Beyond Gendered/Sexed Sexual Response: Debunking Essentialism, Revisiting Experience, and Centering Women’s Sexual Pleasure

The experience of sexual pleasure is foundational to sexual arousal and desire. Despite a universal potential for experiencing sexual pleasure, sex is not equally pleasurable for everyone, in part because the affordances that prioritize sexual pleasure are not equally experienced across genders/sexes and social locations. In this chapter, we draw from established associative learning models and data from queer women to argue that variations in sexual response—like gender specificity of sexual response and sexual concordance—have been wrongly characterized as innately gendered/sexed. We argue that gender/sex and sexual orientation are not determinants of variations in sexual arousal and desire, but proxies that stand in for, and ultimately overshadow, more theoretically compelling constructs, such as experience of sexual rewards. To fully understand the complex interplay among sexual attractions, arousal, and sexual desire more broadly—phenomena that are simultaneously corporeal, psychological, social, and political—we argue that sexual response research needs to adopt an embodiment perspective that incorporates understanding of psychophysiological processes alongside experiential awareness and the social situatedness of our bodies. We conclude with recommendations for moving beyond essentialist gendered/sexed frameworks, embracing the rich diversity of sexual experience, and prioritizing crucial methodological advancements to cultivate a deeper, more inclusive understanding of human sexuality.