. And lots of people do. One of those is Sarah. Sarah is on the asexual spectrum. She rarely experiences sexual desire and when she does it tends to only be with people she knows very well. 

I asked her to tell me a bit more about how she came to a place of understanding about her lack of interest in sex.

Sarah 52:35

I definitely had a lot of thoughts about whether I or not I had a sex drive through, probably all the way up til I was about 23, before I had any kind of clarity about it. Before then, I would say my sexual relationship history was very blank, very blank slate, I didn't really date very much. Growing up, I remember, I was called picky a lot by a lot of people. 

I think, my figuring out whether I had a sex drive, and figuring out what my sexuality was kind of interlinked a lot. I remember, I think when I was about 18, or 19, I had a conversation with my mum, where I said something about, I don't feel comfortable when boys want to touch me or be close to me. And I remember she didn't really have anything to say back to that. I think maybe she thought of it as like a trauma response, maybe something had happened. And she asked me and I went, Nothing's happened. And that's kind of the point. I don't want anything to happen. I don't know why I don't want anything to happen. 

I joined the LGBTQ society at uni after that. And I think I was kind of waiting at that point going, Okay, now I figured out my sexuality, I'm at least not straight, maybe gay, maybe bi, but at least now women are involved in the situation, I'll probably be sexually attracted to them. And then I remember I was drawn to more women, and I definitely was attracted to them. But I never felt what people said they felt when they felt sex drive, like I didn't want to jump anyone, or like rip their clothes off, I always thought, I just want to, like, have a really good hug, or like, I want to kiss that person, and then stop. 

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 54:14

Like many of us, Sarah used those early years at university to experiment. One time she went to a party with the express aim of hooking up with a guy to find out what it was like. Afterwards, she said, she just felt kind of… meh. It wasn’t awful, she said, but she certainly didn’t feel like it was an experience she wanted to repeat. But, she reasoned, perhaps it will be different with women. But after some more experimentation she was forced to conclude that it was not all that different with women. 

So… if it wasn’t her sexual orientation, it kinda seemed like maybe she just wasn’t into sex. Confused and deflated, she decided to take a break from dating.

Sarah 55:02

So after those experiences, I kind of took a bit of a big step back because I just had a lot of negative emotions from both of those situations. And I was like, I need to figure out a bit more about myself. 

I went on to AVEN, the forum online, Asexuality Visibility Education Network, I think it stands for. And I started getting involved talking to this bunch of people who didn't really live anywhere near me, but we all kind of had a similar set of experiences. And we ended up meeting up in Rochester as a group, just to have like a drink and a chat. And ended up, I think, going on a couple of dates with one of the girls from that group. But didn't really it didn't really go anywhere. But I think I started having a more mature mindset towards how I would then try and start a relationship. I would be like, I need to get to know someone first, I need physical attraction to not be the most important starting point.

And then the pandemic hit. And that kind of took dating off the table for a while completely. But also, I think it kind of helped because it pulled everything back to, the only way you can meet someone is by talking online, or through a dating app. So there's no way you can like, have sex with someone first or kiss someone before you find out anything else about them. Or at least unless you break a couple of rules. Yeah, so I put all my energy into dating apps and talking to people first and seeing if I had a connection to them. And and that eventually led to meeting or swiping right on the girl who eventually became my girlfriend.

We didn't really say anything about asexuality to each other at the beginning. That actually took a long time to come up. I think, oddly enough, Tik Tok kind of helped us have the actual conversation, because her Tik Tok reel, started pulling up asexual videos. And I think she felt like she connected with a couple of them specifically. And then she sent them to me just saying, This is me. And I was watching them going, like, Yeah, I kind of think that's me, too. Like that reflects my experiences. And then it just started off this really big long conversation about how you both felt that to either of us, sex wasn't that important in our relationship? We had a lot more, despite that. And we've been saying a number of times, since then, if either of us completely take sex off the table and said, You know what, I never want to have sex again. The other one will be like, that's fine. I still want to be with you. Our relationship is much more important than having sex. 

