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

by Emily Nagoski

Self-judgment, isolation, and over-identification turn you into your own lion, being your own threat—“I am at risk.” And they’re normal—we all experience them. Self-compassion doesn’t mean never feeling them, it means being kind to yourself when you do.

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-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we’re doing well and when we’re struggling—because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.

Emotional pain is exhausting, and sometimes it’s necessary to take a break, numb out for a while. Just remember what happens when the sedated lion comes out from under the anesthesia. The cycle has to complete, it wants to complete. Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process—and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.

Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.

1, I recommended that you take a good look at your genitals and notice the things you like. Now I’m suggesting that you take off all your clothes—or as many as you can bring yourself to take off—and look at your entire body in a mirror. And make a list of everything you see… that you like.26

the day you were born, your body was a cause for celebration, for love without condition, and that’s just as true today as it was then. Let those self-critical thoughts go, let the judgments go, and notice only the things you like.

Practice ignoring the self-critical, judgmental thoughts and focusing on the self-appreciating thoughts. And gradually it will become easier to celebrate your body as it deserves to be celebrated, to treat it with the respect and affection it deserves, and to approach sex with confidence and joy.

Exposure to media that reinforces body self-criticism increases body dissatisfaction, negative mood, low self-esteem, and even disordered eating.

If there were a food that consistently made you sick, you’d stop eating it. So if there’s media that makes you feel more self-critical, stop looking at it.

As you’re looking at movies or television or porn or magazines or social media, ask yourself, “After I see this, am I going to feel better about my body as it is today, or worse?” If the answer is “Better!” then do more of that! Increase your exposure to the media that helps you celebrate your body! But if the answer is “worse,” stop it.

stop buying anything that makes you feel worse. You don’t need to be trained in media literacy and all the ways that you’re being manipulated with digital alteration of images in order to know when something is making you feel better or worse about yourself.

if it makes you feel worse, evidence suggests that it’s interfering with your sexual wellbeing—even if you’ve been taught to believe that feeling worse about your body “motivates” you to “improve” your body. That’s a psychological trap you never need to be caught in again. Stop watering the weeds.

By limiting your exposure to media that makes you feel worse about yourself, you’re not just improving your own sex life, you’re also voting with your eyeballs, your ears, and your cash. You’re joining an audience that will pay attenti...

When it comes to investigating and understanding your own individual sexuality, please do cherry-pick. The moral views may be sincere, the media exciting, the doctors apparently expert, but you need not buy into any system in order to create a coherent narrative of your own sexual self.

We build walls for a lot of reasons. To protect vulnerable parts of ourselves. To hide things we don’t want others to see. To keep people out. To keep ourselves in.

But a wall is a wall is a wall—it’s an indiscriminate barrier. 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.

No girl is born hating her body or feeling ashamed of her sexuality. You had to learn that. No girl is born worried that she’ll be judged if someone finds out what kind of sex she enjoys. You had to learn that, too. You have to learn, as well, that it is safe to be loved, safe to be your authentic self, safe to be sexual with another person, or even safe to be on your own.

even if you learned destructive things, you can learn different things now.

The more aware you are of those contradictory messages, the more choice you have about whether to believe them.

Sometimes people resist letting go of self-criticism—“I suck!”—because it can feel like giving up hope that you could become a better person, but that’s the opposite of how it works. How it really works is that when you stop beating yourself up, you begin to heal, and then you grow like never before.

For real: Your health is not predicted by your weight. You can be healthy—and beautiful—no matter your size. And when you enjoy living in your body today, and treat yourself with ki...

Sexual disgust hits the brakes. And sexual disgust is learned, not innate, and can be unlearned. Begin to notice your “yuck” responses and ask yourself if those responses are making your sex life better or worse. Consider letting go ...

Sometimes bodies don’t respond with genital arousal in a way that matches mental experience. Tell him to pay attention to your words, not your fluids,

There is about a 50 percent overlap between what men’s genitals respond to as “sex-related” and what their brains respond to as “sexually appealing.” And there is about a 10 percent overlap between what women’s genitals respond to as “sex-related” and what their brains respond to as “sexually appealing.”

The genitals tell you, “That’s sex-related.” The person tells you, “That turns me on,” or “I like this,” or “I want more, please.” For women, there’s about a 10 percent overlap between “sex-related” and “sexually appealing.” For men, there’s about a 50 percent overlap.

What we’re seeing in nonconcordance is the difference between learning and liking,

your emotional One Ring has learned what’s sex-related (remember the rats in jackets?), and your learning system activates physiological responses to whatever it has learned is sex-related.

