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

There are excellent books about how to listen to your partner and how to manage feelings in a relationship. In chapter 4, I recommended Love Sense by Sue Johnson, and to that recommendation I’ll add What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal by John Gottman and Nan Silver.

When people ask me, “Am I normal?” they’re asking, “Do I belong?”
The answer is yes. You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You’ve belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don’t have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard.

That’s the true story. We are all the same. We are all different. We are all normal.

It takes less energy to just leave them there than to actively suppress them—and evolution is as lazy as it can get away with—so both males and females have nipples.

And the male frenulum—the Y-spot near the glans, where the foreskin attaches to the shaft—is the homologue of the female fourchette (the French word for “fork”), the curve of tissue on the lower edge of the vagina. This is a highly sensitive and undervalued piece of real estate on all bodies.

The closest thing to true is that during intercourse the hymen can be painful if it’s not used to being stretched—that’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common. (The most common is lack of lubrication.)

If a hymen tears or bruises, it heals.

The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. This story has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with controlling women. Culture saw a “barrier” at the mouth of the vagina and decided it was a marker of “virginity” (itself a biologically meaningless idea). Such a weird idea could have been invented only in a society where women were literally property, their vaginas their most valuable real estate—a gated community.

Even though the hymen performs no physical or biological function, many cultures have created myths around the hymen so profound that there are actually surgeries available to “reconstruct” the hymen

many cultures have created myths around the hymen so profound that there are actually surgeries available to “reconstruct” the hymen, as if it were a medical necessity. (Where is the surgery to perfect men’s nipples?)