Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

If women’s sexuality is a garden, I think of love as the rain and stress as the sun, drawing the garden upward, nourishing and challenging at once.

In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response.