Come as You Are: Revised and Updated
Metadata
- Author: Emily Nagoski
Highlights
In a rat’s natural environment, outside the lab, he would never need a jacket in order to feel sexy, and the smell of lemons wouldn’t make him ejaculate. The rats learned these things because humans created an environment where those were salient features of their sexual environment. But even things you would assume are innate—fertile female rats—must be learned by experience.
If a woman is experiencing sexual difficulties, the dual control model demands that we ask four questions: How sensitive is her accelerator? What’s activating it? How sensitive are her brakes? What’s hitting them?
You know that almost nothing your accelerator and brakes respond to is innate; your brain learned to associate particular stimuli with excitation or inhibition. Through a process of “tuning” your context—both your brain and your environment—you can maximize your sexual potential.
Suppose you’re flirting with a certain special someone, and they start tickling you. You can imagine some situations where that’s fun, right? Flirtatious. Potentially leading to some nookie. Now imagine that you are feeling annoyed with that same special someone and they try to tickle you. It feels irritating, right? Like maybe you’d want to punch that person in the face. It’s the same sensation, but because the context is different, your perception of that sensation is different. It’s true for all our sensory domains. A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”7 Same smell + different context = different perception. Mood changes your perception of taste, too: feeling sad, as you do at the end of a weepy movie, reduces your ability to taste fat in food.8
These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.
In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire. And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread.
“Context changes how your brain responds to sex” doesn’t just mean “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—either external circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience. It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive sensations. It’s just how brains work.
Patrick, like about 80–90 percent of people, finds that stress hits his brakes, shutting down all interest in sex—he’s a “flatliner” (more on that in chapter 4). But for Olivia, with her sensitive accelerator, stress is like fuel—she’s a “redliner.” And since they’re both graduate students, they get stressed at the same time during the semester (final exams), which means that right when Olivia’s most interested in sex, Patrick is least interested.
But third, even without medication and an emotion-dismissing culture, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response midcycle because, “Now is not an appropriate time for Feels.” We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation—i.e., not freak anybody out. But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels.
Stoicism as a tool to calibrate stressors?
Emotions are tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. I say this so often my students sometimes roll their eyes: “Not the tunnel again.” Yes, the tunnel again. Because it’s true.
Here’s the short version of how to practice mindfulness: Start with two minutes. For two minutes a day, direct your attention to your breath: the way the air comes into your body and your chest and belly expand, and the way the breath leaves your body and your chest and belly deflate. The first thing that will happen is your mind will wander to something else. That’s normal. That’s healthy. That’s actually the point. Notice that your mind wandered, let those extraneous thoughts go—you can return to them as soon as the two minutes are up—and allow your attention to return to your breath.
therapies move slowly into mainstream practice because we don’t have a cultural framework for the body’s natural processing of physiological stress (what I call “completing the cycle”). As a culture, we don’t trust our bodies, so we override them,
Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half. And when two halves find each other, as Aristophanes says, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.
Brain imaging research has found that activity in the mesolimbic systems (wanting/liking/learning from chapter 3) during a nondistressed experience of parental attachment is extremely similar to that during the experience of romantic attachment—and they’re especially heavy on the liking activation, rather than wanting activation.
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.
the science of falling in love
And just as the baby rhesus monkeys used attachment behaviors to repair their relationships with their monster mothers, women in unstable relationships may use sex as an attachment behavior to build or repair the attachment.
This is the dark side of pairing stress and attachment: the “I am lost” feeling, which motivates us to stabilize our connection with our attachment object—“I am home.” Therapist and author Sue Johnson calls this “solace sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.21
in a relationship with a man who is kind and attentive and committed, Isabel’s “I am lost” fire is not burning—which is a good thing!—and it can’t, therefore, ignite desire. Which doesn’t feel so good.
I’ve been discussing this idea of sex that advances the plot with my women friends, and every time, their eyes widen and they say something like, “And after you’re married, the story’s over. Happy ending, no more plot. Oh.” Which… yeah. But it makes the solution obvious. Add more plot! So if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, crap, that means that only in either brand-new or else dysfunctional relationships will the sex ever be exciting,” there’s good news—and also bad news, and then more good news.
Sex to advance the plot in unstable relationships is like that. It doesn’t feel good when you experience fear and instability in your relationship, just as it doesn’t feel good to have to pee really badly. It only feels like a relief when you can finally do something about
Anxious attachers worry more about sex, and yet they also equate the quality of sex with the quality of a relationship.
In the end, insecure attachment hits the brakes. We can’t understand sexual wellbeing without understanding attachment, and we can’t maximize our own sexual wellbeing without learning how to manage attachment in our relationships.
AM i a sevute attacher? Thr comments of the avoidabt abd their behaviur resonate with me.
I’ve come to think of communicating about sex and love in terms of a “sleepy hedgehog” model of emotion management. It goes like this: Think of your difficult feelings about sex as sleepy hedgehogs that you discover in inconvenient places around your home. If you find a sleepy hedgehog in the chair you were about to sit in, you should: Find Out the Hedgehog’s Name. “Right now I feel… jealous/angry/hurt/etc.” Simple, though there are usually multiple feelings involved at the same time. That’s normal. Sit Peacefully with It. Don’t run away from it, don’t judge it or shame it or get mad at it. Sit still with it, like it is a welcome guest. Listen to Its Needs. The question to ask is: What will help? If you feel fear or anger, how could the perceived threat be managed? If you feel sadness, hurt, or grief, how can you heal the loss? There won’t always be something you can actively do, apart from allowing the feeling to discharge and complete its cycle. And remember that it’s not your partner’s fault or obligation; their help is entirely voluntary and provides an opportunity for you to express gratitude for their support. Communicate the Feeling and the Need. Present the feeling to your partner. “I feel x,” you say, “and I think what would help is y.” For example, “I feel threatened by the time you spend with your coworker, and I could use some kind of plan that will give me reassurance.” Or, “I still have this hurt about that time you did x, and what I need is some time to go through that emotional tunnel so I can get to the light at the end.”
Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as “completing the cycle.”
For a lot of us, there are times when we more readily share a loving presence through spiritual practice or with our pets than with our partners, who are mired in their own stress.
Lol capitalism
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. It wouldn’t do to have too much of either, but in the right balance—when we are “just safe enough”—the garden thrives.
Simultaneous orgasm can be very nice. But you know as well as I do that it is not the marker of a “perfectly adjusted” sexual experience. And yet, nearly one hundred years later, the idea of simultaneous orgasm during intercourse persists as a bogus cultural marker of “sexual excellence.”
The Media Message: “You Are Inadequate.” Spanking, food play, ménages à trois… you’ve done all these things, right? Well, you’ve at least had clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, uterine orgasms, energy orgasms, extended orgasms, and multiple orgasms? And you’ve mastered at least thirty-five different positions for intercourse? If you don’t try all these things, you’re frigid. If you’ve had too few partners, don’t watch porn, and don’t have a collection of vibrators in your bedside table, you’re a prude. Also: You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong, too, try something else. Forever.
SOunds like AC. But in truth i too fall pray to slme of these messGes.