457 - Creating Lasting Sexual Connections with Emily Nagoski
Welcome back, Emily!
We’re thrilled to have Emily Nagoski back on the show! Emily is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestselling Come As You Are, and coauthor, with her sister, Amelia, of New York Times bestseller Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Her next book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections will be out in January 2024.
Emily earned an M.S. in counseling and a Ph.D. in health behavior, both from Indiana University, with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute. Now she combines sex education and stress education to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. She lives in Massachusetts with two dogs, a cat, and a cartoonist.
During this episode, Emily talks about her newest book, Come Together, and discusses the following topics with us:
“Your book focuses on maintaining a healthy sexual connection while in a long-term relationship, which is a topic that people have been trying to figure out for a very long time - is there a particular piece of bad advice out there that gets under your skin?”
“In your book you say, ‘Pleasure is the measure,’ encouraging people to use a pleasure-oriented metric for determining whether or not their sex life is good or not. What are the ways that we’re usually conditioned to make that kind of judgment, and what does focusing on pleasure actually look like in practice?”
“‘Partners in a sexual connection can treat context as a “third thing,” a site of mutual curiosity and exploration. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection co-create a context that makes pleasure easier to access.’ Can you give examples of what that kind of context could look like?”
“You encourage people to get in touch with their emotional floorplan; which emotional spaces make it easier to access pleasure, which ones don't, etc., but you specify that the key may be in learning to get to the space ‘adjacent’ to lust…can you clarify what that means?”
“Let’s talk about sexual difference. This is something that comes up in a lot of relationships, but on our show, it often comes up when people are practicing non-monogamy. Not only could it be possible that my partner’s sexuality is different from my own, but also the way they choose to practice their sexuality with others could be quite different from my own. How do you recommend that people work through their sexual differences?”
“In the book you talk about confidence and joy as fundamental parts of a great sex life, but you also say that sex is an ongoing cycle between woundedness and healing. I think we don’t tend to associate confidence and joy with woundedness and healing! How do all of those things interplay?”
“You talk about the gender mirage - this idea that because we’re born with a particular set of body parts, that dictates how we’re allowed to live in our bodies and how we’re supposed to perform sexually. This creates difficulties for everyone, but especially so for heterosexual relationships because there is very little incentive to break out of that mirage. What are the ways that you see this holding hetero couples back in sex? You say that the world refuses to teach men how to be good partners and how to be there for difficult feelings. Can you talk more about that?”
“How do we practice ecstasy while living in a dark and troubled world?”
Find more about Emily and her work on her website and subscribe to her newsletter, or find her on Instagram.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of The Multiamory Podcast, we are talking about the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections with Dr. Emily Nagoski. Emily Nagoski is the award-winning author of The New York Times bestselling book Come as You Are and co-author with her sister Amelia of The New York Times bestseller Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. We've talked about both of those books before on this show, but today, we're very excited to be talking about her next book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, which just came out today and we're so excited to be talking about it.
Emily earned a master's of social work in counseling and a PhD in health behavior, both from Indiana University with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute. Now, she combines sex education and stress education to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. She currently lives in Massachusetts with two dogs, a cat, and a cartoonist. Emily, thank you so much for joining us today.
Emily Nagoski: Thank you. I'm so excited to talk.
Dedeker: Yes, this is a really exciting time for us. We've been wanting to get you on the pod for a really long time. I know our audience really loves your work. They reference your work all the time in our Patreon communities. I'm referencing your work all the time with our clients. I don't even know, should I tease our listeners ahead of time to let them know that we're going to have you on or is it going to be a bit surprise?
Jase: Just drop it. Yes.
Dedeker: Just drop it. I don't know. I still got to chew on that one, but let's dive in in talking about your most recent book. Your book focuses on maintaining a healthy sexual connection while in a long-term relationship. Now this is a topic that people have been trying to figure out, I feel, since the dawn of time. I was wondering, is there a particular piece of bad advice out there that gets under your skin?
Emily Nagoski: Oh my God, yes.
Emily Nagoski: Maybe it's the worst one because it's the one that I hear all the time, and it's the thing I get asked about, and it turns out to be the most irrelevant thing. That advice is, keep the spark alive.
Jase: What does that even mean?
Emily Nagoski: How do we keep spark alive?
Emily: That's so amorphous.
Dedeker: What does that even mean?
Emily Nagoski: How do we keep the spark alive? What does it even mean? What do you imagine when you hear the spark? What is spark?
Dedeker: I guess I imagine a little-
Emily: Novelty?
Dedeker: Yes. I imagine some little fireworks sparkler that's simultaneously both in my heart and in my genitals that I somehow have to blow on it like fire, like I'm building a campfire, like embers but even then, I don't even know what that actually means in real life.
Emily Nagoski: Sure. There's novelty, there's still adventure and really wild things. There's a spark in your heart and a spark in your genitals. Actually, I think it's talking about motherfucking spontaneous desire, which is my nemesis. I mean, spontaneous desire is great. Spontaneous desire, as many people will already know, hooray, is this idea that desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. You can just be walking down the street, you can be having your lunch and have a stray sexy thought.
Erika Moen, the cartoonist, illustrates it as a lightning bolt to the genitals. You go home to a certain special someone and you're like, "Hey, certain special someone, I have the kaboom." That's spontaneous desire. It emerges in anticipation of pleasure and it is one of the normal healthy ways to experience desire. I think when people say, keep the spark alive, they mean continue experiencing spontaneous desire regardless of any contextual changes. One of the most important ideas in Come as You Are is responsive desire, which emerges not in anticipation of pleasure, but in response to pleasure.
