Come as You Are (43 page)

“Slow down. Stay still.” That’s Olivia’s advice for all higher-desire partners. “Don’t chase, don’t push or pull. Be like the person with the broom on a curling team. Clear the path to sex.”

When there’s no pressure to perform, Patrick is creative, curious, playful, and unabashedly experimental. He knows what a gift Olivia’s sensitive accelerator can be, and he’s aware of the challenges it presents.

So. When Olivia finished her master’s degree, he set up a kind of sensual treasure hunt for her, involving most of her collection of toys, two kinds of lube, at least one instance of being carried, naked, handcuffed, and blindfolded, down the hallway to another apartment in their building, and several of their very good friends. (Which may be the best “science made my sex life better” story I’ve ever heard.)

At the end of it, over a giant meal, Olivia, swimming in endorphins and oxytocin, asked Patrick to marry her—mostly kidding.

Mostly.

Olivia is One Big Yes. It’s a gift. It’s a challenge. She maximizes her sexual potential when she allows her sexual response to grow to capacity, without pushing in any specific direction.

Slow down. Stay still. Don’t push or pull. Allow sensation to grow.

positive meta-emotions step 1: trust the terrain

The first step in changing your meta-emotions is recognizing the difference between the goal state dictated by the script and what you’re actually experiencing. I have two general rules of thumb for navigating this difference:

• When the map (the script) doesn’t seem to fit the terrain (your experience), the map is wrong, not the terrain.

• Everyone’s terrain and everyone’s map are different from everyone else’s.

What these two rules mean is that your best source of knowledge about your sexuality is your own internal experience. When you notice
disagreement between the terrain and the map—and everyone does, at some point—always assume your body is right. And assume everyone’s body is different from yours—as are everyone’s maps. Which means everyone’s journey from lost traveler to master navigator will be different.

I’ve used hypothetical twins a few times throughout the book, but this time I can use real-life twins to illustrate my point. My sister Amelia and I are identical twins. We have the same DNA, were born within ten minutes of each other, grew up in the same house, went to the same schools, watched the same TV shows, and read many of the same books. And yet by the time we started our sexual lives, we had very different maps in our heads.

I had my own unique version of the Media Message in my head. I believed that the Ideal Sexual Woman was an adventurous, noisy female whom men lusted after for her skill and her enthusiasm. She was—of course!—easily orgasmic from penetration, she experienced spontaneous desire, and her vagina got
so wet.
Any woman who didn’t want to try new things was a prude, hopelessly hung up and neurotic.

Notice that the Ideal Sexual Woman does not necessarily enjoy a great deal of pleasure; she just appears to experience pleasure. That’s what a sexual woman should be, as far as my culture had taught me, and so that’s what I performed. By the time I started my first sexual relationship, I was a sexual product, processed and packaged for the pleasure of others.

This map was so potent and persuasive that I couldn’t separate what I believed I should be experiencing from what I actually was experiencing. At eighteen, in my first sexual relationship—with a man who would later become my stalker and threaten to kill me—I would dream that my partner was hurting me, and in my dream I would laugh. I would laugh until even I didn’t know if I liked being hurt.

At the time, I had no idea how screwed up that was.

It was toward the end of that relationship (which ended when I called the police) that I first looked at my vulva and wept.

I had the improbable good fortune of beginning my training as a sex
educator in the same semester that I got into that abusive relationship. At the same time that I was marketing myself as a sexual product, in accordance with my instruction by women’s magazines, romance novels, and porn, I was learning the truth about sexual wellbeing. Over the next decade, I gained a vast store of knowledge, but more importantly I gained a radically more healthful attitude: that a woman’s body and her pleasure belong to her and no one else; that it’s possible to say no to intercourse without saying no to all the other things that come with it—the love and the affection and the pleasure and the play; and that my own internal experience was a legitimate guide for whether or not I wanted to try something.

Perhaps most compelling of all, I recognized that it is normal for my internal experience sometimes to be self-contradictory (I’m a flock!), and the more gently and patiently I pay attention to the full depth of my own internal experience—especially if I am gentle and patient with the uncomfortable feelings—the more I experience confidence and joy.

Amelia, by contrast, had her own unique version of the Moral Message in her head by the time we got to adolescence. Smart women didn’t want sex, she believed. Smart girls were interested in minds, not bodies; only stupid girls were ruled by their “base, animal instincts.” This is a classic middle-class Victorian attitude. She believed the Ideal Sexual Woman was more or less asexual, and she took her own lack of interest in sex as evidence that she was intelligent.

And then she started having sex, and eventually even liking it! So she opened up a new area on the map, explored new territory. She created space for the idea of sex as recreation, a fun thing to do on a Friday night, as long as
X-Files
wasn’t on. She redrew the map to allow for both being smart and enjoying sex as a source of pleasure, but still she was navigating through a fairly narrow band of terrain.

It was only when she met the man she would eventually marry that she began experiencing sex as something through which she could discover human connection and a deeper pleasure than mere entertainment, a pleasure connected to her personhood. This was a whole new map,
which included terrain she had never known existed—though it had been there the whole time, unexplored.

She’s been with the same partner for fifteen years and has had many of the same pleasures and struggles that so many women experience in long-term relationships. And while I had the great good fortune of becoming a sex educator, she had the good fortune of having a sex educator for a sister, so she could be among the women who called me or emailed me to say, “Is this normal?” She’s like the majority of women—context-sensitive desire and nonconcordant arousal. And so, like a lot of women, she sends my blog posts to her husband and says, “This! See?”

