Ask the experience
Begin with the organism and the person’s report: possibility, access, discovery, recruitment, configuration, conditions, pattern, and meaning.
Questions before categories
What becomes visible depends on what we ask.
Public inquiry architecture · No responses collected · Not a validated survey or diagnostic instrument
Neurosexology begins before the inherited category. It asks what an organism may be capable of, how an event became organized, what conditions mattered, and what patterns have developed—while examining how the questions themselves shape the answers that can enter the record.
Questions direct attention. They establish options, imply explanations, invite or inhibit disclosure, and determine which distinctions survive measurement. In Neurosexology, the question is part of the method.
Two kinds of question
Ask what happened. Then ask what the question made possible to say.
The Foundational Questions investigate the organism and the person’s experience. The Question Tenets investigate the act of asking.
Audit the question
Examine the instrument, researcher, institution, inherited map, options, expectations, and omissions.
A question architecture for the body
Questions large enough for a living system.
These questions can orient reflection, conversation, qualitative inquiry, and future research development. They do not presume that every capacity exists, every pathway should be explored, or every person wants to answer.
Possibility and access
- 01
What might your body be capable of?
Begin with possibility without turning possibility into a promise, duty, or claim of universality.
- 02
Through what pathways?
Ask which sensory, physiological, attentional, learned, relational, imaginative, or other routes may participate.
- 03
What can you currently access?
Separate pathway existence from present accessibility. Access may change by health, stress, relationship, attention, medication, safety, environment, or time.
- 04
What remains undiscovered?
Preserve uncertainty. Undiscovered does not mean present, absent, accessible, or inaccessible. It identifies what is not yet known.
The active event
- 05
What becomes recruited?
Ask what body regions, sensations, processes, memories, meanings, and relational elements become active participants in this event.
- 06
How do those components come together?
Ask about configuration: timing, weighting, interaction, sequence, amplification, inhibition, and change across the event.
- 07
Under what conditions?
Treat biology, development, language, culture, learning, attention, safety, desire, relationship, environment, and prior experience as parts of the phenomenon rather than background noise.
Pattern and meaning
- 08
What patterns have developed?
Compare events across conditions and time without mistaking one act, response, fantasy, or episode for the whole person.
- 09
What does your experience mean to you?
Meaning and identity remain person-governed. A framework may support reflection; it does not assign the final meaning of an experience.
There is no required map.There is no required pattern.“I do not know,” “I do not want to answer,” and “this question does not fit me” are legitimate responses.
One architecture, several uses
A rallying cry, a conversation, an interview architecture—not yet a survey.
A good question should increase access and agency—not pressure.
Private reflection
Notice experience, compare conditions, identify uncertainty, or develop language without sharing an answer or converting it into an identity.
Friends, partners, and trusted people
Open conversation only with permission, room for refusal, and no attempt to turn response into proof of consent, identity, origin, or obligation.
Education and care
Widen inquiry and preserve distinctions without replacing clinical assessment, safeguarding duties, or evidence-based instruments.
Qualitative research
Develop event-first interviews, cognitive interviews, diaries, or repeated-event protocols—not a finished scale.
Questions do things
Language can help organize what is noticed, expected, practiced, and reported.
A question may direct attention, imply normality, favor an explanation, recruit curiosity or shame, change what becomes speakable, and create categories later mistaken for discoveries.
- 01Question wording
- 02Attention and expectation
- 03Interpretation and disclosure
- 04Recorded answers
- 05Aggregation and categories
- 06Future question wording
Which organs are sexual?
The wording demands a fixed category before investigating what the organism does.
What parts and processes can participate, through which pathways, under what conditions, and with what accessibility and recruitment?
The wording opens a system to investigation.
The Question Tenets
Principles for asking questions worthy of the experience.
The ten canonical titles remain the methodological standard for auditing how questions are framed and what they permit people to report.
- 01
Questions are part of the instrument.
Wording, order, response options, examples, definitions, and omissions shape what becomes visible. Record and justify those decisions as carefully as any other measurement choice.
- 02
Begin before the category.
Do not assume that inherited labels already contain the phenomenon. Ask what occurred before requiring the person to place it inside a diagnostic, behavioral, anatomical, or identity category.
- 03
Ask experience before explanation.
First ask what happened, what was felt, what changed, and under what conditions. Ask why only after the event has been described with enough precision to support interpretation.
- 04
Perception is data, not necessarily fact.
First-person perception is indispensable evidence about lived experience. It should be preserved without forcing it to establish every physiological mechanism, external event, or causal explanation.
- 05
Study assumed normality.
“Normal,” “typical,” “primary,” “successful,” and “dysfunctional” may contain unexamined reference groups and cultural expectations. Investigate the standard as well as the deviation from it.
- 06
Leave room for the unanticipated.
A question should permit experiences, language, sequences, and explanations the instrument did not predict. Include open description and genuine routes for “none,” “another answer,” and “the question does not fit.”
