Is Sexual Desire An Emotion?


"Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best." Woody Allen

"I always thought music was more important than sex-then I thought if I don't hear a concert for a year-and-a-half it doesn't bother me." Jackie Mason

Some people do not consider sexual desire to be an emotion but rather something else such as, for example, a biological urge like hunger and thirst. I disagree. When considering all the basic characteristics and components   more...of typical emotions, sexual desire emerges as a most typical emotion.

In describing a typical emotion, I suggest the following features. The typical cause of emotion is a perceived significant change; the typical emotional concern is a comparative personal concern; instability, great intensity, a partial perspective, and relative brevity are the basic characteristics of typical ("hot") emotions; the basic components of a typical emotion are cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feeling (see The Subtlety of Emotions). All these features are clearly present in sexual desire.

Change is indeed highly significant in generating sexual desire. Thus, the frequency of sexual activity with one's partner declines steadily as the relationship lengthens, reaching roughly half the frequency after one year of marriage compared to the first month of marriage, and declining more gradually thereafter. Decline has also been found in cohabiting, heterosexual couples and in gay and lesbian couples.

Sexual desire involves a personal concern-it is desire intended to satisfy one's personal desire (in some cases, without taking any or much account of the partner's desires). However, because of its strong evolutionary origin, the comparative concern is of lesser importance in sexual desire. Nevertheless, the concern is evident in the role that imagination plays in sexual desire. While engaging in sexual activity, many people think about comparatively better states that involve not only their present partner and present activities.

The presence of the basic characteristics of emotions-that is, instability, great intensity, a partial perspective, and relative brevity-is clear in sexual desire. Sexual desire involves a very unstable experience; the intense desire makes us tremble all over. As Carol King vividly describes it: "I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down, I feel my heart start to trembling. Whenever you're around." Sexual desire is also partial in the sense that it is focused on a narrow target such as on one person or very few people, and in the sense that it expresses a very personal and egoistic perspective. Needless to say, sexual desire is brief (though it can be regenerated again and again) and ends when satisfaction is achieved.

Sexual desire, like all other emotions, involves the component of cognition (you have some information about the desired person), evaluation (you evaluate him positively), motivation (you want to do something with him), and feeling (there are feelings of enjoyment, pleasure, stimulation).

In light of the above considerations, sexual desire should be considered as an emotion; let me now indicate in what sense this emotion differs from the emotion of romantic love.

The basic evaluative patterns of romantic love are those of praiseworthiness (positively evaluating the beloved's characteristic and deeds) and attractiveness (being attracted to the whole person). In romantic love, both patterns are necessary and important. Sexual desire is more partial in its focus and is mainly concerned with attractiveness. This does not mean that praiseworthiness is utterly absent from sexual desire, but rather that it is far less significant. In sexual desire, the praiseworthiness of the other's character and deeds is often derived from the other's attractiveness.

The more complex nature of love requires far greater personal involvement than is typically found in sexual   less