When Your Genitals Don’t Do What Your Brain Expects
A miscommunication below the belt

If you’ve ever read steamy romance novels or watched pornography, you’ve probably come to assume that genital arousal equals mental arousal. If a man wants sex, he gets hard; if a woman wants sex, she gets wet — right? Wrong. Researchers of human sexuality have performed studies on sexual arousal and genital response, and they discovered something called “arousal non-concordance.”
Arousal non-concordance describes what happens when your mental arousal doesn’t match your genital response. In other words, you’re mentally ready for sex, but your genitals aren’t. For example, a man who desperately wants to have sex struggles to get or maintain an erection, or a woman is intensely aroused but discovers that her genitals aren’t producing any or enough lubrication. Non-concordance can also happen the other way around. A man can become erect even when not aroused, and a woman can get wet even when sex is the last thing on her mind.
A 2009 study conducted by researchers Kelly Suschinsky, Martin Lalumière, and Meredith Chivers found that men experience an approximately 50-percent overlap between their genital response and their reported arousal. That means 50 percent of the time, a man’s mental arousal doesn’t align with his genital response. The difference is even more significant with women. The study showed a 10-percent overlap, which means that 90 percent of the time, a woman’s response doesn’t match her arousal.
In her book Come as You Are, acclaimed author and sex researcher Emily Nagoski lists the many ways in which our misguided beliefs about non-concordance and “proper” genital response are deeply harmful. In a culture that equates genital response with arousal, many people feel broken or ashamed when they experience non-concordance.
Moments of erectile dysfunction are extremely distressing for many men: they may feel embarrassed for their perceived failure to get or maintain an erection. Women also experience a similar form of shame. In many erotic novels or films, wetness is used to measure a woman’s arousal. If a woman experiencing arousal non-concordance fails to produce genital lubrication even when she’s turned on, she may feel ashamed that her body fails to perform in the same way that female bodies do in media depictions.
Also, her partner may believe that they failed to arouse her, causing them to feel sexually inadequate. All of these different experiences of shame as a result of cultural misunderstandings about arousal non-concordance can lead to sexual dysfunction and dissatisfaction.
There’s also a more dangerous consequence of a societal lack of awareness about arousal non-concordance. “If we persist in the false belief that women’s genital response reflects what they ‘really’ want or like, then we have to conclude that if their genitals respond during a sexual assault, it means they ‘really’ wanted or liked the assault. Which isn’t just nuts, it’s dangerous,” Nagoski warns. That kind of reasoning threatens to discredit a person’s account of their traumatic experience in favor of relying on their uncontrollable, unreliable, biological responses.
Luckily, the solution to arousal non-concordance is often quite simple. Modern medicine has provided men who struggle to get or maintain an erection with a vast array of pharmaceutical treatments, such as Viagra. The solution is even more straightforward for women. A small amount of store-bought lubricant is usually sufficient when a woman’s genitals fail to produce enough natural lubrication.
Arousal non-concordance, although commonly misunderstood, is easily addressed with open communication. If more people were aware of the normalcy of arousal non-concordance, their sexual lives could be vastly improved, and assault victims’ experiences would be taken more seriously.