Come as You Are (25 page)

We judge as wrong anything associated with lowness.

In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response.

This isn’t true in all cultures or belief systems—quite the opposite.
¹⁶
And even notoriously “sex-negative” Christian traditions may view sex
as sacred under certain, “sanctioned” conditions. A religious fundamentalist friend in grad school surprised me after she was married with her eagerness to learn about pleasure and exploration, so that she could share it with her husband. She had to learn to think differently about her body in this new context, but once she had made the shift, her entire experience was revolutionized.

In the right context, sex and bodies are not “low” or “degrading,” they can be sanctified and glorious.

But many of us were raised in cultures that say our own sexual bodies are disgusting and degrading, and so are the fluids, sounds, and smells those bodies make, as are a wide array of the things we might do with our own bodies and our partner’s. “Avoid sex! Sex is gross, as well as dangerous!”

If a sexual behavior or a part of your body is considered “low,” do you suppose that activates the accelerator?

Nope. Disgust hits the brakes.

Disgust is physiologically distinct from the stress response; it’s more akin to parasympathetic “freeze” than sympathetic “fight or flight.” Disgust hits the brakes in the emotional One Ring, it slows your heart rate, stops your gut, and closes your throat. It doesn’t matter whether it’s activated by the stink of skunk or the stink of hypocrisy, the sight of blood or the sight of cruelty, the physiology is basically the same.
¹⁷

As Merritt thought more about her brakes and her lack of trust in her own body, she came to this conclusion: “I want to learn to trust my body.”

This became clear as she and Carol sat together, talking about what and how to teach their teenage daughter about sex. They made a list of all the things they wanted her to believe and experience, including

• Recognize her own beauty of body and spirit

• Feel fully in control of who touches her body, and how, and when

• Know how to protect herself against consequences like infections and pregnancy

When Carol (she of the feminist consciousness-raising group in the ’80s) asked, “How about pleasure? I’d love her to know how to give herself pleasure and to enjoy her body,” that was a tough one for Merritt. It’s not that she didn’t want that, it’s just she . . . couldn’t . . . quite . . .

Rare is the American parent who feels comfortable talking to a kid about sexual pleasure—rare but not nonexistent. My favorite story of a sex-positive parent came from a guy who told me that the first time he ejaculated (by rubbing his pelvis against his mattress), he ran to his mom, terrified that he had broken something. “Mom! Mom! All this white stuff came out of my penis while I was rubbing it!” And the mom was amazing. She calmly explained what had happened, that it was normal, and how to deal with it in the future.

When I told that story to Merritt and Carol, Carol laughed and said, “I love that mom!” but Merritt turned pale.

“If I had been that boy,” she said, “I’d have burned my sheets before I would have told my mother.”

Merritt, remember, didn’t grow up in a sex-positive environment. But in America, each generation is rapidly overturning old ideas about social control and sex. She is the first in her family to go to college, and only the second generation to make a living doing something other than farming. And along with the social and economic revolution she represents, she’s also the first out lesbian—and she’s the first in her family to argue with her spouse about how to teach their kid about sexual pleasure.

“My parents taught me a lot of valuable things about commitment and loyalty and being a kind and loving person,” she said. “But they also told me that if I had sex outside marriage I’d go to hell, and even now, after almost twenty years of Carol coming home with me for Christmas, they still can’t look her in the eye.”

“It sounds like they didn’t mean to teach you shame, but that’s what you learned,” I said.

“And when you came out,” Carol said, “you were attacked.”

“So no wonder you don’t feel like you can fully trust your own body,” I said.

Merritt closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’d never want Julia to feel like there was anything wrong with any part of her body. I am not being a role model for her.”

And so, of course, she proceeded to change her entire relationship with her body and to trust herself—to relax into pleasure and swim in the water of life. I’ll describe how in chapter 8.

when somebody “yucks” your “yum”

Disgust can function as a social emotion—that is, we learn about what aspects of the world (including our own bodies) are disgusting by reading the responses of the people around us. For example, infants will avoid a toy that their adult caregiver looks at with an expression of disgust.
¹⁸

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

We can see how the process of learning disgust can unfold, moment by moment, in a person’s life if we imagine, for argument’s sake, a pair of identical twin girls separated at birth. Let’s call them Jessica and Theresa.

Imagine that both Jessica and Theresa, when they’re maybe five or six years old, have a habit of masturbating in their rooms at naptime. (If you noticed a disgust-withdrawal response in yourself at the idea of a young girl masturbating, you’ve just experienced what I’m about to describe!)

So one day, Jessica is masturbating in her room at naptime, when her adult caregiver walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. The parent recoils in an involuntary disgust response, and says, “Stop that!”

On that same day, in a different home, Theresa is also masturbating, and her adult caregiver also walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. But that parent says calmly, “We’re leaving for your aunt’s house in a few minutes. Get your shoes on.”

Jessica’s brain learns to associate the shame and distress (brakes)
communicated by her parent with whatever sexual arousal (accelerator) she was feeling at the moment her parent scolded her.

Theresa’s brain, by contrast, learns no such association. She was interrupted but not shut down—her accelerator deactivated, but without necessarily hitting the brake.

