Authors: Emily Nagoski
I figure if Gertie can enjoy her sex life, surely the rest of us have that potential, too!
Contrast her experience with that of Ms. B., whose story opens a
New York Times
article about women’s sexual medicine. The article begins:
Since Ms. B. entered her mid-40s, she says, sex has been more about smoke and mirrors than thunder and lightning. She is rarely if ever interested enough to initiate it with her partner of 10 years, and she does not reach climax during the act.
She wishes it were otherwise.
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Having gotten this far in the book, you’ll recognize that Ms. B.’s desire style may be responsive or context-sensitive rather than spontaneous, and it sounds like she’s not reliably orgasmic with intercourse. Both of these put her squarely in the majority.
And she wishes it were otherwise.
Which is perfectly understandable. I imagine she learned (as most of us do) that spontaneous desire and orgasms with penetration are normal, and since that’s not what she’s experiencing, she believes she’s abnormal. Broken. If I believed I were broken, I would wish it were otherwise, too.
But she’s not broken, she’s normal—in fact, she’s typical. And what effect does wishing her normal sexuality were otherwise have on her sexual wellbeing? Does it activate the accelerator or hit the brakes?
The result is that she herself describes herself as “sexually dead.”
And it doesn’t get much worse than that.
Now, let’s imagine, just hypothetically, that Ms. B. tried on the possibility of, say, feeling
curious
about her lack of desire, instead of wishing it were different. What if she said to herself, “Huh, I notice I haven’t wanted sex much lately. That’s an interesting little puzzle! It’s normal for my desire to change as my context changes, so I wonder what part of my context has changed, to influence my desire? And I wonder what sort of context my partner and I could create that would cause me to want sex so much that I can’t stop myself from jumping his bones?”
Sometimes it’s as simple as that, like flipping a light switch. But not
always. Sometimes, before you can explore your own sexual functioning with curiosity and warmth, you must move through the fear or rage or grief that is standing between you and that warm light. And that’s not easy. But it’s possible. It happens in my classroom and my workshops every time I teach.
One more example: A student sat on the couch in my office and described how her desire for sex had vanished in the course of her otherwise very happy two-year relationship. She had always experienced spontaneous desire in her (uniformly bad) previous relationships. We gradually figured out that the instability of her bad relationships had fueled her use of sex as an attachment behavior, as I described in chapter 4, and so now, in a stable, trusting relationship, her desire was behaving very differently.
“So what do I do if my desire for sex is only spontaneous in bad relationships?” she asked.
“What you do,” I said, “is you start
loving
responsive desire. Figure out what contexts give you a fantastic relationship
and
hot sex. Context-free spontaneous desire is just the man-as-default standard, and screw that. Don’t use somebody else’s standard to measure the quality of your sex life.”
Which is when I saw the transformation happen in her head.
“That makes so much sense! Oh my God, I want to tell the whole
world
!” she said.
“Me, too!” I answered. “That’s why I’m writing a book!” And then I emailed her a draft of this chapter.
Because in this chapter, I tell you how. I’ll start by describing how your feelings about your feelings—your meta-emotions—influence your sexual functioning: It’s the little monitor in your brain again. I’ll talk about the sexual “map” in your brain, which the little monitor is using to guide her opinions, but which has been drawn according to the cultural messages I described in chapter 5, so it’s often totally unreliable. I’ll describe the obstacles to changing your little monitor’s opinions, and then I’ll take you step by step through the challenging—but richly rewarding—process of changing your meta-emotions in order to create
a sexual connection with yourself and your partner that overflows with abundance and joy.
I aspire for us all to be like that little old lady peacefully enjoying her sexy hallucinations. If Gertie can learn to welcome her erotic life with her hallucinatory gentleman caller, surely we all can embrace our sexuality as it is, and thus make it the best it can be, regardless of how it differs from what we were taught it “should” be.
can’t get no . . .
Meta-emotions are how you feel about how you feel, and they go back to the little monitor in your brain who has an opinion about how much progress you should be making as you move toward a goal. That opinion is the “meta” part. It’s how you feel about what you’re experiencing.
When you experience your sexuality in the way your monitor expects, she feels good. Satisfied. When you experience your sexuality in a way that creates a discrepancy between your experience and the monitor’s expectations, the monitor gradually becomes frustrated . . . and then angry. Eventually she pushes you off an emotional cliff into the pit of despair, as she gives up and decides you can’t achieve your goal state.
Suppose you’re not reliably orgasmic from intercourse. That’s normal. Because you’ve read chapter 8, you know a lot about other strategies for having orgasms, especially from clitoral stimulation. And when you feel good about your body as it is, it’s easy to start trying out new strategies.
But what if you feel frustrated about your lack of orgasms with intercourse? Or ashamed? Or sad? Or judgmental? Will that make it easier or more difficult to try out new strategies and find success?
Feeling okay about how you feel—even when it’s not what you expected—is the key to extraordinary sex.
As we saw in chapter 7, there are three ways you can develop more positive meta-emotions. You can ask yourself:
• Is this the right goal for me?
• Am I putting in the right amount of the right kind of effort?
• Are my expectations of how much effort this particular goal requires realistic?
We’ve seen these strategies in action throughout the book: In this chapter, when Dr. Sacks tells Gertie that her hallucinations seem like a good idea, her goal state changes, so that the gap between her present state and her goal state closes. She is already where and what she wants to be. With no discrepancy, there can be no negative meta-feelings, only satisfaction and delight. So her little monitor is well satisfied. And in chapter 5, when Laurie decided to stop trying to want sex with Johnny and just allowed herself not to, she too closed the gap between where she was and where she wanted to be, which opened the door to affection without performance demand.
