What Is Arousal and Why It's So Important for Women's Sexual Desire
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There is something we rarely talk about when it comes to women and sex.
It’s arousal. It’s taken as a given. But it’s not.
The reality is that most women have not experienced arousal — at least not in the way their body can truly experience it. From my experience speaking and working with women over the last decade, I can tell you that most women have no idea what arousal feels like. In fact, mmost have never experiences sex at more than 30% arousal. It is undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons why women generally do not like sex.
For a woman, having sex with 30% arousal is like eating bread that is 30% cooked. It does not taste good, it upsets your stomach, and it makes you avoid it.
What does this 30% number mean for women? It means that sex is not as pleasurable as it could be. It also means that women are not having sex from genuine desire.
The truth is that we have not paid sufficient attention to understanding women’s arousal and teaching women (much less men!) about it. Most women don’t know what to look for and how to access the kind of arousal that makes sex pleasurable. Men have even less information, having learned about sex with a woman from p_ _n or from masturbating as a teenager, all of which creates a false image of what arousal is that hurts women’s success of having it.
So let’s look at what is arousal and what it means to women wanting sex.
What is Sexual Arousal?
Arousal is the process of the body being turned on. It has both physiological and psychological components.
Before I break this down, imagine this for a woman:
You’re in the embrace of your partner as he holds you close. You can feel your body relaxing, muscles softening. As some point, you realize that your mind is quieting down and the thoughts you had coursing through your mind are no longer so present. You feel an upwelling of energy and you reach out to stroke your partner’s face, then his arm. He starts to stroke you in a more sensual way, using the tips of his fingers to brush against your arm, then back. You look into each other’s eyes and linger for a few moments, then move into a kiss, one that starts slowly and gets to go deeper. You feel a tingle in your genitals and it spreads to all over your pelvis. It expands all over your body, making it feel like the lights have come on. Your partner continues to play with your body, moving his hands over your back and arm. You move into a kiss again, this time feeling more blood in your genitals. You can feel the skin getting more sensitive to touch, almost like cells waking up to boogying on the dance floor. More tingles in the genitals follow and you a sense moisture too. Now, all those thoughts that felt so front and center in your mind fall away, and you’re focusing on the touch, the connection, the pleasure. You don’t have to plan or wonder what comes next, or what you need to do; the mind steps aside for the body to intuitively move about, where each movement is simply something that your body wants to do. As you play with each other, your body gets more and more sensitive, with more tingles and more aliveness. You sense your erogenous zones of your body are craving a more sexual kind of touch, so you guide your partner to move from the periphery to the inner thighs, belly, breasts … to explore, touch, kiss, tease. You feel the swelling increase as more blood is pumping into your labia and the internal legs of the clitoris. You have now lost sense of time and space; the touch and pleasure inside the space between your body and your partner’s is all that matters. You explore and play with each other, and at some point, in no uncertain terms, your body — namely, your pussy — throbs with pleasure for penetration. Now you know you want sex.
What I just painted is the process of sexual arousal for a woman. As I mentioned, it has both psychological, physiological and behavioral components that happen in a slow progression:
The muscles soften as the body begins to relax and de-armor, dropping away layers of protection. You feel safe and more open to engage with partner.
The skin becomes more sensitive and welcome of sensual touch.
The mind quiets down and your attention turns to the body, the pleasure and each other.
The genitals are flooded with lubrication, which allows for sensual exploration and play with the body. Lubrication is NOT a sign that the body is ready for intercourse; it IS a sign that the body is welcoming more touch and play.
The pain threshold lowers in the genitals and breasts due to engorgement, as the chemicals of arousal act as an anesthetic, preventing pain and making things more pleasurable, such as nipple play.
As the body awakens and self-consciousness drops away, you become more active and initiate more touch or positions.
The swelling acts to protect the internal vital organs from bacteria, blocking the urinary canal so that bacteria does not enter into the body to cause an infection. It also prevents tearing of the vaginal opening.
You lose yourself in the touch, pleasure, connection, the mix of it all and it feels like you’re in an alternate state of consciousness.
The throbbing in the genitals signals to you an openness to sex in a way that makes it pleasurable, not just friction.
There are two circumstances that create this that are worth noting:
It takes time to arrive at this. For a woman who has sex once a week, this process takes at least 45 minutes to 1 hour at a bare minimum. For someone who has sex more rarely, this process will take longer, mainly because your body and psyche are not practiced enough to let go and drop into the experience. You need more time to ground and connect to yourself and your partner.
This is a sober journey, without any alcohol. While alcohol might help with the inhibitions and self-consciousness, alcohol works against arousal. As a depressant, it dampens sensation, dulls sensitivity, and depresses the nervous system that is responsible for arousal.
Why is sexual arousal important for women’s sexual desire?
Go back to the description above, the end in particular. Notice that the clear signal of wanting sex is at the end of her journey of opening up and getting turned on. It is when her arousal is high, her mind is relaxed, and her body is open that a woman knows — deep down in her pussy — that she wants sex.
This is the hallmark of responsive sexual desire, where the desire for sex arises out of arousal. Arousal comes first, sexual desire follows.
Before that point when the body is throbbing with desire, wanting sex is merely a mental decision that has roots elsewhere. In the beginning, when we meet, it comes from lust. The tension that it creates is so strong that it compels us to override the readiness of the body to get to sex quickly. In a long-term relationship, the decision to have sex before the body is truly ready is often based on self-consciousness and the guilt that comes from taking time, from pressure to please the partner and move on their timeline, lack of self-knowledge about what you want and need, and lastly the lack of self-permission to ask for what you want.
All of this means that most women make the decision to have sex before they’re truly ready in the sense that the body is equipped and open to have sex in a pleasurable and enjoyable way.
