Sexual response cycle

What is the sexual response cycle?

The sexual response cycle is a model that describes which phases the body goes through during sexual arousal. The best-known version distinguishes arousal, plateau, orgasm, and recovery. It’s a description of an average, not a norm an individual body is supposed to follow.

The four phases of the original model

Four, and they were described as a straight line.

1. Arousal. The first phase, which according to the standard description arises “as a result of physical or mental erotic stimuli”. Heart rate and blood pressure go up, and vasocongestion sets in: blood pools in the pelvic area.
2. Plateau. The stretch of arousal just before orgasm, with further increases in blood flow, heart rate, and muscle tension.
3. Orgasm. The shortest phase, with contractions of the pelvic-floor muscles, which closes off the plateau phase.
4. Recovery. After that, the muscles relax, blood pressure drops, and the body comes to rest. This phase holds the refractory period: the time when an orgasm is usually not possible again, described more often in men than in women.

What stands out about this list: there’s no desire in it. That came later. And that is exactly where the argument started.

Where the model comes from

From a laboratory, and that explains both its strength and its limitation.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson formulated the cycle in 1966 in Human Sexual Response. They had done what no one before them had done systematically: measure sexual reactions directly instead of asking about them. What came out was a physiological description, based on what happens in the body.

Helen Singer Kaplan added a phase in 1974 that Masters and Johnson had skipped. Her model had three phases: desire, arousal, and orgasm. Desire came to stand at the front, as the engine that sets the rest in motion.

That order was the starting point for decades, in the consulting room and in sex education. It also shaped how problems were viewed: someone with no appetite was missing the first step and so had something that needed fixing.

Why the model was revised for women

Because for many women the order turns out to run the other way.

Rosemary Basson published a different model in 2000 in The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. Her own summary of why: “Clarification of women’s sexual response during long-term relationships is needed. I have presented a model that more accurately depicts the responsive component of women’s desire and the underlying motivational forces that trigger it.”

The key word is responsive. Desire in her model isn’t always something that’s already there; it can arise after arousal has gotten going. Someone starts on sex from something other than appetite, from closeness or curiosity say, and the desire comes along the way. Basson notes explicitly in her model that attachment to a partner increases how well sexual stimulation works.

She also names the goal right along with it, and that’s why this model is on this page: to prevent a disorder being diagnosed when the reaction simply runs differently from what the classic cycle prescribes.

The Dutch sexologists Ellen Laan and Stephanie Both worked that out further in Feminism & Psychology. They put the old thinking sharply: the drive model “implies that sexual desire is something you either have or don’t have, and, if you don’t have it, there may be no sex in your future”. Their alternative, the incentive-motivation model, assumes that desire can follow arousal rather than come before it, and that this arousal gets going through a stimulus that has meaning for you.

When your body and your head don’t say the same thing

That happens, it has a name, and it isn’t a malfunction.

Ellen Laan, who led the department of Sexology and Psychosomatic Gynecology at Amsterdam UMC until her death in 2022, used plethysmography to measure women’s genital response to sexual stimuli. The International Society for Sexual Medicine sums up her finding this way: “physiological (objective) arousal and subjective arousal do not always go together (disconcordance)”.

In plain terms: your body can respond while you don’t feel aroused. And the other way around. In women that diverges more often than in men. Laan also showed that women’s genital response, given the right stimulus and the right circumstances, gets going just as well as men’s.

What you get from that is mainly this: getting wet is no proof of appetite, and staying dry is no proof of the opposite. Anyone who uses their own body as a lie detector is reading it wrong.

The accelerator and the brake

Besides the phases there’s a second way to look at it, and it explains more of what people recognize.

Erick Janssen and John Bancroft developed the dual control model around 2000 at the Kinsey Institute. In their review article in The Journal of Sex Research they sum it up this way: sexual arousal and the processes around it “are dependent on the balance between sexual excitation and sexual inhibition, and that individuals vary in their propensity for these processes”.

Two systems, then. They’re both on at once. An excitation system that responds to what’s attractive, and an inhibition system that responds to what’s in the way: haste, a full head, a door that won’t lock, the feeling of being judged. What you notice is the balance of those two, not the output of one of them.

That explains something the phase model doesn’t. More stimulation doesn’t always help, because if the brake is hard on, harder gas produces no movement. Often it’s more effective to take something away than to add something.

The researchers went through 152 studies from 2009 to 2022. Their conclusion: the excitation side ties mostly to desire and responsiveness, while the inhibition side plays a role in sexual problems, and usually in interplay with the excitation side. Here too, people differ in how sensitive each system is; a sensitive brake isn’t a defect but a trait.

What people get wrong about the sexual response cycle

“Appetite comes first, or something’s off.” That’s exactly the assumption Basson and Laan challenged. Desire can follow arousal, and that’s a normal variant, not a deficit.

“It’s a fixed order.” Basson drew her model partly as a circle on purpose: desire and arousal can feed each other back and forth and occur in either order.

“The model describes how it should go.” It describes what happens on average. Basson states in her abstract, in so many words, that part of the aim is to prevent a different reaction from being diagnosed as a disorder.

“If you have no appetite, you need more stimulation.” Not according to the dual control model. When the brake side is hard on, extra stimulation changes little; then it works better to remove what’s in the way.

