Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

But the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like some kind of freshness seal. If a hymen tears or bruises, it heals.

Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. This story has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with controlling women.

One blog reader emailed me that “brakes and accelerator at the same time” exactly described her experience while reading the best-selling sexually explicit novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

She and Henry talked about it, and they decided to try an experiment: He would create entire evenings where he courted Camilla, wooed her, and—eventually—won her. And they learned something from this that surprised them both: It wasn’t the pursuing. It was the waiting that turned her on.

the real trick was not the experience of being chased but the amount of accelerator activation that comes with going slowly, delaying gratification. For her, the process of getting from enjoying to eagerness is a bit like the ticking pilot light on a gas stove—not quite enough gas, not quite enough, not quite, until phoof! she crosses from enjoying into eagerness. Or—going back to the shower analogy—her accelerator was like a hot-water heater that took a lot of time to heat the whole tank. It worked great, it just needed more patience, but it was so worth the wait.

It’s allowing the stress response cycle to complete. Allow it to discharge fully. Let your body move all the way from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”

There are only two possible outcomes, right? Either you get killed by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape and live. So imagine that you successfully run back to your village and scream for help, and everyone helps you slaughter the lion, and then you all eat it for dinner, and in the morning you have a respectful burial service for the parts of the carcass you won’t be using, giving reverent thanks for the lion’s sacrifice.

But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels. We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.

Bottom-Up: Processing Your Body. If the idea of analyzing your patterns of thought and behavior is unappealing to you, you may prefer a body-based therapy, such as sensorimotor therapy13 or Somatic Experiencing (SE).

I like to visualize the lion of body self-criticism as a sweet little kitten that’s been treated badly and needs me to give it affection and tenderness. That’s what helps me to forgive my culture for teaching me such bullshit.

Treat cultural messages about sex and your body like a salad bar. Take only the things that appeal to you and ignore the rest. We’ll all end up with a different collection of stuff on our plates, but that’s how it’s supposed to work. It goes wrong only when you try to apply what you picked as right for your sexuality to someone else’s sexuality.

Genital response doesn’t mean anything but sexually relevant—expecting, essentially a conditioned reflex—not enjoying. It doesn’t indicate desire or pleasure or anything else.

Genital response, which happens between your legs, is expecting. Arousal, which happens between your ears, includes enjoying.

Sex researcher Meredith Chivers often says, “Genital response is not consent.” Let’s add to that, “And neither is pregnancy.” Genital response is no more an expression of pleasure, desire, or consent than the fertilization of an egg is.