362 - Sluts & Scholars Presents: Come As You Are (with Emily Nagoski)
Sluts & Scholars and Come As You Are
This week’s episode is a special one featuring one of our fellow Pleasure Podcasts. Nicoletta of Sluts & Scholars interviews Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are, about her book and they both share some of their insights and experiences when it comes to knowledge about sex.
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out Nicoletta’s podcast and Emily’s book!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we have a special treat for you. That is that we want to feature an episode from one of our co-podcasters on the Pleasure Podcast Network that we're really excited to share with you. This is some content that's actually very similar to some stuff we've really wanted to bring to you as well and so we're really excited to be able to show off one of our pals on the network.
Dedeker: This is an episode from Sluts & Scholars and our friend Nicoletta, who you may have recently heard on our pornography episode. This is an actual interview with Emily Nagoski who wrote a book called Come as You Are and this interview that they both did together is really, really amazing. I found so many insightful and fascinating things about sex on this show.
We don't talk about sex a lot on the Multiamory Podcast, but I think there are many things to learn about from this episode and from Emily, who is really a leading person in this field and I think that you all will learn a ton from this episode and what this conversation had to say.
Nicoletta: Emily Nagoski is great. I've been a huge fan of their work for a really long time. She has a TED talk specifically about out maintaining sexual connection in a long-term relationship that I send to pretty much all my clients.
Dedeker: She talks about it on the show.
Nicoletta: Just I really love how she takes all this information from her research and presents it in a really, really accessible and applicable way. We hope that you enjoy.
Jase: Just to give all of you a little bit of context, this particular was recorded in June of 2020. This is before the 2020 election and in the early days of the pandemic. Just to give you some context for some of the things that they might be talking about in this episode. With that, we hope that you learn a lot from this and we really appreciate all of you giving it a listen.
Cam: You are listening to a Pleasure Podcast. For more from our sex podcast collective, visit pleasurepodcast.com.
Nicoletta: Thanks for tuning in. Sluts & Scholars is a sex-positive, shame-free, educational podcast, where we try to help you talk smart and fuck smarter. While we love to give advice and resources, please note that this podcast or any emails from us are not intended to be therapy or replacement for therapy. Welcome back to another week of Sluts & Scholars. My name is Nicoletta Heidegger and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and sexologist.
This week, I am super excited, but also nervous to welcome Emily Nagoski. She is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Come as You Are, the surprising new science that will transform your sex life and the Come as You Are workbook and co-author with her sister Amelia of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. She began her work as a sex educator at the University of Delaware, where she volunteered as a peer sex educator while studying psychology with a minor in cognitive science and philosophy.
She then went on to earn a master's of science in counseling and a PhD in health behavior from both Indiana University with clinical and research training at the famous Kinsey Institute. Now, she combines sex education and stress education to teach women to live with confidence and joy in their bodies. What a bomb asked bio that you wrote them? Welcome.
Emily: Thanks.
Nicoletta: I have already said this before we started recording, but it's such an honor to have you here. We've been trying to schedule this for so long and I'm just so honored to have you here because you've been such a key component of a lot of the work I do with my clients.
Emily: That is delightful to hear. Writing a book is terrible, it's really hard, and it is genuinely affirming to have gone through that experience and know that now it is really making a difference in people's lives. Truly, thank you for saying that.
Nicoletta: No, I can tell you it is and it's pretty much become required reading for every client that I see. Something that most people take away from it, which I know you've talked about in different shows and things before, is that people come out saying, "Wow I feel normal." I feel normal and I think that is the question that everybody has and wants to know is, am I normal? How do you define normal?
Emily: I don't, if I can avoid it. As I was thinking about it and why it's so important to people to feel sexually normal, sex for humans as a species is primarily a social behavior and only secondarily a reproductive behavior. How do we learn all our social behaviors?
Nicoletta: From others.
Emily: By watching other people and seeing what they do. We can check, by watching other people, we can see if we're doing it right, but because sex is very often quite a private behavior, we never know. We don't have someone else to check against to see if we're doing it right. Plus we have a whole lot of moral goodness or failure tied to our sexuality of whether we're doing it right or not because to do sexuality wrong is to be a failure.
As a member of your gender, it's to fail your partner. Nobody wants to be just okay. When they say normal, they do not mean average or typical. Everybody wants to be basically the best sex partner their partner has ever had and that's the way we feel okay. As I was thinking about this, I've come to the conclusion that when people want to feel that they are normal, what they really want is to feel that they belong on earth within our species, within their community, that they're not going to be stigmatized and outcast.
As this massively social species that uses sex as a social behavior, failure at sex means ostracization from our communities and we are never quite sure if we are failing and risking isolation.
Nicoletta: This desire to be normal is like an evolutionary bias or need or like a survival mechanism?
