PLEASURE VS DESIRE: SO DIFFERENT AND STILL SO SIMILAR

Pleasue in Not Desire

Pleasure and desire are different systems in the brain, At the level of the emotional, mammalian brain, desire is known as “wanting” or “incentive salience,” and pleasure is discussed as “liking” or hedonic impact.

“Wanting,” in the brain, is a vast network of dopamine-related circuitry that mediates how motivated we are to pursue a goal. “Liking,” by contrast, is a set of smaller “hedonic hot spots” where opioids and endocannabinoids mediate how good a sensation feels.

• Pleasure is “Oh, that’s niiiice,” and “Yay!”
• Desire is “Oooooooooh, what’s that?” and “How do I get more?”
• Pleasure is stillness, savoring what’s happening in the moment.
• Plcasure is a perception of a sensation.
• Desire is motivation toward a goal.

In a sense, pleasure is satisfaction and desire is dissatisfaction. because pleasure is enjoying an experience, while desire is motivation to pursue something diferent.

Here, I’ll put it in a table:

• PLEASURE

  “Liking”

  Opiods,Endocannabinoids

  Ahhhhh, that’s nice!Yum! Yay!

  “That feels good”

  Enjoying

  Perception

  Hedonic impact

  Satisfaction

• DESIRE

  “Wanting”

  Dopamine

  Oooh, what’s that? Vhereis it? How do l get it?

  “l want more”

  Eagerness

  Motivation

  Incentive salience

  Dissatisfaction

And here’s a highly simplifed illustration of the neuroanatomy of “wanting” and “liking”:

See? They’re different (though overlapping) neural systems, with different (though overlapping) experiences linked to them. For sure, they are related to each other, but you can want more of something without liking it, and you can like something without wanting more of it.

Consider the “wanting” involved in continuous, joyless scrolling on social media. You’re searching for something you can’t name, maybe for the reward of, at last, finding something that makes you feel good or that even confirms your worst fears. You want .. . something. But you’re not enjoying it, you’re just following the urge to keep looking. Desire without pleasure.

Boredom, at its most uncomfortable, is wanting without liking.

Your brain is searching for something to focus on, something to do with itself. All those neurons and nothing to occupy them! It’s not like daydreaming or mind-wandering, where you simply allow your brain to travel imaginary paths and feel satisfyingly occupied.

Conversely, consider the “liking” involved in being handed a gift, out of the blue. The moment of receiving the gift, even before you open it, is pleasure in the absence of desire, It is the pleasure of learning that someone was thinking of you when you weren’t there.

The delight of watching your favorite people enjoying themselves together is liking without wanting. Suppose you put in the effort to throw a party, and now here they are, all your favorite people, laughing together and playing. Pleasure. Satisfaction. Because something you planned is bringing pleasure to people you love. And it doesn’t even matter that that pleasure was planned rather than spontaneous.

So far, so simple.

Where it can get muddy is in how desire feels, Pleasure, by definition, feels good, Desire per se is more or less neutral; it’s the context that makes it feel good or bad. I think people confuse desire for pleasure because desire sometimes feels good. Once we recognize that desire can also feel bad, we begin to understand both how desire and pleasure are not the same thing and why pleasure is the one that really matters.

How Sexual Desire Feels

Anticipation, expectation, craving, longing, these are all ways of experiencing desire that can feel delightful and even ecstatic. But anticipation, expectation, craving, and longing can also feel frustrating, irritating, and annoying. Desire can be hope and optimism, but it can also be anxiety and fear.

Whether desire feels good or not depends on the context. All pleasure depends on the context.

If you have experienced desire, stop and recall a moment when it was pleasurable. Probably, the object of your desire, whether it was a lover or a new gadget or a tasty snack, seemed within reach, maybe you felt in control of whether or not you got what you wanted, maybe your desire was grounded in a promise someone made that filled you with anticipation.

The pleasurable version of spontaneous desire is, I think, why people get confused about the difference between pleasure and desire and why we might be convinced that “spontaneous’ is the good, right, normal kind of desire. After all, it was “easy” -or at least, it happened out of nowhere-and it was fun.

But spontaneous sexual desire can feel terrible, too, Suppose you can’t figure out how to get closer to your object of desire, or the object of your desire is entirely out of reach or, worse, actively rejecting you, pushing you away. In that context, your ongoing desire can feel like a form of torture.

