Real, Joyful Sex with Emily Nagoski
September 28, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are over the moon and a bit scited, scared and excited today because after dozens of episodes today, we have our first guest. We have decided we are only having guest who are in act of service for you and who are completely in line with our intentions that we can do hard things and this is one of our greatest intentions here. Okay, after a decade of listening, to people telling me the truth about their lives, mostly women but specially lately, all genders, here’s what I’ve noticed, two interesting things. Number one, we all have a shit load of problems, okay? Number two, we all have pretty much the same 20 problems, okay, but we all think our problems are our fault, are personal to us, are due to some kind of shortcoming or fault or ignorance of ours but if everyone is having the same struggles, how can our struggles be personal, right?
It was like, I was sitting in a meeting recently, discussing girls and eating disorders, because of my history with that and present with that and someone looked around the circle at all the girls, one of the survivors and she said, I just don’t understand how could this happen? What’s wrong with us? I said some version of this but less eloquently. Nothing is wrong with you, you were just born into a world that told you from the moment you were born that your worth was in your beauty and that your beauty depended on your smallness. You are told in a million different ways that as a girl, you were not allowed to hunger or feast or grow and still be pleasing. You were just paying attention. You were just a good student.
You are not broken, you are just responding quite logically to a broken world and now, you have this disease and it’s not your fault but it is your responsibility to heal because you deserve to have joy and freedom in this one wild and precious life, you’ve been given, in this particular, brutiful, fucked up world, you’ve got to live in. So our intention here is to convince you that there is nothing wrong with you, to counteract centuries of gas lighting to prove once and for all that it’s not you, it’s them. That you’re not crazy, you’re a goddamn cheetah and remove the shame because most of our problems are not our fault but they are our responsibility so we got to work together to free ourselves. Okay. Enter our sex episode two months ago, called Silent Sex Queen. Okay, your reaction was sort of ludacris.
The voicemails, the emails, the questions just flew in and that was extremely exciting except the only problem with that was that in spite of the power vested in me by me, as Silent Sex Queen, I don’t know shit about sex. Okay? So we needed a sex expert, a sexpert, which I don’t understand why they don’t call themselves that, but that’s fine. We needed a sexpert but I am wary of all experts until I sat down with this book called Come as You Are, right? Now listen to this, people. Here’s what I read just in the introduction. All right. “So many women come to my blog or to my class or to my public talks, convinced that they are sexually broken. They feel dysfunctional, abnormal and on top of that, they feel anxious, frustrated and hopeless about the lack of information and support they’ve received from medical professionals, therapists, partners, families and friends.”
“Here’s what I need you to know right now. The information in this book will show you that whatever you’re experiencing in your sexuality, whether its challenges with arousal, desire, orgasm, pain, no sexual sensation is the result of your sexual response mechanism functioning appropriately in an inappropriate world. You are normal. It’s the world around you that’s broken. I wrote this book to share the science stories and sex positive insights that prove to us that despite our culture’s vested interest in making us feel broken, dysfunctional, unlovely and unlovable, we are in fact fully capable of confident, joyful sex.” She had me at Come but the title, Come As You Are is pretty damn good too. Our first guest sexpert, brilliant teacher, Emily Nagoski. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things, Emily.
Emily Nagoski:
I’m delighted to be here, to be an active service for your listeners is exactly what I want to do.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, you’ve been untaming people around sex for a very long time, so before we get into some really cool, you’re going to talk to us about the five things that really get in the way of us having joyful, confident sex lives, as you would say. Before we start, can you just tell me, whenever I’m going to think hard about something I just need to know, first of all, what is the point of thinking hard, like why sex, Emily? Why is it important that we have confident joyful sex lives? What is in it for us? Why sex Emily?
Emily Nagoski:
On a certain level, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t have to matter. No one is going to die if they don’t have sex, and on another level, sex is part of being a mammal. You’re not required to have it but like it is built into the body that you were born into, your body is the one and only thing you have with you on the day you’re born that you still have with you, on the day you die and pleasure … Joani Blank from Good Vibrations said, “Pleasure is your birthright.” On a third level, because we do live in a world that teaches us that our moral obligation is to be pretty, happy, calm, generous and attentive above all to the needs of others, regardless of the sacrifice from ourselves required to revel in our own sexual pleasure, is an act of rebellion against that message. So it doesn’t have to matter if you don’t want it to matter, but it can be an act of revolution.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, I’m sold.
Abby Wambach:
Good podcast, everybody. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
You know your audience, don’t you Emily?
Emily Nagoski:
No, that’s what I say every time.
Glennon Doyle:
Sex as an act of rebellion. All right, I’m in. I’m in. Okay.
