Authors: Emily Nagoski
Then I read from
The Hite Report
, published in 1976, from the chapter titled “Redefining Sex”:
Sex is intimate physical contact for pleasure, to share pleasure with another person (or just alone). You can have sex to orgasm, or not to orgasm, genital sex, or just physical intimacy—whatever seems right to you. There is never any reason to think the “goal” must be intercourse, and to try to make what you feel fit into that context. There is no standard of sexual performance “out there,” against which you must measure yourself; you aren’t ruled by “hormones” or “biology.” You are free to explore and discover your own sexuality, to learn or unlearn anything you want, and to make physical relations with other people, of either sex, anything you like.
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And I asked my students, “Which of these is more like what you learned growing up?”
No contest.
Ideal Marriage.
Many of us have absorbed ideas about sex that are at home in a century-old sex manual, even though all the research and political change since then has busily dismantled every single aspect of those old ideas. Somehow the culture has not absorbed the more inclusive and evidence-based ideas of more recent decades.
The outdated ideas consist of three interwoven cultural messages of sexual socialization that women encounter in modern America. I call them the Moral Message, the Medical Message, and the Media Message—sent by three separate but intertwined messengers. To varying degrees, each has pieces of truth and wisdom to offer, and to varying degrees each has a self-interested agenda. We’ve all absorbed at least a little of all of them, and they shape the story we tell about our own and others’ sexualities.
The Moral Message: “You are Damaged Goods.”
If you want or like
sex, you’re a slut. Your virginity is your most valuable asset. If you’ve had too many partners (“too many” = more than your male partner has had), you should be ashamed. There is only one right way to behave and one right way to feel about sex—not to feel anything about it at all but to accommodate the man to whom your body belongs. Sex is not part of what makes a woman lovable; it can only be part of what makes a woman unlovable. It may make her “desirable”—and many women try to be desirable, but only as a lesser alternative to being lovable. If you are sexually desirable, you are, by definition, unlovable.
And a slut.
This is the oldest message, having changed only superficially in the last three hundred years. There are almost too many examples to choose just one, but let’s take a paragraph of rhetorical questions from James Fordyce’s
Sermons to Young Women
, published in 1766 and read aloud by Mr. Collins to the ladies in Jane Austen’s novel
Pride and Prejudice.
The overall message of the
Sermons
is “women are appealing when they’re meek and ignorant and pure.” In this section, Fordyce is discussing “public diversions” involving “oaths, imprecations, double meaning, everything obscene” (he means going to the theater):
Between the state of virgin purity and actual prostitution are there no intermediate degrees? Is it nothing to have the soul deflowered, the fancy polluted, the passions flung into a ferment? . . . Such indeed one would think were the opinion of those, who imagine there can be no harm in a passion for places of entertainment . . .
Translation: If you enjoy being entertained, you will lose your mental virginity, which makes you the same as a prostitute. Which would, it goes without saying, make you unlovable.
And a slut.
Jane Austen knew it was bogus. You know it’s bogus. But it’s there in the culture you were raised in, and it sneaks under the fence and invades like poison ivy.
The Medical Message: “You Are Diseased.”
Sex can cause disease and pregnancy, which makes it dangerous. But if you’re ready to take that risk, sexual functioning should happen in a particular order—desire, then arousal, then orgasm during intercourse simultaneously with your partner—and when it doesn’t, there is a medical issue that you must address. Medically. Women’s sexual response is biologically analogous to men’s, though most women want sex less than men and take longer to achieve orgasm. To the extent that a woman’s sexual response differs from a man’s, she is diseased. Except for pregnancy, which is what sex is for. One woman even told me that her (male) doctor said her low sexual desire was caused by her body shutting down her sex drive in order to prevent her from getting pregnant. She asked me if that’s true. Short answer: No. Long answer:
Hell
no, and I hope that doctor reads chapter 7.
This is a newer message, dating from about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. As an example, Marie Stopes’s 1918 classic,
Married Love
, has this to say on the subject of intercourse:
Where the [man and woman] are perfectly adjusted, the woman simultaneously reaches the crisis of nervous reactions and muscular convulsions similar to his. This mutual orgasm is extremely important . . . and it is a
mutual
, not a selfish, pleasure, more calculated than anything else to draw out an unspeakable tenderness and understanding in both partakers of this sacrament.
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.
This is the newest message, following close on the heels of television and the birth control pill, around the middle of the twentieth century. To see an example, just look at the checkout counter of any drugstore, where magazine racks announce in bright sans serif fonts all the exciting things you could (and, it goes without saying,
should
) be doing in bed. In the month that I’m writing this, the covers of various women’s magazines announce “Break the Bed Sex: 21 New Ideas to Blow Your Own Damn Mind” (
Cosmopolitan
), “The First Time He Sleeps With You: Four Confessions That Shocked Us” (
Glamour
), and “Total Body Sex: Follow This Road Map to a Longer, Stronger Big-O!” (
Women’s Health
).