Emily: The nerd version of this is there are ultimate and proximate stories to tell about where a trait comes from. An evolutionary story is an ultimate story. You go all the way back in our evolutionary history. The general rule of thumb is use the closest, most proximal story you can to account for something.
If you don't have to go to evolution, don't. I think we really don't have to go to evolution for this one. It's just the density and intensity of our social connections. The importance and power of social connection for our species is as far as we need to go to understand why it's so important for people to aspire to a feeling of belonging.
Nicoletta: That's so tough because I feel like the social learning that we have now is based on really false assumptions because we only really see, like you said, a small window into people's lives and with social media. Usually, when I have a couple come in, they'll often say, we're not having any sex. Everyone is having so much more sex than we are. What's a normal amount of time for couples to have sex?
Emily: Oh, that question.
Nicoletta: I'll say, "Firstly, how do you define sex? Then how often are you engaging in this erotic play?" They'll be like, "Oh, every other day or like twice a week." I'm like, "That's a lot." When people ask what is a normal amount of time for couples to have sex, they seem to have this skewed view that people are having a lot of sex all the time and that's what defines a good relationship.
Emily: As a person who adores the research and the statistic exists, the number exists, how frequently people have sex on average. The way researchers get that number is, you ask a thousand people how often do you have sex, whatever sex means to you? You take everybody's answers, add them together and divide them by the number of people who responded, and then you've got the average number.
It is impossible to say a number like that out loud to people and have them not compare themselves to that number and decide whether they are adequate or not based on where they fall relative to that number. That thousand people who answered the question from which we got this number, does any of their sex lives have anything to do with your sexuality, your body, your relationship, is it relevant in any way to your decision-making around your own sexual choices?
Nicoletta: I want to say no, but how do we convince people that it doesn't matter and it's not relevant?
Emily: There is no convincing to do, people just have to have that click moment for themselves. To recognize even that they are making that comparison and having the realization that we can't measure whether we're sexually normal or adequate based on how we compare to other people. The only way to tell whether we're doing it right is whether or not we like what we're doing. I made a shortcut for this. Did that people remember what you say more if it rhymes?
Nicoletta: Really?
Emily: Yes, they remember it better and they believe it more. I made a rhyme. Are you ready?
Nicoletta: Yes, I'm ready.
Emily: Pleasure is the measure. Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being, it's not how often you do it, who you do it with, how many people you do, what position, how many orgasms you have, nothing like that. It's whether or not you like the sex you are having. That is how you can tell whether or not there's a problem in your sex life.
Nicoletta: I think I watched a Ted talk that you had done where it was talking about what do-- I don't want to misquote, but long-term successful couples have in common. It wasn't frequency of sex. It was having pleasurable sex or sex worth having.
Emily: This is great timing actually because Peggy Kleinplatz's new book.
Nicoletta: I think that's where I met you is her talk at AASECT.
Emily: The book she was in the process of writing when we were at that pre-con just was published. The title is Magnificent Sex. It's co-authored with Dana Ménard and it is revolutionary. What Peggy has done, as you know, is interview dozens of people. Her team interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex lives. She wanted to know, what does extraordinary sex look and feel and what counts as extraordinary sex for these people who self-identify that away and how do they get there?
One of the favorite things that I learned from that pre-con is that the first thing that people say when they're asked, so how did you become a person who has extraordinary sex? They just had to unlearn everything they had ever learned before, not just about sex, but about bodies and gender and safety and love and what it means to connect. They just had to start from scratch. Instead of assessing whether or not they were doing sex based on some script or external standard, they figured out what felt good for them. They turned inside instead of looking outside for guidance and wisdom.
Nicoletta: What do you think of folks who are maybe just measuring it based on frequency?
Emily: I think there is almost no way to escape feeling a sense of failure and ultimately despair if you do it that way.
Nicoletta: I guess I could compare it to eating in quarantine. I feel very privileged to have enough food to eat, but it's almost none of it feels enough because maybe it's not the quality food that I want to be eating and so I feel I would much rather have this fulfilling meal that I'm going to remember for days.
Emily: Exactly. If you choose to measure whether or not your sex life is fine by the frequency of sex and so you have sex X times a week or X times a day, if that's not actually sex that you enjoy or crave, then you begin to have this feeling about it and this feeling about your partner. I checked it off the list, you had the sex, we are doing it at the rate that people do it. You're welcome. That is not a healthy, joyful connection with your partner. That's not pleasure. That's accomplishing a task, doing a chore. For what?
Nicoletta: For what? It sounds you study mostly, I think, people with vulvas sexual response, but I don't know if you've done any research on people with penises, but I do get a lot of feedback from folks when I'm trying to change this narrative that they describe, for lack of a better word, blue balls. They describe this, "I need to have this outlet, otherwise, I'm going to physically explode."
Emily: One of the most important pieces of science that I found while I was writing my sex blog. I wrote a sex education blog called The Dirty Normal, which was one of the inspirations for starting to write the book. In the comments, people would push me and challenge because I would write a post titled something like, sex is not a drive, and talk about how this is very old school, deeply uncontroversial science. There is no ambiguity about this.
