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The Story With Its Foot on the Brake

On why more doesn’t fix low desire, what the gas pedal and brake of the dual control model actually explain, and why a sexual wellness trade show turned out to be full of people asking existential questions.

Summary

In session, I sometimes ask whether someone has tried something. A lubricant. A toy. An article of clothing they would have to carry to a register. The answer often arrives before the question has finished landing, and it arrives in multiples. No. No, no. Not for me.

One no is information. Four in a row is a position being defended. A reaction that fast is rarely about the object; it is about what the object would require. And what people describe when I ask is never the toy. It is the walk across the store, the browser history, the face they imagine making while handing the bag to their spouse.

You could call that squeamishness. You could call it modesty, or low libido, or a mismatch in wanting. None of those names survive contact with the material, because each locates the trouble in the appetite. The trouble sits upstream of appetite. Somewhere between the wanting and the reaching, a story gets there first: one about what kind of person wants this, and what wanting would prove about them.

The Competitor Nobody Names

Earlier this month I gave a talk at Stimulate, the sexual wellness symposium and trade show that runs here in Nashville: retailers, manufacturers, designers, and the buyers who decide what earns shelf space. My subject was the philosophy of pleasure, which is not a standard agenda item at a business-to-business event. I pitched it expecting to be declined, on the theory that a proposal far enough outside the box occasionally lands because of how far outside it is.

It landed on the main exhibit floor, in the middle of the noise, delivered through silent disco headphones. Everyone in the room could hear me perfectly. I could hear nothing but the inside of my own skull. A crowd of strangers in a loud hall, having a conversation about desire that was inaudible from three feet away. I am not sure the subject has been staged more accurately.

The argument I brought them was this. Every brand names a competitor, and in this industry the named competitor is almost always another store, another site, another product line. The real one never appears in the deck. It is the story the customer is already carrying about what it means to want, and what it means to like pleasure at all. That story keeps a person off the website and out of the shop, and no amount of paid acquisition touches it.

Gas Pedal, Brake

Regular listeners have heard me on gas pedals and brakes before. The research Emily Nagoski draws on suggests that most people who arrive with a desire problem arrive convinced the gas pedal is broken, that there is not enough stoking the fire. What that research found, as she reports it, is that this is rarely the case. Far more often something is standing on the brake. Anxiety. Stress. A belief that wanting something will cost you your standing in this life or the next.

Which puts an entire industry in an awkward position, because the industry is organized around more. More sex, more pleasure, more orgasms, more. All of it lovely, and all of it useless if the parking brake is down to the floorboards. You can add horsepower for years. The car does not move. So I left the room with an audit: what proportion of your marketing aims at somebody’s gas pedal, and what proportion helps a person get a foot off the brake?

Preference or Prohibition

Alivia heard the clinical version underneath the business version immediately, and named it: there is a story that has its foot on the brakes. The refusal that comes back in my office rarely takes the shape of I don’t want to. It takes the shape of I couldn’t.

The two sound nothing alike once you know to listen. A preference has a lightness to it. It comes straight off the shoulder — I’ve thought about it, it doesn’t do much for me. Nothing is at stake, so nothing needs defending. A prohibition arrives faster, louder, in multiples, armored because it is protecting a claim about the person rather than a claim about the product.

People are allowed preferences. But when a decline carries a verdict underneath it, treating that verdict as a taste is a category error, and both the market and most partners make it constantly. The clearest example at the show was age: more products designed for older bodies, more language admitting that sexuality does not expire on a schedule. Even so, you can lengthen the runway as far as the property line, and if the message underneath stays where it is, the plane never leaves the ground.

What the Room Turned Out to Want

The part I did not anticipate happened in the aisles, where somebody asks what you do. I would say I host a podcast about meaning and desire and the messy business of being human, and faces would change. What came back, more than once, was some version of you’re not just talking about sex in an insert-tab-A-into-slot-B kind of way. Said with relief, by people whose inventory is tab A and slot B.

Alivia’s favorite part of the event was the same finding through a different door. She kept meeting designers whose conversations were never only about margin, who wanted to know in granular and slightly obsessive detail what it felt like to use the thing they had made — whether the experience was good, rather than whether it moved units. Nearly everyone there, she said afterward, seemed to be working from an existential lens of their own, which is not a sentence anyone expects to write about an exhibition hall.

The appetite for depth turns out to stand on both sides of the counter: the customer who cannot explain why the no came out so fast, and the manufacturer who cannot say in a product description what they actually care about.

The night before we recorded, we had dinner with Raven O’Rourke, a friend, sex therapist, and former guest, and the conversation went where it reliably goes with her: how existential sex is, how existential death is, and how thoroughly the two are wound around each other. Every reason to reach for someone and every reason not to runs through the same fact of being a body that ends. Rollo May spent a career there. Yalom built a practice on it. And I still do not understand how that conversation is not happening all over the place.

The Audit, for People Who Do Not Run a Store

The retailers got a version of this one. Here is yours.

• When you last declined something erotic, did the no come off your shoulder, or did it need repeating?
• What would you have to walk past, carry, or explain for the answer to be yes?
• Whose face appears when you picture being seen wanting it?
• How much of your effort this year went toward wanting more, and how much toward making it permissible to want at all?

What do you want is the wrong question to leave you with. It is answerable, and people produce an answer under mild social pressure every day. Here is the harder one. What would you have to believe about yourself for the answer to be yes, and who handed you the belief you have been using instead?

Moments Worth Noting

It’s actually the story that their customer is carrying in their head about what it means to want.

There’s a story that has its foot on the brakes. — Dr. Alivia Stehlik

It doesn’t matter how much more people throw at you.

It was never a conversation just about profit and making money. — Dr. Alivia Stehlik

I don’t know how we’re not having that conversation just all over the place.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Opening
• 02:27 — What a sexual wellness symposium actually is
• 04:57 — Sexuality does not expire on a schedule
• 06:47 — From public accounting to sex therapy
• 09:21 — The philosophy of pleasure, and the Hail Mary pitch
• 11:02 — Silent disco headphones on the exhibit floor
• 15:43 — The competitor nobody names
• 17:55 — Why therapists make useful consultants
• 20:40 — Gas pedals, brakes, and the dual control model
• 23:04 — The audit
• 23:18 — Preference or prohibition
• 25:11 — Three reactions in the room
• 29:41 — Tab A into slot B, and the appetite for depth
• 31:38 — Everyone there had an existential lens
• 32:29 — Designers who care how it feels to use the thing
• 34:35 — Closing

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The Receipts

• Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are — the gas pedal and brake framing referenced on tape.
• The dual control model of sexual response — Erick Janssen and John Bancroft, Kinsey Institute. Offered as general background on where the accelerator/inhibition framework originates; not discussed on air.
• Rollo May, Love and Will — on the distance between wish, will, and permission. Named here as background.
• Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy — on death as the organizing anxiety underneath most others. Background reading for the closing conversation.
• Stimulate Sexual Wellness Symposium & Trade Show, Nashville — now in its fourth year, founded and organized by Nicole Leinbach Hoffman.
• Raven O’Rourke — friend of the show and former guest. Listen to her episode!
• Dr. Alivia Stehlik — soliloquiephysio.co, @aliviastehlikpt

Reignite Desire

If this episode located something in you and you would rather not leave it at the level of noticing, the Reignite Desire masterclass on August 29 is where the work of getting a foot off the brake actually gets taught. Registration is open now.

Register → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/desire

Keywords: Existential Sex Therapy / Desire / Sexual Wellness / Shame and Sexuality