Emily Nagoski:
We just like agree perfectly about like things. Why have we been taught all this bullshit? How do we go about unlearning all the bullshit?
Glennon Doyle:
Unlearning. Okay, so let’s go with that. Let’s go with unlearning. What I loved about Come As You Are, so many things, but I loved how it was organized because the structure was helpful to me. Can you talk to us about your main ideas about the things that get in our way? Most of them are things we’ve learned or learned wrong, right, that are getting in our way of confident, joyful sex. So what are those things that we can knock out and have a chance at pleasure?
Emily Nagoski:
One of the main ideas is that people’s bodies are different, and some of those bodies are better or worse, and I’m talking now about … let’s just go right to genital shape and size. We live in a world where people are exposed, sometimes at a young age to images of bodies that have been manipulated, even images of genitals that have been manipulated. Some softcore porn will digitally make a vulva look like it’s a little closed clamshell, and they have no hair on them and there’s no inner labia sticking out and they’re all one color, and that color is usually white, and we learned from seeing those images that that’s what a normal vulva looks like, and if our vulva doesn’t look like that, there’s something wrong with us and then the medical industry invents surgery to make our vulvas look tucked in, just like these photoshopped genitals. What’s actually true about genitals is every single package of genitals is made of the same parts.
They’re all just organized in different ways and as long as they’re not causing pain, they are healthy and beautiful precisely as they are. We can take that message that … we are all made of the same parts. They’re just organized in different ways, and they’re all great to every aspect of our sexual functioning. So genitals is chapter one. Dual control model is chapter two. Everybody has this same mechanism in their brain of an accelerator, which notices all the sex related information in the environment, that’s everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or crucially think, believe or imagine that your brain codes is something related to sex, and it sends a turn on signal, many of us are familiar with but at the same time, in parallel, you have brakes that are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now.
Everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or crucially think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat and it sends a simultaneous turn off signal. So your level of arousal at any given moment is this balance of how much the ons are turned on, and how much the offs are turned off and our accelerators and brakes vary, for one thing and how sensitive those mechanisms are. Some people have quite sensitive accelerators. Some people have very not sensitive accelerators. It takes a whole lot of stimulation to get their accelerator going. Some people have really sensitive brakes. So like the least thing, a stray fingernail, a stray noise, a stray thought can shut everything down. Some people have really not sensitive accelerators or not sensitive brakes.
So their accelerator will continue working, even in the face of a whole lot of good reasons not to. People vary tremendously, and they vary in what activates their brakes and accelerators. There are common ones, among things especially that hit the brakes. So stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, repressed rage. We’ve all got it, there-
Amanda Doyle:
We’ve all got all of those, right, Emily? I just want to confirm.
EN:
Yeah. Everything you want.
AD:
Okay, good. Just checking, asking for a friend.
EN:
There’s also body image stuff. If thinking about your body activates critical thoughts about your body, that’s hitting the brakes. Trauma history. If sex has been used against you as a weapon as it has for so many people, then something that is sex related and activates the accelerator will also simultaneously activate the brake. You weren’t born with these connections made. It happened over the course of your life, you learned it, and you can unlearn it, by thinking carefully about it by doing worksheets and writing prompts and reducing your stress level overall, and therapy. Therapy is your friend, when it comes to untangling these knots, especially sex therapy, they’re specially trained in these issues. So people vary. We’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways, because when a person is raised on the day, they’re born, everybody goes, “It’s a girl,” based on the shape of their genitals, they start teaching them specific manuals, messages. There’s a user’s manual or a script that says, here’s what you’re supposed to do and nowhere in there is like, “Enjoy erotic pleasure for yourself.”
GD:
Tell us about responsive desire, like that whole … because we got the dual control model, but I’m not sure everybody knows about … say it again, the desire response …
EN:
Spontaneous versus responsive desire.
GD:
Tell us about that.
EN:
So the super efficient way to talk about it is that spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure, where responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. So spontaneous desire is the sort of standard narrative that you’re just walking down the street and you just have a stray thought or you see a stray person, and that’s enough for your brain to, kaboom. Erika Moen, who is the cartoonist to illustrates Come As You Are draws it as a lightning bolt to the genitals, kaboom. You want it and so you go to your partner, you’re like, “Hey, partner, I have some Kaboom. Do you want to Kaboom?” That’s spontaneous desire, and it’s totally a normal, healthy way to experience desire. But then there is also responsive desire, which is more like … it can happen a variety of ways. One of them is you’re like flipping through choices on Netflix you haven’t picked yet, you’re certain special someone sits next to you, and like touches you and says nice things.