Instead of it just being walking down the street or eating your lunch, it's date night. You've scheduled tonight is the night that you're with this person, you had a really long and difficult week, but you hired the childcare and you put on your party clothes and you show up. You put your body in the bed, you'll let your skin touch your partner's skin, and your body goes, "I really like this. I really like this person. We should do this again sometime." That's responsive desire and it is one of the normal healthy ways to experience sexual desire.
Most people, when they hear spark, they hear spontaneous desire like I should want my partner out of the blue regardless of what else is going on in my life. If I have to drag myself to date night, if it takes some time for me to preheat the oven, then there's something wrong and I don't want my partner enough. In the book, I call it the desire imperative. That there's this sparky thing you feel at the beginning of a relationship and that lasts for a while and eventually it goes away and either you can accept that it has gone away.
As your hormones fade, you hold hands together at sunset drifting on a sea of sexlessness, I guess, or you can fight hard, you can invest time, energy, money in trying to keep the spark alive. When you look at the actual research on people who do sustain strong sexual connections over the long term, they do not talk about desire. They do not talk about spark. You know what they talk about? Pleasure. They like the sex that they have. If I had just one thing that people could remember, I would have them remember this. It is not dysfunctional or in any way problematic not to want sex you do not like.
Jase: It sounds so simple, but yes, important.
Emily: Going along those lines, a piece of advice that I've often heard on a lot of podcasts with long-term relationship partners on them is that you should rally when your partner wants you to have sex with them, you should just do it. You should just find that spark or whatever it is within you and just say yes regardless of how you feel. I've always struggled with that idea. I feel like maybe that's not the best advice out there and I was curious what you thought of that.
Emily Nagoski: I think that is the kind of advice that only works in very specific circumstances because, again, if you are rallying yourself to go ahead and have sex you do not like, you are reinforcing all those pathways that tell you that when your partner approaches you for sex and you capitulate, you consent to have the sex that you do not enjoy. Every time your partner approaches you, you are learning that the thing that happens next is something that is going to be unpleasant for you and so your dread just grows and grows and your brakes, your sexual brakes get hit more and more and it becomes more and more difficult actually to enjoy the sex.
When you show up and you're like, "Yes, you're right. It's been a while. I know that if we got started, I would really enjoy it," I have four chapters devoted to that and we could talk about it forever of, "Yes, you would like to have sex. I, in principle, would like to have sex and I don't know how to get there from where I am right now." If you're like, "I know that if I could just get there, we would have so much fun. I would be so glad we did," then yes.
Jase: Yes. It's funny that that specific thing you're talking about and in your TED Talk from 2019, you talk about going to a party as the metaphor for this. I think that one metaphor comes up probably every week in Dedeker and my conversation with each other about having sex. It's that-
Dedeker: In a good way, in a positive way.
Jase: Yes. We know we're going to like the party, it just feels like a lot of work to get ready for it, and to get dressed to go to it, but we know we're going to have fun.
Emily Nagoski: I learned metaphor from sex therapist Christine Hyde in New Jersey actually at the Romance Writers Association Conference in New York City in 2015. What was normalizing about it for me, I was like, "Other people dread parties before they go? So I'm normal?"
Dedeker: That's why that metaphor has landed on me so powerfully is because I'm also an introvert who doesn't like parties, but will sometimes go to them and enjoy myself afterwards. I really really feel that it's such a great metaphor.
Emily Nagoski: I extend that metaphor in the new book. For me, spontaneous desire is like waking up in the middle of the night and you remember that there's leftover cake in the fridge from the party, and your interest in that cake has nothing to do with you being hungry. You're not hungry, it's the middle of the night, but man, you love cake and there's a cake in the fridge. That's spontaneous desire.
Responsive desire is when you're like, "I said I would go to this party and I've had a long week, but I said I would go so we arrange the childcare and I'm going to put on my party clothes and we're going to go through all the traffic, and then I show up, and I have a good time at the party." That's responsive desire. Then there's a third thing that I call magnificent desire named after Peggy Kleinplatz and Dana Ménard's book Magnificent Sex, which is wonderful and if anyone hasn't read it yet, you should read it. It's so good.
Magnificent desire, these are people who don't just have fun at the party, they love to entertain. Even when they're at the freaking fracking grocery store, they are getting the mortadella because they're imagining piling it up in little beautiful heaps on the charcuterie board. They get the little skinny breadsticks to lay at an angle just so. Why would we spend time and imagination preparing for a party that might not even happen? Why invest so much effort into making it beautiful, making tiny little hotdogs wrapped in croissant? Why? Why would we take time to do all that?
Because we love sharing pleasure with the people we care about, and we put in time in advance because we know that when we show up to the party, we're going to share this pleasure together. Couples who are most successful at sustaining a sexual connection over the long term are these couples who love to entertain. The other metaphor that I use in Come as You Are is the garden metaphor. On the day you're born with this little plot of rich and fertile soil, and your family and your culture start to plant ideas about sex and love and bodies and relationships and safety and gender.
By the time you get to adulthood, you have this garden and they have taught you how to tend it, and some of us get lucky and have nothing but beautiful things that we want to cultivate. A lot of us get stuck with some very toxic shit in our gardens and have to go row by row and weed to choose which things we want to keep and cultivate, and which things we want to pull and throw in the compost to rot and become fertilizer for other things.
Early in a relationship, you're often going to visit each other's gardens and explore and find out what's there, but at a certain point in a long-term relationship, when your sexual connection lasts over years, eventually you start to cultivate a shared garden. You bring over your favorite things from your garden and they bring over their favorite things from their garden. You hope to heck those things are compatible, they're not going to strangulate each other. As time passes, there are certain seasons in life when the garden gets neglected, and also the garden is still there, and you can go back and untangle all the weeds that have grown.
