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

by Emily Nagoski

nonconcordance and sexual dysfunction are linked together by a third variable: context.

Sexually functional women have brakes that are sensitive to context, turning off the offs when they’re in the right context—which, remember, means both external circumstances and internal mental state. Sexually dysfunctional women’s brakes stay on, even in contexts where you would expect them to turn off.

researchers could measure how being in the lab influenced the results, compared to being at home. In other words, they measured the effect of context.

The control group’s genital response and subjective arousal more than doubled when tested at home, compared to in the lab. Plus they reported feeling “less inhibited” and “more at ease” at home. The low-desire group’s genital response also doubled at home… but their subjective arousal did not, nor did they report feeling less inhibited or more at ease. Which is to say, they were less concordant because their brakes didn’t turn off. Just being at home wasn’t enough to turn off the low-desire women’s brakes.

Arousal is not about her genitals, it’s about her brain.”

with each associated with a particular kind of input—genital sensations, relationship satisfaction, stress, attachment, etc.—that throws a switch on or off.

remember that you are healthy and functional and whole. Your body is not broken and you are not crazy. Your body is doing what bodies do, and that’s a beautiful thing.

please pay attention to my words, not my vagina.”

Your breath. Your respiration rate and your pulse increase with arousal. You begin holding your breath, too, as you get to the highest level of arousal and your thoracic and pelvic diaphragms contract.

Muscle tension, especially in your abdomen, buttocks, and thighs, but also in your wrists, calves, and feet. When the tension moves in waves through you, your body bows and arches.

Most important, your words. Only you can tell your partner what you want and how you feel. Not all women feel equally comfortable talking about their desire and arousal, but you can shortcut with “yes” or “more.”

It’s not about attending to any specific physiological response, behavior, or other clue. It’s about attending with a kind of broad, receptive vigilance. Suggest that your partner attend to you not with a magnifying glass but with the wrong end of a telescope, or the way a chess master watches a chessboard—looking for large-scale patterns and dynamics.

deal with any lack of lube-on-demand by supplementing with the fluid of your choice: your saliva or your partner’s (when there’s no risk of infection transmission), your partner’s genital fluids (ditto), store-bought lube, whatever.

a sense that using lube means you’re somehow inadequate.

you get to choose which beliefs you nurture and which you weed out.

Playfulness, Curiosity, and Humor. It is literally impossible to feel stressed and anxious about something when your approach is playful, curious, and humorous. Let it be a little silly; let it be fun.

Make Your Partner Feel Like a Superhero. Communicating about sex feels risky sometimes because, above all, you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings.

Often it’s a good idea to choose lube together with your partner—shop together and pick something you both feel good about, so that you are both equally invested in it.

Blood flow to the genitals is response to sex-related stimuli (learning), which is not the same thing as liking or wanting, much less consent.

Men and women seem to be different in the concordance of their genital response and subjective arousal.

this difference between women and men doesn’t mean women are broken; it’...

Arousal nonconcordance is not a symptom of anything; it’s just a normal part of ...

The best way to tell if someone is aroused is not to notice what their genitals are doing, bu...

Creating a great sex-positive context for the lower-desire partner resulted in a context that was mind-blowingly, almost painfully erotic for the higher-desire partner.

Where spontaneous desire appears in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. And it’s normal. People with responsive desire don’t have “low” desire, they don’t suffer from any ailment, they don’t even long to initiate but feel like they’re not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than, “Sex is generally fun,” or “That’s an attractive person right there,” to crave sex. They can be sexually satisfied and in healthy relationships, and yet never crave sex out of the blue.

what matters most: sex worth wanting.

desire without pleasure is not the sexuality of people who have great or even good sex.

consider what partner characteristics, relationship characteristics, setting, ludic factors, and other life circumstances create pleasure that leads to urgent longing.

Women’s own reports of why their desire diminishes will probably sound familiar to you: exhaustion, issues with mental and physical health, changes in body image, feeling overwhelmed by their many roles and obligations, and feeling anxious and worried about sex itself—worries ranging from unwanted pregnancy to “taking too long” to get aroused to not meeting partner expectations.

unlikely culprits for desire issues (hormones and monogamy) and the most likely culprits: brakes-hitting cultural messages and the relationship issue that I call “the chasing dynamic.”

Desire emerges when pleasure crosses the person’s individual threshold.

low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him. Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention. Like when they were first falling in love—a

If you’re experiencing pain with sex, talk to a medical provider—there may well be hormonal issues involved, along with a variety of neurological and physiological factors.

if you’re experiencing low desire, hormones are the least likely culprits.

what has the research found to be predictive of low desire? According to Brotto, “developmental history, psychiatric history, and psychosexual history.” In other words, all that stuff from chapters 4 and 5—stress, depression, anxiety, trauma, attachment, etc.

Stress, self-compassion, trauma history, relationship satisfaction, and other emotional factors have far more influence on a woman’s sexual desire than any hormone.

incentive motivation systems are all about being pulled by an attractive external stimulus.

When you hear “drive,” think “survive.” When you hear “incentive motivation,” think “thrive.”

The myth that sex is a drive is bad for people’s sex lives.

But there’s a more important reason that it matters that sex is like curiosity and not like hunger: If someone steals a loaf of bread because they’re starving, on some level we can have sympathy and mercy; even when stealing is wrong, we acknowledge that people do what they have to do to survive. But if someone steals a loaf of bread simply because they’re curious what someone else’s bread tastes like… do we have the same sympathy, the same mercy? Because sex is not a drive, it is not a biological “need,” and no one is entitled to it, and no one ever has permission to steal it from anyone, under any circumstances.

the antithetical pull between the familiar versus the novel, the stable versus the mysterious. We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty.

If the problem is that long-term love is antithetical to long-term passion, then the solution, says Perel, is to maintain autonomy, a space of eroticism inside yourself, as a way to maintain the distance necessary to allow wanting to emerge. As Perel puts it, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”11 This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.

Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy. From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship.

Those who reported that they had good sex lives, he writes, “consistently mentioned: (1) maintaining a close, connected, and trusting friendship; and (2) making sex a priority in their lives.”12 In other words, sustaining desire isn’t about having a bridge to cross but about building a bridge together.

for Gottman and the couples in the research he cites, “desire” has more to do with liking. Holding. Savoring. Allowing. Exploring this moment together, noticing what it is like, and liking it.

The Mating in Captivity style of desire is higher adrenaline; it’s inherently exciting. We relish this kind of perpetual itch-scratch-relief-itch cycle. We like to want, so much that we can’t always separate the experience of wanting from the experience of liking.

The Science of Trust style of desire is lower adrenaline, more a celebration of sensation in context, a celebration of togetherness.

Perel’s style is about hunger as the secret sauce that makes a meal delicious. Gottman’s is about arriving home from work and cooking dinner with your partner, having a glass of wine while you cook, feeding each other all the strawberries you meant to keep for dessert, then sitting down together and savoring every mouthful.

Both are clear that passion doesn’t happen automatically in a long-term, monogamous relationship. But they’re also both clear that passion does happen—as long as the couple takes deliberate control of the context. For some couples that context feels like creating closeness. For others, it feels like creating space.

But the real story behind these drugs isn’t simply that they don’t “work”—that is, they don’t increase spontaneous desire or sexual frequency, except perhaps in a small minority of women. The real story is that even the women for whom the drugs “work” were never broken in the first place.