A drive is a biological system that notices when there's something going wrong inside of an organism, like thirst or hunger. It pushes the organism out into the big bad scary world to go fix that problem or else. The or else is you will literally die. That's a drive. Sex is not one of those. Frank Beach, because an old white man said it, people have
Nicoletta: We'll believe it. Yes.
Emily: Frank Beach said, "No one ever suffered tissue damage for lack of sex," which is literally true. Blue balls can be uncomfortable if you get to a high level of arousal and do not have an orgasm. The presence of your arousal coming down can feel physically uncomfortable, but physically uncomfortable is in no way dangerous, but-- People were like, "I'm pretty sure, Emily, I've had an experience where I felt I was going to literally die."
Nicoletta: But you didn't.
Emily: Yes, they didn't literally die, which is an important piece of information, but I also know no one who's literally died of starvation, which didn't mean nobody was ever hungry. I wanted to not dismiss their experience so I went looking and what I found, oh, boy, it is criterion velocity and the discrepancy reducing feedback loop, which makes everyone fall asleep immediately when I say it so I had boiled it down to this little
Nicoletta: Yes, give me a rhyme.
Emily: I wish I had a rhyme, but I do have a story. There's a monitor. There's this little creature in your mind that knows what your goals are. It knows how much progress you're making toward the goal and it's aware of how much effort you're investing toward achieving that goal. It's keeping this constant ratio of effort to progress. It happens to have quite a strong opinion about what the right amount of effort to progress ratio should be.
If you are putting in just a little bit of effort and making just tons of progress, easily achieving your goals, that feels delightful. It feels motivating.
Nicoletta: Work smart, not hard.
Emily: The peak human experience happens when there's a little bit of friction, when there's a little bit of grit, when things are just a little bit too hard, you have to push for it. That's when our performance is at most excellent and when we feel most satisfied is when we're challenged just a little bit because that's really motivating.
If we're working really hard for a goal, a lot of time is passing and a lot of effort is being invested and we keep failing over and over again to make the progress that we feel like we're supposed to be making, your little monitor starts to get frustrated. That can be increasing motivation, it can make you work harder for it and you get more frustrated until gradually, that escalates to rage.
Then at a certain point, your little monitor switches its assessment of your goal from being attainable to being unattainable and it pushes you off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair. Frustration and rage are really uncomfortable. On top of the physical sensation of frustrated sexual arousal, frustration and rage are very physically uncomfortable. That's step one in why it may feel like you're literally going to die.
Step two is the cultural script we hand people about what it means to attain this goal because the goal having sex-- When there's a higher desire partner in a relationship, I like a starting place for the higher desire partner is what is it that you actually want when you want sex because it's not sex. If you just wanted an orgasm, you can do that on your own.
Nicoletta: You can do that on your own.
Emily: What is it that you want? The more vulnerable people are willing to be in sharing an answer to that question with their partner, the deeper they can go in moving forward with this desire differential that they may be experiencing because when-- I'm going to talk about a heterosexual couple right now because that's what I see a lot of the time and the stereotype is that the guy's going to be the higher desire partner and the woman's going to be the lower desire partner.
We know that in clinical practice, it's a even split between which person in a straight relationship is going to be the higher desire partner, but the cultural understanding is he's higher desire and she's lower desire. One of the reasons that script shows up for us is because when a person is born with a penis and everybody goes, "It's a boy," they get taught a whole lot of stuff about their body and sexuality and gender and power and pleasure and connection.
First, we teach them that their value as a man walking around can be measured by their ability to get their penis into a vagina. For their partner to decline sex is not merely declining sex. It's not just, "Oh, I'm so tired. I can't do it right now."
Nicoletta: It's a total soul rejection.
Emily: Absolutely, it is, "I am not willing to go out of my way to make sure that you know you are worthwhile as a human being."
Nicoletta: So I'm nothing.
Emily: Right. Then on top of that, remember how I said sex is a social behavior for us. Sex is not a drive but connection is. Another thing we tell people when they're born with a penis is, "The one and only way you're allowed to access a sense of deep, emotional connection and vulnerability and truly being who you are with another person and being emotional--"
Nicoletta: This is your only outlet.
Emily: This is the only way you're allowed to access that. When your partner says no to sex, they are saying no to you accessing this genuine biological drive. It is not that they feel horny or blue balls, they feel enormously afraid that they are not a worthy human, and they feel deeply, intensely lonely.
Nicoletta: If sex is not a drive, what is it?
Emily: It's an incentive motivation system. Do I imagine we're ever going to live in a world where people stop saying sex drive and start saying sexual incentive motivation system?
Nicoletta: Probably not.
