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.