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

by Emily Nagoski

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.

Kaplan realized something important was entirely missing from the four-phase model: desire. The entire concept of sexual desire was utterly missing from the dominant theory of human sexual response.

The second brake is a little different. It’s more like the hand brake in a car, a chronic, low-level “No thank you” signal. If you try to drive with the hand brake on, you might be able to get where you want to go, but it’ll take longer and use a lot more gas. Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure,” like worry about not having an orgasm.

Result: You don’t develop a preference for the smell of a fertile female over the smell of an infertile female or even of another male. It requires a sexy (i.e., copulatory) experience to teach the male rat’s brain that a female in estrus is “sexually relevant.” The instinct to attempt copulation is there, and he’ll attempt copulation with everybody—but if he doesn’t have the experience, he can’t learn how to turn that instinct into successful action.

Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say,

Trauma results when a person has control over her body taken from her, she freezes, and then she can’t unlock. Whether the cause is a car accident or sexual violence, the survival mechanism kicks in: freeze, the petrified shutdown characterized by numbness and sometimes tonic immobility (paralysis) or a sense of disembodiment. Some people describe it as “going into shock.” This is the life-threat stress response, activated when your brain decides you can’t escape a stressor, nor can you fight it. It’s reserved for the most dangerous and violent contexts.

Sexual trauma survivorship impacts information processing for both the accelerator and the brake. Sensations, contexts, and ideas that used to be interpreted as sexually relevant may instead now be interpreted by your brain as threats, so that sexy contexts actually hit the brakes. And the chronically high levels of stress activity in a recovering survivor’s brain can block out sexual stimuli, categorizing them as low priority.

This is the dark side of pairing stress and attachment: the “I am lost” feeling, which motivates us to stabilize our connection with our attachment object—“I am home.” Therapist and author Sue Johnson calls this “solace sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.21

So much solace sex is misinterpreted by partners as being intense desire for intimacy, when it is really intense fear of being lost.

“Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person. In the very best relationships, we’re allowed to experience all forms of stress—anger, fear, shutdown—and receive the loving presence of our partner sitting still and quiet through the storm.

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened. Counterintuitively, when attachment is at its most secure and stable—when your relationship is all satisfaction and no worry or “plot”—it can take a backseat in your sexual arousability.

“We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”

Well, you’ve at least had clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, uterine orgasms, energy orgasms, extended orgasms, and multiple orgasms? And you’ve mastered at least thirty-five different positions for intercourse? If you don’t try all these things, you’re frigid. If you’ve had too few partners, don’t watch porn, and don’t have a collection of vibrators in your bedside table, you’re a prude. Also: You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong too, try something else. Forever.

Linda Bacon literally wrote the book on HAES—Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight—based on her decades of research on nutrition, exercise, and health. There are four major tenets, according to “The HAES Manifesto”: (1) accept your size, (2) trust yourself, (3) adopt healthy lifestyle habits including joyful physical activity and nutritious foods, and (4) embrace size diversity.14

For sex educators, the rule is, “Don’t yuck anybody’s yum.”