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

by Emily Nagoski

the cultural view of labia doesn’t match the biological reality. Vulvas in soft-core porn are digitally edited to conform to a specific standard of “tucked-in” labia and homogeneous coloring, to be “less detailed.”2

The name for the whole package of female external genitalia is “vulva.”

If you’re having trouble with any phase of sexual response, is it because there’s not enough stimulation to the accelerator? Or is there too much stimulation to the brakes?

Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works.

Having an attractive partner who respects them and accepts them as they are • Feeling trusting and affectionate in their relationship • Being confident and healthy—both emotionally and physically • Feeling desired by their partner, being approached in a way that makes them feel special • Explicit erotic cues, like erotica or porn, or hearing or seeing other people having sex

When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat.

Learning to recognize the contexts that increase your brain’s perception of the world as a sexy place, and having skills to maximize the sexy contexts, is key to increasing your sexual satisfaction.

“Why should I trust my body?” she said. “My whole adult life, my body has been unreliable and falling apart. When I get stressed, everything just shuts down—I get sick, I get injured, none of my systems work. And that includes sex.”

Im tbe same

“It sounds like your body is opting for the ‘freeze’ stress response, where it just shuts down instead of trying to escape or fight,” I said. “It’s what happens when a person has either long-term, high-intensity stress, or is in the process of healing

Allow it to discharge fully. Let your body move all the way from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”

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.

I’ll just say that one powerful way of changing the context is to take away the stress of performance anxiety that comes with feeling obligated to have sex.

Your feelings are neither more nor less important than your partner’s. Your pain doesn’t automatically make your experience more valid, nor does your partner’s pain make your partner’s experience more valid. When we are in emotional pain, we tend to prioritize easing that pain over respecting our partner’s experience, so we have to remind ourselves that our different experiences matter equally. Each of you is 100

Stress reduces sexual interest in 80–90 percent of people and reduces sexual pleasure in everyone—even the 10–20 percent of people for whom it increases interest.

Trauma survivors’ brains sometimes learn to treat “sexually relevant” stimuli as threats, so that whenever the accelerator is activated, the brake is hit, too. Practicing mindfulness is an evidence-based strategy for decoupling the brakes and accelerator.

“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.”

What it comes down to is that a lot of women trust their bodies less than they trust what they’ve been taught, culturally, about their bodies.

So it’s not surprising that self-criticism is directly related to depression8—and does depression improve your sexual well-being? It does not.

Your body reacts to negative self-evaluations as if you’re under attack.

When you stop beating yourself up—when you stop reinjuring yourself—what happens is . . . you start to heal.

Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.

The shorthand version of this exercise is: Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.

“Genital response is not consent.” Let’s add to that, “And neither is pregnancy.”

Context—external circumstances and internal brain state—is fundamental to most women’s sexual wellbeing;

Do whatever excites you, whatever literally gets your heart beating faster.

“If I were a woman who loved sex, how would I deal with feeling too busy for sex?” or “As a woman who loves sex, what’s my best strategy for overcoming self-criticism?”

Feeling stressed, depressed, anxious, self-critical, untrusting in your relationship, or simply exhausted and overwhelmed are all real and meaningful barriers to sex.

“The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.”

Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how: The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm—stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort—need to be taken seriously and have their needs met.