- 07
Variation is not dysfunction by default.
Difference, rarity, or mismatch with a dominant script does not establish disorder. Ask about distress, impairment, risk, consent, flexibility, context, and the person’s goals.
- 08
Do not manufacture shame.
Avoid language that presumes defect, moral failure, abnormality, inadequacy, or required disclosure. Measure shame when relevant; do not create it through the measurement process.
- 09
Aggregation should return something to respondents.
People whose bodies and experiences produce knowledge should receive legible findings, visible limitations, revision history, and useful public materials—not only institutional extraction.
- 10
Ask questions worthy of the experience.
Respect complexity, privacy, time, burden, agency, uncertainty, and the possibility that the person’s language may reveal something the framework has not yet learned to represent.
Provocations · Version 0.1
Short statements for interrupting assumptions—not substitutes for their arguments.
A provocation is neither a governing tenet nor an established finding. Each statement points to the fuller framework, evidence boundary, or research question that makes it responsible.
An outcome does not tell you its cause.
Observed results can support several explanations.
Follow the argumentVariation ≠ dysfunction.
Difference becomes a clinical claim only when the relevant evidence and criteria support it.
Follow the argumentThe numbers can tell us what happened. They cannot, by themselves, tell us what the person experienced.
Measurement and lived experience belong together without becoming interchangeable.
Follow the argumentThe person is not the contradiction.
When evidence layers diverge, investigate the model before treating the person as incoherent.
Follow the argumentCapacity is not the same thing as access to capacity.
Possibility, present accessibility, discovery, and expression answer different questions.
Follow the argumentFrom inquiry to measurement
A useful question is not automatically a validated measure.
The Foundational Questions and Question Tenets are an inquiry architecture—not a Neurosexuality assessment, capacity inventory, diagnostic tool, or clinical scale.
- 01
Open inquiry
Begin with broad questions and first-person language rather than an inherited scale.
- 02
Source-language collection
Collect descriptions only through an ethically governed, consent-based process with visible sampling and privacy protections.
- 03
Candidate dimensions
Identify distinctions and missing concepts without treating frequency as proof of universality.
- 04
Construct definition
Define exactly what is being measured and how it differs from adjacent constructs.
- 05
Cognitive interviewing
Test wording, assumptions, timeframes, examples, and response options across people.
- 06
Pilot testing
Examine burden, missingness, response distributions, harms, and unanticipated interpretations.
- 07
Reliability and validity work
Test consistency and whether evidence supports the interpretations made from scores or categories.
- 08
Versioned public record
Publish methods, limitations, corrections, revisions, and usable findings.
Open questions → first-person language → candidate concepts → operational definitions → cognitive testing → pilot measures → validation and revision
Three worked examples
Better questions preserve the distinctions a compressed question erases.
Do you like anal sex?
Event-first expansionThink of one specific experience. What sensations were present? What became sexually salient? Which conditions shaped whether it was wanted, pleasurable, neutral, painful, overwhelming, or inaccessible?
What becomes visibleThe act no longer impersonates the pathway, experience, pattern, identity, or explanation.
Were you aroused?
Event-first expansionWhat bodily responses occurred? What did you experience? What did you want? What did you communicate or authorize? Did you want the event to begin, continue, change, or stop?
What becomes visibleResponse, pleasure, desire, consent, and meaning remain available for separate investigation.
Can you orgasm with a partner?
Event-first expansionUnder which conditions has orgasm become accessible or inaccessible? Which pathways, stimulation, attention, relationships, expectations, timing, and environments have differed across events?
What becomes visiblePresent difficulty can be located within conditions before it is interpreted as fixed incapacity or disorder.
Boundaries and privacy
You can use a question without surrendering an answer.
The invitation is to inquiry—not disclosure.
- This page does not collect or store responses.
- No answer is required to continue through the site.
- The questions do not generate a score, category, diagnosis, or identity.
- They do not determine consent, capacity, pathology, orientation, gender, compatibility, or treatment need.
- Public reflection and formal research participation are different activities.
- A response given in one context must not be silently reused in another.
Questions should travel
Questions should return language, distinctions, and agency to the people being asked.
Two printable, versioned one-page resources are planned: the Nine Foundational Questions and the Ten Question Tenets. Equivalent HTML on this page remains the canonical record; no answer submission is required.
Record details
- Record ID
- NS-QUESTIONS-001
- Record type
- Inquiry architecture
- Canonical URL
- https://neurosexology.org/questions/
- Publication status
- Published
- Evidentiary status
- Open question
- Participation status
- Not currently offered
- Version
- 1.1
- Framework version
- 1.0
- Author / architect
- Nicholas Julian Madison
- Related record IDs
- NS-TENETS-001 · NS-RESEARCH-PROGRAM-001
- Last substantively revised
- August 11, 2026
- What changed in this version
- Added Version 0.1 linked provocations; the Foundational Questions and Question Tenets remain unchanged.