Smart Sex, Smart Love with Dr Joe Kort

Dr. Adrienne Rowland on Why Sex Is Not a Drive

• Dr Joe Kort • Season 4 • Episode 22

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For many years, researchers categorized sex as a biological drive like thirst, hunger, sleep or temperature control. But the question lingered, “what if you don’t have sex? What will happen to you?” Unlike thirst or hunger, individuals will survive without sex, says Dr. Adrienne Rowland, an AASECT-certified sex therapist specializing in sexual health and LGBTQIA+ affirming care. During this Smart Sex, Smart Love podcast, she discusses the difference between spontaneous desire and responsive desire and why both are normal, how to manage desire discrepancies, and what to do about male patriarchy systems that remain present today.

 

“When I talk with couples, many still follow the traditional male patriarchy system: a man’s sexual desire is a woman’s responsibility,” Dr. Rowland finds. “In our patriarchal society, women often grow up learning that sex is not for them; it is their role to pleasure their male partner. It is important to empower primarily women to feel confident with their body autonomy, and to not feel guilty for saying ‘no’ to a sexual encounter they don’t want,” she asserts.

 

“We are responsible for our own pleasure. Normalize it. Negotiate your desires, and the result will be very freeing,” Dr. Rowland announces. “No one should give permission to explore their own pleasure.”

JOE KORT:

Welcome to Smart sex, smart love, where talking about sex goes beyond the taboo and talking about love goes beyond the honeymoon. My guest today is Dr Adrian Rowland, a licensed Master's social worker, asex certified sex therapist, sex therapist, supervisor with a doctorate in clinical sexology and an a sec approved continuing educator. Provider. Dr rowland's doctoral project focused on creating a gender affirming care curriculum for medical providers to improve knowledge and reduce bias. She also created standards for queer affirmative care as well as a comprehensive resource guide for a source, web based network that enables service agencies to coordinate care for residents. Dr Roland specializes in sexual health and LGBTQ, plus affirming care, offering therapy, supervision, teaching and consulting. Today, she's going to be talking to us on the subject of sex is not a drive. We often say sex drive, but it's really not a drive. And she's going to explain, welcome Adrienne, Hi, Joe. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure to have you. I've known you for quite a while, and I love your work. And I mean, I'm reading this, you've done so much more than when I first met you. It's incredible. Well, you were my supervisor for my asect sex therapy certification, which was Gus 2017 now, wow, yeah, so we, we did this through covid too. Yeah, yeah, wow. Well, you're a gem in the field. I've always felt that way, and I've come to you for things, and you were so good with the paperwork. Thank you. I hate paperwork, so that too. My pleasure. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right. Well, let's get right into it about sex not being a drive. You say it's a biological drive? No, it's not a biological drive like hunger or sleep. We explain this, sure. So we think about drive like a mechanism to help an organism create a healthy baseline. So if you think about thirst, hunger, sleep, temperature, control, all of those things our body needs to do to survive, oftentimes or for a long time, researchers thought sex was also a drive, because there was a compulsion to have sex, and there was a need or a desire to have sex, and so they thought it was one of the drives. But then they found, well, what happens if somebody doesn't have sex? They certainly don't die. It

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

might be uncomfortable, they might not enjoy it, but they certainly don't die like they would die if they don't drink or eat food or regulate their temperature or sleep, one of the reasons why it has been viewed as a drive for so long is because of something called spontaneous desire, which we will talk more about. But about 70% of men experience spontaneous desire, and most research is done on men has been historically and so, because someone would experience spontaneous desire that so they're like, Oh, this is a drive. Because spontaneous desire means you experience arousal, and then are you sorry? You experience desire like, oh, I want to have sex. And you experience arousal right away, like maybe genital arousal, or in your mind, you know you have this desire for sex, and because, mainly men, not always, but about 70% of men experience this spontaneous desire. They viewed it more as a drive, but we now know that you, like I said, you don't die if you don't have sex. And there is something called responsive desire, which is less about arousal, but more about getting to, kind of like coming to the idea of, Hmm, do I want to have sex? I love food as a metaphor, so I use, like a donut shop. So you can go, you can say, Oh, I saw this donut on a TV commercial. It looked pretty interesting. I go to the donut shop, I look at the sign, and I'm like, Oh, that looks pretty nice. I maybe I smell the bakery, and I'm like, Noah, smells pretty good. But nothing's really stirring in me yet. I'm just curious. So maybe I go in, I take a look at the counter or what's behind the glass, and like, that looks like a pretty interesting donut. I'll try it all the while. I'm curious. I might be willing, but again, like my mouth isn't watering, I'm not My stomach's not rumbling, but maybe once I take a couple bites of the donut and I'm like, Oh, now that's a tasty donut. I want more. That's maybe when arousal in for a donut may come. And so it might be after I might experience desire, after arousal. So it might be in the midst of in the context of sex, of beginning to have sex, beginning to be sexual, that the someone who has responsive desire might. Might say, like, I'm into this. I want to keep doing this. This is a this is good I'm experiencing. And then I might even experience genital result, arousal as a result. If that makes sense, it doesn't

