Come as You Are (31 page)

Here’s a thing that happens to me sometimes: A wife drags her husband over to me and says, “Tell him what you told me.”

Laurie did that with Johnny at a lunch buffet. “Tell him what you told me. The arousal thing. Tell him, please.”

“He didn’t believe you?”

“He thinks I ‘must have misunderstood.’ ”

So I told him: “Okay, Johnny. I know this is the opposite of everything you’ve ever learned about sex, but it’s true: The state of Laurie’s vagina doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about her state of mind.”

She thwacked him on the arm with the back of her hand and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “See?”

He looked at me and he looked at her and he looked back at me and he opened his mouth to ask a question and then he closed it again.

Then he said to Laurie, “Go away, honey.”

She did—not before giving me a knowing glance.

In a confidential whisper, he said to me, “If I can’t go by her genitals, how do I know she really wants me? Because she could totally just be saying she wants me when really she’s just being nice.”

Johnny is a dude-bro, manly, fix-it kind of guy. I like him a lot, and often my role is to translate the science of women’s sexual well-being into Manly Fix-It Dude-Speak for him. So I started by saying, “Arousal is not about her genitals, it’s about her brain.”

Then I described the sexual response mechanism as a set of on and off switches, with each associated with a particular kind of input—genital sensations, relationship satisfaction, stress, attachment, etc.—that throws a switch on or off. Men’s and women’s sexual response mechanisms have the same set of dials and switches, but they tend to be tuned to different levels of sensitivity, so that just a little bit of genital stimulation throws an on switch for men, while just a little bit of stress throws an off switch for women. Laurie’s life, I explained, was throwing
all
the off switches.

He said, “You’re saying I’ve got this strong input from my body, but her strongest input is from her . . . life?”

“Yes!”

“So to hack the system, what I need to be paying attention to is the stuff that’s hitting the brakes, because once those are off, the accelerator will take over. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. You’ve got it. I think she wrote a list of stuff that hit her brakes—”

“She did,” he said. “I’ve seen it. I didn’t know what to do with it, but now . . .” He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head and said, “This really changes everything. What this says is that the sexiest thing I can do isn’t some crazy erotic thing. The sexiest thing I can do is take away as many of the brakes as I can, which is . . . I mean, I can do that. Just . . . why did no one tell me this before?”

“honey . . . I’m nonconcordant!”

If you’ve got a body that doesn’t always match your mind, then you’ve got a body that defies conventional (and wrong) wisdom, and so you might find yourself in the position of having to correct your partner’s understanding. There are three things to remember, which can resolve any problem your nonconcordance may generate.

First, remember that you are healthy and functional and whole. Your body is not broken and you are not crazy. Your body is doing what bodies do, and that’s a beautiful thing. Hooray! So know that you are normal. Tell your partner you are normal, calmly, joyfully, and confidently. No need to be defensive or aggressive—it’s not your partner’s fault for not knowing about nonconcordance. Actually, it’s more my fault and the fault of all the other sex educators and researchers. We have failed to communicate this idea clearly to the world, and now you’re stuck with the job of fixing our mistake. Sorry about that. So apologize for me, on behalf of all the sex educators and researchers in the world, and then give your partner the facts:

“Emily Nagoski is sorry that you didn’t already know that genital response isn’t a reliable indicator of sexual arousal. But it’s true. What my genitals are doing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how I feel. Thirty years of research confirms this. So please pay attention to my words, not my vagina.”

You don’t have to actually apologize for me; you can just email me and say, “Could you please email my partner an apology for their not knowing about nonconcordance?” and I’ll do it myself. Seriously, I will.

Second, offer your partner other ways to tell that you’re turned on.

No woman, on learning about nonconcordance, asks, “But if my genitals aren’t telling me I’m aroused, then how do I know when I’m turned on?” It’s only the men who say, “If I can’t tell by her genital response, then how do I tell that she’s into it?”

That makes sense, especially if they’re guys who experience a high degree of concordance themselves. It’s natural to construct a framework of sexuality based on your own experience and not quite know how to deal with someone whose framework is different from yours.

So here are some alternative things your partner can pay attention to, if your vagina is telling only about
expecting
, not about
enjoying
:

• Your breath. Your respiration rate and your pulse increase with arousal. You begin holding your breath, too, as you get to the highest level of arousal and your thoracic and pelvic diaphragms contract.

• Muscle tension, especially in your abdomen, buttocks, and thighs, but also in your wrists, calves, and feet. When the tension moves in waves through you, your body bows and arches. For some women, in some contexts, this happens in an obvious way. For other women, or in other contexts, it is subtle. It’s a cue.

• Most important, your
words.
Only you can tell your partner what you want and how you feel. Not all women feel equally comfortable talking about their desire and arousal, but you can shortcut with “yes” or “more” or “blrgpfh!”

And remember this, too: It’s not about attending to any specific physiological response, behavior, or other clue. It’s about attending with a kind of broad, receptive vigilance. Suggest that your partner attend to you not with a magnifying glass but with the wrong end of a telescope, or the way a chess master watches a chessboard—looking for large-scale patterns and dynamics. Your partner should attend the way a master chef tastes food—not just for individual flavors, but for the way those flavors combine and create something unique and new and delicious.

