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

For a lot of us, there are times when we more readily share a loving presence through spiritual practice or with our pets than with our partners, who are mired in their own stress. God and your dog never judge or blame you for having Feels—but neither of them can make love with you.

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults.

But then, when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit.

Predictably, the experience of disgust is context sensitive—we’re less grossed out by sex-related things while we are sexually aroused.19 And women tend to be more sensitive than men to learned disgust, particularly in the sexual domain,20 though it’s not yet clear why.21

When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive

And the negative opinions she had when she was stressed just added another level of stress and escalated the situation, which made her feel all the more self-critical, which eventually activated her least adaptive coping strategies. It was like trying to douse a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

You didn’t get to choose your little plot of land—your SIS and SES and your body—and you didn’t get to choose your family or your culture, but you do choose every single other thing.

There is about a 50 percent overlap between what a male’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what his brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” And there is about a 10 percent overlap between what a female’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what her brain responds to as “sexually appealing.” Men’s genitals are relatively specific in what they respond to, and so are their brains. Women’s genitals are relatively general in what they respond to, while their brains are more sensitive to context. Note that a stimulus can be “relevant” without being appealing.

For women, there’s about a 10 percent overlap between “sexually relevant” and “sexually appealing.” For men, there’s about a 50 percent overlap.