JOE KORT:

make sense. So let me, let me put in terms that I can understand for myself. So I watch, you know, a lot of tick tock, and I'll see creators who eat, and I don't know why, men or women, I love to watch the meat. And this one Creator, she goes to different places and and I watch her get the burger and hear the rapper and everything, and I'm like, Oh my God, that makes me so I feel hungry. But I'm like, Yeah, then I go to the next one. But you're saying that if I went to the actual place and ate the same thing she's eating, and I wasn't that hungry and I started eating it, then I would start to find myself hungry. The same is true for sex with responsive

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

sex. That yes, the same is true with responsive sex, but you might experience spontaneous desire if you are watching that person unwrap the burger and eat it, and your mouth starts watering and your stomach starts growling, that would be more of a spontaneous desire response, because you're the thought of it, the idea of it has you reacting, whereas more of a responsive arousal, you might have to actually be in, you know, eating the burger to be then like, yeah, that's a good burger. I want to keep eating this.

JOE KORT:

And isn't it true that women are more with responsive sex and men are more spontaneous? Is that

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

how it is. It's not a universal truth, right? But about 70% of men experience spontaneous desire, and about 15 to 30% of of women may experience more spontaneous arousal. Other than that, it's more responsive. And of course, if there's a guy out there who's saying like, Oh, that doesn't fit me at all, I have more of a responsive desire. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not a one is better than the other. They're just completely different and same. With a woman who's saying like, Oh my gosh, I think about sex. And, you know, have a general response and want sex all the time. I must be spontaneous or have a spontaneous desire style. There's nothing wrong with you. Doesn't mean that you're you're not doing your gender right.

JOE KORT:

And a lot of men do feel something's wrong with them if they own, if they have responsive over spontaneous, because the the vision of men is that we should we all are like that. We're all walking around wanting it all the time,

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

absolutely, absolutely. And that's just not that's not true. And context matters, right?

JOE KORT:

Yes, context matters. And I like what you're saying, because women will often say, too. And I'll tell women, as a sex therapist, even if you're not in the mood, you might try engaging in some sexual contact, and then you might find yourself a woman will say, then, I do find myself being in the mood like you just said about the

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

burger. Absolutely, absolutely. So it's not about forcing yourself to get in the mood, but do things that help put you in the right context. And maybe it's, you know, doing some grooming, maybe it's relaxation, maybe it's reading something erotic, or watching porn or or or non sexual touch to kind of, you know, like massage or touch, you know, back rubs or things like that, or hugging, snuggling, kissing, those things can lead up to sex that can help increase arousal.

JOE KORT:

Yeah, and just for the sake of outer course, shout out those things can just be sexual in and of themselves without

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

absolutely penetration, right? Absolutely and, you know, historically or anecdotal, I don't know men often, I don't want to stereotype, but some men often skip over some of those outer course things or what they would consider as, quote, foreplay, I like to say it's all play. It's not that just penetration is what is sex, right? And so if that is what someone needs to help them, you know, because they have more of a responsive arousal or responsive desire style, they might be missing out on that because their partner or they may not even know that that's true for them, and they might be skipping that all together.

JOE KORT:

Yeah, right, that makes sense. Did you make up that all play? Because I want to borrow it, if

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

you don't mind. I think so. I mean, I don't know if I heard it somewhere or not. I just, I just said it, feel free. Because because

JOE KORT:

it counts for everything, right? It's out, of course, and inner cores and anything, right? Yes, absolutely, all right. So you describe sex as an incentive motivation system. What does this mean? Yeah.

