Spontaneous and responsive desire: a useful frame for non-sexual desires too?

What are spontaneous and responsive desire?

Sex educator Emily Nagoski writes about ‘spontaneous vs responsive desire’ in the context of sex. As she explains it, spontaneous desire is sexual desire that just happens:

‘You’re sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and pow! You’re saying to yourself, “I would like some sex!”’

—Emily Nagoksi, Come As You Are

The ancient Greeks called eros ‘winged’: it flits around, alights on unsuspecting saps, sets them afire with lust, then flies off just as randomly. This conception of eros is probably pointing at spontaneous (sexual) desire.

Responsive desire, on the other hand, is desire that responds to pleasure:

Some people find that they begin to want sex only after sexy things are already happening…

…You’re feeling very calm and happy and trusting…and your partner comes over and touches your arm affectionately… the sensation of your partner’s touch says, “Hey, so, this is happening. What do you think?” And your brain says, “Affection feels nice.” [After a while], your partner starts kissing your throat, and that sensation makes it way to your emotional brain and says, “Now this is happening, too. What do you think?” And by then the brain says, “That is fantastic! Go get more of that!”’

—Emily Nagoksi, Come As You Are

Many people don’t realize that responsive desire is a thing, which can lead to problems, Nagoski argues. Responsive desirers, because they don’t have (much) spontaneous desire, might feel like there’s something wrong with them. They might feel frustrated that their desire isn’t more readily-accessible. They may (inaccurately) characterize themselves as asexual or low-desire.¹ Meanwhile, spontaneous desirers might worry that their responsive-desirer partners don’t really fancy them. But responsive desirers have just as much capacity for sexual desire as spontaneous desirers: it just needs to be warmed up first.

Spontaneous and responsive desire in non-sexual contexts

I’ve been wondering: is ‘spontaneous vs responsive’ a useful frame for other forms of desire too — the desire to make friends, the desire to learn, the desire to create? Perhaps for some people, these desires arise spontaneously, but for others, they need to be warmed up, elicited, or aroused.

I started thinking about this because I noticed that I was blocked on a lot of my goals. I wanted to do more learning and writing and activist-y stuff, but I didn’t know what, specifically, to do. I desired to do these things as broad categories, but I didn’t want to do any specific instance of them. I was often bored but didn’t know how to unboreden yourself.

One explanation for this would be that I wanted to want to do more learning and writing and activist-y stuff, but I didn’t actually want to do those things. But that didn’t feel satisfying to me as an explanation. I know that I’ve found writing and learning satisfying, and I want to do activism to express real values.

So then I started thinking about spontaneous and responsive desire. I started wondering: maybe my desires for learning, writing and some other activities are more responsive than spontaneous. I don’t feel strong whims to do these things out of nowhere, but I can develop motivations within the right contexts and in response to the right inspirations.

And this in turn led me to ask: what might the spontaneous/responsive distinction look like in non-sexual contexts?

Friendship

Spontaneous desirers meet someone new, think they’re cool, and actively try to talk to them, ask them out for coffee, and intentionally make friends with them. These are the classic extroverts, the party people.

Responsive desirers don’t often have the impulse to talk to new people or to consciously deepen shallow acquaintances. They might feel shyer, or simply be more excited to hang out with friends they already have. But they’re not anti-social; if someone tries to befriend them and they click, they’re pleased and want to deepen the friendship. They might be seen as introverts, as ‘quiet’, or as clique-y.

Intellectual curiosity: the desire to learn, understand and theorize

Spontaneous desirers get curious about a topic and set out to learn more about it. As children, they might thrive under unschooling, or in a less-structured school environment where they have lots of time to pursue their individual interests. As adults, they might spend a lot of their free time going down Wikipedia rabbit holes.

Responsive desirers have less drive to randomly research things, but they thrive within structures that can pique their curiosity. They need more scaffolding, but within that scaffolding, they are just as curious and interested in learning as spontaneous desirers.