Emily: No, we’re not. I think, for this reason, it's really important that we understand the difference instead of it being about an uncomfortable problem has arisen in my body and I have to go solve this problem or I'm going to die. It is an incentive motivation, which is something attractive and desirable. A repetitive stimulus out there in the world pulls us toward it to go explore it with curiosity.
Nicoletta: The talk about drive and I really like the question that you asked and it's definitely something I try to ask of my clients is, what are the reasons that you have sex, and however they define sex. That could be self-pleasure. That could be literally anything. Something I also see a lot of is women who struggle having an orgasm with a partner when they can do it easily on their own.
As I'm balancing this thing between pleasure doesn't have to be orgasm, I would love to know what you think is happening in the brain and the body in those discrepancies, and does it matter if orgasm is not the measure?
Emily: See, that kind of question is exactly why I ended up not being a therapist.
Nicoletta: Tell me more.
Emily: I would find it impossible to say, "Tell me what you think is happening in the brain," and instead I would just be like, "Here's what's happening in the brain."
Nicoletta: Oh, yes, no, I want to know what you think is-- what is happening in the brain?
Emily: Whereas I, as an educator, am like, my job right now is to tell you, explain to you how your brain works, so that it feels completely comprehensible why it's easier to have an orgasm by yourself with a vibrator than with your partner.
Nicoletta: It's interesting because sex therapy is more educational than other therapy. I think there's a lot more education happening.
Emily: People are more baseline ill-informed.
Nicoletta: Yes.
Emily: People know a lot about sex, but almost everything they know is wrong.
Nicoletta: Is incorrect.
Emily: The whole process of my training as a sex educator from when I was 18 years old, my first semester in college, was learning over and over and over again, that everything I learned before I started getting trained, literally everything I learned about sex is wrong. Everything, every single thing. I thought there were two genders. I thought sex was mostly about reproduction. I thought the hymen was the main reason why first vaginal penetration was painful. I thought hymens broke. I thought that orgasm was supposed to happen with vaginal penetration. Everything I thought was wrong, everything. I thought desire was--
Nicoletta: Fake news it's all lies.
Emily: Yes. We have been lied to since the day we were born, and we've been lied to about a topic to which big pieces of our identity are tied.
Nicoletta: All right. Don't sugarcoat it, don't lie to me, but tell me what is happening in the body and the brain scientifically to show why it's easier to have an orgasm by yourself than it is with another person.
Emily: Piece of cake. The mechanism in your brain that controls sexual response is the dual control mechanism. This is the dual control model. If it's called the dual control model, how many parts does it have?
Nicoletta: Two, professor.
Emily: Yes.
Nicoletta: I feel like this is the model that you're most famous for really promoting.
Emily: The reason I put it Come as You Are is because it was originally created by Erick Janssen and John Bancroft. John Bancroft was one of my clinical supervisors in my master's degree and Erick Janssen was one of my dissertation chairs in my doctoral work. I am like the daughter of the dual control model.
Nicoletta: It is an honor and a privilege.
Emily: Yes. I remember the day that John taught the whole sex therapy practice about the dual control model, this thing they were just working on in 1999, the first article had just been published. I felt like my skull had been cracked open. My brain was just dribbled out all over the floor and then the pieces got put back in better. I have never been the same since.
Nicoletta: This is what it should be called to be a daughter of the American revolution.
Emily: Oh, please, let the revolution be actually about gender equality and bodily autonomy and sexual pleasure. Oh, my God. That'd be amazing.
Nicoletta: Well, yours is. Let's hear it. It sounds like awesome work.
Emily: Dual control model. Why is it easy to understand why it might be easier to orgasm from a vibrator by yourself than with a partner? The first part is a sexual accelerator or the gas pedal. It notices all the sex-related information in the environment, everything your brain has ever learned is related to sex. Every sensory morality, whatever you think, believe, or imagine, as well as whatever you smell, see, taste, or touch.
Nicoletta: Which is sometimes shit that surprises you.
Emily: Absolutely. Just because it's sex-related doesn't mean you want or like it. We live in a sufficiently screwed-up culture that your brain has learned to associate some things with sex that are totally horrifying because rape culture and misogyny. Your brain just sends the turn-on signal that we're familiar with and it functions all the time at a low level. The fact that you and I are here talking about sex is a little bit sex-related. You have a little bit of turn-on signal being sent, at the same time in parallel, the second mechanism is functioning. If the first one is the accelerator or the gas pedal, the second part must be-
Nicoletta: Brakes.
Emily: -so brakes.
Nicoletta: Gosh, I feel like my good girl vibes are strong right now.
Emily: Oh, yes. Pats on the head and gold stars.
Nicoletta: That's all I wanted.
Emily: Trust me, I understand that impulse. I recently had a Skype conversation with Erick Janssen and we were just checking in. He's in Belgium now, and we were talking about my opinion about some research I had been reading that was really recently done. I felt really critical of it and I very hesitatingly was like, "I understand the value of this work, and here's this missing piece that I just feel like is really important so I can't put these results anywhere in my framework because it's missing this."