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

So I get this from Emily nagaski. So if you're not familiar anyone out there, Emily nagoski wrote, come as you are, which I think is one of the most important books for anybody to read, regardless of your sex, because it gives so much needed research and information about AFAB assigned female at birth, bodies and how they operate. So she and I'm just going to read it because I don't want to mess it up. So she says an incentive most. Innovation system means that a person is being pulled by an attractive external stimulus instead of driven by an uncomfortable internal experience, like hunger, hunger or thirst. So if you think about like someone might be like, see something sexually stimulating, they think about something sexually stimulating or it's it's more external to them than feeling like your stomach rumble or your throat parched, where that is uncomfortable and you want to alleviate that. So sex is more about going towards something pleasurable, rather than doing something to avoid something uncomfortable. Does that make sense?

JOE KORT:

Oh, yeah. All right, thanks for clearing that up. So what about you say also that when you talk with couples about sex not being a drive, it typically is because of male patriarchy symptoms system like male patriarchy systems that assert that a man's sexual desire is the woman's responsibility. Will you talk about this? Too?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Sure. So again, this isn't exclusive to heterosexual relationships. However, it is seen often in heterosexual relationships, partly because we do live in a patriarchal society, and often religious systems elevate the patriarchy to view the man as kind of the most important entity, and women are very often in these societies taught that sex is not for them, if the end that they're not even sexual. I don't know how many clients I work with, how many women that I've worked with with who have been told, don't worry about sex. It's not for you. You're not It's not normal to want sex if you do like there's something really wrong with you. It's when they get, you know, slut shamed a lot. It's purity, purity culture, myth and things. And so they may grow up learning any kind of sexual desire that they may have, whether it's responsive or spontaneous, is wrong or deviant or evil, or that they just don't even acknowledge it. And so when they have sex with their partner, they it's just, really just for them, and it's their job. It's their obligation, whether they're, you know, willing or not. This is what you do for your husband. And so what perpetuates that is if, if people believe it is a drive, then they may feel like, well, this is a need I have, and so I need it to live. And you can't deny me that what I need to live, right? And so they may then be more manipulative or coercive or outright abusive to their partner, because they don't know that it's not a drive, and they they truly believe that they'll be harmed, or their harm will come to them if they don't have sex. Or they can say like, well, you owe me, because I need this, and that can be incredibly problematic.

JOE KORT:

Yep, I see the same thing in my office. I'm sure you do too, and then that's why you're talking about this. You know about this? How does this play out differently? Or does it play out differently with LGBTQ couples?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

I think it still plays out. It may play out a little bit differently in not so much of like gender roles, but when we see desire discrepancy in couples where one person has a has more interest in sex or wants to have sex more often than their partner, then being able to come together and cooperate to negotiate what that looks like the person who wants to have sex more often may look to their partner and say, You just You owe me. I'm you are responsible for my pleasure, and they may require or really push for that, especially in situations where people don't believe in masturbation, where they don't believe in experiencing pleasure for themselves, they may really look to their partner for that kind of of outlet. But in LGBTQ, I think it's mostly when there's desire discrepancy that we would see that happening, maybe less so than with a gendered as for gendered reasons,

JOE KORT:

yep, yep. And what I noticed from the gay male couples is when there's a desired discrepancy, we just say to each other, then go find it somewhere else. Go get your rocks off and come back to me, as long as I'm your primary. Not all gay couples, male couples, but often, right?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Yeah, and that, and that is often not negotiated in heterosexual couples. No at all where that could be a really valuable option, but when the higher desire couple like and how each person views their partner, right? So the person with lower desire may view their partner as hyper sexualized, a sex addict, which we know is not a thing. Mean and have a problem, and the higher drive, sorry, see, I even say it language, yeah, well, I mean, it's colloquial. I mean it's okay, it's okay to say it, as long as we know it's not real, like it's not, it's not, you know, because we're gonna say it. There are things that we say that we don't mean all the time. The a great example that even Emily Noah ski uses in her book is it's like an atheist saying, Thank God. It doesn't mean anything you know. So I think it's okay to say as long as like in our minds, we're like, okay, I know it's not a drive, but what I was saying for the person who experiences lower desire, or excuse me, the person who experiences higher desire, they may view their partner who has lower desire as cold, frigid, withholding and something wrong with them, right? And oftentimes, couples will come to therapy and say, fix my partner. My partner wants too much sex. My partner doesn't want sex enough. There's something wrong with them because they're different than me. Fix them,

