Emily Nagoski

It doesn’t help either you or your Feels if you shove them in your partner’s face and say, “ACCEPT THIS!” How would you respond if your partner did that to you? Unless you’re a saint of unrivaled patience and tolerance, you would get defensive—and fair enough. Shoving your Feels in your partner’s face is using your feelings as a weapon, and that’s never okay

When I was in college, I was hanging out with a group of guy friends, and one of them—I’ll call him Paul—told a story about a buddy of his. At the end of a party, when there were people sleeping or passed out all over the house, Paul found his buddy having sex with a girl who was passed out drunk, unresponsive, and clearly unaware of what was happening. I say “having sex with,” but the technical term is “raping.” And the buddy says, “Hey, you want to try this?” And my friend telling the story says, “Nah. We gotta go.”
The reason that’s all he said, Paul told us, rather than, “What are you doing, you douchebag? Get the hell away from her,” was that he felt torn between his gut instinct that what his friend was doing was Seriously Not Okay and the automatic reaction of his body to the sight of sexual intercourse. He got an erection. He was horrified at himself, at the idea that any part of him might interpret this Seriously Not Okay situation as erotic.

But genital response isn’t enjoying. It’s expecting.
Your genitals are telling you something, and you can trust them. They’re telling you that something is sexually relevant, based on their experience of Pavlovian conditioning. “This a restaurant.” But that’s not the same as sexually appealing.
Do, absolutely, trust your body. And interpret its signals accurately.
Genital response, which happens between your legs, is expecting. Arousal, which happens between your ears, includes enjoying.

A penis in a vagina is sexually relevant, though it may be unappealing, unwanted, and unwelcome. There is no wanting necessary for genital response. It’s just, “This is a restaurant,” with no comment on whether it might be a good place to have dinner.

The sexually satisfied women were more sensitive than women with low desire to the change in context from the lab to home. Which is exactly the result you’d expect if you assumed that women’s sexual satisfaction is more dependent on sensitivity to context than on sensitivity to genital response.24
Let me make that extra clear: The big difference between women in the control group and women in the low-desire group was not what their genitals were doing or even how aware the women were of what their genitals were doing. The big difference was how sensitive their brakes were to context.

Context sensitivity causes both the low desire and the nonconcordance. Nonconcordance is not the problem. Context hitting the brakes is the problem.

Sexual boredom can happen only if you’re no longer curious.

Just as all vulvas are normal and healthy just as they are, so all orgasms are normal and healthy, regardless of what kind of stimulation generated them or how they feel. Their value comes not from how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it.

Sex is a crucial attachment behavior for human adults, so the two states—separation anxiety plus sexual stimulation—reinforced each other, to give rise to a sexual experience that was intense but ultimately unsafe and unhealthy.

• Remember that feelings are biological cycles with a beginning, a middle, and an end, built in. You believed me when I said it earlier, right? When we got chased by a lion? And the kid came out from under anesthesia? Feeling an emotion won’t get you trapped forever in that emotion; on the contrary, it will allow you to move through it, like a tunnel. It might not be fun, but it’s not dangerous. Your body knows how to do it. All you have to do is allow it.