I think it can, with like sexual desire can come in waves and go in waves. Whether or not you're anywhere on the asexual spectrum, or you define yourself as sexual. Like, even personally, I have definitely felt attracted to my girlfriend. I've definitely wanted to have sex with her and I've definitely enjoyed it. But equally, there's months between sometimes where we've just got a lot on or we're tired or we just don't want to and that's fine. Like, it doesn't mean that there's any less, like, our relationship is any less, or any less strong, and we're any less close. I think it can be a way to feel close to your partner. But it doesn't need to be the way. We frame it like, your relationship is a house and sex is the bathroom. And if you get rid of the bathroom, I mean, technically you can live in the house, but it will be awkward and frustrating. And you want the bathroom back at some point. Whereas it is more of like a conservatory. Like it's nice to have is pretty you enjoy it. But if you got rid of you conservatory you still have the rest of the house like it'd still be a nice house.

Franki Cookney 58:30

Is there anything you wish more people knew about low desire in the asexual spectrum?

Sarah 58:35

I mean, there's lots of things I think I wish more people knew about low desire and asexuality generally. But mainly that it doesn't mean something's wrong with you, if you don't feel like you fit into this box of sort of standard, normal, sexual attraction. Because I don't think we should have a default normal anything, especially when it comes to sexual attraction. I don't think it really exists. I think we just see the loudest thing, brightest thing in the room and go, That must be the normal one, because I see it clearly, when I don't see all these other things (regularly, at least). And that there is a community for everyone. But yeah, I think basically just try not to think, am I normal? Or am I not normal? Try to think there isn't a normal? And I’m me, and I'm fine. And I'll figure it out?

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 59:22

“There isn’t a normal”. If I had to sum up this series in one sentence, it would probably be that! It seems to me that so much of our bad sex comes down to the fact that we’re just not doing what works for us. Instead we contort ourselves emotionally (and let’s be honest, sometimes physically) to fit a faulty narrative.

It’s my great hope that, through the subjects we’ve explored and the stories we’ve heard in this series, we can start to interrogate our relationship with sex and figure out what we really want. 

But it doesn’t end there, I’m afraid. Because then… we have to be able to communicate it. And that is no easy feat.

[THEME MUSIC]

Hannah Witton 1:00:17

I think it's hard to talk about sex, because of all of that stuff we've talked about in terms of just like, the fair the lack of education. And but then, ultimately, like on a kind of human level, I think it's like our fear of rejection, our fear of like putting ourselves out there and saying to somebody, this is me, please be kind. 

Franki Cookney [voiceover] 1:00:40

Oh god yeah. I will put my hand up right now and say: I, Franki Cookney, am terrified of rejection. The question is how do we accept this and move on… because we have to if we want to get better at talking about sex. Come back and join me next week for the final episode of BAD SEX.

If you’re enjoying this series, or you have thoughts you want to share, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at secondcirclepodcast@gmail.com or - even better - send me a voicenote. I do love a good voicenote. Go to speakpipe.com/TheSecondCircle to record one now. 

I know there’s only one episode left but do still go ahead and smash that subscribe button! And don’t forget to leave a review, it really helps spread the word and bring in more listeners. I’ll see you back here next time for more BAD SEX.

The Second Circle is produced and hosted by me, Franki Cookney. My audio producer for this series was Anouszka Tate. My editors on this episode was Lucy Douglas and Rob Davies.

I could not have made this series without the incredible support of those who donated to my crowdfunder. You are a bunch of bloody legends. In particular I’d like to thank Rochelle Dancel, Rachel Wheeley, Christine Woolgar, Anna Richards, Jeegar Kakkad, Quinn Rhodes, Simon Eves, Clíodna Shanahan, Paul Nixon, Tabitha Rayne, John Beisley, David Carroll, Douglas Greenshields, Tun Ewald, Jack Holloway, Laura Hunter-Thomas, Olivia Savory and David Kreysa. Thank you for being part of this.

[ENDS]

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