JOE KORT:

which leads me to the next question is, how do you deal with that in your practice?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Yeah, I think through education, really, really being able to explore with them. What I just talked about with you, about the difference between spontaneous desire, responsive desire, normalizing that, that they're both normal and they're both okay, and that there's not a set amount of desire that is normal for a human being because we're so varied, and also being able to communicate about their wants and needs. And we know couples don't do this very well before they get married. We don't teach good sex ed in school, so we don't know about pleasure. We don't talk about before somebody gets married, or don't even have to be married, but just negotiating the relationship early on of like, what is what do you want sex to look like? So really being able to communicate about desires and wants, a lot of times I hear women like I mentioned before, they don't know what pleasure, what they experience, is pleasurable, because they've never really explored for themselves. They haven't felt like they've given themselves permission. Nobody else has given them permission to be sexual beings and so really encouraging folks within the couple to explore their own pleasure, because we are responsible for our own pleasure, and that's what I teach clients, too. It's not my partner's job to make me feel good, because there's so many factors that can get in the way. I mean, we could talk about this for hours. It's my it's my job to help to do things and ask for things that feel good to me. So really, being able to talk to couples about what feels good to them, and trying things out, and then if they need to make different arrangements in the relationship, like, how do they feel about if their partner says, You know what? Oh, you know what? Oh, you don't want to have sex tonight. Cool. I'm gonna go masturbate. Or maybe they negotiate an open relationship where somebody gets a sexual need met, or desire met outside of the relationship with consent, with, you know, agreement in the couple. But it really depends on what they're looking for and kind of what the dynamic is. So

JOE KORT:

I'm going to throw something your way, and want to get your thoughts on this, because I see this a lot in my practice. I'm sure you do too. So he might in many mixed gender couples, he might say, okay, you don't want sex, that's great. I'm going to go masturbate. I'm going to look at an Instagram account. I'm going to look at some erotic imagery. And she's not okay with that. Nope, nope. Not at all. Now that's cheating on me, so I'm not, I'm not going to be able to satisfy you, but you can't satisfy yourself either, especially in that way. What do you do?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

I empathize a lot with, you know, and we really talk about, I like to really hear from her where that's coming from. You know, what she's believing about that, because there's something going on for her that is that she's struggling with right, that she's that she's viewing it as cheating, or that she is imagining that he wants that whatever he's viewing more than he wants her. And so I really am normalize how the value of masturbation and how different it is from partnered sex, how it it does different things for us, like that. Didn't put that very well, how it accomplishes different goals than partnered sex. And then we talk about bodily autonomy, and we talk about how we don't get to tell our partner what to do with their own body. And we talk about, like, really being able to communicate about those needs, and where do you give so I'm hearing you say that sex is not available for you, know, for you, and masturbation is not available for him. Where's the cooperation? Because that's not like, how are you. Negotiating that in a way that feels okay to both you we're not going to get everything that we want, because that's not realistic in partnership. But where is that that give? But it really comes down to really addressing the fears that maybe the one partner has about you know that might be unrealistic or can be dispelled about masturbation and poor news.

JOE KORT:

I like what I thank you for this. That's helpful. I remember hearing this that somebody say, Well, I'm we're in a desire discrepancy relationship, which, by the way, most couples are. One wants it more than the other, and it can be at different extremes. And then you could go to another relationship, you could say, well, this isn't working out for me, and then you might be the higher one in this relationship, but the lower one in the next relationship, because you may be with somebody who has a higher desire, right?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Absolutely, it's all about perspective. It's about how you are comparing yourself to somebody else. And it is, you're right. It's very difficult to find people together that have very similar desire levels because we're all so varied, and if you can talk about that early on, if you can experience sex early on in the relationship, research shows that having sex before marriage is really helpful to the relationship. If you can talk about all of that openly, you might be able to deal with some of the pitfalls, or decide you get to a point of like, okay, maybe this relationship just isn't for me.

JOE KORT:

I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on partners sometimes having to be able to say no before they can say yes, yeah.

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

So something I didn't talk too much about is also what happens when some when it is believed that sex is a drive and one of the partners may be coercive or manipulative like you owe this to me. I need this a lot of times, the partner does not know how to say, no. They don't know because they haven't been taught about bodily autonomy, and that regardless of the relationship structure that they get to say no when it comes to their body. Does that mean that there aren't times when, if you're willing, if you're like, maybe I'm not really feeling it, but maybe I'll get into it, like we talked about earlier, that I could, we could start to do some things, and if I feel like I want to keep going, then I will. They don't know that they get to do that. And so oftentimes when I talk to to I hear this like people pleasing. And so I'll do a somatic exercise with them, where I say, every time I say yes. I want you to say no and I'll say yes in a lot of different ways, and their only job is to say no every time I say yes. And you would be amazed at how difficult and how cathartic that exercise is, because they learn, wow, I don't really say no anywhere in my life. I get taken advantage of. I'm a people pleaser. I you know, again, Emily nagaski talks about human giver syndrome, you know, I and it's often women. It's not always women, but often. And so just helping them learn to say no in small ways really helps them then be able to say, yes, I want this. So for for clients, where desire discrepancy is a big part of the issue, I take ask them to take sex off the table for a period of time completely so that there's no question. They can flirt, they can engage in other types of intimacy, and they don't even have to be stressed with oh gosh, is this going to lead to sex until they're ready to be able to reintegrate that and helping her be able to say, No, I don't want to do that, and I'm willing to do this is really empowering and powerful for the relationship