It's not just about your individual garden, it's about, "Here's this shared plot that you and I are cultivating together. What do we love? What do we want to have in this garden?" The way Peggy Kleinplatz asks her clients is, "What kind of sex is worth wanting?"
Dedeker: I love that question. That's beautiful.
Jase: Well, on that topic, we wanted to ask you about pleasure. In the book, you talk about how pleasure is the measure in encouraging people to focus on using the amount of pleasure as the thing to measure rather than frequency or length or athleticism or whatever other things people might look to for evaluating their sex life.
Emily Nagoski: Positions, location.
Dedeker: Number of orgasms.
Jase: We're usually conditioned to judge it based on all of those other things. Those are, I guess, some of those plants that were put in our garden there. What does it actually look like in practice to try focusing on pleasure? Because I think that sounds great in theory, but it's hard to imagine. How do you do that? What does that look like in real life?
Emily Nagoski: This is one of the really tricky questions because, "What does it look like?" tempts me to tell a story about what it looks like for some specific people in their specific relationship. The deal is what it looks like for some people in their specific relationship truly has nothing to do with what it's going to look like for you in your specific relationships because people vary and also people change across time. I remember being at the Woodhull Conference back in 2012 or 2013 and talk after talk that I went to was like, "Pleasure is the most important thing."
Nina Hartley said, "You can't experience pleasure when you can't breathe below your third rib," which is 100% accurate. People kept talking about how pleasure is really important and pleasure needs to be at the center of the conversation. Nobody was talking about what pleasure is and why it's difficult sometimes. Can I talk a little nerdy brain science about what pleasure is?
Jase: Yes, love it.
Dedeker: Oh, please do. You are among friends here.
Emily Nagoski: One of my favorite characteristics of the mammalian brain is the affective keyboard of the nucleus accumbens shell, which depending on your state of mind, depending technically on the state of your vagus nerve, probably will change how it responds to a particular stimulus. When you are in a calm, relaxed, happy, trusting, connected, playful state, curious, your brain will respond to almost any stimulation as something to be explored with curiosity, something that can be a potential game. Which is why something that would be painful under a lot of circumstances can feel sexy under sexy circumstances.
Insert cock and ball torture here, insert nipple clips here, spanking, whips, all the pain stuff can feel pleasurable because your brain is in the right state and your affective keyboard has tuned itself to a positive valence. When you're in a stressed-out state of mind, when you're feeling threatened, overwhelmed, exhausted, when you're physically unwell, your affective keyboard tunes itself to interpret almost any stimulation as being something to avoid it as a potential threat, even stimuli, that in a different context, it might have moved toward with curiosity.
Something you would ordinarily think of as pleasurable, like a caress from someone you really love, under general circumstances, that might feel positive, but if you are currently off at that beloved partner and they caress you very gently, it's irritating.
Dedeker: Oh, the worst sensation, the worst feeling.
Jase: I think that comes up even not if I'm upset with that partner, but if I'm just annoyed and frustrated at work or something and a partner comes up and tries to be loving and light touches, I'm like, "Ah, get off. No, I'm in the middle of being mad and focused right now."
Emily Nagoski: Yes. There's now a whole bunch of neuroscience about how reliably our brains will interpret as threatening any kind of social approach. When we're in a fight or flight state, we're in a dorsal shutdown state, and when we're in a ventral socially engaged, connected, safe state, our brains are very ready to experience all kinds of sensations.
Dedeker: It's that thing where, I know there's so many people, I think the aphorism that gets tossed around is how the brain is the biggest erogenous zone of the body?
Emily Nagoski: It's the most important erogenous zone. Your largest erogenous zone is your skin.
Jase: Your skin.
Dedeker: That's what I would imagine if we're getting pretty technical there.
Emily Nagoski: Just in terms of sheer area. I correct it because I had a really terrible copy editor for Come as You Are. I have the sentence that your brain is your most important sex organ and she changed it to largest.
Dedeker: I see.
Emily Nagoski: I was like, "Oh, no." It matters to me. Because you can have an orgasm, you can remove almost any part of your body except your brain and still be able to have an orgasm. You don't need genitals to have an orgasm. You don't need feet to have an orgasm. Don't need hands to have an orgasm. You need a brain.
Dedeker: It really puts the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz in a different perspective for me, but maybe that's why he really wanted a brain all along.
Jase: His whole song is talking about having an orgasm, yes. He would finally have a brain.
Emily: His lack of being able to have one.
Emily Nagoski: I would not be such a nothing, my head all full of stuffing, my heart all full of pain. Oh, he was, oh.
Emily: Oh, that's very sad. Goodness. I want to talk about something that you said in the book, "Partners in a sexual connection can treat context as a third thing, a site of mutual curiosity and exploration." Then, "couples who sustain a strong sexual connection co-create a context that makes pleasure easier to access." That's really interesting.
Emily Nagoski: That's the thing.
Emily: Can you give examples? Yes, exactly. Just like what are some examples of what that context can look like in a practical sense?
Emily Nagoski: The third thing comes from an essay written by a poet about his marriage to another poet, where he talks about that they didn't spend their days gazing into each other's eyes. They spent their days with their gaze on shared third things, which every relationship that lasts any amount of time requires third things. It can be your favorite artist, it could be your kids, it can be the sports team that you follow, it can be your garden, it can be your special needs cat. You have third things that your relationship focuses on.
I 100% believe that your shared erotic connection, if that's a component of your relationship, it deserves to be a third thing toward which you turn your shared gaze with focus, with pleasure, with play. Many people say that sustaining a sexual connection in a long-term relationship is hard work. I say it's a hobby because it's not necessary for almost anything or almost anyone, but it is. If it's worth doing, you're going to have to put some effort into it, cultivating a garden takes some effort, and you do that by creating a context that makes it easy to get to the pleasure. The origin story of the book is that writing Come as You Are actually ruined my own sex life.
