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

by Emily Nagoski

You’re not broken, you’re a tomato plant in a world that expects you to be an aloe. If you thrive on more water, tell your partner, and celebrate it together. Tell each other what contexts activate your accelerators and what contexts hit your brakes. Talk about the sexiest sex you’ve had together and what you can do to make it happen again.

This level of mutual acceptance and self-acceptance is itself a specific and vital characteristic of the most exuberantly sex-positive context. It requires not simply being aware of how each person’s sexuality works, but also accepting and welcoming those sexualities, just as they are. It’s not how your sexuality works that matters; it’s how you feel about your sexuality. How your partner feels about theirs. And how you both feel about each other’s.

If partners have different levels of sexual desire, the higher desire partner doesn’t have the “right” amount of desire and the lower desire partner doesn’t have the “wrong” amount of desire, and vice versa. People vary.

If spontaneous desire goes away, it’s because the context changed, not because someone is “broken.” To bring spontaneous desire back, change the context.

The most important thing to know about desire is that it’s not what matters. Pleasure is what matters. If you create a context that allows your brain to interpret the world as a safe, fun, sexy...

Spectatoring is the art of worrying about your body and your sexual functioning while you’re having sex,

Rather than paying attention to the pleasant, tingly things going on in her body, her head would fill with anxious thoughts about how her breasts were moving or how she didn’t have an orgasm the last time they had sex or what her inability to focus on pleasure meant about her as a sexual person. She worried about the sex she was having, instead of liking the sex she was having. And worry is the opposite of pleasure. Worry hit the brakes.

you don’t make orgasm happen. You allow it,”

orgasms feel different to everyone and that orgasms can vary from each other, depending on the mode of stimulation, whether you have a partner with you, maybe even where you are on your menstrual cycle—any number of factors.

The main thing most women describe most of the time is a sense of “doneness,” a sense that you’ve crossed a threshold and something has completed. There’s often a peak of tension where your muscles tighten and your heart pounds. Orgasms are like art, I told her. You know it when you see it. It may not be what you expect, but it will be different from everything else.

Orgasm is the sudden, involuntary release of sexual tension.

Humans, unlike all other species, can be in control of their brains, rather than their brains being in control of them. We can notice what we’re thinking or feeling, and we can do something about it. That’s the key to managing any form of performance anxiety, including spectatoring: Notice what you’re paying attention to, and then shift your attention to the thing you want to pay attention to.

That’s mindfulness. Noticing when your attention wanders from the thing you’re trying to notice is the skill that will help you stop spectatoring, because you’ll learn to notice the spectatoring and to redirect your attention to the sensations in your body.

Those rhythmic, involuntary contractions are perhaps the most nearly universal physiological marker of orgasm—but even that can’t be relied on all the time. In one study, two out of eleven women exhibited no vaginal muscle contractions at orgasm.3 And in another study, some women exhibited the muscle contractions without orgasm.4 In other words, genital physiological markers of orgasm are not always predictive of a woman’s subjective experience of orgasm. Which makes perfect sense if you recognize that orgasm—like pleasure—isn’t about what happens in your genitals, it’s about what happens in your brain.5

Orgasm is a lot like being tickled. Sometimes it can be fun, other times it’s annoying, and sometimes it feels like almost nothing. Pleasure is a perception of a sensation, and perception is context dependent.

We all know intuitively that the perception of tickling sensations is context dependent. There’s a time and a place for tickling.

people ask me all the time, “How come sometimes my orgasms are great and other times they’re really not?” It’s as if we believe that orgasms are somehow different from other sensations, that they should feel a certain way, no matter the context.

How that release feels depends on context. Which is why some orgasms feel amazing and oth...

sometimes women have orgasms during rape and that that’s basically just a reflex, it doesn’t mean pleasure or consent.

Orgasms differ from each other because the context for those orgasms differs. The quality of an orgasm is a function not of orgasm itself but of the context in which it happens.

There’s just the sudden release of sexual tension, generated in different ways. Anatomically, physiologically, even evolutionarily, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about kinds of orgasms based on what body parts are stimulated.

If we were going to categorize orgasms by how they feel, we’d need a new category for every orgasm a woman has.

It comes to this: Pleasure is the measure. Pleasure is the measure of your orgasm—not what kind of stimulation created it, not how long it takes to get there, not how long it lasts or how strongly your pelvic floor muscle contracts. The only measure of your orgasm is how much you enjoy it.

how come I can give myself permission to have that pleasure, but I can’t give myself permission to enjoy other kinds of pleasure?”

“Why can’t I have an orgasm during intercourse?” The reason they can’t is very likely the same reason most women can’t: Intercourse is not a very effective way to stimulate the clitoris, and clitoral stimulation is the most common way to make an orgasm happen. In fact, research has found that one reason why women vary in how reliably they orgasm with penetration is the distance between the clitoris and the urethra.

