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We all have those people that we admire to the point of fandom, and for me, one of those people is Emily Nagoski. Her work has had a deep impact on my personal life and my professional life. She single-handedly changed the way I work with clients who have low desire or libido they aren’t happy with.
And her blog? It’s one braingasm after another. So, needless to say this week was a dream come true for me.
Because I’ve already spent so much time gushing over her book, “Come As You Are,” on previous episodes, we don’t actually spend a lot of time talking about it in this hour. Instead, we talk about pleasure and joy as political rebellion, feminism, the importance of creating context that works for your sexual enjoyment, being inclusive of all bodies, fat acceptance, research, and her new book on burn out.
She also invites us to weigh in on her new romance novel. You can tweet at the show @sexgetsreal and @emilynagoski with your vote – terrorist or werewolf?
And next week? Dylan is back! So stay tuned.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Emily Nagoski and Dawn talk about:
- Why pleasure is central to Emily’s feminism, and why Emily believes that joy is an act of political rebellion. It starts with Emily’s definitions of pleasure and joy, which are beautiful and profound. Then, she builds on why having joy (which is loving your body exactly as it is) is such a radical act and how incredibly political it is to reject the messages we’re surrounded by and instead embrace yourself unapologetically.
- Context and how vital it is to our experiences and pleasure. Too many people overlook the importance of context and that you have permission to create the context you need to feel good.
- Emily’s lovely permission slip around bodies that she repeats endlessly in her workshops, which is “all the same parts, organized in different ways.” How did she come up with that and why is it so important for all of us to embrace that mindset?
- Gender essentialism and how our anatomy in no way determines our destiny, except that the culture we live in tries really hard to force destiny on us based on our genitals. It’s not the truth, it’s simply the norm. Perhaps there’s a better way?
- The grief and rage that so many of us resist because if we were to realize how many years and decades we wasted worrying about changing ourselves and how untrue and unnecessary the conformity was, it would crush us and break our hearts.
- Consent and getting to choose how our bodies are touched. Do we like what is happening to us in this moment? Emily’s approach is so simple, but also incredibly profound. Her definition of sex positivity is amazing. I’m a fan.
- Emily’s favorite part of “Come As You Are” and her writing process.
- How her romance novel, “How Not To Fall” was birthed in direct response to 50 Shades and the abuse it heralds as sexy and acceptable.
- The ways that science and research is still failing women, and most especially people of color due to racism and stigma around sexuality, specifically, for Black women. We need to be aware of this when we quote statistics and findings from scientific studies – that it’s usually only young, thin, white, cis, het folks.
- What research Emily wishes we had more of when it comes to sex, science, and understanding our responses. Her answer is deliciously detailed – and includes the phrase “incentive salience”.
Resources discussed in this episode
The epic, the amazing, “Come As You Are”
Emily’s romance novel, “How Not To Fall” (published under Emily Foster)
The Militant Baker blog on fat bodies and fat activism
About Emily Nagoski
Emily Nagoski is the author of the New York Timesbestseller, COME AS YOU ARE: The surprising new science that will transform your sex life (Simon & Schuster, 2015). She has a Ph.D. in Health Behavior with a doctoral concentration in human sexuality from Indiana University (IU), and a Master’s degree (also from IU) in Counseling, with a clinical internship at the Kinsey Institute Sexual Health Clinic. She also has a B.A. in Psychology, with minors in cognitive science and philosophy, from the University of Delaware.
While at IU, Emily worked as an educator and docent at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex Gender and Reproduction. She also taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships and communication, stress management, and sex education.