Dedeker: Oh, dear. Funny how books can do that sometimes.
Emily Nagoski: Writing a book is terrible as Amy Poehler says.
Emily: .
Emily Nagoski: You might think that writing and talking and thinking about sex all the time would increase your interest in sex. No, I was so stressed out that I had zero interest in actually having any sex, for months, nothing. Then I went on a book tour and I was even more stressed, so there were more months of nothing. I went to the research, because that's what I do, to be like, "What do people do?" There's all this stupid, keep the spark alive. What?
I found there's three characteristics of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. One, they have a good relationship. They are friends who admire and trust each other. For crying out loud, I hope that's not controversial.
Dedeker: No, it's not. We talk about that all the time.
Emily Nagoski: Two, sex matters to them. They decide that it is important for their relationship for whatever reason, and all of chapter one is, "What is it that you want when you want sex? What is it that you don't want when you don't want sex?" Finding out why and whether sex matters to you as an individual and to this specific relationship is one of the essential things you have to do repeatedly. Why would we spend our time? Maybe we've got kids to take care of, maybe we've got jobs to go to, maybe we've got school to attend, other family members to pay attention to, other friends who want to spend time with.
God forbid, we just want to watch a little YouTube and take a nap, like we're busy. Why would we close the door on all these other things? There has to be something that matters. The second characteristic is they decide that it matters for their relationship and it does not always matter, sometimes it drops to the bottom of the priority list, and that's fine. The couples who sustain a strong connection are not the ones who never lose track of each other, they're the ones who find their way back because it matters.
The third characteristic is these are couples who recognize that all the culturally constructed narratives about who they're supposed to be as sexual people are all fictional bullshit that only get in the way. They invest a whole bunch of energy rejecting that stuff and co-creating sexual identities that truly work for them, and they allow those to evolve over time. In particular, I'm talking about the patriarchy broadly and the gender binary more specifically. Being trapped in those roles is very dangerous, so there's two chapters about the gender binary. Creating a context, context is made of two things, internal state and external circumstance. External circumstances is made of time and-
Emily: Whatever is going on in your life at that particular moment.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily Nagoski: Yes, the political world and your work life. Your internal state is like I was talking about your affective keyboard being tuned based on whether you're stressed or feeling connected. The way I talk about internal state in the book is with this thing I call the emotional floor plan, which is based in Jaak Panksepp's seven primary-process emotions. One of those primary-process emotions is lust. Let's imagine that the lust space in your brain is like a room on the floor plan of a house. If you want to get into the lust space, what space do you come in from? What mental space were you in before you got to the lust space?
For a lot of people, it's play. Why is vacation sex so reliable for so many people? For various people that I talk to, it's because when they're on vacation, they transition out of all the stress and worry and planning and all that stuff and into a play state with their partner. Play is the mammalian motivation state of friendship where there's nothing at stake, you got nothing to lose. I don't know if you all are dog people, but when a dog goes and looks at you with their mouth open and soft, and their ears perked up, and their eyes bright, they're inviting you in a play bow to say, "Nothing I do is serious, I just want to play."
Jase: Right .
Emily Nagoski: That play state for a lot of people leads directly into the lust room. For some people, it's the care space, the ventral-- I'm using all these polyvagal terms, I don't mean to be technical, but the open, warm, connected, caring for, like lying on the couch together in front of a fire, cuddling, feeling held, cared for, warm, that care space, as opposed to the taking care of frantic, responsible. Care is a very big space in the mammalian brain, especially the human brain. There is this area of caring for each other that often just slides right into the lust space for a lot of people.
Seeking is another space in our emotional floor plan. This is curiosity, exploration. My favorites, this for me, this was a really big one until I got out of school. All the people I dated when I was in grad school were also grad students, and talking about each other's research, it was like basically a water slide directly from talking about the other person's research into the love space, just like directly, just easily. For other people, the seeking space, adventure, exploration takes the form of traveling the world together. I know people who sold all their possessions and traveled around the world together, which sounds like a nightmare to me personally, but they loved it.
Things went wrong all the time, but because they were together and dealing with it together, it was this bonding adventure, and they now have the babies to prove it. For a lot of people, these three in particular: play, care, and seeking, usually have a doorway right into the lust space. For all the people who are like, "I know that if I could just get there, I would have a good time, but how do I get there?"
The question is, how do I get to care, how do I get to the play space in my brain, how do I get to the seeking space in my brain, because chances are you, like me, this is exactly the situation-- If I could just get myself there, I know it would be good, but the last time I tried, I just cried and fell asleep. I was stuck in one of the pleasure adverse spaces, like fear, and rage, and panic grief, which is loneliness. I felt stuck and trapped and I couldn't get out. A combination of learning to access play with my partner and a whole bunch of therapy to help me learn to recognize-
Emily: Always helpful.
Emily Nagoski: Yes, like when am I in? How do I know in my body that I'm in the fear space? What puts me there and how do I get myself out? How do I know when I'm in the rage space? What gets me there and how do I get myself out? Learning how to navigate my emotional floor plan was for me the key. Creating a context is yes about your external circumstances, it's about creating windows of time. The reason I'm a fan of scheduled sex is because I feel like I want to live at that--
People's complaint about scheduled sex is they feel like, if they have to put in the calendar, if they have to plan ahead, they don't really want me enough. If they don't want me spontaneously, there's something wrong. If that's your life, cool. Also, I think a lot of people are busier than that.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Yes. All three of us say yes.