You know it’s just for fun. You’re not really trying to live up to the standard set by characters on a TV show. But it’s there, affecting your garden, whether you welcome it there or not.
Camilla had said, “The images we see—or don’t see—matter. They tell us what’s possible.”
And it’s just as true for the stories we tell as it is about the images of the people in the stories.
Camilla had spent a lot of her early adolescence reading old romance novels from the 1970s and ’80s. These stories stuck with her so powerfully that she even wrote her undergrad thesis on gender and race politics in ephemeral art.
But now, having figured out context and the dual control model, she revisited a collection of romance novels, examining the contexts that the narratives created for the women’s sexualities.
And those contexts were bizarre.
She told Henry and me, “So here’s the universal story: The heroine is a Good Girl, who has no accelerator and a sensitive brake, who has never had the slightest sexual feeling until she meets the Hero. You can tell he’s the Hero because suddenly Good Girl’s accelerator is going bananas. But Good Girl has to keep the brakes on because sex is inherently bad and dangerous, and so of course the Hero just has sex with her anyway—”
Henry raised an eyebrow and shook his head at this. I face-palmed.
“But gradually the purity and goodness of her squeaky-clean vagina ‘tames’ the Hero and they fall in love and get married.”
This is both hilarious and tragic, because it is
so
not how women’s sexuality actually works.
But here was the next-level insight:
She said, “So what I’m thinking is . . . what if the way women’s sexual desire and emotions and relationships are represented in the media is just as distorted as the way women’s bodies are represented? What if everything about how sex works is just as poorly drawn as the Escher Girls? What if basically everything culture says about sex is wrong, and my slow-to-heat accelerator is actually just completely normal?”
And of course it is. She’s made of all the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way.
you are beautiful
On the day you were born, how did you feel about the chub of fat on the back of your thighs?
How did the adults around you feel about it?
Every baby needs her caregivers to hold her in their arms with affection and joy, and most of the time in the Western world, those caregivers are bursting with eagerness to meet that need. On the day we’re born, most of us are celebrated and called beautiful.
But something happens between that joyful day when every inch, every ounce, every roll, and every bump of a girl’s body is celebrated as perfect and lovable precisely as it is . . . and the day she hits puberty.
What happens is she absorbs messages about what is or is not lovable about her body. The seeds of body self-criticism are planted and nurtured, and body self-confidence and self-compassion are neglected, punished, and weeded out.
Students laugh like I made a joke when I ask, “What would happen if you met your friends at dinner and said, ‘I feel so beautiful today!’?”
“Really, what would happen?” I insist.
“No one would do that,” they tell me.
“But . . . how often would someone meet friends at dinner and say, ‘I feel so fat today’?”
“All the time,” they say.
All the time.
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Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are.
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And it’s messing with our orgasms, our pleasure, our desire, and our sexual satisfaction. There is a direct trade-off between sexual wellbeing and self-critical thoughts about your body. A 2012 review of fifty-seven studies, spanning two decades of research, found important links between body image and just about every domain of sexual behavior you can imagine: arousal, desire, orgasm, frequency of sex, number of partners, sexual self-assertiveness, sexual self-esteem, using alcohol or other drugs during sex, engaging in unprotected sex, and more.
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The results vary somewhat among different age groups, among women of different sexual identities, and across different racial groups, but the overall result is universal: Women who feel worse about their bodies have less satisfying, riskier sex, with less pleasure, more unwanted consequences, and more pain.
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I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that feeling good about your body improves your sex life. It’s obvious once you think about it,
right? Just think about having sex if you feel insecure and unattractive. How would it feel to have a person you care about touching you and looking at you, when the thought of your own body makes you uncomfortable? Would you pay attention to the sensations in your body and your partner’s—or would you pay attention to all the things you feel compelled to hide?
And does that activate the sexual accelerator, or does it hit the brake?
Now imagine having sex when you feel tremendously confident and beautiful. Imagine a person you care about touching your skin with their hands and their gaze, when you love every inch of yourself and can feel your partner appreciating how gorgeous you are.
The
eagerness
mechanism is fully on board in both cases—but in the first case the mechanism is torn between moving toward the sexual experience and moving away from your own body. In the second, when you enjoy living inside your own skin, the mechanism moves toward sex
and
toward yourself, without conflict.
So of course body self-criticism interferes with sexual wellbeing. We can’t understand women’s sexual satisfaction without thinking about body satisfaction, just as we can’t understand women’s sexual pleasure without thinking about attachment and stress. And women will not be fully, blissfully satisfied with their sex lives until they are fully, blissfully satisfied with their own bodies.
So, to have more and better sex, love your body.
Which is one of those things where you’re like, “Yeah! . . . But . . . how?”
It’s hard, because you never chose
not
to love your body. You didn’t choose much that happened to you between the day you were born and the day you hit puberty, and that’s when most of the body self-criticism was taking root. You never even got a chance to say yes or no to the self-criticism being planted in your garden.