Narratives of Desire in Mid-Age Women with and Without Arousal Difficulties (Report‪)‬

Scholars and clinicians have long attempted to define sexual desire, yet a consensus still has not been reached. The work of Masters and Johnson omitted a sexual desire component in both the description of the four-stage sexual response cycle (Masters & Johnson, 1966) and in their book on treatment (Masters & Johnson, 1970), which was based on their model. Recognizing that this model was incomplete, sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan (1979) advanced a "triphasic view" of sexual response that included an initial phase of desire that she defined as a sensation that "moved the individual to seek out, or become receptive to, sexual experiences" (p. 10). Kaplan's theory posited that desire was a necessary precursor to excitement (arousal) and would dissipate once sexual gratification (orgasm) was reached. This biologically based definition of desire influenced the classification of desire disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed.; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1980), but critics continued to challenge this definition over time because it was based on a medical model of male sexual functioning (Basson, 2000; Tiefer, 1991). Other conceptualizations of sexual desire have been forwarded, such as the systems perspective (e.g., Schnarch, 2000; Verhulst & Heiman, 1988) wherein sexual desire is experienced as a feature of a system (i.e., as in a dyadic relation) as opposed to something that one individual possesses. A different view places desire within motivational theory (Everaerd & Laan, 1995) in which it functions as an action tendency to rewarding sexual stimuli, which may be internal or external; thus, spontaneous sexual desire, or desire in the absence of a stimulus, does not exist. This motivational model may account for the waning of desire in long-term relationships in which rewarding stimuli are fewer and less potent. This model also provides a theory from which experimental studies can be derived. However, empirical testing of the theory has been limited to laboratory environments (e.g., Both, Everaerd, & Laan, 2003).