That stimulation goes up to your brain and it’s some accelerator simulation and your body is like, “So this is happening. What do you think?” Your brain says, “Well, that’s really nice,” and then some more things start happening and you might even like turn toward your partner and start kissing on them and then your brain receives that input from your body and your body ask, “So, this is happening now. What do you think of that?” Your brain goes, “You know what, how about Kaboom?” That’s one of the ways that can happen. It’s not spontaneous. It happens in response to an accumulation of pleasure, but very often, especially in long term relationships. When we study couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over decades, how their responsive desire works is they set a time, Saturday at 3:00, you be in the right underwear? Let’s do it.
So you arrange the babysitting and you finish the last load of laundry and you go into the bedroom and you close the door, and you put on the red underwear, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin, touch your partner’s skin and your body goes, “Oh, right, I really like this. I really like this person.” That’s how responsive desire works in the best circumstances and it is also a normal, healthy way to experience desire. In fact, it is more typical of people who sustain a strong sexual connection than it is among people who don’t.
GD:
That makes so much sense to me, babe. That’s what we’ve been talking about. We have to have dates, because it’s like, once we’re there and we’ve begun, we’re always like, this is never a bad idea like why-
EN:
It’s kind of like exercise?
GD:
Yes, yes and I think it’s like unromantic to think of it that way, so we don’t want to talk about it that way. That’s how it works for us. It’s like, we have to like make it happen, and then we remember why it’s such a good idea, but we’re not walking around all day thinking, “This is a good idea. We should do it.” It’s like the other way around.
EN:
Exactly. It is not the people who can’t wait to put their tongues in each other’s mouths. I mean, if you do, great.
GD:
Yeah, good for you.
EN:
That’s not predictive of a strong sexual connection over the long term.
GD:
Very interesting. Okay, I need to ask you this one question, because you said, knowledge is an important … knowing what we don’t know or what we’ve been taught wrong, like what you just told us about what every different labia looks like, how we are all supposed to look like … unlearning all of that is important, having the knowledge, but you also talk about joy. That knowledge is the first step to have confidence, but you have to have joy, which is not only knowing what is true, but loving, what is true can you say more about that please, because my favorite thing is this idea that everything that screws us up is this picture we have in our head of how it’s supposed to be. Talk to us about that in sex.
EN:
When you talk about like, everybody think about their definition of sex, not in terms of someone else but in terms of like your own self, because the thing that gets the most in the way is this image you have of how it’s supposed to be. I was literally like listening to the podcast, I was in the middle of like doing the dishes and I put everything down, and I just went … because that’s the thing. That’s the problem. We are all fine, except insofar as we compare ourselves to what we think we are supposed to be, and judge ourselves against that comparison, and does judgment activate the accelerator or does self-criticism and judgment hit the brakes? The big irony is that one of the best ways to screw up your sex life is to compare your sex life and judge it as inferior to what it is supposed to be. So knowing that your body is already beautiful and spectacular, and a glorious miracle is one thing.
Knowing that responsive desire is not only normal, but like the kind of desire experience that is associated with a strong sex life that lasts for decades. Knowing that you have an accelerator and you have brakes, and when you are struggling, knowing that getting rid of the stuff that’s hitting the brakes is more important than hitting more stuff that activates the accelerator. A lot of like the mainstream pop culture, sex advice is lingerie and sex toys, and lube and porn, and those things are great if you like them, go for it but usually when people are struggling, it’s not because there’s not enough stimulation to the accelerator. It’s because there’s too much stimulation to the brakes. So knowing all of that, knowing what’s true about your body, your sexuality, knowing what’s true about your culture, knowing what’s true about your relationship is where confidence comes from.
GD:
It’s like, instead of giving me lingerie, sit down and figure out how half these damn meals are going to be made in the next week for the family so that the break of the ticker can slow down and I can make out with you because the lingerie is really for you, also, not for me anyway. Just more presents for the partner, right?
EN:
Some people really love to put on lingerie for themselves.
GD:
They do?
Emily Nagoski:
People vary. Yes. Every time you’re like, “Do they, really?” It is so valuable because you’re normalizing the people who feel the way you do and you’re normalizing the people who feel a different way. Some people, they’re just putting on a show for their partner. For some people, they look at their bodies in the lingerie and they’re like, “Damn.”
AD:
I can see that. I could totally see that.
GD:
That’s so cool. I was like, damn, I wear lingerie for like the first five months of my relationship, right babe and then I just haven’t put it on. After the honeymoon was over, I just went back to sweatpants.
AW:
Sweetie, the honeymoon is not over. Emily just said, the honeymoon is not over.
GD:
Okay, all right.