If you’ve wanted to want sex, you’ve experienced a different uncomfortable desire. Many people who struggle to let go of the “ideal” of spontaneous desire know how awful it feels to want something you can’t get, which is why it’s so important that we remind ourselves that it’s responsive desire, not spontaneous desire. that characterizes great sex over the long term. If you enjoy the sex you have, you’re already doing it right, and you’re allowed to stop trying to create spontaneous desire.

If we think only about the pleasurable experiences of desire, we end up using the words “pleasure” and “desire” more or less interchangeably, But they’re different; we know they’re different because of the brain science. And if pleasure always is pleasurable but desire is only sometimes pleasurable, doesn’t it make sense to center pleasure, and allow desire to emerge in contexts that maximize the chances that the desire will feel good?

How Do You Feel About Pleasure

This is a too-often ignored factor that I want to emphasize early. How do you feel about pleasure itself, especially sexual pleasure?

Just as we were lied to about pleasure, told that it was obvious and easy, we were lied to about bom to feel about pleasure. Too many of us were taught to fear, resent, or otherwise disparage pleasure.

The late, great sex educator Betty Dodson encountered this often, as she coached many women to orgasm, Her “rock ‘n’ roll” method taught women to ride the visceral wave of arousal and orgasm, as pleasure rolled through them like a rising tide. She made a series of instructional videos showing women’s evolving relationships with their own sexual pleasure.

In one video, one of Betty’s clients, Cynthia, age forty-one, isn’t sure if she was having orgasms or, if she was having them, thought they were small, almost-nothing orgasms.

“What I picture it being like or I think it should be like, is just bigger, all over bigger and more where you’re just out of control and you’re … just .. . very dramatic.”

Betty assures her, “You’re never out of control. [. . .] You’re in your body, the only thing you’re out of is you’re out of your mind.”

Early in her coached masturbation session, Cynthia tells Betty that the lowest setting of the vibrator is good and she doesn’t want lube. Eventually, though, Betty directly invites more intense vibration and lube.

Immediately, Cynthia recognizes, “That’s better.”

“Hang on it, oh, hang on it,” Betty coaches her, as Cynthia’s moans crescendo.

After Cynthia’s second orgasm, she describes her revelation: “I never let [the vibrator] stay on long enough. … Instead of backing off when it feels so intense, I just kept it there and that’s when it gets very … When you meet it, it feels like it really changes the whole thing…. It felt like, ‘Oh, I have to take it away, it’s too much,’ but it isn’t too much.”

“That’s the most important thing to learn,” Betty praises. When it gets really strong, move into it.

“Meet it,” Betty tells her. “Get in it.”

Throughout her session, Cynthia has, by my count, at least three orgasms. The barrier to her pleasure was her uncertainty in the face of pleasure that felt so good it seemed like “too much.”

This is the story of our relationships with pleasure. We feel like it’s too much; it’s not too much. When pleasure feels strong, you don’t have to move away from it.

Over and over in Betty’s sessions, women learn that the urge to take away stimulation when it feels like “too much” can interrupt pleasure and prevent it from growing into all that it can be in their bodies. “Stay on it, Don’t stop, Keep it there,” Betty tells her clients and us, “Meet the intensity with your intensity, Move into it instead of pulling away from it. Ride it. Hang on to it”

In another memorable scene, Lisa, a client who is exploring her way toward her first orgasm from masturbation, gets to an intense level of arousal, at the pulsing edge of orgasm, and her response is to pull the vibrator away from her clitoris.

“Don’t stop,” says Betty, guiding the vibrator back to her client’s mons.

“Sorry,” Lisa says, and she holds the vibrator against her body again, Because of course she apologizes.

“Stay on it” Betty coaches. “Stay on it”

Seconds later, we see the unmistakable body-shaking pulses of tension taking Lisa’s body like a riptide, With Betty’s encouragement, Iisa moans and then screams her pleasure, allowing it to beas big as it wants, to last as long as it wants.

In this video, we witness the moment when Lisa learns how to be still with pleasure, not to run from it and not to try for it, but to allow it. To meet it.

How do you feel about your own pleasure? When you’re experiencing intense sexual sensations in a safe-enough context, do you sometimes turn away from it, to diminish it? Let me name the emotion: To worry that a sexual sensation might overwhelm you or be “too much” is to fear pleasure.

Pleasure is not unsafe. You can allow your body to experience all the pleasure you choose to create. As Lama Rod Owens writes in Love and Rage, “Loving pleasure means that I allow it to be itself. I enjoy it when it arises and I let it go when it leaves.”