Authors: Emily Nagoski
Meanwhile, Merritt’s sensitive brake makes her garden wilt in the mildest drought, and Laurie’s garden feels like it’s been subjected to global warming, stripped of its native climate faster than she and her plants can adapt, and she fears the whole garden is dying. And she’s afraid that if she loses her garden, she might lose her partner.
Listening to and respecting the fundamental messages that your body is trying to send you—“I am at risk,” “I am broken,” “I am lost”—is essential to creating the right context for sexual pleasure to thrive. Allowing time and space for your body to move all the way through the cycle, to discharge stress and to connect wholly with your partner, is an essential part of creating a context that grants maximum access to pleasure.
Western culture does not make this easy; it builds walls of shame and doubt between us and our essential selves, between “at risk” and “safe,” between “broken” and “whole,” between “lost” and “home.”
In the garden metaphor, the cultural messages about women’s sexuality are very often the weeds, encroaching in ways no one chose but that everyone has to manage.
And that’s what chapter 5 is about.
tl;dr
• Stress reduces sexual
interest
in 80–90 percent of people and reduces sexual
pleasure
in everyone—even the 10–20 percent of people for whom it increases interest. The way to deal with stress is to allow your body to
complete the stress response cycle.
Complete the worksheet on
this page
to figure out what works for you.
• Trauma survivors’ brains sometimes learn to treat “sexually relevant” stimuli as threats, so that whenever the accelerator is activated, the brake is hit, too. Practicing
mindfulness
is an evidence-based strategy for decoupling the brakes and accelerator.
• In the right context, sex can attach us emotionally to new partners or reinforce emotional bonds in unstable relationships. In other words, sex and love are closely linked in our brains—but only in the right context.
• Sex that brings you closer to your partner “advances the plot,” as opposed to gratuitous sex, for no reason other than that you can. To have more and better sex, give yourself a compelling
reason
to have sex, something important to move toward.
coping with stress
My three top stressors:
1. |
2. |
3. |
How I can tell I’m stressed:
Physical Signs of Stress (e.g., digestive upset, jaw tension, etc.) | Emotional Signs of Stress (e.g., tearful, easily frustrated, etc.) | Cognitive Signs of Stress (e.g., distracted, unfocused, etc.) |
When I’m feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or exhausted, here’s what helps:
Choose one (for now) of the things you just identified and think about what it would take to increase your access to it. Suppose you decided you wanted to use this stress management strategy more. What are some challenges you might face?
What are some things you might do to minimize those barriers, if you decided to try using this stress management strategy more?
On a scale of 0–10, how IMPORTANT is it to you to increase your access to this stress management strategy? _______
What makes it that important, rather than a little less important? | What could potentially happen that would make it MORE important? |
On a scale of 0–10, how CONFIDENT do you feel that, if you decided to increase your access to this stress management strategy, you could?
What makes you that confident, rather than a little less confident? | What could potentially happen that would make you feel MORE confident? |
Given all of that, what’s one thing you will do TODAY that can move you just one step closer to being able to use this stress management strategy more?
five
cultural context
A SEX-POSITIVE LIFE IN A SEX-NEGATIVE WORLD
When Johnny and Laurie took my advice and stopped having sex, something unexpected cracked open inside Laurie.
They cuddled and snuggled a few minutes at bedtime each night, without the awkward are-we-going-to-have-sex-tonight anxiety.
Into that silence one night, Laurie asked Johnny why he liked having sex with her.
He gave such a good answer. He said, “Because you’re beautiful.”
He didn’t say, “Because you
look
beautiful” or “Because you’re my wife” or “Because sex is fun” or even “Because I love you.” He said, “You are beautiful.” It’s a perfect thing to say—not least because he really, really meant it.
Laurie being Laurie, she burst into tears. Until that moment, she had not realized how much self-criticism she was carrying with her every day, how much shame she felt about the ways her body had changed since she had the baby, as if those changes reflected some moral failing on her part—as if a truly “good person” would never allow her body to be changed by a paltry thing like having a baby.
She started listing all the things she felt uncomfortable with—her droopy boobs, her squishy tummy, her cottage-cheesy thighs, the deepening wrinkles that bracketed her mouth—a mouth that seemed to have a permanent frown now. And Johnny started touching each and every one of these “imperfect” body parts, saying, “I love that, though” and “but this is beautiful.”
At last he looked into her eyes and said, “You really don’t see it. You really believe this stuff makes you less beautiful. Honey, your body gets sexier every day, just by being the body of the woman I share my life with. Your belly is our belly. I’ve got one too. Do you love me less for it?”
“Of course not.”
“Exactly, of course not.”
And of course what happened next is they had totally mind-blowing sex—made all the more mind-blowing by the whispers of, “We aren’t supposed to be doing this!” It turns out the pressure of what she’s “supposed” to be doing works both ways.
