"They came up with what's known as the four-stage model, which was that the body gets aroused, you hit a plateau, you have an orgasm, you go back down to baseline, says Dr Angela Wright, a GP and clinical sexologist based in Yorkshire. But what's interesting about that is there's nothing about actually wanting sex. It was like it just fell from the sky, rather than that there was any kind of desire that went along with the process."
"And what we see, typically, is that in male bodies, desire is usually experienced more like hunger; but in female bodies, especially in longer-term relationships, 75% of the time it's more like walking into the supermarket, smelling bread and realising you want to eat. To put it another way, part of our desire seems to be spontaneous and another part responds to environmental cues, some of which we respond to because we associate them with the memory of a reward."
Masters and Johnson developed a four-stage model of sexual response: arousal, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, which described physiological changes but did not account for sexual desire. Later models distinguish desire from arousal and identify spontaneous versus responsive desire. In male bodies desire often resembles hunger, while in many female bodies, especially in long-term relationships, desire commonly arises responsively to environmental cues. Desire is influenced by hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen but is substantially shaped by behaviour and learned associations. Sensory signals from sight, touch, memory, fantasy, and emotional connection engage the limbic system and hypothalamus and travel through the nervous system to produce bodily arousal.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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