A sex nerd among sex nerds, Emily has the lowest Erdős number of any sex educator in the world. She lives in western Massachusetts with two dogs, two cats, and a cartoonist. She’s funnier in real life (and hardly ever speaks in the third person). You can find Emily on Twitter @emilynagoski, Facebook, and follow her over on her blog, The Dirty Normal.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: Welcome to this week’s episode listeners. This is Dawn Serra. So this interview is one I’ve been wanting to conduct for a long time. It’s basically me fangirling for an hour because I love Emily Nagoski’s work so much, and I was so delighted to get to talk to this incredible, intelligent, fun, revolutionary human being. And you will hear my excitement and giddiness in the episode. I just want to remind everybody before we jump in, if you’re in the DC area, I am teaching five sex workshops at Secret Pleasures Boutique in DC throughout September and early October. So there’s a link on the website if you are anywhere in the area. I’m teaching blowjobs 101 class for all bodies including strap-ons. I’m teaching an anal pleasure class, that’s like anal sex 101 and anal play. I’m doing one called Thriving Together which is all about creating and sustaining a really fun connected relationship over the long term based on all the Gottman research. I’m also teaching, too, From Curious to Kinky workshop. One that’s in mid September and one that’ll be in mid October. So make sure you check those out and get enrolled.
The first From Curious to Kinky has already sold out, the Blowjob workshop’s about halfway sold out as of this episode going live, so make sure you go check that out and also follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter because I’m tweeting as more classes come up and workshops. So let’s get started. Also one other note about this episode, Emily and I had done our entire interview and we were just about to go into the wrap up where she shares all of her links and her power went out. So at the very end of the episode, the interview ends a little abruptly and I’m going to come back with all of Emily’s information. So let’s dive in and have fun.
Dawn Serra: Hey, everyone, it’s Dawn Serra with Sex Gets Real. It’s taking everything in me not to freak out right now. Because on the line with me, is someone that you hear me talk about probably almost every episode of the show, and in almost every blog post that I do with your questions. So I want to welcome Emily Nagoski to the show. Hello, Emily.
Emily Nagoski: Hello.
Dawn Serra: Oh my gosh, I’m so excited that you’re here. Literally, my answer to probably 70% of the questions I get is go read Come as You Are or to watch your TED talk.
Emily Nagoski: I love that.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yeah. So for those of you who don’t know who Emily is, which you should if you listen to this show with any kind of regularity. Emily Nagoski is a PhD sex educator with 20-years of training and experience. Her mission in life is to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies, which I love. One of the things that I want to start with is you recently said, “Pleasure is central to my feminism and joy is an act of political rebellion.” I love that. I would love to hear a little bit more about what that means for you and what we can learn from that.
Emily Nagoski: Yeah, so my personal feminism must come from the place that I come from, which is a East Coast, United States, born in the late 70s white girl. And in that locked jaw puritanical culture, pleasure is not granted to anyone without feelings of shame and guilt and selfishness. So if we want to liberate ourselves from the patriarchy, basically, I think an essential step in that is to acknowledge that the pleasure of which our bodies are capable, is our birthright as the Good Vibrations motto would have it. The more we say, “Fuck you and your guilt and shame, and the claim that I am selfish because I enjoy living inside my body.” I get to feel this way.
Your body’s the one and only thing you have on the day you’re born, that you also have on the day you die for most of us. So automatically it comes with being born, you have permission to feel the sensations of your skin and pleasure as I talked about in the book— I mean, it’s one of the main messages of the book is that the experience of pleasure depends on the context in which you’re experiencing it. So tickling is the standard go to example where if you’re in a fun, flirty, sexy state of mind and your certain special someone tickles you, that could potentially be fun. But at the same certain special, someone tries to tickle you when you’re mad at them, when they’re being annoying – like you want to punch him in the face. Right?
Emily Nagoski: So when I say that pleasure is central to my feminism, what I mean is that I have permission to create contexts that allow my brain to interpret the sensations of my body as pleasurable. For most people, that’s a context that is safe, low stress, high affection, high trust. And when we’re talking about sexual pleasure, explicitly erotic. I am allowed to have those things because I’m a human being and I was born with a body – done. So when I talk about pleasure being central to my feminism, I mean that.