JOE KORT:

I love this. How is it somatic experiences, experiencing when it's a no, yes, back and forth. Can you explain that?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Yeah, so it's it's really interesting, just really being, encouraging somebody to listen to their body, what they're experiencing, and if I say in a variety of different ways. Like, just the word yes and you have to say no, just saying it, they start to feel things in their body. If it's not something that they're used to doing or they're comfortable doing, they might. I've had so many people cry not be able to do it. Like, just flat out refuse. And like, Nope, I can't say no, because there's just this feeling, this very real feeling of, I'm going to get in trouble, or it won't, it will be rejected, or it won't be respected. And a lot of that goes back to trauma and experiences that they've had earlier in their lives. And so it's really about what is going on in your body? What are you What are you feeling? And where so in sex therapy, I do a lot of somatic sensing to help, especially when people have had trauma and they have not been able to trust, you know, their body's response, really being able to work towards trusting that response. And we're getting kind of off track on that, but it's all related.

JOE KORT:

No, it's very good. What else would you want to say about desire versus drive and what people need to hear about all that?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Yeah, I think mainly empowering, primarily women to know that they are not responsible for their partner's pleasure, but anyone just to know that you are not responsible for your partner's pleasure, and that you get to ask for the type of pleasure or the type of thing that feels good to you, that helps create pleasure for you, and that however you experience pleasure is normal, and whether that's responsive or spontaneous, whether it's, you know, using a vibrator or Not, whether it's through penetration or not. You know whether it's just feeling excited when you hear somebody whisper, I mean, all the things just really trying to take the taboo out of how someone experiences what is just true for them that they experience.

JOE KORT:

Doesn't it turn out that as sex therapist. That's what we primarily do, is help people understand, as long as it's consensual between two adults, nothing. There's nothing wrong with what you're doing. That's the hardest thing people to

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

learn, yeah, yeah. But when they get that, oh my gosh, the freedom in that. I love it. Yes, I just I love seeing their eyes light up, especially when we talk about normalizing masturbation or use of erotica or porn and things like that, saying there's nothing wrong with you that's normal, that that would turn you on.

JOE KORT:

Yes, yeah, just like it, I get turned on. Hung but with hunger, watching somebody eat online,

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

yeah? Which is crazy to me, Joe. I'm just kidding

JOE KORT:

me too. When I first started, I was like, I kind of like I kind of like this.

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

But you know, what's even crazier is I love watching animals eat, just and watching people eat, but I love the sound and sight of animals eating. Like, oh, wow, yeah. So there you go. We're different.

JOE KORT:

That's another podcast we can do maybe. All right, so how can people find you on the internet?

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

Um, yeah, so I'm, I am not like a big social media person tool for that, even though I'm younger than you. Oh, sorry, I just so primarily, I mean, I have a very, very, very small presence on social media, so email is absolutely the best way of getting a hold of me. Adrian Roland, 60 eight@gmail.com and I'll respond so but yeah, that's probably the best way, because I don't like to answer the phone, but I will respond to emails very readily, right?

JOE KORT:

Alright, and they can find you also on the a sec American Association for sex educators, counselors and therapists.org,

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

yes, that and I'm on Psychology Today, also, just look me up that way. Yeah, right.

JOE KORT:

Well, it's been a pleasure having you on my show. It's been a pleasure having you as my student now, my colleague and I'm people need to hear what you have to say, so I'm glad that we have a forum for it

DR. ADRIENNE ROWLAND:

now. I appreciate it so much. It's been a lot of fun,

JOE KORT:

all right, and those of you that are listening, you can hear my podcast at Smart sex, smart love.com you can also follow me on Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. My handle is at Dr. Joe court, D, R, J, o, e, K, O, R T. You can also go to my website. Joe court.com thanks for listening until next time, be safe and stay healthy. You.