EN:
So knowing what’s true is confidence and it’s knowing what’s true, even if it’s not what you wish were true, even if it’s not what everybody taught you is supposed to be true, even if it’s not what you want to be true, but then we get to joy, which is loving what’s true about your body, loving your brakes, loving your genitals, loving everything about the size and shape and beauty and gloriousness of your body. Loving your brakes, loving your responsive desire, letting go of the idea that spontaneous is better, which a lot of us are carrying around this idea, that desire is supposed to be spontaneous, and just kaboom, hit us out of the blue. Welcoming the idea that responsive desire is a beautiful, wonderful thing. Loving what’s true, even when it’s not, what you were taught should be true, even when it’s not what you wish were true, even if it’s not what everybody told you should be true.
What makes joy the hard part is that getting to a place where you love all these things you have been taught to hate, taught to believe are the enemy, means abandoning hope that you will ever be that thing, that everybody always taught you, you are supposed to be. You got to let go. You got to grieve it. You have to have some rage about the fact that you were lied to for decades, and then you clear open the space for really exploring your actual sexuality that you have, instead of the one you were always supposed to have.
AW:
Whoa.
GD:
Damn.
AW:
That made me cry. I mean, Emily, I spent a lifetime in women locker rooms, looking at what I felt like was that ideal image of what a body should look like. World champion women athletes, right and what you just said was just so … and I felt like because I was bigger, and different looking. I just felt like there was something wrong with me all of my life, and when I was listening to your book … by the way, if you’re not a reader, listen to Emily’s book, Come As You Are. Her voice is perfect. You’re so good at reading, like I loved it but I digress and I just want to say, I came home and I had never internalized the idea that maybe I thought that I was wrong, that my body was wrong and that my parts were not correct. So, saying all of this is like the beginning of like a healing for me, and I just want to say thank you so much.
That’s why I like started to cry, just now when you’re saying like, you have to abandon the hope of being that thing, because so many of us struggle with the idea of not being the thing that the world approves of, right? Doing that, and abandoning that hope is going to save your life, and I don’t know, you just gave me permission to do that, so thank you.
GD:
You also gave her permission to come home from one of those walks and say, “Babe, let’s look at our labia.” Emily, it takes me a little longer to get on board with certain activities the book suggests, so we did postpone that actually but-
AW:
She goes, not tonight, I mean, maybe tomorrow.
GD:
Maybe tomorrow. Yeah, we could hope for tomorrow. Yes talk to us-
EN:
Give yourself a long runway, on the things that are challenged.
GD:
Thank you. Thank you, Emily.
EN:
Don’t beat yourself up for needing extra time because the best way to shut things down is to beat yourself up.
GD:
Yes, great. Talk to us about our conditioning, okay, because one of the things that gets in our way and you talk about it so beautifully, it’s just self hatred, right? The disgust, we’re taught to feel disgust about ourselves and about sex and we get it from the media, and we get it from our religions, and how do we get de-conditioned so we can be free from all of these nasty messages about being a woman and sex?
EN:
I think one of the first things is recognizing that it’s even there because a lot of us started being taught these disgust responses to our own bodies and the idea of sexuality long before we understood that’s even what was happening. I got an email from a woman who read Come As You Are. She was watching her adult brother, change his baby daughter’s diaper, which is great. So she’s all clean and he reaches for the new diaper, and when he turns back, she is touching her vulva and he goes, “Ah, don’t touch that.” You got to wonder, how would he have reacted if his baby had a penis instead? How would he have reacted if his baby had been touching her feet? Don’t we love it when babies find their feet? “Did you find your pretty little toes? Did you find them?” What kind of world would it be if, when our babies find their vulvas and clitoris is we went, “Did find your vulva? Did you find your clitoris? What a good girl.”
GD:
So good.
EN:
It’s a totally different world, but this little girl is not going to remember that moment or any of the countless moments like it. They’re just going to accumulate to associate anything with her genitals to disgust, shut down, being bad, scolded. In her brain, there’ll be a dark place where her genitals are supposed to be, and she doesn’t have access to it, and she doesn’t know why she finds it disgusting. I don’t tell a lot of personal stories, but I have permission for this one. When I was a kid, when I was like … No, I did not grow up in a super sex negative family. I just grew up in a regular America, sex negative family and I guess I read the word vagina at the library because I was in the car, driving home with my mom from the library, and I asked her what’s a vagina? I do not remember what she said, but I do remember this huge flash of emotion that just like spontaneously emanated for this embarrassment, this panic, this shame, probably.