Joy for me… So it took me a long time to figure this out. I say that I teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. And it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that a student raised their hand and said, “Emily, can you tell me what you mean by confidence and joy? Could you please define your terms for us? How do we know when we’ve got confidence and joy?” I was like, “I have no idea.” So I walked away. It took me a couple of— I was vacuuming the rug, actually, because I have two dogs and two cats. So I was vacuuming the rug and thinking about this question, and what I finally figured out was that confidence comes from knowing what is true about your body, even when it’s not the things that people taught you were going to be true. Joy is loving what’s true, even when it’s not the things people taught you were supposed to be true about your body, and to dare to look at what’s true inside your body – to confront the reality of the fact that you are a primate, and you have sexual sensations, and they are fine the way they are – to notice all that stuff and like it, even though every message you’ve ever received says that, “If you dare to like who you are, there is something fundamentally and permanently flawed with you.” That is radical and transformative.
Emily Nagoski: If each one of us noticed all the no messages and your broken messages, and one by one just went, “I think that’s not true. I think actually, I’m fine. I think you’re lying to me and I’m allowed to like who I am.” The entire world would change. It is really difficult and we have to keep doing it every day. Because every day we’re exposed to more cultural messages that tell us we are not allowed to like ourselves. So it’s a gradual revolution.
Dawn Serra: Yes. I’m so glad you said that word “gradual”. I feel like that’s one way we beat ourselves up, especially when it comes to body acceptance and being radically in love with ourselves as well.
Emily Nagoski: Right. “Darn it, I had a self-critical thought.”
Dawn Serra: Exactly, exactly. Or like you feel good for a couple weeks, and then you have a couple of weeks where you feel terrible, and you feel like you’ve failed in some way. So yeah, I love the gradual gives you permission to take it one day at a time, one step at a time.
Emily Nagoski: It’s just very much about like, “Wow, look how hard this is. I totally 100% believe this and here I am still struggling with this. This is a really hard thing. It’s not that I’m doing it wrong I’m not strong enough. This is really hard.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yeah. Something that you said, too, when you were talking about pleasure is how we get to create the context in order to experience pleasure. I know that so much of your book is about context and responsiveness. But one of the myths that I’m constantly running up against as a sex educator, and I know you’re very familiar with this, is this cultural expectation that context just happens, instead of us actually consciously choosing it?
Emily Nagoski: The thing is, context does just happen. But just because it’s the context that happens, doesn’t mean it’s the context that works for us.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yes.
Emily Nagoski: Yes, context does just happen. And if there are things about the context that aren’t working for you, they’re probably some things you can change to make it more like the context that does work for you.
Dawn Serra: Yes, exactly. I love that – being able to choose the things that you want to change. Also, one of the things that I took away so much from Come as You Are was this permission to get to explore lots of different versions of context in order to start figuring out the nuance that works for me in various circumstances and various emotions, and various settings and that explorer discovery mind set of there’s not just one context that works or doesn’t work for you. There’s this endless spectrum and you get to play in it to feel what’s working for you in that moment.
Emily Nagoski: Yeah, I love that you use the word play.
Dawn Serra: Thank you. I think that’s so important and we forget it all the time.
Emily Nagoski: So much of women’s exploration of sexuality tends to be driven by fear and shame that they’re doing it wrong, rather than by curiosity and interest, and play of what are all the different kinds of things that I can experience – that there isn’t a way to do it wrong, there’s just one of the different things that I can experience what feels right for me today and what isn’t working for me today.
Dawn Serra: One of the other things that you mentioned is you were talking about joy, and loving what’s true about your body. I attended your talk that you gave at Lotus Blooms in Northern Virginia, about a month and a half ago. And what struck me was over and over and over again, you said all the same parts organized in different ways. What just really resonated with me about that is regardless of what genitals we’re talking about, and reproductive systems we’re talking about. You kept bringing it back to this central idea of all the same parts organized in different ways and how that gives so much permission to intersex bodies and trans bodies, and bodies that maybe don’t look like the bodies we see in porn. I absolutely love that just those words seem to create space to invite people to start experiencing their joy.