Now, if penetrative orgasms are comparatively uncommon, why do women ask about it so often? Why is it so often viewed as “the right way to orgasm”?

Centuries of male doctors and scientists—Freud is often pointed to as a key offender here, and rightly so—claimed that orgasms from vaginal stimulation are the right, good, normal kind, and clitoral orgasms are “immature.”

Culture sanctions spontaneous desire as the “expected” kind of desire because that’s how men experience desire (though not all of them do, of course), and culture sanctions concordant arousal as the expected kind of arousal because that’s how men experience arousal (though, again, not all of them

To say that women should have orgasms from vaginal penetration is anatomically equivalent to saying that men should have orgasms from prostate or perineal stimulation. Certainly many men can orgasm from that kind of stimulation, but we don’t judge them if they don’t, and they don’t usually wonder if they’re broken if they don’t.

according to cultural myth, women should be just like men—with concordant arousal and spontaneous desire—right up until we actually start having intercourse, and then we’re supposed to function in an exclusively female way, orgasming from a behavior that also happens to get men off very reliably. Men’s pleasure is the default pleasure.

Distress about orgasm is the second most common reason people seek treatment for sexual problems (after desire), occurring in about 5 to 15 percent of women.15 Difficulty with or absence of orgasm in certain contexts is very common.

Orgasm is, in some ways, like riding a bicycle—it comes more naturally to some people than others, and if you’re not motivated enough to keep trying until you figure it out, you’ll never learn.

Most problems with orgasm are due to too much stimulation to the brakes—too many worries, too much stress, anxiety, shame, or depression, including stress, anxiety, shame, or depression about orgasm.

When you’re continually “failing” to reach orgasm, your little monitor grows frustrated and then angered and eventually despairing.

The little monitor and her opinions about how effortful things should be is the foundation of a wide range of frustrations and satisfactions, orgasm not least among them.

Our culture absolutely teaches us to have impatient little monitors, with criterion velocities set as small as they can be, which means many of us are easily frustrated, enraged, and eventually despairing when we can’t easily achieve our goals—including orgasm. If you feel like you should have had an orgasm already, but you haven’t, you’ll begin to get frustrated…

Is this the right goal for me? Am I putting in the right kind of effort, as well as the right amount? Am I realistic in my expectation about how effortful this goal should be?

The central approach to orgasm difficulties is to change the goal by making pleasure the goal, not orgasm. When you begin to feel frustrated, remember that’s your little monitor feeling like you’re not making progress toward the goal of orgasm. That’s the time to remind yourself that you are already at the goal as long as you are experiencing pleasure. Orgasm isn’t the goal. Pleasure is the goal.

Initial resistance (“I should be able to orgasm without having to use a ‘tool’ ”) and concerns about whether vibrator use somehow disrupts sexual connection with a partner (“Am I cheating on him with it?”) often gave way to a sense of freedom and exploration.

The idea that there’s a pure, good, natural way to have an orgasm and a wrong, bad, unnatural way to have an orgasm is a cultural pigeonholing of experience shaped by those three messages—Moral, Medical, and Media—from chapter 5.

So change the goal, change the effort, change the criterion velocity. Pleasure, not orgasm, is the goal. If it takes five minutes, that’s five minutes of pleasure.

the study, said the research participants “were uncomfortable, because they had cold feet.”27 Put on socks, have warmer feet, and have easier orgasms. Even in the unerotic setting of a research laboratory, such a small shift can make a difference.

All your internal states—your physical comfort, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, loneliness, frustration, etc.—interact deep in the emotional One Ring of your brain, and they influence each other in a process called “integration.”28 When one state—like cold feet—interferes with another state—like sexual arousal—that’s “subtractive integration.” And when one state actively reinforces another state, that’s “additive integration.”

Sexual pleasure emerges, like flocking behavior, from the interaction of all these different birds.

The technical language for what I’m describing here is that sexual pleasure is an emergent property of a complex dynamical system. But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together,

sexual pleasure is an emergent property of a complex dynamical system. But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together,

when all of your motivation systems are coordinated and attuned to the environment in a way that gives rise to every system...

Get rid of all the predators and pile on different kinds of incentives at the magnetic pole: attachment, curiosity, expansive pleasure—all the motivations orgasm can fulfill. The more the whole system is moving in the same direction, the more the orgasm takes over your whole awareness, with every cell of your body focused on the same thing: pleasure. Peak sexual pleasure requires all of you. The most pleasurabl...

The more the whole system is moving in the same direction, the more the orgasm takes over your whole awareness, with every cell of your body focused on the same thing: plea...

The most pleasurable orgasms happen when every part of you is present and collaborating in pursuit...