Emily Nagoski, Ph.D., speaks our kind of language. We read the first few pages of her new book, “Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life,” and we were sold. It tackles the tricky task of explaining women’s complex sexuality (which, hello, is different from men’s) so people can reconceptualize and recontextualize sex to unlock their pleasure potential. Why aren’t you having that much fun in bed? This book will give you the answers. Below is an excerpt from the introduction to give you an idea of Nagoski’s overall approach, which combines sound science with female empowerment to help promote positive sex education. It’s like looking in a mirror…except we don’t have the Ph.D. — so if you won’t listen to us, listen to her!
THE TRUE STORY OF SEX
From the introduction to “Come As You Are”
After all the books that have been written about sex, all the blogs and TV shows and radio Q&As, how can it be that we all still have so many questions?
Well. The frustrating reality is we ’ve been lied to—not deliberately, it ’s no one ’s fault, but still. We were told the wrong story.
For a long, long time in Western science and medicine, women’s sexuality was viewed as Men’s Sexuality Lite—basically the same but not quite as good.
For instance, it was just sort of assumed that since men have orgasms during penis-in-vagina sex (intercourse), women should have orgasms with intercourse too, and if they don’t, it ’s because they’re broken.
In reality, about 30 percent of women orgasm reliably with intercourse. The other 70 percent sometimes, rarely, or never orgasm with intercourse, and they’re all healthy and normal. A woman might orgasm
lots of other ways—manual sex, oral sex, vibrators, breast stimulation, toe sucking, pretty much any way you can imagine—and still not orgasm during intercourse. That ’s normal.
It was just assumed, too, that because a man’s genitals typically be- have the way his mind is behaving—if his penis is erect, he ’s feeling turned on—a woman’s genitals should also match her emotional experience.
And again, some women’s do, many don’t. A woman can be perfectly normal and healthy and experience “arousal nonconcordance,” where the behavior of her genitals (being wet or dry) may not match her mental experience (feeling turned on or not).
And it was also assumed that because men experience spontaneous, out-of-the-blue desire for sex, women should also want sex spontaneously.
Again it turns out that ’s true sometimes, but not necessarily. A woman can be perfectly normal and healthy and never experience spontaneous sexual desire. Instead, she may experience “responsive” desire, in which her desire emerges only in a highly erotic context.
In reality, women and men are different.
But wait. Women and men both experience orgasm, desire, and arousal, and men, too, can experience responsive desire, arousal nonconcordance, and lack of orgasm with penetration. Women and men both can fall in love, fantasize, masturbate, feel puzzled about sex, and experience ecstatic pleasure. They both can ooze fluids, travel forbidden paths of sexual imagination, encounter the unexpected and startling ways that sex shows up in every domain of life—and confront the unexpected and star- tling ways that sex sometimes declines, politely or otherwise, to show up.
So . . . are women and men really that different?
The problem here is that we ’ve been taught to think about sex in terms of behavior, rather than in terms of the biological, psychological, and social processes underlying the behavior. We think about our physiological behavior—blood flow and genital secretions and heart rate. We think about our social behavior—what we do in bed, whom we do it with, and how often. A lot of books about sex focus on those things; they tell you how many times per week the average couple has sex or they offer instructions on how to have an orgasm, and they can be helpful.
But if you really want to understand human sexuality, behavior alone won’t get you there. Trying to understand sex by looking at behavior is like trying to understand love by looking at a couple ’s wedding portrait . . . and their divorce papers. Being able to describe what happened— two people got married and then got divorced—doesn’t get us very far. What we want to know is why and how it came to be. Did our couple fall out of love after they got married, and that ’s why they divorced? Or were they never in love but were forced to marry, and finally became free when they divorced? Without better evidence, we ’re mostly guessing.
Until very recently, that ’s how it ’s been for sex—mostly guessing. But we ’re at a pivotal moment in sex science because, after decades of research describing what happens in human sexual response, we ’re finally figuring out the why and how—the process underlying the behavior.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, researchers Erick Janssen
and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction developed a model of human sexual response that provides an organizing principle for understanding the true story of sex. According to their “dual control model,” the sexual response mechanism in our brains consists of a pair of universal components—a sexual accelerator and sexual brakes—and those components respond to broad categories of sexual stimuli—including genital sensations, visual stimulation, and emotional context. And the sensitivity of each component varies from person to person.
The result is that sexual arousal, desire, and orgasm are nearly universal experiences, but when and how we experience them depends largely on the sensitivities of our “brakes” and “accelerator” and on the kind of stimulation they’re given.
This is the mechanism underlying the behavior—the why and the how. And it ’s the rule that governs the story I’ll be telling in this book:
We ’re all made of the same parts, but in each of us, those parts are organized in a unique way that changes over our life span.
No organization is better or worse than any other, and no phase in our life span is better or worse than any other; they’re just different. An apple tree can be healthy no matter what variety of apple it is—though one variety may need constant direct sunlight and another might enjoy some shade. And an apple tree can be healthy when it ’s a seed, when it ’s a seedling, as it ’s growing, and as it fades at the end of the season, as well as when, in late summer, it is laden with fruit. But it has different needs at each of those phases in its life.
You, too, are healthy and normal at the start of your sexual development, as you grow, and as you bear the fruits of living with confidence and joy inside your body. You are healthy when you need lots of sun, and you’re healthy when you enjoy some shade. That ’s the true story. We are all the same. We are all different. We are all normal.
From the book “Come As You Are” available on Amazon
