Arousal may be spontaneous, or arise in response to sensory stimulation, memory, fantasy or emotional connection. Here’s how to understand the differences
What turns you on? Depending on the person, the answer to that question will vary wildly. But what is really going on under the, ahem, hood when we start to get in the mood?
The first scientists to really take the physiology of sex seriously – or at least break the taboos around talking about it – were William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sexologists who began their studies in the 1950s (and got married in 1971). “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. So subsequent models have asked: what is it that makes humans want to have sex? 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.”