For whatever reason—cultural, biological, or both (probably both)—women have more overlap between their facial expressions and their subjective experience, while men have more overlap between their skin conductance (physiology) and their subjective experience.14

They took the importance of context seriously and started with a romantic movie and then took turns retelling each other their “Story of Us.”15 This is a trick they adapted from John Gottman’s relationship research—they narrate to each other how they met and fell in love, to remind each other (and themselves) of the meaning of their shared life, their affection and admiration for each other. It works differently for each of them; it activates Carol’s accelerator by making her feel in love, and it deactivates Merritt’s brakes by making her feel trusting of her partner.

As she relaxed into the pleasure of observing her partner’s pleasure, she found that when she connected with the experience of giving pleasure, her own pleasure could expand inside her, without all the brakes and worries and fretting.

both porn and mainstream culture continue to perpetuate the myth that genital response = desire and pleasure. Now that you know about nonconcordance, you’ll see people getting it wrong all over the place.

For centuries, men’s sexuality has been the “default” sexuality, so that where women differ from men, women get labeled “broken.”

When we’ve overcome this myth of men-as-default, we’ll stop mistaking “varied” for “broken.”

Every guy, at some point in his life, has the experience of wanting sex, wanting an erection, and the erection just isn’t there. In that moment, the erection (or lack of erection) isn’t a measure of his interest—he might even wake up the very next morning with an erection, when it’s nothing but an inconvenience.

Most boys, around adolescence, experienced unwanted genital response—sitting at the back of the bus, noticing a teacher’s body, his own ill-fitting pants, or even just general excitement about nonsexual things (driving a car, eating a donut, really anything) can activate the relevant pathways and generate the physiological response in a teenage boy.

genital response is not desire; response isn’t even pleasure. It is simply response. For everyone, regardless of their genitals. Just because a penis responds to a particular idea or sight or story doesn’t mean the person with the penis necessarily likes it or wants it. It just means it activated the relevant pathways—learning.

Genital response doesn’t mean anything but sex-related—learning, essentially a conditioned reflex—not liking. It doesn’t indicate desire or pleasure or anything else.

At most, phallus size often—not always—predicts whether a person has ovaries or testicles. Similarly, blood flow to the genitals doesn’t say anything about what the person wants or likes (or should want or like). No. At most, blood flow to the genitals often—not always—is simply information about whether a person has been exposed to something that their brain interpreted as sex-related—with no information about whether they wanted it.

A second, more science-y way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to pay attention to the science and then tell the wrong story about it, to decide that women’s genitals are the “honest indicator” of what really turns them on, and the women are lying, in denial, or just repressed out of awareness of their own deep desires.

Women have been socially programmed not to admit that they’re actually turned on by certain things (like violent sex or lesbian porn), so when they report their perceived arousal, they’re lying or in denial about their hidden desires, or possibly both. But what their genitals are doing is what’s really true.

That’s an appealing story—as if our bodies are showing us a secret, wildly sexual self that could be into anything if we just gave ourselves the permission that our culture has been denying us for centuries! And after all, women have been subjected to oppressive cultural messages that made it shameful for them to acknowledge and pay affectionate attention to their own sexuality—that’s

this whole book is about paying attention to your own internal experience and trusting your body. And what could be more “trust your body” than “Your genitals are telling you what you like, even when you don’t know it”?

We see this myth—that a woman’s genitals can tell us more about how she feels than she can—everywhere.

The moment feels true to many readers, because so many of us were raised to believe other people’s opinions about our bodies, more than we believe our own internal experiences. Certainly there are women who are turned on by being consensually debased, but the whole plot pivots on the fact that Ana isn’t one of them.

Even in the face of such absurdities, it’s an incredibly persistent myth. Alain de Botton, in How to Think More about Sex, goes so far as to describe lubricating vaginas and tumescent penises as “unambiguous agents of sincerity,” because they are automatic rather than intentional, which means they can’t be “faked.”

Experience trumps physiology every time.

If we persist in the false belief that women’s genital response reflects what they “really” want or like, then we have to conclude that if their genitals respond during sexual assault, it means they “really” wanted or liked the assault.

We metaphorize our bodies; we use descriptions of our physiology to stand in for descriptions of our states of mind. “I’m so wet” and “I’m so hard” are intended to say, “I’m into this.” These metaphors are so entrenched that people believe they’re literal. Indeed, some people actually want us to believe that women are lying—whether deliberately or because we’ve been culturally oppressed out of the capacity to recognize our own desires—when our genitals are responding but we say we’re not turned on.

Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men, in a world that wants women to believe they can’t understand their own internal experience.

Like this putative correlation between pirates and global temperature, there’s also a correlation between nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction. The correlation makes it easy to think that the nonconcordance is causing the sexual dysfunction, or that the dysfunction is causing the nonconcordance.