I'm pins and needles worried about having this critique of these researchers whose work I love. He's like, "I absolutely agree." My whole body just celebrated. I'm not wrong.
Nicoletta: Speaking of accelerators, for sure.
Emily: Right. Your break notices all the good reasons not to be turned on. That is everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and crucially think, believe, or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat and it sends a turn-off signal. The process of becoming aroused isn't just hitting the accelerator, it's activating that accelerator and also turning off the brakes. When you are by yourself with your vibrator, first of all, mechanical stimulation is a higher intensity of stimulation to your accelerator than any organic stimulation you can get. Many people--
Nicoletta: That's what it's made for.
Emily: Their first experience with a vibrator, a lot of people with vulvas are like, "Yes, I just had an orgasm in seconds." First experience with a vibrator. At the same time, you also are not activating the breaks with things like being concerned about making sure your partner's needs are met and making sure their expectations are being met and making sure--
Nicoletta: How do I look? How long am I taking?
Emily: How do I look? Is the cottage cheese on the back of my thigh showing? Is my facial expression good? Am I making too much noise? Am I making not enough noise? All that monitoring of am I doing it right? Are all those thoughts-- Does that hit the accelerator?
Nicoletta: Definitely not for me.
Emily: Totally hits the brakes. The experience of arousal is going to depend on the context where it's happening. When you've got a context where you've got this very intense stimulation to the accelerator, and a whole bunch of stuff not hitting the brakes, yes, arousal and orgasm happened smoothly, comparatively, but in a context where you're worried about your partner and worried about all the cultural expectations that come along with performing sex with the partner, that stuff is heading the breaks and actually making it more difficult to access pleasure.
Jase: Hey there, this is Jase again, just hanging out nearby listening to this episode with you. Hope you're having a good time. We wanted to take a quick break to talk about some of our sponsors, which really go a long way to helping us keep this show coming to everyone out there for free. We really appreciate your support, taking the time to listen to our sponsors, and if any of them seem interesting to you, check them out, as that does directly help our show.
Nicoletta: I do know people who say, "Yes, it's fun and pleasurable and I like doing it," and why isn't that enough?
Emily: I don't know, why isn't it enough?
Nicoletta: I don't know. That's why I think I challenge that for people, but I do understand the desire to be like, "Okay, the orgasm is something I know my body knows how to do," and just feeling so frustrated that it can't happen with a partner or hasn't happened yet with a partner.
Emily: Then what do people try?
Nicoletta: I think it's so interesting because I work with people who are so-- a lot of them are so insightful and so smart and I say, "Well, have you tried doing it the same way that you're self-pleasuring?" They're like, "Oh, no, I would never do that."
Emily: Wow.
Nicoletta: Because it's embarrassing, you're vulnerable.
Emily: I just though as well, there's your problem.
Nicoletta: We're talking, obviously, the dual control is much more than just mechanics, but there's this combination of mechanical and then this entire complexity of sociocultural emotional pressures. To me, it makes so much sense, and even when people learn that, I still feel their frustration.
Emily: Because they have in mind the stimulation it should take, and the length of time it should take for them to get to orgasm, and a kind of stimulation that should get them to orgasm, like they have this script.
Nicoletta: Or this intensity of the script that I should be able to orgasm from 40 minutes of someone shoving their thing inside me.
Emily: The consequences of not being able to do that, or else, is huge. It is like being a failure as a woman. It is not a trivial thing, not to match the script you have in your head of what you're supposed to be experiencing around sexuality.
Nicoletta: I want people to read your book. I know you have some great worksheets online that I often have clients do, but one of them is turning off the offs. It's not easy enough just to tell someone, just relax. When someone tells me to relax or calm down, I want to flip the fucking table over.
Emily: It's a great way to stress a person out.
Nicoletta: Exactly. What are some of the actual ways to start practicing turning off the offs or even knowing what they are?
Emily: First thing is figuring out what those things are. Some people just have to think about it and they instantly know, and many of the things they list will be things that activate stress in their bodies. There are stress wars in the world that activate stress in your body. Even in Peggy Kleinplatz's research, laundry shows up a lot as a thing that's a mood killer that shuts things down.
Nicoletta: Dishes.
Emily: Knowing that stuff is done, releases-- If you think about it in terms of a little monitor, those are projects with a beginning and middle and an end, and until you've gotten to the end of it, some part of you is still monitoring where you are in that project of dishes and laundry. If you get to bed and there's still dishes in the sink-- I literally had this experience. I was at a romance writer's conference, and in the elevator, I heard two readers saying-- these scenes where couples are literally running away from the mafia and being shot at and they're hiding and they have sex. I can't even have an orgasm if there's still a dish in the sink.
Nicoletta: That's true. I do know some people who are actually hornier during this COVID crisis because they do get turned on by stress, but that seems to be a smaller percentage.
