This episode contains explicit content, so listen or discretion advised.

Hey everyone, I'm Emily Nagaski, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday morning.

If you listened yesterday, you know that I'm a sex educator, and this week is all about sex.

Today, I'm going to break down the basics of human sexuality and desire.

You'll leave with a better understanding of how our bodies actually work, and how all of this can make your life better.

So let's get into some of the science behind sexuality and desire.

The dual control model is my very favorite thing to talk about.

It's a model of sexual response that was originally developed in the late 90s by Kinsey researchers Eric Jonson and John Bancroft.

So what it says is that a mammalian brain has a mechanism with two parts.

The first is a sexual accelerator or the excitatory impulse that notices all the sex related information in the environment.

And it sends the turn on signal that many of us are familiar with.

And it's functioning all the time in our brains at a subconscious level.

Here we are talking about sex, so you have just a tiny little bit of turn on signal being sent.

Fortunately, at the same time, in parallel, your breaks!

The other part of the dual control model are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now.

So the process of becoming a rouse is a dual process of turning on the on's and also turning off the off's.

And what's so revelatory about this is that when you're struggling with any element of your sexuality from desire, a rouse or pleasure or orgasm,

a lot of the advice has been to add stimulation to the accelerator like try role play out of vibrator watch porn.

And if you like those things, do you go for it great?

And most of the time when people are struggling, it's not because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator.

It's more often because there is too much stimulation to the break.

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