Emily Nagoski: The way I came up with that phrase, it was really in response to blog readers who were feeling challenged about the language I was using about bodies. My beginning with sexuality is the fact of humans as primates, as mammals as these meat, monkeys, right? And that feels – that’s intellectually connected with approaches to sexuality rooted in biological essentialism. So I needed language that would communicate to people – “Yes, I’m talking about your biology, about your organism.” And I don’t mean in any way to imply Freud’s bullshit anatomy is destiny. Anatomy is not in any way destiny, except in so far as when you’re born with a particular anatomy. The culture imposes a destiny or unexpected destiny onto you and you begin to learn that from before the day you’re born. So that’s the only way.
So when I was thinking, “How can I communicate to people that—” I mean, look, you have a body, and it’s awesome and everyone’s body is different. That means different things for people. So it was when I was thinking about that, that I finally got, we’re all made of the same parts just organized in different ways. It’s not about the shape of our genitals and the shape of the rest of our bodies. It’s also about the sensitivities that we have in the brain mechanisms that govern sexual response. It’s in our sensitivities to the cultural messages that we receive. Some people are really impermeable to cultural messages and don’t understand why people feel so controlled by social messages, and other people have a very strong urge to comply with social expectations so that they can know they’re doing it right. They’re being good girls. They’re behaving them, and how come in behaving themselves, it still doesn’t feel like they’re okay? So everyone is different in their temperament and in their life experience, as well as in their body. And it just creates this space where nobody gets judged and nobody gets told that they’re doing it wrong. You just need to find the thing that works for you. Also, what would it be like if maybe we stopped expressing our opinions about other people’s sexuality and bodies? What if we just went, “Hey, everybody’s different. You do you.”
Dawn Serra: Yes, the comparison trap seems to cause— Well, I’ll speak for myself. The comparison trap has caused me so much pain at so many points in my life. I know that I hear that a lot from listeners, too, of, “My penis doesn’t look the way that other people’s penises look,” or, “My breasts are small and my boyfriend watches porn that has big breasts,” and it’s one right after the other – these worries that what I see or what I experience isn’t measuring up and now we’re pushing our sexual energy and our experiences outside of ourselves.
Emily Nagoski: Right. That’s the joy part. So what’s happening with me doesn’t match what I’m seeing with other people. No, it doesn’t match and what would it be like if you could really embrace what’s you? Because it doesn’t have to be the same as that other thing.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Oh, I love that so much. I think one of the things that’s so powerful in everything that you speak about and write about, and all of your experiences as a sex educator is— what comes across to me consistently is permission permission permission permission in this really lovely inviting, “This is permission for every single person” way. It’s not like you’re giving permission to certain types of people with certain types of experiences. It’s just this all bodies and all the experiences, and let’s focus on our internal needs and wants, and desires. I think that’s so beautiful about what you do.
