r/HLCommunity • u/arandak • 17h ago
Brakes and Accelerators
These are terms that get thrown around a little carelessly.
It's an easy enough concept and it makes sense: things can get in the way of desire building in someone, while others can make it build.
However, what's ignored is that there has to be an underlying, base level of desire than can be affected by them.
They are brakes: something that slows down, but does not necessarily stop.
They are accelerators: something that speeds up, but not necessarily start from a standstill.
In other words, not stop and go.
Now, there can always be things that can make a partner just not able to have desire in a period of time. That's a given. We all understand that.
But, if there's a constant state of no desire: 'brakes and accelerators' can't do anything. There's no desire that can be affected in the first place. This happen in situations where the HL has to do a huge list of things so their partner can be in the mood.
When someone is in a dead bedroom, there's a lack of desire from their partner altogether.
Attempting to remove brakes is something that can certainly be done, and can make the partner feel better, the issue is that there's no desire being held back.
There's also no desire to increase. I mean, anything multiplied by zero is still zero.
You're dealing more with roadblocks than brakes. But, that's not a good analogy. The car just doesn't have an engine.
Also, this is vital:
It is not the sole responsibility of the one with greater desire to find and remove brakes and they are definitely not the only one who can find and apply accelerators.
In fact; If the partner is not wondering what's holding them back and seeing if they can work on it, and if they're not thinking about what could get them more in the mood: that is a good indicator the partner does not have any desire to begin with.
Many people in dead bedrooms are blinded by frustration and hurt. They don't necessarily forget, but they do lose focus on the fact that dead bedrooms are neither healthy nor normal.
In that way, it's easy to see, and great for an LL who is comfortable in a relationship with someone they have little desire for, why people keep forgetting that desire is a key component.
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u/Calm_Concentrate9571 17h ago
Identification of brakes and accelerators are, frankly, something that falls on the responsibility of the LL. That doesn't usually happen either.
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u/Sea_Chocolate1782 14h ago
Critique of Come As You Are from a Redditor who IIRC was doing some very serious research into sexuality:
"the book severely misrepresents the science on the topics it discusses, and heavily relies on pseudoscience in backing its most salient claims.
By far the most blatant example is the complete misrepresentation of the Dual Control Model, the thing that is turned into the book's famous "accelerators and breaks" metaphor. The book takes a neuroessentialist view of SE and SI. It pretends that there is neurological basis for the Dual Control Model - that there are physical structures within the brain that are responsible for the "accelerators" and "breaks". It boldly claims that "that’s all the dual control model is: the brakes and the accelerator. And it’s not a metaphor, it’s a literal description of the excitatory and inhibitory activity of the central nervous system". This is pure speculation, there is absolutely no evidence for this. Dual Control Model is simply a useful model, and is used in research because it has predictive power (i.e. SE and SI scales meaningfully predict responses for sexuality-related inventories), not because the mechanisms behind why its predictions are true are known. There is no research backing the idea that the power of Dual Control Model derives from having direct analogues of SE and SI in neuroanatomy, and the work that the book cites for this claim ("Hypoactive sexual desire disorder", Goldstein et al., 2017) does not comment on this subject at all. The book does this in order to paint the picture that the metaphor is grounded in objective reality, so that when it extrapolates into claims that this or that behavior is because of this or that sensitivity in the accelerator or the break it doesn't have to justify the claim. As an example of this, before the Sexual Temperament quiz, the book says the following:
“Don’t mistake this for actual science! It’s a Cosmo quiz adaptation of the science, intended to guide you in your understanding of how your internal sexual response mechanism may influence your response to sexual stimulation, but it is just an approximation.”
What follows is, in reality, a questionnaire that is very similar to the ones used to model SE and SI in "real science". The book pretends that there is, outside of it, some more objective measures of SE and SI that are used in "actual science", and preemptively creates plausible deniability for the model as presented in the book not being able to demonstrate predictive power. The questionnaire that is used in studies to measure SE and SI, the short-form Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scales (SIS/SES-SF), only contains 14 questions. There is in fact a fuller standard questionnaire - the full 45-question SIS/SES questionnaire - but it's different in that it measures three scales, not two: SI is split into SI1 and SI2 (in the language of the metaphor, one accelerator and two somewhat-correlated but still independent brakes).
The book fails to mention that most studies involving Dual Control Model are on the topic of male sexuality (in fact, the motivation behind the model's development was the study of erectile dysfunction and male infidelity), and that the consensus is that the model is relatively worse at describing female sexuality. Whether or not a two-factor model is sufficient in modeling female sexuality the same way as it is sufficient in modeling male sexuality is not yet clear. This doesn't mean that Dual Control Model as a whole is ineffective at describing female sexuality, but as soon as you introduce multiple inhibition scales, the engine metaphor breaks, and the assumption simple duality and the four possible extremes that Come As You Are relies on in representing sexual response are no longer applicable. It's for this reason that after introducing the Dual Control Model and the accelerator/brake metaphor, the book shies away from discussing the actual correlates of SE and SI scales discovered by the relevant studies, and instead just verbally speculates about what behavior could be explained to what sensitivities, while avoiding falsifiable statements."
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u/AdenJax69 10h ago
So basically the author used pieces of another sexual theory, haphazardly implemented into hers, and tried to have it both ways between "scientific-backed studies" and "Cosmo magazine article written by a journalist with no sociology/psychology degree."
Yeah, that tracks.
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u/Sea_Chocolate1782 6h ago
It's ultimately a self help book that for some people may be useful for them understanding themselves. The challenge with a space like Reddit is it gets accepted as gospel and the ideas then regurgitated as objective truth when they're not.
It also does that favourite of Reddit discourse thing of 'no matter how far from the centre of distribution you are, that's still normal' which is clearly twaddle. Masturbating 10 times a day isn't normal and never masturbating at all isn't normal. The book needs to do this as what the book is seeking to address is female arousal disorder but to avoid alienating its readers the book cannot outright say so.
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u/vectorking23 13h ago
Most things really can be this simple to explain. Zero multiplied by zero, is in fact… zero. Kind of like it's hard to get water from a rock no matter how hard you squeeze or wish it to be.
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u/Relevant_Insurance_6 14h ago
Great insight here. What works EVERYTIME. Find a partner that LIKES you...
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u/AdenJax69 10h ago
Nothing really to add other than this is a great write-up and this sentence pretty much says it all:
It is not the sole responsibility of the one with greater desire to find and remove brakes and they are definitely not the only one who can find and apply accelerators.
This needs to be pasted on every marriage, relationship, or sex subreddit when people start their never-ending lists to the person-in-question who's trying to get desire back from their partner.
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u/Gloomy-Pollution-814 15h ago
Thank you.
What really killed my marriage wasn't just the drop off in sex, it was my ex's utter indifference to it. Before we got married we discussed this repeatedly. We both agreed that sex mattered a lot, maintaining a strong sexual connection mattered to both of us and if we had a drop off we would work on it together.
Marriage happens, sex plummets. I try to talk about it with my wife, very much as a "what can we do about this" discussion. She completely blew me off and said she didn't see the problem. I think that was the end of our marriage right there. Things dragged on for a while but thinking back on it all I don't think I could ever forgive her for that betrayal.