Authors: Emily Nagoski
The concern people most often bring to me about vibrators is that they’ll get “addicted” to them, but it doesn’t happen. Here’s what does happen: Orgasm with vibrators occurs relatively quickly for many women because a vibrator provides such a high intensity of stimulation. And some women get very comfortable with how quickly they orgasm with their vibrator, which leads them to forget how long it took without the vibrator. And when they get frustrated by how long that takes, the frustration makes it take even longer. But by this point in the book, you probably know the answer to this problem: frustration = impatient little monitor. 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. Hooray! If it takes thirty minutes, that’s thirty minutes of pleasure! Also hooray!
flying toward ecstasy
What the science gives us is this: To have more and better orgasms, turn off all the offs and slow down how you turn on the ons. Let your whole brain get on the orgasm train.
But what science can’t give you is
permission
to experience ecstatic pleasure. In the end, that’s the key to spectacular orgasms. And only you can give you that. Science can’t tell you how to feel about your orgasms. Science can tell you only that how you feel about your orgasms changes your orgasms. Science can tell you that feeling shame, judgment, frustration, and fear about orgasm will diminish your orgasmic experience, while acceptance, welcoming, confidence, and joy will expand your orgasmic experience. Science can tell you that your brain is like a collective of desires, and the more the collective collaborates, the more of you can move toward ecstasy.
But not one word of that science makes you more or less entitled to the pleasure of your own skin and mind and heart. Your orgasms belong to you, and all the science in the world can’t make you more delighted with them or more afraid of them or more curious about them. The science can’t do that. Only you can do that.
You were born entitled to all the pleasure your body can feel. You were born entitled to pleasure in whatever way your body receives it, in whatever contexts afford it, and in whatever quantities you want it. Your pleasure belongs to you, to share or keep as you choose, to explore or not as you choose, to embrace or avoid as you choose.
So, if you wanted to, how would you find your way to ecstasy? How would you get all the birds flying together in the same direction?
Patience, practice, and a sex-positive context.
You already know how to go about creating a sex-positive context—the worksheets from chapters 3, 4, and 7 helped you with that. And you understand how to build patience—by training your little monitor to make sure you’ve got the right goal, the right kind and quantity of effort, and the right criterion velocity.
Which leaves us with the “practice” part.
Practice what?
Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how:
The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm—stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort—need to be taken seriously and have their needs met. They need to be respected and treated like the sleepy hedgehog from chapter 4.
Be kind and gentle with each of the offs, listen to what they need in order to feel satisfied, and then satisfy them. Go back to your context worksheets: What hits your brakes? Consider the things in your environment and also your own thoughts and feelings. What context do you need in order to turn off those offs?
Most of the offs women experience have
nothing to do with sex
, and many of them have straightforward, pragmatic solutions.
Chronically stressed? Complete the cycle with a good cry, a brisk walk, a primal scream, or other physical release, as described in chapter 4. Give yourself a solid twenty to sixty minutes to allow the stress of the day to wind down with whatever rituals or practices help. Baths, walks, exercise, cooking, meditation, yoga, a glass of wine, whatever works.
Constantly monitoring for footsteps in the hallway? Arrange for a time when no one else is home.
Tired? Take a nap, or even just rest for twenty minutes. Squicked out by grit on the sheets? Change them! Cold feet? Put on socks! Sometimes it really is this simple.
Other offs are more complex and require longer-term solutions, such as those I addressed earlier: self-critical thoughts or other body image challenges, lack of trust in your relationship, trauma history, sexual disgust. It took decades of planting and cultivation to create the garden you currently have. It won’t change overnight. Give yourself permission to make progress gradually, and celebrate all the incremental steps between where you are now and where you’d like to be.
And the most important turnoff the offs practice of all: self-kindness. Too often women get stuck in their sexual growth because they can’t get
past their belief that something “shouldn’t” hit their brakes. It shouldn’t turn them off to have the lights on, they shouldn’t be so hung up about their bodies. “Should” is all about what you’re “doing wrong.”
Pop quiz: Does a belief that you’re Doing Something Wrong with sex hit the accelerator . . . or the brake?
Yeah.
So when something hits the brake, what do you do? You take it seriously. Listen to it. Be gentle with it, like a sleepy hedgehog. Even if you wish something like having the lights on didn’t hit your brakes, the fact is it might, and that’s okay. It’s also okay to wish it didn’t. But believing it shouldn’t only hits the brakes more. Recognizing that frees you up to do something about it—something like having sex with unlit candles in the room for a week or two, then with one lit tea light candle, then two, then three . . .
You see, sex is not context dependent—sex can happen more or less anywhere.
Pleasure
is context dependent. Create a context where you can experience pleasure, and sexual ecstasy will follow, given time, practice, and genuine solutions to turn off the offs.
Appendix 2 offers instructions for achieving ecstasy. Try it! Remember: Each member of the flock has its own needs and motivations. Turn off all the offs, and turn on all the ons.