So when I got home, I looked up vagina in the medical encyclopedia in our house, and the medical encyclopedia taught me what a vagina was, and my mom had all unknowingly taught me how to feel about a vagina. So seven years later, when I began training as a sex educator, 18, first semester in college, my first homework assignment was to go look at my own genitals. I got the little hand mirror and I was going to look and I had this flash of emotion. I felt like I was going to confront the enemy. I had never explicitly been taught, “Don’t touch that.” There weren’t, and a lot of people do have explicit messages that that’s disgusting, and dangerous and bad, and no one is ever going to love you, if you touch that. I didn’t get that I just got regular … so just regular sex negativity led me to feel like my body was an enemy, and I was going to like march up and confront it.
I lay down on my bed, and I got my little hand mirror, it was like a makeup compact, so there’s like makeup on one side and then, mirror on the other. I’m a college student and I look. First time I’ve ever looked and I burst into tears, because it was just part of me, it was … like the backs of my knees or the soles of my feet, not something I see often, but they’re an integral, literally just integrated into all of the rest of me and I realized that I had been sending these judgmental messages to this part of my body and that was not going to help it function more effectively. That was not going to help my genitals to be happy.
AW:
That’s right.
EN:
So the reason I recommend it to all of my students, is because I know for a fact that it can change people’s relationship with their bodies and that moment is actually the foundation for me, as much as I love the science. Don’t get me wrong. For me, everything goes back to that moment of when I don’t know what’s true, when I feel lost, when I wonder if I’m okay. My body already knows the answer. I don’t have to look outward. I can just look in a mirror. I can look inside my own experience, just as everyone. I hope you love the science, I worked really hard on it and I think it’s very valuable, but ultimately, I and the science are not … knows what’s true for you. You are who knows what’s true for you and if you get quiet enough, and you look closely at what’s actually happening inside your body and outside your body, you’re the source of wisdom. I forgot what the question was, did that helps?
GD:
It was a hell of an answer. It doesn’t matter what the question was. That’s hugely important and also utterly necessary because sometimes what we know is true in our bodies is actually the opposite of what we have been taught by science, okay? So like-
EN:
On top of that the patriarchy has taught us to believe other people’s opinions about our bodies more than we believe our bodies themselves.
GD:
Exactly. I’ve recently read an article about Freud and how he put out the idea that the vaginal orgasm is the only proper way to have an orgasm. So, a while back, it was decreed that if you could not have a vaginal orgasm, you were frigid, so that’s where the word frigid came from. Frigidity was not being able to have a vaginal orgasm. Women were sent to therapy. Women were sent to doctor’s offices. They had a surgery where they were moving people’s clitoris closer to their vagina because they thought maybe that would help. So Emily, I mean, we have to go inside ourselves as a matter of survival because the actual science and experts are labeling us wrong.
EN:
Yes.
GD:
Say things about that and tell us how we can actually have an effing orgasm.
EN:
So here’s the thing about science. I love it. It’s great. It’s the worst way of coming to know general facts about the world, except for all of the other ones. Science is really, really important.
AW:
Oh my gosh.
EN:
The science is done by human beings. Now I, as a sex educator and my colleague sex educators and other sex therapists are required to go through something called a SAR, a sexual attitude reassessment, which is an intensive, weekend or week long training, where we are exposed to everything that could possibly activate our cultural learning of like what’s not okay, and give you the quick, disgust reaction. My job as a professional is to make sure I let all of that go so that whatever person comes up to me and tells me their story, whatever they say, I’m fine, like I don’t have … because they have spent enough time in the world having people respond to their story with … they don’t need that for me. They need me to be like, “All right. Okay, do you?” Sex researchers are not required to do that. So they bring to their work, the same lies that all the rest of us were taught.
It’s getting better. It started getting better in the 70s and 80s, when guess what, more women became sex researchers and they brought with them the assumption that being a woman is not a disease. We’re not currently broken and it made sex research better. My vision for the future is that more trans and non-binary people, and especially more people of color, will become sex researchers and it’ll be made better because more voices are being integrated into the scientific process. Yeah, science has been wrong a lot across history. It comes and goes. The full anatomy of the clitoris was in a mid 19th century anatomy textbook, and then it disappeared, and then, it came back in another version, and then it disappeared again in 1957. Why did the clitoris come and go?
AD:
I didn’t know until like, seven minutes ago, that the clitoris is not just like … it’s like four inches long, and like, three quarters of it is inside your body. It isn’t just what’s outside, it’s actually the same length as the average non-erect penis, but we just … it’s all the inside stuff, so when that whole like G spot thing, that’s the internal part of the clitoris. No way.
EN:
Yeah, so as you said in the last episode, only about a quarter of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal stimulation alone and when I use words like man and woman, I’m using the language from the research, which is almost exclusively cisgender people, that is another layer of problem in the research. It’s also a whole lot of college students, and something inherently built into the nature of sex research, it’s only on people who are willing to participate in sex research, and that is not a representative sample of the population.
