The Sexual Body as a Meaningful Home: Making Sense of Sexual Concordance

The past 20–30 years have provided plenty of new empirical data on women’s sexuality, a topic often theorised as puzzling and unexplainable. In recent discussions, a controversial issue has been the phenomenon of sexual concordance, i.e. the correlation between the self-reported, subjective assessment of one’s sexual arousal and the simultaneous bodily response measured directly on the genitals. In laboratory-based assessments, sexual concordance has been observed to be on average substantially lower in women than in men, although the reasons for the considerable gender difference are still open to debate. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to culture-dependent meaning-formation and on feminist social theory of everyday sexuality, I argue that the reasons behind women’s low sexual concordance can be found neither in their minds nor their bodies but in the way meaning-making processes function in human sexual experiences. Women’s first-person perspectives on their own sexuality have historically played only a marginal role in the creation of socially endorsed sexual meanings, yet these shared meanings have a profound influence on how individuals make sense of their bodily experiences in sexual situations.

Sexual Concordance and Orgasm Consistency in Women

The agreement between psychological and physical sexual arousal is variable among women: some show very high levels of sexual concordance while others demonstrate little or no agreement the emotional and physiological components of arousal (Chivers, Seto, Lalumière, Laan, & , 2010). This mind-body connection has been implicated in female sexual dysfunction, as women sexual dysfunctions tend to show especially low levels of sexual concordance (e.g., Laan, van Driel, & Lunsen, 2008). To date, there has been very little research on how concordance influences individual in sexual outcomes in women without sexual dysfunction. Initial evidence suggested a relationship between sexual concordance and orgasm consistency in healthy women (e.g., Adams, Haynes & Brayner, 1985); however, the few studies examining this relationship present mixed findings. The current study attempts to clarify the relationship between sexual concordance and orgasm consistency and examines sexual assertiveness as a mediator in the predicted concordance-orgasm consistency relationship.