Emily: It's about 10% to 20% actually. There are some people for whom stress hits the accelerator instead of hitting the brakes. It doesn't necessarily mean they experience more pleasure, but they do experience more spontaneous
Nicoletta: Arousal.
Emily: -craving for sex. It just happens, acts for some people, their brains are wired in a way where the activation of stress also activates sex.
Nicoletta: I wonder if that's just an activation of the nervous system because sometimes people think that they are turned on or having desire because they're having a physical response.
Emily: The best available evidence is basically this cross-wiring story. It's called writing activation, is the technical term for it, where the activation of the stress response spreads to sexuality and ends up activating sexual response. One of the things we know when you study the muscle in the cortex, is that pleasure, arousal, and desire are three separable systems in the brain.
The clearer we can get in, whether we're talking about pleasure, arousal, or desire, the more easily we're going to communicate with our partners and understand ourselves, is this just my body's experiencing response to a sex-related stimulus? Am I one of the 10% to 20% of people who, when there's stressed out, regardless of whether I want or like it, my body's just like ready for sex?
Nicoletta: How would you define those differences? The pleasure, desire, and arousal?
Emily: Pleasure, it's in the brain. It's these tiny hedonic hot spots. You know hedonism?
Nicoletta: Yes.
Emily: About pleasure, they're called hedonic hotspots, these opioid hotspots in the emotional brain that light up when you drop a sugar water onto the tongue of a newborn infant. Just this explosion of like, "Oh my God, that's so good." Just sheer pleasure. That is obviously related to but separable from the wanting system. This is the dopamine system that moves through the emotional brain into cortex and is a huge network that takes in the entire brain and is about motivation, wanting.
It's about like your desire to empty the dishwasher. It's about your desire to put your penis in a vagina. It is about your motivation to change who the president is. That's wanting. Sometimes wanting feels good, and sometimes wanting does not feel good, but desire and pleasure are not the same thing.
It makes me a little bananas to hear people treat them as though are identical, especially, because we live in a culture that absolutely prioritizes desire. We want to want so desperately. The thing is, for example, in the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades, desire is not a characteristic of the satisfying sex they have. In Peggy Kleinplatz's participants who have great sex, these eight key factors that identify extraordinary sex, this spontaneous desire for sex is not one of them, desire is not the thing. Pleasure is the thing. Do you like the sex you are having?
I learned this great analogy from a sex therapist named Christine Hyde in New Jersey. She tells her clients to imagine your best friend invites a party, you say, "Yes," because it's your best friend and it's a party. Then as the date approaches, you start thinking, "Traffic's going to be really heavy.
Nicoletta: -find that my so far, what am I going to wear?
Emily: Like, am I even going to want to put on my party clothes on a Saturday night? But you said you would go, so you put on the party clothes and you show up to the party, and what happens?
Nicoletta: Hopefully, you have a good time.
Emily: Hopefully, you have fun at the party. If you're having fun at the party, you are doing it right. If you are not having fun at the party, there is no amount of looking forward to that party that will make that party worth attending. Peggy and one of the key sentences that I have learned from Peggy is this question of what kind of sex is worth wanting.
Nicoletta: I love that approach of hers. This really makes me think of what happens when we lose the "fireworks," because as you were describing the first drop of sugar on my tongue as a baby, I was like, how exciting. Then if I have that snack every day, it's not that exciting anymore. I think a quote that I really love that I heard from you in a talk was that you can't want or desire what you already have.
Emily: Right. That wanting is about crossing a distance, about pursuit.
Nicoletta: What do we do when that initial wanting and that excitement from the beginning is gone and it feels like such a grief process?
Emily: Yes, there is a grieving process of letting go of the whole model of desire as the center of your definition of sexual wellbeing. We have all been lied to our entire lives and to reckon with that, does entail a lot of grief as well as a lot of celebration because when you let go of that model, you create space for what's actually true about the way sex works in a long-term relationship, which is pleasure-oriented instead.
What you do is you recognize that there is nothing that you have lost that is worth mourning just in the fact that spontaneous desire that hot and heavy fallen in love feeling of sexuality is not what characterizes your sexual connection most of the time anymore. That is not the thing that mattered. Do you still like the sex you're having? You want to make it right.
Nicoletta: I do wonder what's the difference between just a normal lessening of desire after time and instead being pleasure-focused versus a sign that there's an issue in the connection?
Emily: I have found that people are really good at answering that question. Do you find that also like you give the party analogy or you talk about but do you like this sex are having, or what sex is worth wanting or what is it that you want when you want sex? People are pretty good at recognizing when there is a hollow dry socket, painful place in their sex life when it's not just, I don't have spontaneous desire, but when we have the sex, it's really great, and I'm glad we do it versus I don't want of the sex, and when we do it, I dread it and I feel frustrated and neglected and you're not really showing up and listening to me.