We’re an example of how even genetically identical gardens, planted with very similar seeds, may still grow into very different terrains. It turns out she’s got a slightly more sensitive brake than I do, and I’ve got a slightly more sensitive accelerator. So perhaps the Media Message was a slightly better fit for my native sexuality and the Moral Message a slightly better fit for Amelia’s, and so different ideas took root and grew.

For both of us, by the time we began having sex with partners, we had some set ideas about what that experience was supposed to be like. And both us of, like nearly all women, went through a time of realizing how poorly prepared we were and then relearning what it meant to be a sexual woman.

For both of us, education about the science of sexual wellbeing helped us draw maps that better represent our sexual terrains, which in turn allowed us to communicate about our sexual wellbeing more effectively with our partners. It also helped us let go of judging other women for having experiences that contradicted our own—because it turns out everyone really is just different.

But the information gathering, redrawing the map, was not the hard part—not for either of us, not for the woman who learned about sex from porn, and not for most of the women I talk with.

positive meta-emotions step 2: let go of the map (the hard part)

Knowing how your sexuality works is important; welcoming your sexuality as it is, without judgment or shame, is more important. And that’s the hard part for a lot of women.

Upon learning that they are normal, many women instantly feel liberated and satisfied with their sexuality in a way they never have before. The light goes on and they say, “My map was wrong all along and I’m actually normal!” But some women, even though they can accept that their responsive desire or nonpenetrative orgasms are normal, can’t accept that this new kind of normal is something worth being. One commenter on my blog put it this way: “I think you’re glossing over the fact that ‘responsive desire’ is a lesser desire than [spontaneous] desire.”

Eighty-five percent of women have “a lesser desire”? Yeowch.

The construction of responsive desire as “lesser” is not a fact, of course, it’s a value judgment, an opinion. If responsive desire is how your body feels, then lesser desire is the meta-feeling, how you feel about how your body feels. “I shouldn’t have to put all this effort in,” you think. “Desire should just
happen.
” And beneath that thought is the feeling, “I shouldn’t be like this. I’m inadequate.”

And is the feeling, “I’m inadequate,” going to activate the accelerator, or hit the brakes?

Right.

So the hard part isn’t knowing that you’re responsive or nonconcordant or whatever else is true right now about your sexuality. The hard part is
liking
your sexuality as it is, when for multiple decades the world has been trying to convince you you’re broken. The hard part is finding beauty in a terrain that doesn’t match the map.

Why is it hard?

I can’t claim to have direct scientific evidence for what I’m about to say—I’m not even sure what direct evidence would look like—but I’ll tell you truly what I think, based on what I know of the science and what
I know of women’s experience as they move toward a more profound sexual wellbeing.

I think that letting go of negative meta-emotions—like the feeling underneath the thought, “I shouldn’t be this way” or “I wish my sexuality were different”—requires that your little monitor move through the pit of despair, recognizing that your previous goal state was unattainable—or at least unattainable in the way you expected to attain it.

Our scripts or maps include clear ideas about what the goal, effort, and timelines of our sexuality
should
be. We should be easily orgasmic, experience spontaneous desire, all of those man-as-default myths. Letting go of those often seems similar to letting go of self-criticism, as I described in chapter 5. We think that if we let go, we’re giving up hope; it feels like failure. This is as true for sex-related goals, like desire style, orgasm, and pleasure, as it is for goals in the rest of life—ending a relationship, deciding not to complete a degree or go to grad school, accepting that your healthy body shape doesn’t match the (unhealthy) cultural ideal.

This is what can make changing your map so difficult. It requires a little journey through the pit of despair, grieving for the map that was wrong and all the places you missed as a result.

Emotions are tunnels: You have to go through the darkness to get to the light at the end. Sometimes that’s fairly easy. Sometimes it hurts like hell. Sometimes letting go of a particular goal feels like you have to let go of your entire identity.

And when letting go hurts, that’s where nonjudging comes in.

how to let go: nonjudging

If you’re anxious about your sexuality, or you’re angry with yourself for feeling (or not feeling) a certain way, or you’re ashamed, what you will often do is put that feeling about your sexuality in a box and hide it somewhere deep inside you. And the feeling sits in that box, waiting to complete its cycle. You haven’t gotten rid of it, you’ve just put it on hold.
It’s as if that small part of you is sitting on a roller coaster, stuck at the top of an ascent—eventually it will have to come down. It has to. It has to complete its cycle.

Now suppose that instead of putting it in a box, you’re aware of your feeling about your sexuality and are curious about it, or you’re gently affectionate toward it, as you would be toward a tearful newborn or a sad, shy kitten, or you’re simply neutrally observing from the sidelines of your own internal experience. These kinds of compassionate self-awareness create a context that doesn’t hit the brakes and instead allows your internal state to complete its cycle.

I used to think that it was the
awareness
of your internal state that mattered, but in study after study, “observation” of internal state is not a significant predictor of wellbeing.
⁴
No, the best meta-emotion predictor of wellbeing is a variable known as “nonjudge.”
⁵

People who score low on nonjudge agree with statements like, “I tell myself that I shouldn’t be thinking the way I’m thinking” and “When I have distressing thoughts or images, I judge myself as good or bad, depending on what the thought/image is about.” People who are high on nonjudging say the opposite: When they have distressing thoughts, they simply recognize that that’s what’s happening, without judging themselves as good or bad, right or wrong. In other words, nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.

I’ll illustrate this with my favorite research paper on the subject, a recent small study that looked at the role of mindfulness in people’s experience with generalized anxiety disorder.
⁶
The researchers measured, among other things, participants’ anxiety symptoms and the degree of interference with daily life these symptoms caused, along with participants’ responses on the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire. Two of the five factors are “observe”—noticing your internal experience—and “nonjudge”—not categorizing your internal experience as either good or bad.