Ask the Expert: Nurture in Sexual Emotions

Agneta Fischer (Social Psychology) answer

Dear Mark,

Wow, thanks for this interesting, but difficult question! You seem to assume that I know something about sexual emotions, but actually I don’t, so forgive me if I speculate a bit in answering your question. Are sexual emotions a category similar to for example social emotions, moral emotions or health-related emotions? I guess so, but in all the handbooks of emotion that I have on my bookshelf there is not any chapter on sexual emotions. Maybe this is because sexuality is still considered more a biological need or drive than an emotion, despite the efforts of the previous generation UvA researchers, like Walter Everaerd, Ellen Laan and yourself, who pleaded for an emotion perspective on sexuality.

What are sexual emotions? I would define them as emotions that are elicited by sexual acts, sexual relations, or objects of one’s sexual desire. In contrast with earlier definitions, I think sexual emotions can also be evoked by one’s sexual identity, as hetero or LHBTQI+. There are today many heated discussions about sexual identities showing for example that being queer is an element of one’s identity that is a strong elicitor of emotions.

Whereas sexual drives have strong biological roots, sexual emotions are in my view not biologically given. Sex gets a meaning through the social environment, where family, peers, school, or social media, teach what is ‘normal’, what is ‘sexy’, what is ‘exciting’, or what is ‘desirable’ in sexual relations. This information provides an interpretation frame of what we emotionally experience, and can be especially confusing for young people, who need to find out who they are and what excites them, especially when they become aware that they deviate from the standard view. Moreover, first sexual experiences largely determine later appraisals of sexual activities and relations, both positive and negative. These appraisals thus can give rise to specific emotions, such as desire, lust or excitement, but also to fear, disgust or shame, in case of sexual abuse, and hugely affect subsequent sexual experiences.

But the question was about important gender differences, and whether they are nurture. You know from your own research that hetero men and women differ in what exactly arouses them, and we also know that overall women’ s sexual experiences are way less positive than men’s: women more often report sexual violence and sexual abuse, they are more often denied pleasure, they are more often sexually mutilated, and so on, and so on. A meta-analysis from 2010 further reported that men have more casual sex and report more lenient attitudes towards casual sex. Evolutionary psychologists tend to explain this difference in term of the evolutionary male need to increase genetic success, but whatever you think of that explanation, it is the cultural norm that provides the justification of women’s sexual subordination and denial of pleasure and arousal. So, to answer your question bluntly: yes, gender differences in sexual emotions are nurture.

Agneta