Emily Nagoski: If something gets on the calendar, like my partner cordoned off time on the calendar just to spend with me and it's not just enough time for the sexities. It's enough time to transition out of wherever we were in our emotional floorplans into-- and I have found you don't try to transition into the lust space because the ironic process will take over and you'll never get there. Don't think about a white bear. Don't think about a white bear. Get an erection, get an erection, get an erection. It's never going to happen. Don't try to go to the lust space, go to the room next door to the room where it happens. Just get to the play space, get to care, get to seeking. From there, you will waterslide, you will open the door, you will get into the lust space from there.
Dedeker: So much of this is making so much sense. A couple of things. I know for Jase and I, the times when we have put sex on the calendar or if we've decided we want to put actually a big chunk of time towards sex on the calendar, often the first hour of that is playing video games together actually.
Emily Nagoski: That's so great, play.
Dedeker: We're both people who very much get in our heads and get very work-obsessed. I do think that something that has helped us is that we do know we need to transition time, but I never put it together that the video games count as that play time. I so appreciate you talking about this because I think our cultural narrative usually is, "Oh, if you can't get there, do more foreplay. That's what you need, just do more foreplay." To be quite frank, if you're a woman and you feel like you can't get there, I would do more foreplay and then we just assume men are always up for it and don't need to transition or anything like that.
Then I also think about the fact that our models for making that transition, when we look at pop culture and the way sex is depicted, either in film or TV or in porn, in film and TV, it's like we go from action sequence to having sex with each other, or we go from having a passionate debate with each other to having sex with each other. Where I'm just like that's not really the way I think most of us actually transition. If it's porn, there's no transition. We're just boom, we're just right there. I so appreciate normalizing the on-ramp, and that is not just about you need more foreplay.
Emily Nagoski: Yes. Here's my specific neuroscience reason of why it's not just more foreplay. The deal is when your brain is not in the correct state, it's not going to interpret your foreplay behaviors as sexy because your brain is not in a state to interpret it. It doesn't matter that you're doing sexy things. You can be making out with your favorite person and if your brain is still stuck on the dishes in the sink, and the laundry in the washer, and the toys on the floor, and your homework that didn't get done, and the conflict you had three days ago that never quite got resolved, it doesn't matter how much you usually enjoy making out with this person.
It's not going to arouse you because your brain isn't even perceiving the pleasure of it.
Emily: I want to talk about the difference between multiple people in relationships and their sexual desire, just sexual differences in general. I think that comes up a lot in many relationships, even ones that are monogamous. In the context of non-monogamy which we talked about on this show, there's the possibility that the way that they choose to engage in sex with other people might be very different than how you choose to do that. How do you recommend that people work through those sexual differences, maybe desired differences in how much a person wants sex or not?
I think that that's a thing. Some people say, "Oh, well, I'm just a really sexual person, and you are less sexual than I am." In terms of those differences, whether it be desire, whether it just be the amount of sex that a person wants versus another person, I think that that becomes even more challenging in a non-monogamous context when you add more people. I guess just the question is, how do you deal with all that?
Emily Nagoski: Everything is more challenging when you add more people.
Dedeker: Yes, of course.
Emily Nagoski: People in open relationships, polyamorous folks are represented in the book, my one commentary about could polyamory be right for you? It is multiplicatively more complex, and it can be amazing. I have seen open relationships, polyamorous relationships that are models for all relationships, and those people, they have the time to talk about all this stuff. If you have the time and the emotional articulateness and clarity, it can be amazing. Everything is more complex when you add extra people. Just adding extra people is always more complex.
It really comes down to the pleasure part. When eroticism becomes a part of our connection, what kind of sex do you like to have with me? What kind of sex do I like to have with you? You want a third person involved in this sexual encounter? What kind of sex does that person like to have with me? What kind of sex does that person like to have with you? What kind of sex do you like to have with that person? What kind of sex do I like to have with that person? What kind of sex do we all like to have together? It's about the pleasure of it.
Some people do have greater interest in sex. Some people have overall less interest in sex. Some people have lots of interest in sex at some seasons in their life and way less interest in sex at other seasons in their life because their context has changed. They're more stressed, they're physically ill, they're just overwhelmed with other priorities, things just change. Staying attuned to what your internal state is, how your external circumstances are changing, being really aware of what feels good for you, staying really honest with people about what feels good for you, versus what doesn't feel great for you.
Which is a complicated conversation when it's not the same thing that the other person thinks feels good. Those are the things that matter and those are not five-minute conversations.
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Dedeker: Well, something you mentioned in the book is about how when there's any kind of sexual difference between two people, that sometimes that's something that can really activate a sense of judgment.
Emily Nagoski: Sure, if you decide that one person is right, and the other one is wrong.
Dedeker: Exactly right or if I think the way that you think about sex or your sexual interests are maybe gross to me, or vice versa, or if you think I'm too prudish in my sexual whatever. I'm wondering about couples being able to bridge those gaps where they can acknowledge the places that they're different.
Emily Nagoski: We're now in chapter three, I think maybe four, six. There's a chapter about the characteristics of a sex-positive context. It turns out the person who first said, "Comparison is the thief of joy," was Teddy Roosevelt. He was wrong. People compare, kids compare body parts all the time. It's just like, you have this and I have that. This is one way, that's another. The thief of joy is judgment. Judgment is the thief of joy. Deciding that things are different. This one is right and that one is wrong. These are different. This one is good and this one is bad. It's the judgment that is the thief of joy.
