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How to Know What You Actually Like in Bed
The Science of You
10 min read
Not knowing is not a character flaw. It is an extremely common starting point that nobody talks about.
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There is a quiet assumption embedded in most conversations about sex: that you already know what you like, and the only challenge is finding a partner who shares it or communicating your preferences clearly. But many people, including people with significant sexual experience, genuinely do not know what they like. They have a vague sense of what has not been unpleasant. They have a clearer sense of what they have been told they should want. And they have almost no framework for finding out what actually works for them specifically. This article is about how to change that.
The reasons are layered. Shame is the most obvious one. If you grew up in an environment where sexual curiosity was treated as wrong, embarrassing, or dangerous, you learned to suppress the internal signals that would help you understand your own responses. Self-objectification is another factor. Research by Sanchez and Kiefer found that self-objectification during sexual activity, the experience of monitoring how you appear rather than being present to what you are feeling, is associated with significantly reduced sexual pleasure and reduced awareness of your own physical sensations. If you are watching yourself from the outside during sex, you are not gathering information about what your body actually responds to.
Then there is the prioritising-a-partner problem. Many people, particularly women and femmes, have had sexual experiences primarily or exclusively structured around their partner's pleasure, preferences, and pace. If your sexual experiences have mostly been about navigating what someone else wants, you have very little data about yourself. You know what you have tolerated, what you have enjoyed when conditions were right, and what has left you cold. That is a start, but it is not the same as knowing your own responses.
Inexperience with solo exploration compounds this. Masturbation is often done quickly, functionally, without much curiosity or attention. It achieves a physiological outcome without generating much information. That is fine for what it is, but it is not the same as exploratory attention to sensation.
Emily Nagoski's synthesis of the dual control model, developed by Erick Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute, offers one of the most useful frameworks for understanding why people respond so differently to sexual stimuli. The model proposes two systems: a sexual excitation system (SES), which functions like an accelerator, and a sexual inhibition system (SIS), which functions like a brake.
The accelerator responds to sexually relevant cues: touch, sight, sound, smell, imagination, context, atmosphere. When it picks up a signal it recognises as sexual, it begins to generate arousal. The brake responds to potential threats: stress, anxiety, self-consciousness, pain, distraction, performance pressure, relationship tension. When the brake is engaged, it suppresses arousal regardless of what the accelerator is receiving.
This model explains why "just relax" is unhelpful advice: relaxing is not the same as releasing the brake. The brake responds to specific threats, not to a general level of tension. Understanding your own brake is as important as understanding your own accelerator. What engages your brake? Performance anxiety? Worry about how your body looks? Background stress that you have not processed? Being in a relationship where you do not feel emotionally safe? These are not moral failures. They are brake inputs, and identifying them is practical information.
Understanding your accelerator is equally specific. What kinds of context, sensation, atmosphere, or emotional state reliably begin to generate arousal for you? For many people, especially women, context is a much more powerful input than specific physical stimulation. The research consistently shows that psychological safety, emotional connection, and setting matter enormously to subjective arousal for a significant portion of people. That is not weakness or overcomplexity. It is how the system works for that person.
The single most efficient way to learn about your own sexual responses is solo exploration with a deliberate, curious, low-stakes stance. Not solo sex as goal-directed release, but as genuine investigation. This requires creating conditions that minimise brake inputs: time you do not feel rushed, privacy you feel confident in, a body that is not exhausted or in pain, and a mind that has permission to simply notice rather than evaluate.
The goal is not to achieve a particular outcome. It is to pay attention to what is happening in your body as it is happening. What kinds of touch generate more sensation? What kinds generate less? What changes when you vary pressure, pace, or location? What happens to your breathing? What mental imagery, if any, arises spontaneously? What do you find yourself wanting more of?
This is fundamentally different from the common framing of masturbation as simply a means to orgasm. You are using time alone with your own body to gather information that you cannot get any other way. The information you gather is genuinely yours: it reflects your nervous system's responses, not what you have been told you should want, not what a partner has assumed you wanted, not what you have performed enjoying.