AD:
I would think not. I would think not.
EN:
So there’s all this stuff … So one of the hypotheses for why anybody would have an orgasm from vaginal penetration alone, the technical term for it is unassisted intercourse, which is one of those science terms that I just love, it cracks me up. So one of the hypotheses for why anybody would have an orgasm from an area that doesn’t seem to have a lot of nerve endings to it, which the vagina itself does not, is that penetration is actually stimulating those internal organs of the clitoris. I’m sure, you can probably find like an image of this whole structure that you can put in the show notes or something, but it looks like a wishbone basically, that straddles the urethra and the vaginal opening. So some stimulation for some people with vaginas, results in pressure against those legs of the clitoris, and that’s why some people have orgasms from vaginal stimulation.
Another hypothesis, the original G spot hypothesis is … so wrapped around the urethra is something called the urethral sponge. It is the equivalent of the prostate. The prostate has two jobs it swells up in response to stimulation and thus closes off the urethra so you cannot pee when you’re very aroused and it produces about half the volume of the ejaculate, the seminal fluid. So around a urethra, right next to a vagina, when it swells up, it creates this like sensitive place that you can touch through the wall of the vagina. This is the classic come here motion or some of them like a tapa-tapa. Some of them love a rub like, pressure rub. Some people find it very pleasurable if they’re already turned on. Some people will only ever find it painful. For some people, it just makes them feel like they got to pee. People vary tremendously. Nobody is right or wrong. People are just different-
GD:
Sigmund Freud. Freud was wrong.
EN:
I mean, no one’s experience of sensation from vaginal stimulation. Freud was … I have a lot of things. I have a lot of feelings about Freud-
GD:
I have a theory, do you … because it is unbelievable to me that most of us somehow because of what’s in the culture, still think that we’re supposed to have vaginal orgasms.
EN:
Yes, I get that question every week.
GD:
Even though all the research shows us that most women can only have orgasm through the clitoris.
EN:
For decades, yes.
AD:
Even the way you say it can only have orgasm through … like there’s something wrong with us, like we can only have orgasm so this … No, this is the way women have orgasms. That’s the way I want it said. This is how most women enjoy and experience orgasm not only have it this way.
GD:
Good job, sister.
AD:
Not, this is a very good orgasm.
GD:
Okay. Do you think so … This is my question for Emily. Do you think that perhaps the reason why the patriarchy does not want that information disseminated is that if the truth comes out that vaginal intercourse does not … is not necessary for orgasm at all that we need penises much less, that women actually can have orgasms from other women, by themselves that more and more penises are becoming completely irrelevant, if this information is disseminated widely. It’s just something I’ve considered briefly.
AD:
It’s just her working hypothesis for the entire universe Emily, that’s all.
GD:
Yes, no.
EN:
Yes. I think it’s a little different. I think it is very convenient for people with penises who like putting their penises into vaginas. It is very convenient to have the narrative be, this is the ultimate source of pleasure for that person with a vagina and to say actually, no that thing you love doing is just sort of an appetizer. It’s just a fun extra bonus activity to the person with the vagina.
AD:
And further convenient to classify it as this is what should work and will work and if it doesn’t work to give you an orgasm you have a problem. You are sexually, non-functioning women, right, because I over here, a person with penis, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do to make it work but you over there, person who might or might not have a clitoris because I haven’t noticed, are not doing what you should be doing.
GD:
Supposed to do.
AW:
Yeah, why aren’t the men taking more damn responsibility?
GD:
I want to talk for a minute about trauma. How so many women’s experience of sex is colored completely by trauma in their lives, severe trauma like over just being part of a patriarchy, trauma but abuse. How do women even begin to do what use, to have confident, joyful sex lives when they’ve been traumatized?
EN:
Step one therapy, because these are big … the roots of the patriarchy, go deep and to dig deep enough into your soul, to uproot that stuff, takes help and because most of us are not trained in how to be with a survivor while they grieve, and while they work through the rage, of having this damage inflicted on them, and seeing how deep the scars go. Most of us are not trained in how to do that, so a therapist is a person who can be with a client, while that happens. I often describe therapy as going into the woods with someone and standing quietly and calmly no matter what happens in the woods, because nothing that happens in there is dangerous. I as an educator am like, “Here’s a toolkit. Here’s how to use all the tools. Here’s a map of what you’re going to find in the forest.” Go for it, you can do it. I don’t go in with them.