Emily Nagoski: So chapter nine is the chapter I had the hardest time writing. The reason for that is because it’s 10,000 words in which to express this really difficult idea, which I think is the biggest obstacle to people really hearing that message of, “We’re all different. You are normal and healthy, just the way you are. If you’re experiencing unwanted pain, get thee to a doctor.” But otherwise, the question is, do I like what’s happening? The barrier to people really receiving the message that they are normal and healthy, and they’re allowed to be different from everybody else, and they’re also going to change over their lifetime, I think, is the amount of grief and rage that is necessarily activated when you realize how many decades you’ve been lied to and how fundamental those lies have been. And how you’ve been treating yourself in this way, you’ve been trying to follow the rules and trying to be the thing everyone said you were supposed to be, and it was all wrong. And you were actually fine all along. People resist the idea that they could possibly have spent a couple of decades of their life fighting hard toward a goal that was the wrong goal.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I know I went through a period where I had some really— so I exist in a fat body. I’m very vocal about that. And I went through a period of time when I was right on the cusp of starting to change how I experienced my body, where I had this really cruel fatphobia towards other fat bodies, and judging how they looked. I know now looking back that that was me really starting to resist the fact that all of the ways that I had abused myself and judged myself in order to try and be good enough, we’re wrong. And it was me trying to fight against, “Well, that can’t possibly be wrong. That’s been my whole story my whole life. So I’m going to hate these other people that are existing in their fat bodies and being okay with it, and showing them off and like, ‘Ew, that’s disgusting.’” And when I finally worked through that feeling kind of lost about like, “Now what? How do I feel in this body if I’m not going to listen to what everybody’s been telling me to feel?”
Emily Nagoski: Do you read The Militant Baker blog?
Dawn Serra: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. She’s incredible.
Emily Nagoski: Yeah. It was one of her blog posts that finally put together for me so much of the ways that we shame people whom our culture others. I’m talking about the ways if you see a fat woman who doesn’t hate herself, the reason she draws so much ire. The reason people on the internet feel like they’re allowed to call her all kinds of terrible names is because, “Here’s all of us trying to follow the rules and have our body conform to the cultural expectations. And there you are loving your body as it is not conforming, not even trying to conform. If that’s okay for you to do, that means that I have spent my whole life wasting my time and energy trying to conform to a cultural ideal that doesn’t mean anything. And that would mean that my life doesn’t mean anything, and that’s terrifying.
Dawn Serra: Yes, it really is. It was her post, actually, that started me on my own transition. She had written “Nine things Nobody Will Tell Fat Girls About Sex.” One of the points was, they know how you’re going to look naked before you take your clothes off. And it was this moment of like, “Holy fuck. You mean all of these years of me wearing the right kinds of clothes and the right colors without certain types of stripes weren’t actually hiding me?” It was this – I was so confronted with, “People can see my body the way that it is not the way I’ve been trying to pretend that it is.” And that took me down a whole new path of fear and holy fuck, and then letting go of so much of that. Yeah, it’s been amazing.
Emily Nagoski: Yeah. Here you are. That’s great.
Dawn Serra: It’s still every single day – I still have moments when I look at myself, and there’s something that my brain wants to tell me something isn’t okay. And I’ve had to train myself, that’s not a truth.
Emily Nagoski: Right. Don’t believe everything you think
Dawn Serra: Exactly, exactly. One of the things that you just said is “Do I like what’s happening?” You recently wrote on your blog about a father who asked, “What can I tell my sons when it comes to consent and rape?” And your posts really boiled down to, you get to choose how you want to be touched. You get to choose how you’re touched. That, to me, really ties back to pleasure and joy, and learning to love this body you’re in and also taking that political stance of, “No, this is my body and I get to decide what happens to it.” In a world where there’s so many rules where people feel like they get to do things to our bodies without considering whether or not we want to be touched. I wonder, what’s the response been to that post and have you had any other feelings about it, because it really did boil down to people get to choose how they want to be touched. And that’s the end of the story. If we all operated from that place, it could be amazing.
Emily Nagoski: I have not had any negative response to it. It’s really hard to argue with. Right? Who’s going to say, “No, that person doesn’t get to choose.” Where it gets complicated and people have a lot of feelings is when you talk about it in terms of children, getting to choose how they are touched. So if grandma comes over and says, “Can I give you a hug?” And the kid says, “No.” How many grandmas say, “Okay, I’ll ask again later.” And how many grandma say, “I’m going to hug you anyway.” Teaching children that they don’t actually have autonomous decision making over how and when they get touched. So that’s where I think it gets most complicated.