People know the difference between sex they like and sex that is just checking off a box or performing to someone else's expectations or just getting it over with. One of the problems that a lot of people-- there's a mess in the way we communicate about this idea, the sort of like people hear it as just do it, just go ahead and do it. I do not mean just do it. I mean, only do things you like, never do anything that doesn't bring you pleasure. If you don't like it, that's the problem you solve.
Nicoletta: How do you have sex that's worth having? Do you think that there's hope for folks who aren't liking the sex that they're having and aren't wanting to have it?
Emily: Oh, totally. Absolutely. I know for sure there is.
Nicoletta: I think so too and there are some people who just say, "Oh, well, there's no chemistry."
Emily: Yes, I know. It's so desperately sad to me when I hear something like that. I'm not going to say there's no such thing as just like a basic, like it's not there.
Nicoletta: Accountability.
Emily: Sometimes that's what's happening. A lot of times it is way more complex than that and if people could fight their way through all the wrong things they have always believed about sex and all the wrong things they have always believed about bodies and gender, they would absolutely be able to find their way back to each other in a more intense and powerful way than they were ever before connected.
Nicoletta: Oh, fuck, you have so many good sound bites. Everything you're saying is just really speaking to me.
Emily: See, when I say something like that, that sentence sounds very meaningful and I know it is so much harder than just, you can find your way back to each other. It is because you have to--
Nicoletta: Oh, yes. It's a lot of fucking work.
Emily: You have to be able to communicate your resentment over a decade of frustration about God knows what in a relationship--
Nicoletta: You have to undo your old narratives. You have to be able to say what you want and actually voice it. You have to know what you want. You have to be-- practice saying it out loud in a vulnerable way.
Emily: It's a lot of work. Then you have to listen to your partner's needs and desires.
Nicoletta: Gross.
Emily: Oh, my God. Do it in a non-judgmental welcoming way.
Nicoletta: Even if yours aren't lining up.
Emily: You have to notice all the ways your previous false beliefs have had a negative impact on your partner over the years and grieve about that together. Yikes. That is some big emotional work.
Nicoletta: I can see why a lot of people just say, "Okay, onto the next one." Then they get their next fix of desire and then the same shit happens all over again.
Emily: I actually talked to someone this year who was in sex therapy with their partner. The trouble was they were not having any sex and he was masturbating to porn every day. They got to a place where he had the insight. He understood what it would take for them to reconnect sexually. He literally said--
Nicoletta: I don't want to.
Emily: Nope. "I don't have what it takes to do that work. I'm not going to do it." They got a divorce.
Nicoletta: I feel that. I have folks come in and they look at me and they're like, "Okay, please fix this for us." Then as we're getting into what it is going to take, it's fucking hard. I'm in this field and it's hard to practice in my relationship.
Emily: Oh, me too. For sure. I am also locked in quarantine with my marital euphemism who also like my best friend who helps me with everything I do. We also look at each other like--
Nicoletta: You again. I feel that. This is work that we all have to do and just imagine that if Emily and I are struggling with this, if you're out there listening, you're obviously struggling with this.
Emily: We teach other people how to do it for a living, which is how we know how extremely hard it is but it's also worth it, I think. The payoff when you can do it, when you can-- In the book and in that TEDx talk you mentioned, I use this really silly metaphor of hedgehogs that every difficult feeling you have and that your partner has is this little sleepy hedgehog that's on the bed.
Nicoletta: To make it cute?
Emily: Yes. To make it non-threatening, but you want it to stay sleepy so that it doesn't stick out its little quills and hurt somebody. If your bed is covered with these sleepy hedgehogs, no wonder you cannot connect with each other sexually. It's like when the dog sleeps in the middle of the bed. It's just in the way. You got to move the thing out of your way.
All these difficult feelings between you and your partner, you have to find out what each hedgehog's name is and turn toward it with kindness and compassion and be really gentle and ask it quietly what it needs and then get your partner's help in meeting the needs of that difficult feeling so that you can set it free together.
Nicoletta: Not to oversimplify it but on top of that, it just made me think that animals are such huge cockblocks in relationships and they love watching people have sex.
Emily: I do not mind. If our dog is watching, it totally does not bother me.
Nicoletta: I get used to it but if they're jumping up on the bed and trying to lick your nipple while you're in the middle of it, that happened to me, it's maybe not ideal.
Emily: People vary so much in what hits their accelerator and what activates their brakes and that's--
Nicoletta: Maybe your dog licking your nipple does hit your accelerator.
Emily: If you find it exciting, that's fine. I find it totally neutral. It doesn't hit the brakes, doesn't interrupt. It's just a thing that happens at the same time. It's like I can hear the dishwasher running downstairs and that's a thing that's happening, but it doesn't hit the accelerator and it doesn't--
Nicoletta: Just to acknowledge, my friend who was recently on the podcast said that her thing with the animals is she just has to be louder than they are. If they're outside the door and they're squeaking and trying to get in, she says she just makes her sex noises louder.