“The model applies to everyone the same.” Masters and Johnson described one pattern; Kaplan, Basson, and Laan each showed that for some people it runs differently. The model has been revised more often than it’s been adopted since 1966.

What you can do with this

• Don’t judge yourself on the order. Starting without appetite and getting it along the way is a described, normal route.
• Look at the stimulus and the circumstances, not only at whether the appetite is there spontaneously. That’s what the incentive-motivation model points to.
• With low appetite, first ask what’s braking, before you look for what more you can add. That’s the practical core of the dual control model.
• Don’t read your body as proof. Genital response and felt arousal don’t always move together, and that’s been measured and named.
• Give it time. The plateau phase is longer for many people than the picture of it, and haste works against the physiology.
• Discuss it with your GP if it bothers you. Thuisarts.nl, the site Dutch GPs point patients to, writes that it’s “completely normal” to have stretches of lower appetite, and names busyness, stress, and little attention for each other as common causes. If it does bother you, you can talk about it with your GP. This page explains a term and is not medical advice.

More reading on the sexual response cycle

Within this glossary, orgasm control and orgasm denial cover what happens when you deliberately play with those phases, and edging describes stretching out the plateau phase.

Beyond this site, Thuisarts.nl is the place to start with complaints, because GPs use that information themselves. Anyone who wants to read up on the science will find the original article on the responsive model at Basson, and the Dutch working-out of it at Laan and Both.

Where this fits on this site

The question I get most often is a version of this: is it bad that I’m not in the mood right away. The answer is above, and it’s no. How a date begins when you don’t know whether the appetite will come is on the page about intimate togetherness.

Sources

• The female sexual response: a different model. Rosemary Basson, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 26(1), 51–65, 2000 (PMID 10693116, DOI 10.1080/009262300278641). Gives the prompt “Clarification of women’s sexual response during long-term relationships is needed”, the presentation of a model that “more accurately depicts the responsive component of women’s desire and the underlying motivational forces that trigger it”, and the double aim of preventing a differently running reaction from being diagnosed as a disorder and of defining subgroups of dysfunction more sharply.
• What Makes Women Experience Desire?. Ellen Laan & Stephanie Both, Feminism & Psychology 18(4), 505–514, 2008 (DOI 10.1177/0959353508095533). Gives the critique of the drive model that “implies that sexual desire is something you either have or don’t have, and, if you don’t have it, there may be no sex in your future”, and the incentive-motivation model with the claim that “the experience of desire may follow rather than precede sexual excitement” and that desire arises after arousal set going by a meaningful stimulus. The publisher blocks scripts, so this abstract comes from the Crossref API.
• The Dual Control Model of Sexual Response: A Scoping Review, 2009-2022. Erick Janssen & John Bancroft, The Journal of Sex Research 60(7), 948–968, 2023 (DOI 10.1080/00224499.2023.2219247). A review of 152 publications from 2009 to 2022, by the model’s own originators. Gives the description that sexual arousal and the processes around it “are dependent on the balance between sexual excitation and sexual inhibition, and that individuals vary in their propensity for these processes”, and the conclusions that the excitation side ties mostly to desire and responsiveness while the inhibition side plays a role in sexual dysfunction, risk behavior, and sexual aggression, usually in interplay with excitation.
• Obituary Ellen Laan. International Society for Sexual Medicine, January 24, 2022. In memoriam of Ellen Laan, born April 3, 1962 and died January 22, 2022, head of the department of Sexology and Psychosomatic Gynecology at Amsterdam University Medical Center. Gives the finding that “physiological (objective) arousal and subjective arousal do not always go together (disconcordance)”, and that women, given the right stimulation and circumstances, can respond fully with increased blood flow and lubrication.
• Minder zin in seks. Thuisarts.nl, Dutch College of General Practitioners. Gives the finding that it’s completely normal to have stretches with less appetite for sex, the common causes of busyness, stress, and little attention for each other or for yourself, and the advice that you can talk about it with your GP if it bothers you.
• Human sexual response cycle. English-language encyclopedia. Gives the attribution of the model to William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson in their book Human Sexual Response from 1966, the four phases arousal, plateau, orgasm, and recovery with what happens in each, the description of the refractory period as part of the recovery phase, Helen Singer Kaplan’s three-phase model with desire in front, and Basson’s circle model in which attachment to a partner increases how well sexual stimulation works.

Related terms

The response cycle describes the phases; the terms below are about what people do with them.

• Edging. Stretching out the plateau phase by stopping just before orgasm.
• Orgasm control. The arrangement where someone else decides whether and when the orgasm comes.
• Orgasm denial. Deliberately leaving out the orgasm phase.
• Subspace. An altered state of consciousness that ties to arousal but doesn’t coincide with it.
• Aftercare. What’s needed afterward, in the phase the model calls recovery.
• Pelvic floor. The muscles that contract rhythmically during the orgasm phase, with the role in continence and pain included.
• Libido. The strength of the appetite, with the Dutch figures on how often low appetite occurs.
• Tantra. The tradition where slowing the phases is the starting point.
• Menopause. Why arousal in that phase takes more time, and what the GP guideline says about it.
• Vaginismus. What happens when the pelvic floor closes before arousal and lubrication get going.
• A-spot. One of the erogenous points that got a name without the evidence coming along.