As children, they might thrive within traditional education. If they decide to learn something as an adult, they are more likely to seek out a structured way to learn it, like a class or workbook.

Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson recorded a podcast on autodidacticism which seems related to this: perhaps autodidact Robin has spontaneous curiosity-desire, whereas ‘heterodidact’ Agnes has (more) responsive curiosity-desire.

Desires to be altruistic, virtuous, or morally good

Spontaneous desirers get an idea about how the world could be better and naturally take it upon themselves to address it. These are the moral leaders, activists, visionaries, campaigners.

Responsive desirers heed the calls of spontaneous desirers, and become strong followers or supporters of causes. They are likely to donate to charity appeals, respond to calls for aid, or be activated by a salient local catastrophe. Parents are often responsive altruistic desirers of this kind with regard to their children.

For all of these, including the original case of sexual desire, spontaneous/responsive is a continuum, not a binary, and I expect that most people have some elements of both. People will also have different desire styles in different domains (e.g. mainly spontaneous for sex but mainly responsive for learning).

Why is this analogy useful?

If this is true: so what? What can we get out of this analogy?

Gender and desire

The spontaneous vs responsive distinction is gendered². Nagoski was interested in this in the first place because she was writing about women’s sexuality. She says that 75% of men and 15% of women have (mostly or exclusively?) spontaneous desire, whereas 5% of men and 30% of women have responsive. When we think of ‘sexual desire’, we tend to picture spontaneous lust rather than smouldering embers; Nagoski argues that this is because the majority of men have spontaneous desire, so, in a patriarchal world, it’s considered the default.

In other areas too, I suspect that spontaneous vs responsive desires are subtly gendered. The archetypical responsive-desiring altruist is the busy mother and housewife: she goes through life responding to demands from her kids, her husband, the house, her aged parents, her community. She is highly altruistic, but her altruistic activities and energies are diffused and shaped by outside forces. Consider how George Eliot describes how the ardent, passionately virtuous Dorothea ends up (spoilers for Middlemarch):

No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion, and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself… Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help. Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother…

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

This feels like a very feminine-coded way of being.

Conversely, the archetypical spontaneous altruist is powerful, a leader, determined, courageous. They may neglect external demands because of their single-minded focus on their cause.

Talking about gender-coding like this feels tricky: if I say ‘spontaneous, determined agency is associated with masculinity’, then that is one more drop in the ocean of content and messages that reinforces that association, whereas really I want to disrupt it. Things that are masculine-coded are done by women and femmes all the time! AND, things that are masculine-coded can be good! Spontaneous desire (in the sexual realm) unfairly dominates the conversation, but there’s nothing WRONG with having it, whether you’re a man, a woman or non-binary; and many non-men in fact have plenty.

But I think gender is interesting to think about here, because… I’ve been worrying about not having enough agency. But perhaps I do have agency, and I’ve had it all along, but I don’t recognize it in myself because my picture of what it means to “have agency” is of the more masculine, independent, uninfluencable sort.

Do responsive desirers have less autonomy and agency?

Another question is: ok, but isn’t spontaneous desire… just… better? Isn’t it better to know what you want and go out and get it, rather than being buffeted by the winds of others’ desires?

Nagoski argues strongly for the validity and acceptability and fundamental goodness of being a responsive (sexual) desirer. This is part of her general vibe: women are not (never!) Broken or Bad but are always Valid and Normal and Good.

But, you might say: ok, even if this responsive desire thing is common, it still might be a problem! As an analogy, depression is a very common mental illness, and having depression doesn’t make you Not Valid or Irreparably Broken. But at the same time, being depressed sucks, and if a person is depressed, they might reasonably look around for ways to be less depressed, e.g. therapy or medication or changing something fundamental about their life.