Merritt had believed all her life that orgasm was supposed to be easy, and that her struggle with it made her a freak. She believed that it was supposed to feel a certain way and have a certain effect. But she wanted to learn to trust herself, so that she could open the door wide to pleasure. So she stopped comparing her experience with her expectations and simply allowed her experience to be what it is. She just enjoyed the sex she was having instead of worrying about whether it was the sex she “should” be having. She created an environment of acceptance, where the parts of her mind that needed to worry, that needed to avoid something bad happening, could instead move toward something good. It took time. And practice. And positive meta-emotions (that’s chapter 9).
Did it work? For her, it did.
Merritt is a writer and she was raised religious, which might explain the email she sent me near the end of her don’t-have-an-orgasm-with-Carol experience. Or it might not. Lots of people start talking about God and spiritual experiences when they find their way to ecstasy. The language of mundane human experience, anatomy, physiology, even relationship doesn’t feel large enough to contain it.
Anyway, this is what she wrote:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since Love is lord of heaven and Earth,
How can I keep from singing?
It’s from a hymn called “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Pete Seeger and Enya and many others have recorded it. It’s about what happens when you make contact with the peace at the center and core of yourself, which is the same peace at the center and core of the universe, and it resonates through you, like you’re a bell that’s ringing.
That is what happens when you turn off all the offs and allow all the ons to focus on one shared goal: pleasure.
tl;dr
• Orgasms happen in your brain, not your genitals.
• Thirty percent of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone. The remaining 70 percent are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic from penetration alone. The most common way for women to orgasm is from clitoral stimulation.
• Orgasm is not an evolutionary adaptation, necessary for survival. It’s a fantastic bonus!
• To have bigger, better orgasms, turn off more of the offs, and turn on the ons more gradually.
nine
meta-emotions
THE ULTIMATE SEX-POSITIVE CONTEXT
Laurie and Johnny had tried all the tricks. But in the end, what made the difference was when Laurie chose pleasure—for herself.
Armed with the decision to just start paying attention to what it feels like, Laurie went to a weekend mindfulness retreat called something like Awakening the Feminine Divine. She practiced yoga and slept nine hours a night. She ate mindfully. She breathed mindfully. She shared her feelings with strangers, made new friends, and found a renewed sense that she was not alone in her struggles. And, let me just emphasize this, because Laurie would want me to: She slept nine hours a night.
She focused for twenty-one hours (the time she wasn’t sleeping) on really noticing what it felt like to be alive and move through the world.
And she came back a new woman.
“I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself,” she announced. “And what I want, more than anything, is to be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love.”
“Wait a second, Johnny and I and everyone else who loves you, we’ve all been saying that for months,” I said. “What did they do to you at that retreat?”
“I stood in the Divine Gaze of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Auspiciousness, and I felt my own power and beauty,” she recited seriously. Then she cracked a grin and said, “You’ll probably tell me that’s just a metaphor for activating something or other in my mesolimbic whatever, but I don’t give a damn about the science. It frickin’
worked.
”
This chapter is about the science Laurie doesn’t give a damn about.
It frickin’
works.
Here we are in the final chapter. So far we’ve learned that in some important ways women’s sexual response often does not follow the same patterns as men’s sexual response:
• Women, as a group, have more sensitive brakes and less sensitive accelerators, though there’s lots of variation.
• To a greater degree than men’s, women’s sexual response is sensitive to external circumstances and internal brain state—to context.
• Women are less likely than men to experience concordance between their genital response and their subjective arousal.
• And more women than men experience responsive or context-sensitive desire.
All of which may come as a surprise to the 10–20 percent of women whose sexual response is similar to the “standard narrative.” We also learned that people, especially women, vary widely from each other and change substantially across their life spans.
This chapter brings all of that together, with a single core truth about what makes the difference in a woman’s sexual wellbeing:
How you feel
about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself.
Not what you think about it, not what you believe about it, not what you’ve been told about it, not what it’s like, what you do, or even what
choices you make—all of those are influenced by how you feel about it, but it’s the “how you feel about it” part that’s the key. Your meta-emotions.
I’ll illustrate this with contrasting examples.
The first is from neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book
Hallucinations
, in which he describes a patient he calls Gertie C., who told him she sometimes has sexually explicit hallucinations. Gertie C.’s experience is far from typical, but to me that’s what makes it such a fantastic example of meta-emotions. Sacks writes:
When she told me about [her erotic hallucinations], she added, anxiously, “You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!” I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humor and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting “a gentleman visitor from out of town” in a few minutes’ time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
1
Notice that when she was reassured that the hallucinations were “rather a good idea,” their quality became more positive, and so she experienced a kind of pleasure and affection she would otherwise have lacked in her life. How she felt about it is the only thing that changed, and that change transformed the experience from paranoid to amorous.