Prepared for Pleasure? An Alternative Perspective on the Preparation Hypothesis
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COMMENTARY
Prepared for Pleasure? An Alternative Perspective on the Preparation Hypothesis Meredith L. Chivers1 Received: 26 August 2020 / Revised: 10 September 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The Preparation Hypothesis is a term coined by Suschinsky and Lalumière (2011) in their Psychological Science article, “Prepared for Anything? An Investigation of Female Genital Arousal in Response to Rape Cues,” examining sexual response to stimuli describing sexual coercion among women and men. The hypothesis—that vulvovaginal vasocongestion to a broad range of sexual cues is an adaptive feature of female sexual response—built upon earlier propositions that a “reflexive and automatic genital vasocongestion in response to visual sexual features may be a protective mechanism (Friedl, 1994), preparing the genitals for sexual activity via lubrication, facilitating penetration, and reducing the likelihood of genital injury or infection during sexual activity” (Chivers, 2005, p. 384). This feature of the sexual response system might therefore explain why females demonstrate genital responses to nonpreferred sexual stimuli, including nonpreferred genders, sexual acts, and species (Chivers, 2005). My thinking was inspired by van Lunsen and Laan’s (2004) article, reflecting on the automatic nature of vaginal vasocongestion to visual cues: “One might be tempted to assume that for adaptive reasons, the explicit sexual stimuli used in psychophysiological studies represent a class of unlearned stimuli, to which we are innately prepared to respond. These stimuli seem to override the effects of various attempts at voluntary control” (p. 746). Indeed, I was tempted, and so were Lalumière, Sawatsky, Dawson, and Suschinsky (2020) in their Target Article. The adaptive response in question is a cascade of psychophysiological events involving the pre-attentive processing of sexual cues, and the triggering of an autonomic response, vulvovaginal vasodilation and vasocongestion, and genital This Commentary refers to the article available at https://doi. org/10.1007/s10508-019-01599-5. * Meredith L. Chivers [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, 218 Craine Hall, 62 Arch Street, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
lubrication. The Preparation Hypothesis supposes that the purpose of indiscriminate vasocongestion and lubrication is to minimize harm to the vagina experienced during penetration by a penis. In their Target Article, Lalumière et al. (2020) identify and carefully examine some of the data supporting, and not supporting, this hypothesis—rapid genital response only to sexual cues, low specificity observed using a variety of measures of sexual response, genital response even among those reporting arousal difficulties—but leave relatively undisturbed the questions of the more proximal, contextual factors that predispose these vaginas to be vulnerable to harms. That is, those dyadic, cultural, and systemic factors that have also contr
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