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

by Emily Nagoski

We are all the same. We are all different. We are all normal.

Let’s make the world a better place for vulvas.

sexual response depends as much on context as on brain mechanism.

You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub.

As infants, our lives literally depend on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that’s no longer true, but our bodies don’t know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn’t come back, we’ll die.

So yeah, love feels good—“I am whole.” Except when it hurts like you’re dying—“I am broken.” Because: attachment.

Porn For The Ladies.

You can’t choose for your broken heart not to hurt, any more than you can choose for a broken bone not to hurt. But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.

I am at risk/I am safe. I am broken/I am whole. I am lost/I am home.

You may also find that your family and culture have planted some pretty toxic crap in your garden.

No one asked for your permission before they started planting the toxic crap.

Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are.4

Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.

one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?”

Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others.

Self-indulgence is what you do to numb emotional pain rather than allowing it to complete the cycle.

You do you. Absorb what feels right for you and shake off what feels wrong. Let everybody else do everybody else, absorbing what feels right for them and shaking off what feels wrong.

If you hide behind a wall to protect yourself from the pain of rejection, then you also block out joy. If you never let others see the parts you want to hide, then they’ll never see the parts you want them to know.

What this research suggests is that women’s emotional experiences are more likely to line up with their facial expressions and vocal inflection, while men’s emotional experiences are more likely to line up with their heart rates and blood flow.

Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.”

“I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself,”

Joy is the hard part.

Suffering is not a virtue and pleasure is not a sin. We’ve been lied to all our lives.

Rage not against yourself but against the culture that lied to you.