A responsive-desire-sceptic might further say: especially in the domains of intellectual pursuit and altruism, isn’t it good to form your own opinions and goals, rather than being influenced by those of others? Surely the extreme responsive desirer is overly sensitive, vulnerable to manipulation and brainwashing?

But I think that spontaneous desirers don’t have more autonomy than responsive desirers—not really. It just means that the causes of their desire are not (as) legible.

If your actions are determined by a random, unpredictable process, that doesn’t make you more free than someone who, for example, follows the suggestions of a charismatic orator: it just makes you more chaotic. Whether you believe in determinism, free will, or something in between, that will obtain at both levels of desire. If you believe in free will, there is no principled reason to say that spontaneous desires are free but responsive ones are entirely determined (for perhaps you exercise free will in who or what can arouse desire in you, and in which influences you seek out?). And if you believe in determinism, there’s no reason to say that responsive desire involves undesirable influence, whereas spontaneous desire is only as unfree as all actions are.

In many cultures, spontaneous sexual desire is framed as a sickness, or a madness, or both. A powerful desire that’s inexplicable to you, and that comes from no known source, is scary. Such things are often harder to integrate, in the sense of ‘feeling like it’s a part of you rather than alien’. And indeed, anecdotally, cis men and other testosterone-dominant people sometimes seem to find it hard to integrate their (spontaneous) sexuality, in a way that’s never been true for me. Perhaps this can also be true of spontaneous desires to make clay pots, engage in politics, or grow your hair long.

How to get what you want as a responsive desirer

Rather than thinking of responsive desire as something that inherently makes you less autonomous, I want to ask: if I assume that I have responsive desire (for learning, for altruism), what might I do to cause myself to act according to my values?

Taking the analogy of sexual desire again, there are two options:

Find sexy people/things to inspire you

If someone has responsive sexual desire but still wants to have lots of good sex, one option is for them to find a nice spontaneous-desiring partner who doesn’t mind initiating all the time. Ideally this person would be attractive, sexually compatible, and good at doing the sorts of things that the responsive desirer enjoys.

So one option for responsive-x-desirers is: surround yourself with things that will arouse your desire for x in good ways. These might be:

• Online communities of people who share your values

• Good-quality content about things you’re interested in

For similar reasons, responsive-x-desirers should minimize things that arouse their desire in bad ways; that make them feel drawn to do things they don’t overall endorse:

• Email spam, mailing lists for things they don’t really care about

• Undirected social media use

• Forceful, urgency-generating, manipulative language

Schedule it

Let’s say you have responsive sexual desire, but oh no, your partner also has responsive desire! Are you doomed to a horny but sexless relationship? For people in this boat, Nagoski suggests scheduling. You might not feel motivated to have sex at the start of your scheduled time, but by the time you’ve got ready, snuggled, taken your clothes off, de-stressed, and connected with your partner, you’ll hopefully get into it.

Analogously, responsive-x-desirers might create structures to arouse responsive desire. The responsive intellectual desirer, for example, might sign up for a class or join a book club.

In this case, responsive desirers are faced with the challenge of prioritizing something that they don’t yet desire to do (in the hope/expectation that they will desire to do it once they’ve gotten started). This can be tricky: it means responsive desirers are at risk of missing out on things that they really like because of a lack of good stimuli. It can also be to distinguish between ‘things you have responsive desire for’ and ‘things you just straight up don’t enjoy but you feel like you should do for some reason’: if you have to slightly force yourself to do most things, you may fail to notice when you actually aren’t getting anything out of them.

1. There’s nothing wrong with being asexual or low-desire, but responsive desire is a different thing.

2. Possibly it is even sexed: plausibly desire styles are influenced a lot by hormones. I’ve heard trans people say that their (sexual) desire style changed when they took cross-sex hormones. Hormones might also influence these broader categories of desire. My motivation changes substantially in response to my menstrual cycle, so it’s plausibly to me that my desires would be very different if I was full of testosterone rather than oestrogen and progesterone.