This one incident may not have any lasting impact. If there are no other incidents to reinforce this one, the association in Jessica’s brain will be decoupled.

Now twenty years have passed, and Jessica and Theresa’s life experiences have routinely reinforced these patterns. Jessica’s brain has learned to associate sexual arousal with stress, shame, disgust, and guilt. Theresa’s has learned to associate sexual arousal with pleasure, confidence, joy, and satisfaction.

Which of them has a better sex life?

Jessica will feel conflicted about her sexual sensations—they’re pleasurable . . . and they’re not, at the same time. And she won’t have a clear idea why she feels guilty, ashamed, depressed, or even physical pain when she’s sexually aroused.

If a girl has a particularly sensitive brake system, one incident might be enough to create a tangled knot in her arousal process. For many women, though, it takes consistent reinforcement of a negative message in order for it to be embedded in sexual response, and consistent reinforcement takes a sex-negative culture.

In other words, it happens all the time.

Often disgust is reinforced in subtle ways, but sometimes we can remember a specific moment when the message is made clear. I talked to a grandmother—a badass Southern belle sex educator grandmother, to be specific—who told me about just such a moment from when she was a teenager. She had been sitting on the front porch making out with her boyfriend, but when she went inside, her mother came up to her with disgust in every line of her face and said, “What you were just doing out there? That’s
sex
!”

And this sixty-something grandmother told me, “It took me a long,
long time to realize why I got so anxious about sex with my husband—and I mean
nauseated
anxious—and when I finally figured it out, I was angry for about ten seconds, and then I was just so sad for my mother.”

She went on, “Now when I do health education at my church, I just say it right out loud: ‘I like sex!’ I want everyone to know that it’s okay!”

I love this woman.

For sex educators, the rule is, “Don’t yuck anybody’s yum.” And since we can’t know what everybody else’s yums are, we don’t yuck anything. We know that disgust is a social emotion and that our students have already been exposed to too many people who communicate disgust around sex.

That’s why sex educators and sex therapists go through an educational process of intensive exposure, deliberately designed to minimize our own judgment, shame, and disgust reactions, so that we can respond with open neutrality to whatever students or clients bring into the room. This training often takes the form of a Sexual Attitude Reassessment, a multiday training that includes values clarification exercises, guest panels and speakers, plus (in my experience) a range of porn that would surprise most people in its variety, intensity, and creativity, followed by reflection and processing of our reactions to all of it.

Unless you become a sex educator, you never need to go through a process like this. All you ever need to do is begin to recognize where your learned disgust response is interfering with your own sexual pleasure, and decide whether it’s something you’d rather let go of. Your genitals and your partners’, your genital fluids and your partners’, your skin and sweat and the fragrances of your body, these are all healthy and beautiful—not to mention
normal
—elements of human sexual experience. You get to choose whether you feel grossed out by them.

The research tells us that disgust, as a learned response to sex, impairs women’s sexual functioning and is especially associated with sexual pain disorders.
²²

In the next section, I’ll describe three strategies for making your own
choices about what is or isn’t disgusting—they’re the same strategies you use to make your own choices about self-criticism. But the first step is to begin to notice when you experience an involuntary withdrawal from sex-related things, and try on the possibility that the sight, the smells, the sounds, the stickiness of your own sexual organism are glorious and beautiful parts of being a human being.

Because what if all of that actually
is
beautiful and glorious? What if your body is cause for celebration?

(P.S. It totally is.)

•  •  •

Let’s get practical. Sex-negative culture has trained us to be self-critical and judgmental about our bodies and our sexualities, and it’s interfering with our sexual wellbeing. So how do we create a bubble of sex positivity for ourselves, where we can explore and celebrate and maximize our own sexual potential? How do we maximize the yum, in a world that tries to convince us we’re yucky? I’ve found persuasive evidence that the following three strategies can genuinely create positive change.

maximizing yum . . . with science! part 1: self-compassion

Sometimes we cling to our self-criticism. We think to ourselves: “If I stop beating myself up, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and then I’ll never change!”

And then we cling to our self-judgments even more tightly—after all, these are
moral
issues, involving whether you are a good, decent, worthy person or a bad, disgusting, worthless person. We think: “To accept myself as I am would be to accept that I am a flawed, bad, broken person, and to abandon all hope that I could one day be better, that I could one day deserve love.”

Remember that beating yourself up is the emotional One Ring equivalent of treating yourself as your own internal lion, experiencing yourself as a threat that needs to be escaped (which is impossible), conquered
(which is literally self-destructive), or avoided through shutdown (which is counterproductive, to say the least).

And that’s why we need self-compassion.

Self-compassion is the opposite of self-criticism and self-judgment. In her book
Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind
, researcher and educator Kristin Neff describes self-compassion’s three key elements:

• 
Self-kindness
is our ability to treat ourselves gently and with caring. On the Self Compassion Scale (SCS), a survey used to assess self-compassion, self-kindness is described with items like “When I’m going through a very hard time, I give myself the caring and tenderness I need.” In contrast, its opposite,
self-judgment
, is assessed with “I’m intolerant and impatient towards those aspects of my personality I don’t like.”