Third and finally, deal with any lack of lube-on-demand by supplementing with the fluid of your choice: your saliva or your partner’s (when there’s no risk of infection transmission), your partner’s genital fluids (ditto), store-bought lube, whatever.

What is lube for? Reducing friction, which can increase pleasure, and
it always decreases the risk of tearing and pain. And
always
use lube with protective barriers like condoms or dams. Lube increases their efficacy and makes them more pleasurable. Lube is your friend. Lube will make your sex life better.
³⁰

Sometimes people feel uncomfortable introducing outside sources of lube into their sexual connection. This hesitancy may stem from any number of life events or from simple inexperience with it or from a sense that using lube means you’re somehow inadequate. Remember the sanctity moral foundation. Sex-related stuff gets categorized as “dirty,” even when it’s a bottle filled with something you find in many hair products.

But you know now that vaginal lubrication has its own way of being in the world, which may or may not have anything to do with your sexual interest and arousal. You know that lube is important because it reduces friction, which increases both health and pleasure. And you know that you get to choose which beliefs you nurture and which you weed out.

If you decide to try using lube, here are some tips for talking with your partner about it:

• 
Playfulness, Curiosity, and Humor.
It is literally impossible to feel stressed and anxious about something when your approach is playful, curious, and humorous. Let it be a little silly; let it be fun. This is about pleasure, remember?

• 
Make Your Partner Feel Like a Superhero.
Communicating about sex feels risky sometimes because, above all, you don’t want to hurt your partner’s feelings. The simplest shortcut around hurt feelings is to make the conversation about all the things your partner can do to increase your pleasure beyond its already skyrocketing heights, and all the delight you hope to add by incorporating this new element to your sexual connection.

• 
Choose Your Lube Wisely.
Not all lube is created equal. Often it’s a good idea to choose lube together with your partner—shop together and pick something you both feel good about, so that you are both equally invested in it.

May I recommend that you consider silicone lube? I am a silicone lube evangelist. Here are just a few reasons why:

• 
Safe to Use with Barriers.
Use it with both male (external) condoms and female (internal) condoms, latex or polyurethane.

• 
Thick.
It doesn’t dribble all over in a runny mess. Especially for marathon sex (anything longer than ten or fifteen minutes counts as “marathon” as far as lubrication on genitals is concerned) or anal sex, lube staying where you put it is important.

• 
Lasts Longer than You Do.
It simply does not evaporate. It lasts a long, long, long, long time. It’s expensive, but you need to use only a tiny bit, so one bottle goes a long way.

• 
Dries to a Silky Powder Finish.
Whereas water-based lubes often dry to a sticky, gummy mess on your hands, silicone lubes feel soft and powdery, so you can caress your partner’s body and face without feeling like you’re smearing spirit gum all over your lover.

• 
Great for Sensitive Folks.
It’s also very unlikely to cause an allergic reaction or yeast infections (unlike flavored lubes or lubes with glycerin), it has no flavor, so you can taste your partner’s skin and fluids (yum!).

The one thing silicone lube isn’t good for is use with some silicone toys. It may break down the surface of the toy, so put condoms on them, or else use water-based lube.

The best silicone lube will have just a few ingredients, like dimethicone, dimethiconol, cyclopentasiloxane, or cyclomethicone, and a preservative like tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E). That’s all.

ripe fruit

Let’s go back to the garden for a minute.

For a male gardener, if the fruit in his garden is ripe, he’s usually in
the mood for fruit—not always, but often enough that if you notice some ripe fruit, it’s worth asking yourself if the gardener might be craving some.

For the female gardener, it takes a lot more than ripeness to feel like having fruit. Maybe she wants fruit most when she’s feeling happy. Maybe fruit is what she turns to when she’s feeling sad. Regardless, her desire for fruit has little to do with how good she is at noticing that there is ripe fruit in the garden. It has much more to do with—you guessed it—the contexts in which she enjoys ripe fruit.

Got it?

Good.

Camilla explained nonconcordance to Henry. For her, nonconcordance was a perfect example of how the cultural narrative had failed to tell her the truth, and she was pretty pleased to find another way she was, yet again, totally normal.

It was a little more complicated for Henry, because he was still figuring out the whole desire/wanting thing. He was trying to get comfortable with the difference between the brakes version of not wanting—“I want that to stop”—versus the accelerator version of not wanting—“I like that yet feel no urge to seek out more.”

He said, “I understand that genital response doesn’t tell me what turns you on.
You
tell me what turns you on, and I believe you. But what I don’t understand is how you get turned on without first
wanting
the thing that turns you on.”

Which is maybe the most complex—and controversial—element of women’s sexual wellbeing.

The answer to Henry’s question is: Arousal comes first—before desire, that is. Like this: Genital response happens when your brain notices a sexually relevant stimulus—“This is a restaurant.” Arousal happens when your brain is in the right, sex-positive context—when your brain is
open to the idea of going to a restaurant. Desire comes along when your brain shifts from being open to the idea to actively wanting to go.

And it’s the subject of chapter 7.

tl;dr

• There’s a 50 percent overlap between blood flow to a male’s genitals and how turned on he feels. There’s a 10 percent overlap between blood flow to a woman’s genitals and how turned on she feels.

• The reason for the difference is that sexually relevant (
expecting
) is not the same thing as sexually appealing (
enjoying
). In men there’s a lot of overlap between the two, most of the time; in women the overlap is more context dependent.