So this is my definition of sex positivity is each of us gets to decide how we feel about our bodies and what we do with it. For me, that’s all sex positivity implies. That’s not the definition other people necessarily use. But for me, that’s what sex positivity is. And particularly because there’s been a really active conversation around decolonizing sex positivity, many of the other more pro sex, sex is a game that we can play, and sex can be motive, self-exploration and self-identification, that a lot of those are imposing historically white cultural norms onto the idea of sexuality. So I was having a conversation with a woman of Indian descent, whose mother chose to stay in a relationship where she was not happy or satisfied. She capitulated to sex rather than finding pleasure in it. Based on my definition, that’s still sex positive because she is choosing it. Is she fully free to make any decision that she wants to in her culture? No, nope. She is doing the best she can to make decisions that feel safe for her and her body, given the context that she is in. And I think that’s great. She’s doing the best she can.
Emily Nagoski: While I want to create a culture where everyone has equal access to all options in terms of their bodies and their sexuality and their careers and everything, that’s not where we are as a planet right now. And I’m not going to say that this woman’s mom needs to make different decisions, because that’s not the sex positive things to do. That’s totally she’s making the best decisions you can; she gets to choose within the options available to her in her culture. It’s, really I think, the larger scale global responsibility to change the higher level structure of the culture so that more people are more free.
Dawn Serra: I love that so much. I think you’re so right that oftentimes when we’re in sex positive communities, there’s this hyper focus on the individual trying to create some type of global revolution. And sometimes, for most of us, that’s just not an option. We’re operating within cultural context within families and upbringings that have certain rules, and we’re all trying to do our best within the framework that we’re currently in. And that’s not to say that we can’t also, as a community, start working about shifting the paradigm and creating better access, better education, better conversations, changing the politics. But I think too often we tell people like, “I know you come from the Middle East and you have these religious beliefs, but it’s on you to be totally sexually free in the way that I am.”
Emily Nagoski: Yeah, yeah. In the way that I am because my sex positivity is the right sex positivity. That’s how white people have been doing it for a long time.
Dawn Serra: Exactly, exactly. I feel like there tends to be some big pendulum swings, too, of— Right now, I’ve talked about this with other educators in the sex positive world of there tends to be this huge swing like, “Everybody be poly and everybody be kinky and everybody be this and that.”
Emily Nagoski: And that if you’re not doing those things, then you’re a prude and you’re hung up and you’re neurotic, and there’s something wrong with you is that sexual practice or relationship structure doesn’t work for you. How? You do you.
Dawn Serra: Yes, exactly.
Emily Nagoski: You can try if you want to. If it works for you, that’s great. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s also great.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I just really want to see all of us— I love your definition so much, because something that I’ve talked about a couple of times on the show is you get to choose to have sex that you don’t enjoy. You get to choose to have sex that you feel mediocre about. You get to choose to not have sex, even if you really want to because of these other reasons. Every time you have sex, it doesn’t have to be mind blowing and beautiful, and because you absolutely want it from head to toe. It can be really complicated the reasons that you’re choosing to engage in this type of touch or this type of situation. And it’s okay to have conflicting feelings or to feel confused about it, and to still be choosing that for yourself.
Oh my god, this is such good stuff. So, I just want to circle back really quickly to Come As You Are. It’s listed on the resource site for the podcast. So everybody, I’m going to have links for this episode to Emily’s books and blogs so that you can easily get it if you haven’t already downloaded it after my 70 plugs on previous episodes. But Emily, I’d love to know what is your favorite part of Come As You Are?
Emily Nagoski: Oh. No one has ever asked me that question before.
Dawn Serra: Yay!
Emily Nagoski: What is my favorite part of Come As You Are? How do I count favorite? I remember the moment when I write— So there’s the introduction to the book. There’s the introductory story of Olivia and her relationship with her genitals. Then there’s the first sentence of chapter one. I remember I was on draft three of that chapter, when I finally figured out what the first sentence was going to be. I remember where I was and what it felt like to have that sentence click into place, which is about the etymological origins of the word “Pudendum”. Evil anonymous call women’s genitals the pudendum from the Latin pudenda meaning to make ashamed.
