by William S. Dean
(10/11/06)
The new buzz phrase sex therapists appear to have coined is called "desire discrepancy." That's when one partner's hormonal urges are mismatched with the other partner's, so they tell us. You know how it goes: you're horny; they're not, or vice versa. I suspect many of us have been in this state at one time or another. Probably anyone who's ever been in a non-deserted bar at last call, been a football or golf widow, or can recall those halcyon days when handholding and kissing never went any further has been a victim of desire discrepancy.
As a counter to the fundamentalist abstinence-only policy, the open sexuality community is becoming more and more conscious of a need for sexual balances between people of all persuasions. Tossing off the old Freudian theories of female hysteria and repressed Oedipal lust, the new generation of psychologists may be in danger of the two extremes of over-simplifying or over-complicating issues. That's always a danger when you're dealing with the fluctuating landscape of human sexual responses.
After all, we have a myriad of excuses why we're just not up to sex, don't we? We can blame politics, religion, work, the daily grind, the daily news, and, of course, that puzzle we all wear: the human body. Back in the day, the commonest and comic excuse seems to have been "Not tonight, I have a headache." While it may indeed be that everyone's body is unique along with their psyche, there is still a haze of mystery as to why some couples drift away from the coupling, why the inescapable urges that brought them into intimate contact in the first place cool in the familiarity of everyday life. The puzzle centers in our libidos, I suspect, which some sex therapists and doctors claim are hormonally driven.
Since that's the apparent culprit behind desire discrepancy, we may well ask, "What is a hormone exactly?" It stems from the Greek word meaning "to set in motion." That "motion," in this case, is getting your groove on, hooking up, doing the dirty deed. All multicellular organisms, including plants, produce hormones. We can be fairly secure in speculating that -- barring the phenomenal -- plants, fish, reptiles, and most mammals don't experience desire discrepancy, however. I can't imagine Mother Nature telling her flowers and trees "Yes, I know it's spring, but no sex."
I am not a hormonal specialist by any means. Nor do I lay claim to being Mr. Know-It-All when it comes to erotic desires and sexual fulfillment. But I am a lifelong student of human behavior and a sometimes prober of the human psyche and it appears to me that desire discrepancy is as much a psychological problem as a hormonal unbalance.
To maintain a healthy and positive sexual attitude and appetite, we have to shrug off a lot of excess and unnecessary psychological baggage. All through our lives, we're exposed to conflicting influences about sex and desire. Some people tell us one thing; others tell us the exact or a similar opposite. To those who become confused, it's easy to see that their desire discrepancy factor is going to become crucial and destructive. The simplistic way of looking at this is as if we have a committee in conflict inside our minds, each member wanting to rule what our body does at a given moment. The psychological part of our mind that governs our sexual feelings is called the libido. Now a lot of outside influences affect our libido which, most psychologists seem to agree, is pure desire. Say that with me: "pure desire." Let it linger in your mind awhile. When was the last time you experienced pure desire? When was the last time you reveled in the sheer non-other-influenced desire for sex?
Too often we let intruders in to our libido, perhaps barely aware of their invidious and insinuating influences. For every one of those influences that counter desire, there is at least one example -- historically -- of them having failed. If it's "over exhaustion" from hard work, then one cannot explain farmers' or miners' large families from a couple of centuries ago. These were people who normally worked not an eight hour day, but closer to twelve or more. And I'm not speaking just of the men either. The workloads of women were equally if not more grueling than their men folk's. While the procreative act may have been perfunctory, it nevertheless occurred.
Now let me tell you a curious secret which shouldn't be one: you are the shaper of your libido. You're the one who feeds your libido the fuel for desire. You -- and you alone -- are the one who can empower your libido, make it wax or wane like the moon. If you feed your libido nothing but images of perfect specimens you deem worthy of your desire, you might as well be starving it, because the opportunity of perfect specimens is going to be so rare as to be virtually non-existent. If you feed your libido a steady diet of negative sexual ideas, fears, guilts, and assorted "bad" influences, you cannot expect it to thrive. And you can safely bet, if that is the case for you, that desire discrepancy is going to rule your sex life.
People, as I said before, carry around remarkable psychological baggage that affects their libido. There are men who say, "Well, a blonde screwed me over badly once, so I can't fuck any blondes anymore." There are women who believe because they had one or two or seven bad relationships that they don't deserve a good one and will infest their libidos with such twisting guilt and self-fulfilling negativity that "desire discrepancy" may be a lifelong companion.
If it were not for these negative influences on our libido, we would retain "pure desire." That doesn't mean we'd all be sluts falling into and out of bed every few moments, but it does mean that we'd be freed of dishonesty about our sexual urges. We'd have shucked off the preventable "excuses" that widen the discrepancy between desire among partners and return, perhaps, to a more positive attitude about one of life's most pleasurable activities.
There's a famous, if now somewhat clichéd, scene in the film Network in which a frustrated and angry news anchor urges his viewers to go -- right now -- and stick their head out of the open window and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" That's the kind of catharsis you need to experience when those negative influences that invade your libido seem to have the upper hand. Whatever the psychological trauma, emotional upheaval, guilt-trip, or repressive element, you must weigh it against the pleasurable feelings of good, satisfying, pleasurable sex and desire and find that negative influence paltry and insignificant in comparison. Wax your libido and watch that sex discrepancy shrink to nothing.