Of course, it's a thing I say over and over, y'all have probably heard me say it 12 million times, confidence and joy are the keys to a great sex life. Confidence is knowing what is true. Joy is the hard part. Joy is loving what is true. Judgment is the thief of joy. You can know everything there is to know about your partner, but if a part of you recoils from a part of their sexuality, that's not a part of their sexuality that you should engage with currently and also recognize that that judgment is about you. That's a thing that lives inside you.
When you're going to have a conversation about it, which conversations about this stuff are great, know that you have that judgment living inside you. Imagine what it would feel like for you if your partner responded to something that's true about your sexuality with the kind of judgment you feel inside you about this aspect of their sexuality, and do everything you can to respond to them the way you would want them to respond to you, with kindness and open warmth.
Just, "I said a thing that's really big and difficult there, can we pause and take a moment?" or, "Before I say this thing, I want to acknowledge that this might be big for you. I'm going to ask you to do everything you can just like take deep breaths, keep your face real neutral, and then we'll take five minutes and you can go have whatever reaction you need to have. First reaction I'm going to ask for neutrality." Those kinds of conversations need all kinds of buffering and padding around them.
John Gottman talks about the gentle startup and those are even more important when you feel like you're going to get a disgust response from a partner about something really important to you. The judgment is the problem in that situation. It's not that you are different, it's that you have an internal experience-- the thing is it's their sexuality. It's not you, and you always get to choose whether or not to do anything. Does that make sense?
Dedeker: Yes. I feel like I'm getting this admittedly, I think, difficult process of being able to have that acceptance and warmth, not give the knee-jerk judgmental reaction to your partner, while also recognizing where that judgment lives in you and what it means about you, while also recognizing like, "Okay, it doesn't mean that I have to engage with this part of my partner's sexuality. That's okay. I can have some boundaries. I can choose what it is that I want to engage with and what I don't want," while also trying to hold not personalizing that necessarily. Not necessarily making it about you.
Emily Nagoski: Yes.
Dedeker: lt seems it's important and also seems like a lot of balls to have in the air, as juggling, is what I mean.
Emily Nagoski: It 100% is. I really love the emotional floor plan as a tool for that. Where does this take you in your emotional floor plan? Did you go to fear? Are you afraid of it? Are you angry and resentful or defensive? Is it a gross-out response? Because a lot of us get taught that a lot of things about sex are disgusting, repulsive to us. Some things remain repulsive and some things we were just taught are repulsive and can learn, "Oh, actually toes are delicious when they're clean," or whatever it is.
We can just unlearn the things that we have learned, but all of these reactions are learned and can be unlearned a lot of the time if we decide to, if we decide to explore that reaction from a place of curiosity and play, which we can only do when we feel safe enough in the connection.
Dedeker: Also, you present confidence and joy also being connected with sex as this ongoing cycle of woundedness and healing. I don't think we tend to associate confidence and joy with woundedness and healing. How do you see all those things interplaying?
Emily Nagoski: Y'all have not asked me this question, for which I am so grateful. It's how I can tell y'all are my people. People ask me what's normal sex, how often is it normal to have sex?
Dedeker: Sure.
Emily Nagoski: Even what is perfect sex, because I think we get raised with this idea that there's broken sexuality, there's normal sexuality, which is the transition point you have to go through to get to perfect sexuality. You don't read 100,000-word book about sex because you want to be just okay, just normal, just average. "Oh, honey, thanks. That was a really normal sex." That's not what you're going for. You want to be the best your partner has ever had, which I get, and the deal is that that thing from broken to normal to perfect is not a thing that exists. Normal sex, I invented a definition because people wanted a definition and I didn't like-
Dedeker: Of course.
Emily Nagoski: -any of the ones that were available. My definition of normal sex is sex among consenting peers, which is to say everyone involved is glad to be there and free to leave at any time with no unwanted consequences, and that includes emotional consequences. No, "Oh, come on. Oh, but if you loved me--" No, "Okay, but that means next time I won't." So no unwanted consequences, and no unwanted pain.
Jase: I just felt so yucky even hearing that sentence because it's great to reiterate and point out how it can sound really extreme when you're saying it right now, but will sometimes do that same thing but in these subtle passive-aggressive ways.
Emily Nagoski: Yes. Like, my partner has decided to stop doing something because they don't want to anymore and you're the one who's like, "But I really want to keep going." You get an unwanted pain when a person withdraws their sexual attention from you like, "Hey, what about my thing?" That's normal and okay and that is why we learn how to stay over our own emotional center of gravity because isn't it so much better that our partner stops a thing and we feel like, "Oh, oh." Then we can talk about it later than that they went ahead and did something they didn't feel good doing. Then they tell you later that they did a thing that they didn't feel good doing-
Jase: That's the worst.
Emily Nagoski: -or they did a thing they didn't feel good doing and they never told you about it. I realize that it's like a cost-benefit thing, but this is definitely the best one. Perfect sex. Perfect sex is where everyone is glad to be there. Again, not horn, horny, heavy, all the thing, glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences, and no unwanted pain, plus everyone turns toward whatever is happening with kindness, compassion, curiosity, if you can, a sense of play.
If somebody wants an erection and an erection is not happening, you turn toward that non-erection with kindness, compassion, and a sense of play. There's so many fun things you can do without an erection. You can play with the non-erection. There's things you can do without an erection that you cannot do with an erection, and this is an amazing opportunity to do those things, but also, you can do things that have nothing to do with whether or not there's an erection. That is perfect sex.
Somebody is trying to have an orgasm, orgasm isn't happening. You turn toward the lack of orgasm with compassion, kindness, and a sense of play. Actually, this is a great opportunity because I love when you get to a high level arousal. If you could just stay at a high level arousal and not have an orgasm for a while-
Emily: Sometimes that's the best.
Emily Nagoski: -that would be-- That's perfect. That's perfect sex. Judgment is the thief of joy.