It also follows that committing to sex before she knows she wants sex is not only inauthentic, it makes you have to perform and pretend and override your true natural process of arriving at wanting sex. It makes women lose their minds “trying to get in the mood” or “preparing myself mentally for sex” because they’re trying to do something their body is not yet ready for. This “fake it till you make it” approach might get you to sex, but it does nothing for feeling good inside your body, feeling in integrity with yourself, feeling connected with your partner, or getting the most out of sex.
If you think about it, arousal and sexual desire are in the same kind of a relationship as bread to wheat. Arousal is the growing of the wheat, and sexual desire is the bread. You cannot make bread if you have not grown the wheat. You can substitute wet cardboard for wheat to make some kind of paste that you can bake, but it’s not the same. Nor it is satisfying in the same way.
The reality of women’s sexual desire is that there is a process. The more we learn and honor it, the more everyone benefits.
Sex without arousal for women is a mere rubbing of the genitals at best. At worst, it is a painful experience that feels like a profoundly violation of body and personhood that carries both physiological and psychological damage, even if it is with a safe partner that you really love.
Tips for Sexual Creating Arousal — and What to Avoid
1. Know yourself
This should go without saying. Knowing your body — your pace, your sensitivity, your boundaries — is the most important thing going into a sexual connection with another person. It’s also the last thing that anyone teaches us. Take time to understand yourself and gain a vocabulary for what your body is asking for. You do not need to know what you like in some objective way like you like these positions or this act; it is about being able to listen to your body in the moment, understand what it’s asking for, and translating that into a request that your partner can do right then and there.
Knowing our body is an on-going learning process. What our body needed when we were 17 is not going to be what it needs when we’re 47 or 67. Once you learn how to listen and understand, you’re better equipped to move with the body’s rhythms.
2. Give yourself permission to want what you want & ask for it
This is the biggest block to women’s arousal and we’re responsible for it. We as women have an inner voice that is continuously and unrelentingly censoring our desires. Whether they’re too much, not enough, take too long, not sexy enough, our desires are never good enough or worthy. We are habitually dismissing our own desires and silencing our voice — and we’re dampening our own ability to get aroused.
Give yourself permission to honor what your body is calling for. If you want it slower, give yourself permission to ask your partner to adjust the speed. If you want more touch on your back before he moves down to the genitals because you need to relax more, ask for that.
By asking for what you want, you’re also teaching your partner how to work with your body. It sets him up to succeed with you.
Believe me, a man has no idea how a woman’s body functions, much less your unique one. And he has nowhere to learn this but from you. What I also know is that men want to provide pleasure and be the heroes for their women. Use your voice to talk about what you want and need and create this together.
Start the conversation outside the bedroom with these conversation prompts. Then, when you’re under the sheets together, offer him adjustments towards what feels good to you in the moment, so that you can shape the experience to work for you.
3. Turn yourself on
I am not talking about masturbation to get off here. Getting turned on is a matter of finding and igniting aliveness in your body, and it does not even have to be sexual. It starts with you maintaining your pilot light and feeding it — no matter what your partner does, your lights need to be on inside.
It might be dancing to your favorite song and letting your hips move. It might be asking your partner for a sensual foot massage you love because you know that it turns you on. Moving towards things that arouse you contribute to your overall baseline arousal and make sexual arousal easier to cultivate when the moment calls.
Learning what turns you on is an ongoing life-long process. We are not born knowing. We find out by learning, trying different things, and experimenting.
Use this guide of sensual pleasures to come up with ideas of what turning yourself on might look like.
4. Create arousal TOGETHER
Ultimately, high levels of arousal can only be created with another person. There is a reason why — we cannot take ourselves out of control. Just like you cannot tickle yourself, you cannot put yourself out of control and be completely on the receiving side of pleasure when you’re yourself are creating it. That can only be created with another person.
For the kind of arousal I describe, you have to have a tremendous amount of safety and trust with each other. Not a tiny trace of pressure or guilt can be present or it will ruin the trust. Through vulnerability and genuine openness, you can create a setting where each of you can put down emotional barriers and walls and submit yourselves to each other and the moment.
Understand what you each bring into the relationship and your own barriers to creating safety and work together to break through to deeper intimacy and connection. If you’re stuck in patterns are preventing you from truly letting your guard down with each other, enroll into personalized coaching support.
5. Engage in sensual touch WITHOUT the goal of sex DAILY
Do not leave this kind of experience to chance. While it can happen once in a blue moon when the stars align, the best path to creating this kind of experience regularly is to commit to building the intimacy and sensual connection daily.
I call these Daily SLO Practices, standing for Slowly Lingering Orgasmic. These create daily the building blocks to higher arousal and sexual connection together that literally build up to something bigger and more pleasurable.
Forget foreplay. The pressure to have sex at the end of foreplay short-circuits the entire arousal process for women, forcing her to acquiesce to sex way before she truly wants it.
When sensual touch and connection become the main course — without it being a means to an end (of sex) — you create the kind of safety and space to truly explore sensuality and higher levels of arousal. You set yourselves up for success.
The key takeaway about this: this framework works with women’s responsive sexual desire, instead of working against it. It makes the entire experience way more pleasurable for the woman, making sexual desire easier to cultivate.
Ultimately, it is through connection — with yourself and with each other — that you find your way to deeper sexual arousal and genuine sexual desire. It leads the way to the kind of sex that’s an expression of love and all of you, not just the physical movements. And it takes daring intimacy to find it.
Dare to follow your heart. Dare intimacy.
P.S. When you’re ready to enjoy the benefits of Connection Sex in your relationship, apply for a consultation for you and your partner to explore individualized support.