In chapter 8, when Olivia meditated her way to an extended orgasm, she was practicing being present as she was, rather than pushing forward to some goal. She kept the same goal—ecstasy—but she changed the kind of effort she was investing. And in chapter 7, when Merritt, instead of trying on the aspirational identity of a woman who loves sex, embraced the identity of a woman who did
not
want sex, she was changing her assessment of the kind of effort required to attain her goal of trusting herself. The result was not sinking down forever into a state of not wanting sex—on the contrary! Allowing herself to be where she was opened the door to where she wanted to go.
By contrast, Ms. B.’s little monitor is deeply dissatisfied, convinced that there is a wide gulf between where she is and where she ought to be—and furthermore, she feels utterly helpless to do anything about it. She’s in the pit of despair. She has collapsed into the hopeless grief that comes when the little monitor is convinced that a particular goal state is unattainable. Did she try to create change and fail and try again and fail again, or, when her sexuality fell short of the mark (a mark set by cultural standards that have nothing to do with reality) did her body go right to
shutdown? I don’t know. But I do know that the little monitor can learn, and Ms. B. can teach it—if she chooses to. She can change her goal, her effort, or her criterion velocity.
Before she can begin, though, she must recognize that her “map” is wrong.
the map and the terrain
For many of us, the goal states we have in mind—such as spontaneous desire or orgasm with intercourse—are not goals we have chosen consciously for ourselves. We absorbed them from our culture in the form of sexual scripts. These scripts provide the structure for the beliefs through which we interpret the sexual world. Becoming aware of your scripts is the first step to changing your meta-emotions.
Over the last few decades, research has followed how sexual scripts have changed in Western culture. Recent cultural scenario scripts may include:
• “Men’s sexuality is simple and women’s sexuality is complex.”
• “Women don’t have as strong a sex drive as men.”
• “Orgasm is central to a positive sexual encounter.”
• “Sex is more emotional for women than for men.”
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The scripts are written into your brain early, by your family and culture—remember the Moral Message, the Medical Message, and the Media Message from Chapter 5?
But scripts aren’t about what we intellectually believe is true. They act as a template for our emotional One Ring and for our little monitor to filter and organize information. You can disagree with a script and still find yourself behaving according to it and interpreting your experience in terms of it.
The technical term for this process of organizing your experience according to a preexisting template is “probabilistic generative model.” It
means that information—anything you see, hear, smell, touch, or taste—goes first to your emotional brain, where prior learning (possibly about lemons or little rat jackets, possibly about body image or sexual disgust) plus your present brain state (stress, love, self-criticism, disgust, etc.) combine to shape the initial decisions your brain makes about whether to move toward or away from that information. That initial decision sets off a series of expectations about what else might be true and what might happen next.
A simpler way to understand it, I think, is in terms of maps versus terrains. Your knowledge about sex is a map of the sexual terrain (or garden!) where you experience sexuality.
Sadly, most people’s sexual maps are unreliable. We’re like Brendan Fraser’s character in the movie
Blast from the Past.
His parents raise him in a bomb shelter, mistakenly believing that there was a nuclear attack in 1962, and when he finally goes out into the world thirty-five years later, he is navigating through a landscape that has almost nothing to do with what he has been taught. Like him, we’ve got this map in our heads and we step into the terrain expecting to find a path in one place, and instead we’re instantly lost.
As we saw in chapter 5, our maps may have places that are way more than thirty-five years out of date.
But perhaps the biggest challenge is that when the map and the terrain don’t match, our brains try to make the map true, forcing our experience into the shape of the map. “No, no, this is the trail,” we say as we stumble through the thicket. “It says so on the map.”
A couple years ago, I talked to a young woman who had learned most of what she knew—or rather, what she thought she knew—about sex by watching porn. She was genuinely surprised when nothing in her first sexual encounters happened the way she expected. She thought orgasms would come easily and often. She thought direct clitoral stimulation would always make her see stars. She thought wrong. But she kept trying to make her experience match the map. She kept behaving the way people in the films behave, assuring herself that because she was doing what she
was supposed to be doing, the feeling she was having must be pleasure.
It was months before the dissonance between what she expected to experience and what she was actually experiencing became clear to her. That’s when she came to me, convinced that she must be broken.
When I told her that women are more likely to have orgasms later in a relationship than the first time they have sex with a new partner, she truly didn’t believe me, so convinced was she that her map was right and her terrain—her body—was wrong.
I also told her that pleasure is context dependent, so that even clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good unless it’s in the right context. “Like tickling,” I said. “If it doesn’t feel good, that just means you haven’t got the right context yet. When clitoral stimulation doesn’t feel good it’s not because your clitoris doesn’t work, it’s usually because you’re not turned on enough yet.”
Which brings me to the first step in creating positive meta-emotions.
Olivia is One Big Yes when it comes to sex, which has the potential to create profound ecstasy . . . or profound self-doubt and anxiety, not to mention the chasing dynamic. And it all depends on how she feels about her capacity for Yes.
Way back at the beginning of the first chapter, Olivia found out that her “map” wasn’t true—the story she told herself about wanting sex because of her hormones was a metaphorization that shielded her against the cultural messages that would tell her she’s a bully.
But she drew a new map—grounded in the science and in nonjudgmental attention to her own internal experience. She realized that her sensitive accelerator could team up with her little monitor to create that out-of-control feeling, and they could also team up to create joyful pleasure. She got the out-of-control feeling when she allowed the spiral of stress/self-criticism/stress to escalate. She got the joyful pleasure when she learned to deescalate by allowing the stress to run its course, without hitting either the brakes or the accelerator.