Dedeker: I want to jump on that though to reiterate that, yes, I think of course when it comes to our partners, I think in the ethical slot they call it the tyranny of hydraulics, where it's like if bodies are not performing the way that we think that they should be performing but that's okay, it doesn't mean anyone's broken or anything's wrong with them. I feel like what I see in people though is I feel like people have a much easier time offering that playfulness and compassion and gentleness to their partners and not so much to themselves. I think it's a lot easier for us to be like, "Oh, yes, honey, it's totally fine that you didn't have an erection. No problem," but I couldn't have an orgasm and that means there's something wrong with me.
Emily Nagoski: Emotional floor plan. What space are you in when you're self-critical? Oh, you're in the rage space. The biology of rage is that it's the motivation of destruction. When you hate some part of yourself, some part of you is motivated to destroy this part of you, which no wonder that shuts everything down. When you hate yourself because orgasm isn't happening, for example, when you feel self-critical because of that, does that make it easier to have an orgasm?
Emily: No.
Jase: Definitely not.
Dedeker: Not, for sure.
Emily Nagoski: It super doesn't, right? One, it'll be easier to have an orgasm if you can be like, "Oh, I recognize this. This is self-criticism. Let me replace that with self-compassion," which doesn't work for everyone, particularly people with significant histories of trauma. The first times they experience self-compassion, their brain responds as if it's a threat. If you are new to self-compassion and have a significant history of trauma, don't start with self-compassion, start with compassion for other people, build that muscle, and then build compassion for yourself.
A lot of us find it much easier to be compassionate, just as you said, toward other people than toward ourselves. We can rely on our partners because they find it so much easier to be compassionate toward us than we do toward ourselves. They can interrupt your spin of like, "Oh," and be like, "Everything that's happening right now is joyful and delicious and thrilling and there is no script. There is no right or wrong. There is no doing it right and performing correctly or being a disappointment. There is no being a disappointment. I get to be here with your erotic self. I'm all set. This is great. I don't hate any part of you. No part of me is frustrated with any part of you."
Emily: We've been talking a lot about erections, which makes me think about people with penises and how you talk a lot about the gender binary and this gender mirage, all of those things. Also, I'm really interested in how you talk about that the world in general just refuses to teach men about how to be good partners and about how to be there and sit with difficult feelings and stuff along those lines.
I think it's hard to be in relationships in general. It's hard to be a sexual being and want to be good in that way, but can you just talk about how difficult that must be for men if those things are true that the world is just not teaching them how to show up in these situations?
Emily Nagoski: There's a chapter specifically for people in heterosexual type relationships because of the gender dynamic created by one person being raised according to the it's a girl set of rules and regulations that you get based on nothing more informative than the organization of your genitals. Then the other person gets the it's a boy set of rules and regulations based on nothing more than the shape of their genitals.
They get raised with all of these rules about which emotions you're allowed to experience. Not just emotions you're allowed to express, which ones you're allowed to experience. Boy, if you get raised with the it's a boy set of rules and regulations, you get winning, you get angry, and you get horny. If your little mammalian body is like, "But I feel sad." No, no, no, no, no, you're not allowed to feel sad. Sad is not a thing that exists for you. You feel angry, right? You feel angry. No, you're not sad. You're angry.
These are different spaces in your emotional- floor plan. What you do when you're in the rage space is different from what you need to do when you're in the panic/grief space. You never learn what to do when you're in the panic/grief state. Oh, you feel lonely? No, no, no, lonely is for girls. You do not feel lonely. You feel horny. You never get taught what loneliness feels like and what you do when you feel lonely. The it's a girl script has plenty of other-- but you asked about dudes.
Emily: Yes.
Emily Nagoski: It also does this appalling thing of tying sexuality to identity and worth as a human being, that your value walking around on earth can be measured by whether or not other people let you put your penis inside their bodies. Your value as a human can be measured that way. Also, because when you're raised as an it's a boy person, you're taught that boy people are, let's face it, a little better than girl people. If your penis goes into girl people, then the person who is the gatekeeper for your value as a person is less than you. You are letting someone who is less than you control whether or not you are a worthwhile human being. That is very dangerous and bad for everyone's mental health as well as their physical safety.
Dedeker: Well, it seems like the formula for creating an incel culture.
Emily Nagoski: Yes.
Jase: You just described it right there.
Emily Nagoski: It is. It is not a coincidence. It has existed for hundreds of years. One of the things that my training requires me to do is expose myself to porn from different centuries and to sex manuals from different centuries. This idea of men proving their worthiness through sexual domination of women is very old. It's quite recent actually that people have begun to question it. Do you know when-- I'm going to say a very dark thing, so feel free to skip ahead, listeners. This is a very dark thing. Do you know when marital rape finally became mostly illegal in all 50 states?
Dedeker: Was that like the '70s?
Emily Nagoski: It was the mid '90s.
Dedeker: Oh, good.
Jase: Wow.
Emily: Whoa. God.
Emily Nagoski: It's very new. Why? Because when she got married, that was essentially the moment that she was giving consent for the rest of her life. Legally, for a very long time, her body was his actual property. It doesn't make any sense that you would let your cow decide whether or not to let you milk her. That was gross. Sorry.
Dedeker: No, it's okay.
Emily Nagoski: The thing is it's bad for everyone. It is so toxic that these mammals are born with the capacity, with the necessity of experiencing all of these different emotional states, and we do not let them learn what to do when they're feeling some of the most vulnerable-- loneliness in particular is really-- loneliness is dangerous. Loneliness is as toxic to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I talk all the time about how sex is not a drive. Sex is not a biological need. No one experiences-- no one's going to die if they don't get laid. No one experiences physical injury or illness of any kind if they do not get sex.