That is the thing that I can’t do, therapist … when trauma is involved, therapy. People can make lots of progress on their own too and there are lots of different modalities for making progress. Come As You Are workbook has all these like worksheets that you think through what you were taught and if sex was used as a weapon against you, what that means and how you can transform that narrative into a source of power, but the main … I would say like, if there’s one thing that all of us listening to this can do, is to recognize that all of us need help. None of us are doing our sexuality wrong and all of us need help embracing the sexual selves that we are. So when you say that you hate giving blowjobs, you are allowed to hate giving blowjobs and if I love giving blowjobs, I’m allowed to love giving blowjobs and we’re both right and we both belong and we’re both welcome.
I want that to be true for everyone, regardless of what has happened to them in the past, that when we hear other people’s stories about sexuality, our response is never … it’s always, “Okay.” That’s what happened. If there is a skill people can develop, it’s learning how to listen, when people disclose stories of trauma.
GD:
Tell us how.
EN:
Here are the four steps, when someone discloses trauma to you, when you’re talking to a survivor and they’re experiencing distress, pain. There are four sentences, they are difficult but these are the ones that work. Are you ready?
AW:
Yes.
EN:
One, I believe you. Two, thank you for trusting me enough to tell me. Three, I am sorry that that happened to you and four, I support you, whatever you choose to do.
GD:
I also want to ask, what do people do who can’t afford to get to therapy, who’ve been through trauma?
EN:
Yeah. This is when we’re going to rely on our friends and family, making sure that they can be here. The safe people, there are probably only going to be a couple of people who are safe enough, and there is value. It is not inherently dangerous to feel those big, uncomfortable feelings alone. There can be an important psychological growth that happens when people are traumatized and they allow themselves to wrestle with those difficult feelings by themselves. Some people are taught that uncomfortable feelings are dangerous. Uncomfortable feelings are never dangerous. Feelings, as I say, literally every day of my life, are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness, to get to the light at the end. So you can be in your bed and allow yourself to grieve, and mourn and rage.
It’ll last 10 minutes, 15 minutes and your body will have done all the grieving, raging and mourning that it can do for the present, and learning to tolerate the sort of purging of those uncomfortable feelings is a very powerful skill.
AD:
It’s just so interesting, because it’s like when we talk about this whole thing, I think sex is so … it’s like the dragon at the center of our entire lives because it has this aspect of it, that’s like yes, it’s our bodies and yes, pleasure is our birthright and yes, we experience pleasure through it and loving what is, but it’s like what you said about the very same … the very same activation of our brains, that tells us that this is sexual and that this is the route to our own pleasure and our own birthright, is the very same part of our brain that activates every bit of trauma and violence that has been against our bodies and against our birthright, all at the same moment. You begin to understand how survivors through the chronic degradation of our bodies and our pleasure and our worthiness over a lifetime or whether it’s a specific, violent event, it’s like, how inextricable that all is for someone who is trying to get through their birth right, through the same route that they experience. The attempted removal of their birthright. It’s almost like, God.
GD:
I used to feel so much anger during sex. I would say that anger was the emotion I felt most, used, rageful and then, I would feel like a complete crazy person for feeling, I wasn’t supposed to feel angry during sex, but I would just seethe, in her seethe the whole time. I felt like, I could be anybody and I’m just being used and I’m just like … he’s a cat scratching a post but I have to get through it, because I have to get … and I think that’s all tied together. All of the political, all of the world feelings about sex, I felt in the most personal moments.
AD:
Do you think it’s because when I first read about brakes and accelerators, when you were talking about that, I’m like, “Yeah, yes, that is totally true and also, that assumes we’re listening to our brakes.” How many worlds and how many moments and how many nights are you like, brake say, hell no. Okay.
EN:
But your prefrontal cortex takes over and is like, “No, you have to. Yes.”
AD:
Right, and is that where angers comes from?
EN:
That is the classic recipe for pain with sex. Literal, physical pain with sex.
GD:
So we don’t even feel the right to honor our breaks and that is how we feel in most realms. Not just sex but like we-
ED:
Right, because your pleasure is not what matters. What you want is not what matters. It’s what the men in your life need that matters. So, we are expected to sacrifice everything that we have. Our time, attention, our bodies, our hopes and dreams, sometimes our lives, all sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s comfort and convenience.
AW:
I have a question, because I’m sure a lot of our listeners are in cisgender, heteronormative marriages. If you find yourself in a marriage, like I would say, Glennon you were in, in terms of being ragey and all of these brakes were there but your prefrontal cortex, like what are some strategies that you would recommend to these women to help in that circumstance, to help free them of A, experiencing the pain and anger and trauma inside of these experiences and then B, including their partners to change the outcomes?
GD:
Yeah.
EN:
How long do we have?
AW:
I mean, just give us a couple ideas.
