Nonconcordance and the Metaphysics of Sexual Arousal and Orientation

Sometimes we want to have sex with someone but our bodies don’t respond accordingly. Sometimes our bodies respond accordingly but we don’t have the corresponding desire. Sex researchers call this phenomenon “nonconcordance”. Nonconcordance makes interesting trouble for influential internalist views of sexual orientation that locate its nature “in the head”, such as views on which sexual orientation supervenes only on desires, phenomenal experiences of arousal, hybrid states thereof, and the like. However, rather than conclude that internalist views are false, I float a refined version of phenomenalism, an internalist view on which sexual orientations supervene only on phenomenal experiences of arousal. By claiming that such experiences can have phenomenal parts, I argue that phenomenalists can account for cases of nonconcordance, and then some.