Understanding the Gas and Brake for Your Sexual Arousal
According to Dr. Emily Nagoski and many people who have read her book, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life, one of the most important things to know about your sexuality is that your body has mechanisms that accelerate or inhibit your sexual arousal and desire. To use Nagoski’s car model, we all have a gas pedal and a brake pedal for our sexual response.
Most of us are aware of when the gas pedal is pushed: the feelings of being aroused and desiring sex. Conversely, the brake pedal may be less obvious. It can feel like not being interested in sex, or not being into sex in that moment, or blaming ourselves because our body isn’t responding the way we think it should.
How easily our body presses the gas or brake varies wildly across different people. Understanding your levels of excitation (gas) and inhibition (brake) and what activates each one can improve your sex life.
Like the pedals in a car, our sexual gas and brake pedals are independent of one another. You can be driving very fast and slam on the brake. You could be pressing the gas and brake a little bit each at the same time, and not getting very far very quickly. Or you can have your foot firmly planted on the brake, not moving at all.
The Dual Control Model
The original conceptualization of sexual excitation and inhibition was theorized by Drs. John Bancroft and Erick Janssen in the 90s. They called the model the Dual Control Model, highlighting the two separate mechanisms controlling our sexual responses. You can assess your tendency towards excitation and inhibition on Emily Nagoski’s website where she has her own mini-versions of the surveys that assess sexual excitation and inhibition.
If you are high in excitation, you will endorse statements like, “When I think about someone I find sexually attractive, I easily get aroused.” My personal favourite from the original scale is, “Sometimes just lying in the sun sexually arouses me.” Personally, I hate the sun and heat, so that is a strong no from me!
If you are high in inhibition, you will endorse statements like “If I am worried about taking too long to have an orgasm, this can interfere with my arousal,” which gets at performance-related inhibitors. The other category of inhibitors is consequence-related inhibitors, like worrying the kids might hear or worrying about STIs. An example of a statement about this category is “If my partner does not want to use a condom, I am unlikely to stay aroused.”
Figuring out your sexual gas and brake
The key to understanding your unique sexual arousal and desire is to think about how high or low you are on both sexual excitation and inhibition. Many sexual problems are linked to too much brake and not enough gas. Of course, too much gas with no brake is a problem as well!
Are you able to get sexually excited relatively easily? If not, reflect on the times when you do get particularly aroused. What are the types of things that can press your gas pedal? Can you bring more of that into your life?
Is your body too heavy on the brake? What are the things that are leading you to press the brake? Do you not trust your partner? Do you feel self-conscious about your body during sex? Do you have no privacy for sex? Are you worried about pregnancy or STIs?
Identifying what presses your brake and how easily your brake is pressed can help you figure out what you need sexually. It could be the brake is telling you something important, like you need a different partner that you can trust. Your brake could be activated by your own thoughts (e.g., does my body look ok), something your partner does (e.g., touching you in a way that upsets you), or something in your environment (e.g., knowing your kids or roommates are in the next room).
Knowing your brake-activation triggers can help you figure out how to have sex in ways that reduce how much the brake is activated. You can learn to prevent your body from hitting the brake when you want to have your foot on the gas. Alternatively, you can learn when to respect that your body is hitting the brake for a reason.
Overall, anything that increases your self-knowledge around sexuality can contribute to enhancing your sexual experiences. I am still learning new things about my sexuality as a 40-year-old sex educator. I hope you, too, can be a life-long learner about your sexuality.