Arousal non-concordance is the finding, replicated across multiple studies, that genital response and subjective experience of arousal do not reliably correspond. Meredith Chivers and colleagues published research demonstrating this clearly: genital blood flow, as measured objectively, does not reliably predict whether someone reports feeling turned on. The correlation between genital response and self-reported arousal is about 0.66 for men and around 0.26 for women, meaning the gap is considerably larger for women.
What this means practically: your body can show physical signs of arousal (genital lubrication, engorgement) in response to stimuli that you do not subjectively find appealing. This is not a malfunction. Chivers' interpretation is that genital response functions as a relevance detector, not a desire meter. It responds to sexually relevant stimuli broadly, as a protective mechanism, regardless of whether those stimuli are ones you want to engage with.
The implication for self-knowledge is significant. If you are trying to understand what you actually like, physical response alone is not reliable data. A lubricating vagina or an erection does not mean you want what is happening, or that you are enjoying it. And an absence of obvious physical response does not mean nothing is happening subjectively. What matters is your subjective experience, what you are actually feeling and wanting, and that requires your attention rather than just your body's automatic responses.
This also means that self-judgment based on physical response is almost always misplaced. If your body responded to something you did not want or did not consciously find appealing, that is the non-concordance system working exactly as it is designed to. It says nothing about your desires, your values, or your character.
Most people who try to figure out what they like sexually start from a category-level question: "Am I into X?" But category-level questions are often less useful than sensation-level questions. The useful investigation is more granular than that.
What kinds of touch feel the most alive to you? Is there a difference between what you respond to early in an encounter versus later? What conditions make you feel most present in your own body? What tends to take you out of it? What mental states or emotional contexts tend to accompany your most satisfying sexual experiences? Is there a gap between what you find arousing in fantasy and what you actually want in practice, and if so, what do you make of that gap?
The fantasy versus practice distinction deserves its own attention. Many people find certain fantasies arousing with no interest in enacting them. That is completely ordinary. A fantasy is a mental event. Its arousal value does not commit you to anything, and you do not need to resolve what it means about you in order to note it. What you find yourself actually wanting, in your body, with a specific person, in a specific moment, is a different question from what your imagination finds interesting in the abstract.
Once you have more information about your own responses, the next step is finding language for it. Many people find this harder than the self-discovery part. There is a gap between knowing what you like and being able to say it to another person without feeling exposed or awkward.
A few things help. First, choose a moment outside of sex for any substantive conversation about preferences. Mid-encounter is not a great time for nuanced discussion, and it puts both people under pressure. A relaxed, low-stakes conversation outside the bedroom is much more likely to go well. Second, use specific and positive framing rather than general or corrective framing. "I really love it when you do X" is easier to receive and more useful than "I do not like when you do Y." Third, in-the-moment physical guidance, moving a hand, adjusting pressure, shifting position, is often the clearest and least pressured form of communication during sex itself. It is direct and it does not require either person to pause and process language.
Research on sexual communication consistently shows that partners who communicate more explicitly about preferences report higher sexual satisfaction. The awkwardness of the conversation is a real and temporary cost. The benefit of a partner who actually knows what you like is ongoing.
What you respond to sexually is not fixed. It shifts with age, hormonal changes, life circumstances, relationship context, stress, mental health, and experience. Something that was deeply appealing at twenty-five may feel completely neutral at forty, and vice versa. New experiences create new reference points. Body changes after illness, pregnancy, menopause, or other significant life events change what feels good. A different emotional context can reveal responses that were present but inaccessible under previous conditions.
This means that self-discovery is not a one-time project you complete and then refer back to. It is an ongoing relationship with your own body that requires periodic attention. What you knew about yourself five years ago may still be true, may have expanded, or may have shifted entirely. Treating your sexual self as something to stay curious about over time, rather than something to figure out once and then know definitively, is both more accurate and more interesting.