People do experience physical illness when they are lonely. Love, connection is a biological drive. We sicken and die without it. We live in a culture that has taught approximately half of the people that their primary, if not their only way to meet their need for social connection is through competition and sex. Oh my God. I feel-- oh, God.
Emily: Yes, that's pretty fucked up.
Emily Nagoski: I feel torn because I'm like, "Are men my job?" Are men even going to listen to me say these things? I also know that women who are-- and I'm married to a dude, cis-het white dude, married to one. He has had to escape this stuff. It's not easy for anybody. He had an easier time than some people because he is neurodivergent in ways that protected him. He was raised in a family full-- he has two sisters and a very strong mother, which protected him some. Then he met me. He was like, "Oh, all of it is bullshit. Oh, okay. Good."
Women find themselves in this position of having to do the emotional labor of helping their dude depatriarchy himself, which is not fair. The point of depatriarching is, I shouldn't have to do all of this emotional work for both of us. You feel like, "Why am I still having to do all this emotional work? Why can't you take care of yourself when you’re all vulnerable?" The whole point is you wanted this vulnerable shit to be brought forward and it's going to take a lot of work. One of the metaphors I use in the book is carrying furniture upstairs. He needs help carrying his heavy furniture upstairs and you're trying to carry your heavy furniture upstairs.
Sometimes the most efficient thing to do is for you to put down your thing and help him with his stuff so that he can get it-- Even if that helping is like, he absolutely is capable of carrying that heavy furniture, by which I mean large emotions, up the stairs on his own, but he really does need a spotter to be like, "You can do it. Yes. Just a little more up that way. You're doing great, you can be there with the difficult feelings." Then he comes and helps you with your piece of furniture, and that's the necessary part of the process. It's awkward and uncomfortable.
Man, when you get free of this stuff, you're no longer following the rules about who has to be the sexual initiator and who's allowed to be sexually dominant and what kinds of sex are the right kinds of sex. The path to so many kinds of pleasure opens up wide. Is that a good motivation for trying to de-binary each of you as an individual and your relationship as a whole is like, "Our access to ecstasy is going to burst wide open."
Dedeker: Well, that's a perfect segue into the last question that we wanted to dive into here, because I think in the later chapters of your book, you talk about practicing ecstasy and connecting to ecstasy. I want to know more about that, and especially, I want to know more about this context of how do we practice ecstasy while living in a very dark and troubled world?
Emily Nagoski: Yes. I'm going to say the shortcut answer is go read Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown. That's the real answer because that's where you find so many different ways of seeking for and accessing from. Adrienne Maree Brown, I learned the practice of pleasure gratitude, where every day, instead of just a generic I'm grateful for whatever, you're grateful for a specific pleasure that you experienced during that day.
Dedeker: I like that.
Emily Nagoski: It means that you're constantly looking for the pleasures. As you look for them, it's like looking for four-leaf clovers. If you look, you will find them. That increases your sensitivity to it, which tunes your nervous system not to stay in a state of being able to experience pleasure, but it means you're training your nervous system to have fluid access to a pleasure-experiencing state. Even though we live in a world where we spend a lot of time stressed out or numbed out, that is the nature of the very fucked up world we live in. Even though that's true, we can still, with practice, by noticing pleasure, by spending time, and it requires prioritizing it, which means you have to decide that it matters for you.
The more you practice noticing the sensations in your body, noticing the stimuli-- again, its internal state and external circumstances. What is bringing in access to pleasure right now? I firmly believe, one of the things I talk about in the chapter is meeting your internal guide. You have a part of you that is wise that you can access, is like little meditation and everything all right. Get the audio book. It's going to be so great, and I'll be able to read this part as an actual meditation where you go and meet your internal guide who has the wisdom that you need.
I love science for all its limitations and for the wisdom of how to integrate practice and access to the erotic into your daily life. That answer dwells not in any scientific paper you can read. It's not even in my book. It's not even, God forbid, in Adrienne Maree Brown's book. It is inside you by turning in towards yourself and believing that it is worth a practice that will heighten your awareness of the fact that you are alive today and your partner is alive today. You can share this moment today. As I was writing the book, the book was two weeks from due when a friend of mine died. FuCancer. That is to say fuck cancer.
She was right around my age. She'd gotten married at right about the same time I had. I was literally writing the ecstasy chapter. I was like, "Well, this is a different context for writing this chapter." It became about-- It was about expansive, ecstatic pleasure and that it is your aliveness all along. I was quoting Audre Lorde about the erotic, but then I realized that even if I can't access big giant orgasms, there is an ecstasy in, "I am alive in this moment. My partner is alive in this moment and we can look into each other's eyes, and we are alive right now." Holy moly, none of us are promised abundant time, but we are promised right now, and I feel there is value in framing that as erotic.
Dedeker: Wonderful. I think that's a wonderful place to close. Very well said.
Jase: Yes. Where can our listeners find more of you, more of your work, and of course, getting your book?
Emily Nagoski: The books are available wherever books are sold. Come Together is about relationships. Come as You Are is about women. It's based on science, so it's very heavy emphasis on cisgender women. That is the nature of the science, for which I apologize. There's a Come as You Are workbook for those who do not want to read 100,000 words of effective neuroscience, and there's a burnout workbook, which my sister mostly wrote, and it's very good. Burnout is the one that's about stress. If you're like, "I can't get to sex. I am too overwhelmed and exhausted." Start with Burnout.
I'm going to say emilynagoski.com is my website. My newsletter is the most consistent way to hear from me and learn what's happening. I am going to be traveling. There are events happening all over the country throughout the late winter, early spring.