EN:
Okay. One of the reasons it’s so hard for people to talk about sex is because of a lack of basic vocabulary. Not even knowing that there are sexual truths outside of the ones that they were taught literally everything you were taught, up to the age of approximately 18 was both factually incorrect and just morally wrong, and you need … you can’t bust a myth until you have something to replace it with. You’ll just keep going back to the myth, unless you have something, like a wall to get in the way of you and that thing that is trying to hurt you, and the truth, the science is my wall. It’s what fills up the space where the myth used to be, and that’s a dual control model, but some of it isn’t science. Some of it is the radical moral claim that every human has a right to bodily self-sovereignty, so I’m working on this new book. I have a chapter about the patriarchy, because how could I not?
I talk about … like I had a big reaction when you mentioned Freud because, old boy Freud … Do you know about the thing where he said that, in all my years of studying the feminine soul, the question I still cannot answer is, what does a woman want?
GD:
Yes, yes.
EN:
Right?
GD:
Yes and also that we didn’t need to pay attention to the big questions of life. That’s my favorite. That we could only … we didn’t even need to enter into those conversations. We just needed to settle into a lesser existence and basically do the damn dishes, yeah.
EN:
Women opposed change, receive passively and add nothing of their own?
GD:
Yes, yes, that’s my fav.
EN:
He said that in 1925. What else was happening on this content in particular, right around 1925.
AD:
Voting.
EN:
Voting and labor rights.
AD:
Labor rights, yes.
EN:
You know what the marching protest was in voting in labor rights in the early part of the 20th century? We want bread and roses too. Give us bread and roses too. This means not just that we want decent working conditions and fair pay. It means that we want liberty over own lives. We want pleasure. We want the delights of life. We want music and time and here’s the complicated thing about life’s delights. They require time and peace of mind, and a community that will hold our stuff for us, so that we can step away for just a couple of minutes, and stand in life’s sunshine, to get access to the roses, we need support, to protect us through all the demands. We want bread and roses too. Women’s sexuality, bread and roses are self-sovereignty, bodily self-sovereignty, which really doesn’t seem like it’s too much to ask, right? We want the roses, we want life’s delights.
Every human on Earth wants those things, right? It’s just the expectations around women are different than they are for men. If men, want to have great sex with us, if anybody wants to have great sex with us, we would like to have great sex too. So the question is not a never has been what do women want, it is how can I help her get free and how can I help her access life’s delights?
AD:
I feel like with the roses too part, it’s just this … When you say you deserve pleasure, it’s like, what someone like me hears is like you should want sex, right, but what I want to say is that like, no, you deserve to have your life be set up in such a way that you are able to access your desire to have sex.
GN:
Yes.
AD:
Because it takes it from the duty that like something is wrong with me that I’m A, not having pleasure in this or that I B, don’t … I feel resentful of this or I don’t have the bandwidth for it or whatever and puts it in a place of like, “No, you know what, I do deserve? I deserve to have that my life organized in such a way that I am not nonstop brakes, that the communal aspect of my family is set up so that I don’t have to be 100% brakes, so that we have responsibilities shared so that I can have access to the part of my life that can desire that pleasure and access that pleasure as opposed to being the one that is in a position of feeling like I am a failure because I’m not meeting my duty to respond to your ability to access the part of your life that gets to desire and have pleasure.”
GD:
I’m looking at my sister, and I know that in my head, I am already planning a sign for her wall that says, I want bread and roses too because I know what that has meant to you, sister. Emily, I thank you for the work that you are doing for all of us out in the world. I know everyone that’s listening right now is wishing that we had more time with you. So I want to tell you that we do. The next episode is going to be Emily answering all of your questions. Okay, Emily is an actual sex queen. Okay, not a silent one. So, next episode-
EN:
I mean, my husband thinks so.
GD:
I love it.
EN:
We need to talk about the silent part. I’m not going to not talk about the silent part.
GD:
Okay, we’ll start the next episode by talking about silent part. Emily, give us one quick thing that everyone can do this week, to demand roses. Is it looking at their labia? We’re all going to order Come As You Are, but what other thing can people do that’s easy and simple to claim their sexual joy?
EN:
Step number one for the roses, is noticing the pleasure that exists now, which will teach you, “Oh, I already have the ability to experience pleasure and enjoy it, if I slow down enough to notice it.” So it’ll be food. It’ll be friends, it’ll be touch, it’ll be your kids. Whatever brings you the spark and makes you feel alive. That will be your light that guides you toward erotic ecstasy.
GD:
Okay, you all, next right thing notice the spark. She is going to be back to answer all of your actually really fascinating, wonderful questions on Thursday, so come back for that. For now, if the next two days get extra stressful, don’t worry because we can do hard things. We’ll see you back here soon.