When Laurie told me about this, she emphasized that throughout the whole encounter she never felt like he was initiating sex. It just felt like he was giving her love at a moment when she really, really needed it.
And yes, being a sex educator is the best job ever, when people tell you stories like this.
This chapter is about the obstacles that were standing in Laurie’s way, without her being fully aware of them, and how she and Johnny knocked them down.
Let’s return to the garden metaphor: You’re born with a little plot of rich and fertile soil, unique to yourself. Your brain and body are the soil of this garden, and individual differences in your SIS and SES are important characteristics of your innate garden, which is made of the same parts as everyone else’s, but organized in a unique way.
Your family and your culture plant the seeds and tend the garden, and they teach you how to tend it. They plant the seeds of language and attitudes and knowledge and habits about love and safety and bodies and sex.
And gradually, as you move into adolescence, you take on responsibility for tending your own garden.
As you begin to tend the garden yourself, you may find that your family and your culture have planted some beautiful, nourishing things. You may also find that your family and culture have planted some pretty toxic crap in your garden. And everyone—even those whose families planted pretty good stuff—will have to deal with the invasive weeds of a sex-negative culture full of body shaming and sex stigma. These travel not in the seeds planted by families but underground via their roots, like poison ivy, under fences and over walls, from garden to garden. No one chose that they be there, but there they are nonetheless.
So if you want to have a healthy garden, a garden
you
choose, you have to go row by row and figure out what you want to keep and nurture . . . and what you want to dig out and replace with something healthier.
It is not fair that you have to do all that extra work. After all, you didn’t choose what got planted by your family and your culture. No one asked for your permission before they started planting the toxic crap. They didn’t wait until you could give consent and then say, “Would it be okay with you if we planted the seeds of body self-criticism and sexual shame?” Chances are, they just planted the same things that were planted in their gardens, and it never even occurred to them to plant something different.
I was chatting about this one October evening, over poutine and beer, with Canadian sex researcher Robin Milhausen, and she said this brilliant thing: “We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”
Exactly.
Chapter 4 was about how the context in this moment—your sense of safety in your life and your sense of wholeness in your
relationship—affects your sexual pleasure. This chapter is about the large-scale, long-term context—the years of “no” messages—and the deep patterns of thinking and feeling they create, patterns that are reinforced and reiterated over decades of life. These patterns are emphatically not innate, but they were learned early. You began these lessons long before you were capable of thinking critically about whether you wanted them. And just as you learned them, you can unlearn them, if you want to, and replace them with new, healthier patterns that promote confidence, joy, satisfaction, and even ecstasy.
We’ll start with three core cultural messages about women’s sexuality that my students grapple with as their established ideas about sex are challenged by the science: the moral message (you are evil), the medical message (you are diseased), and the media message (you are inadequate). Hardly anyone fully buys in to any of these messages, but they are there, encroaching on our gardens, and the better we are at seeing them for what they are, the better we’ll be at weeding them out.
Then I’ll talk about body self-criticism. This issue is so entrenched in Western culture that most women hardly notice how ubiquitous and how toxic is it. It’s so entrenched, in fact, that many women believe it’s actually important and beneficial. I’ll talk about the research that says otherwise. If the only change you make after reading this book is to reduce your body self-criticism, that alone will revolutionize your sexual wellbeing.
Next, I’ll talk about another core emotion, like stress and attachment: disgust. Like body self-criticism, disgust is so entrenched in the sexual culture that it’s difficult to know what our sexual wellbeing would be like without it. But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to.
And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve
been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that
you
choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into. When you take the time to notice your unchosen beliefs, and to say yes or no to those beliefs, you empower yourself to have the sexual wellbeing that fits you, custom made.
three messages
Many of my students come to my class thinking that they know kind of a lot about sex, only to discover, about halfway through the first lecture, that they kind of don’t.
What they do know a lot about—and they really know a
lot
about it—is not sex itself but rather what their culture believes about sex. They, we, all of us, are surrounded by messages about these beliefs, messages that are not only short on facts but are also actively self-contradictory.
I was puzzled by the false beliefs my students brought with them into the classroom, until I began reading antique sex advice manuals. And there they were in black and white, written a hundred years ago or more—the same false ideas my students believed. Students have absorbed these ideas from their families and their cultures, without any of them ever having read those books.
One day in class, I read aloud a couple of definitions of “sex.” First I read from
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
by T. H. van de Velde, from 1926. He wrote that “normal sexual intercourse” is
that intercourse which takes place between two sexually mature individuals of opposite sexes; which excludes cruelty and the use of artificial means for producing voluptuous sensations; which aims directly or indirectly at the consummation of sexual satisfaction, and which, having achieved a certain degree of stimulation, concludes with the ejaculation—or emission—of the semen into the vagina, at the nearly simultaneous culmination of sensation—or orgasm—of both partners.
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