Emily: Here you go.
Nicoletta: Give that a try. As we start to wrap, which I'm so sad about, I want everyone to know about some of the other stuff you're doing. I know you are also doing a podcast with your sister. Tell me a little bit about that so people can listen to you spout out this wonderfulness more.
Emily: Sure. It's called the Feminist Survival Project 2020 back in September of 2019. Remember 2019?
Nicoletta: No.
Emily: Back in September of 2019, I looked forward and I recognized that 2020 was going to be a horror show for anybody who believes that being a woman is neither a medical condition nor a moral failing, which is how I define feminist. I wanted to create a podcast specifically to get us through Election Day, basically. Each week talking about managing our stress, coping, and tolerating. I know there's a lot of terrible things on the news, I had no idea that the news would be this terrible.
Nicoletta: You were predicting a storm, but it's definitely--
Emily: It turned out to be a diarrhea storm. Wow. Then this survival project became much more literal than I intended it to be. I make it with my sister because in burnout, the moral of the story is that the cure for burnout is not self-care, it is all of us caring for each other. We have to turn toward each other's difficult feelings with kindness and compassion. It only makes sense to make a supportive feminist podcast with someone else, with whom I can connect emotionally.
Since I wrote the book with Amelia, she was like, "Let's do this." We began it in the first week of November of 2019, and we will complete it in the 1st week of November 2020 come what may. The purpose of it is to help people get through. Amelia is very different from me, even though she is an identical twin, she is a professional musician. She's a choral conductor.
Nicoletta: Oh, interesting.
Emily: She reads a lot of science fiction so her point of view is pretty different from mine. One of the great things about having a professional musician on your podcast is they can write songs and perform those songs, original songs on the podcast.
Nicoletta: Oh, yes.
Emily: A lot of episodes. The darker the episode, the more we try to make sure there is a song at the end of it.
Nicoletta: I love that.
Emily: The bikini industrial complex, which is about fat-shaming and all the ways that women's bodies are judged and we're taught to treat our bodies as the enemy. That's a very dificult episode and one of Amelia's best songs was at the end of that episode.
Nicoletta: This is so good. This is like new-age feminist weirdo.
Emily: Yes, totally.
Nicoletta: I love it. I can't wait to listen. It sounds amazing. I wish I had a musician on my podcast.
Emily: Just be born with one on the same day.
Nicoletta: I'll try that for next time around.
Emily: That's how I did it. I don't see why it wouldn't work for everybody.
Nicoletta: Actually, total side note. I'll have to connect you to one of my colleagues in my doctoral program because she is doing her dissertation on the sexualization of twins.
Emily: Oh, fascinating, but it's still gross.
Nicoletta: It's super this interesting thing of being like two female twins and how it's been sexualized. It's like, "Oh, twins," but then all other incest is seen as bad.
Emily: Yes.
Nicoletta: It's so interesting.
Emily: As a sex educator, I have gone through all the sexual attitude reassessment and--
Nicoletta: You've seen all the things.
Emily: Everything and I don't have almost any disgust triggers anymore. Even literally with the dog jumping onto the bed, while I'm having--
Nicoletta: You're like, "I'm neutral. I'm cool with dogs."
Emily: That's fine, but when you mentioned sexualization of twins, I have a visceral response to that, because it is literal incest that you're talking about with regard to me. No. It's always interesting to bump up against those walls to remember, oh, yes, there's some stuff that--
Nicoletta: Triggers. It's hard to find nowadays, but it's always a little bit-- even though it's uncomfortable, I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." One thing that makes me uncomfortable.
Emily: It's good to know that they're there and that I can recognize it when it happens because it doesn't happen very often.
Nicoletta: On that note, I am happy to be someone who makes you feel uncomfortable-
Emily: Great.
Nicoletta: -but I hope that the rest of the podcast was comfortable. I'm so happy that you joined. In addition to the podcast, how can folks find what you're doing and check out and stay up to date on all your cool projects?
Emily: The podcast website is just feministsurvivalproject.com. For social media, I'm not doing a lot of social media. It's part of my feminist survival for 2020, but I am on Instagram and I am mostly posting pictures of my adorable dogs.
Nicoletta: If you want to follow what I'm doing at Sluts & Scholars, also not doing a lot of it right now, but you can follow me on Instagram @slutsandscholars, on Twitter @SlutScholars, and if you have questions or need to get connected with some resources, you can email me at SlutsAndScholars@gmail.com. Thanks so much.
Dedeker: Hello again, folks, I hope that you enjoyed that podcast episode. We don't have a bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers this week. Instead, take that time to go check out Nicoletta Show, go check out Sluts & Scholars or go and read Emily Nagoski's book Come as You Are. I can highly, highly recommend both. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is on this episode's discussion thread in our private Facebook group or Discord chat.