When I knew that that was the first sentence of the book, I was like, “That’s my way in.” Because that’s so enraging and so fundamental to the way all of us, if we’ve grown up in the post industrial West, have been taught to think about what it means to live inside a woman’s body. There’s just something inherently shameful and broken about it, and that’s my gateway in because it’s so clearly bullshit.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Emily Nagoski: I don’t know if I can call them my favorite thing. But I remember writing that sentence and being like, “That opens the door.”
Dawn Serra: What a beautiful vivid memory.
Emily Nagoski: There’s a few of those. I mean, a lot of writing a book is like sitting down in front of a computer for 10 hours a day, and forcing yourself to create sentences. But there’s a handful of moments – in the same way that in all of my career, there’s a handful of moments where a new idea gets handed to me and it just changes my understanding of the world. I remember a handful of these moments of like… I remember the day I learned about the dual control model. I remember the day I learned about responsive desire. I remember the day I learned about arousal, non-concordance. They are these big flashbulb kind of memories where I knew I was learning something that changed everything I thought I knew about how sexuality works.
Dawn Serra: What’s interesting is as I read the book, I had similar moments of like, “Oh my God, this explains so much.”
Emily Nagoski: That’s how I felt when I learned it myself like, “Oh!” I mean, if somebody had told me this five years ago, that would have been really helpful.
Dawn Serra: Yes, exactly. So you just said part of writing is like sitting down and forcing yourself to create sentences for hours a day, and hoping you get those moments of brilliance, and then it starts coming together. I wonder, so How Not to Fall, for our listeners who don’t know, is this wonderful feminist consent-informed of fun romance novel that you wrote as a direct response to 50 Shades of Grey. I wonder, writing that because you were like, “I’m going to write a better version,” was that writing experience really different because you were anger pounding it all out?
Emily Nagoski: It was a little bit. So there’s a couple of pieces of it. One is that I was pissed, I had to read Shades of Grey as research for Come As You Are. I am a reader of romance novels, I enjoy them. And as a person who does a lot of work around sexual trauma, I require a source of happy endings in my life. Romance novels is a place where I can get them. But I do it, as a sex educator and as a feminist, I have certain standards of things I expect from a story. I should say that if I hadn’t had to read 50 Shades of Grey because it was a cultural phenomenon, I wouldn’t have gotten past the first page. It just wasn’t for me. It really was for some other people.
Some people really, really love that book. But for me… So it’s about a college senior who gets the experiences or sexual awakening at the hands of an older, more powerful man. And I have been a college administrator. So if Anastasia Steele had come to my office to talk about her relationship, which is the kind of thing that happens all the time, I would be mandated under federal law to report that conversation to campus police because she’d be telling me about her stalker. And that was not okay for me that this unambiguously abusive relationship was being presented to the world as a romance. Yikes. So I was mad, I got mad.
Emily Nagoski: I had also, over the course of writing Come As You Are, had to learn how to tell stories effectively because it’s one of the most powerful rhetorical strategies, so I had to learn how. So I was like, “You know what, I know how to tell stories now. I can do this better. I can tell the story of a college senior’s sexual awakening at the hands of an older, more powerful man in a way that is feminist and sex positive, and medically accurate.” So I finished Come As You Are in April and as soon as I was done, it was like methadone. Writing How Not to Fall was like tapering down off of Come As You Are. I wrote it in three months, this 84,000 word story as a sort of purge, like “Aaah!” Then I sent it to my agent as a joke, like, “You know, I thought I was going to write a romance novel, here it is.” She read the first chapter and was like, “I can sell this.” So she did in a two book deal. So here I am as a romance novelist. So yeah, it absolutely felt like a purge. But also, I would add that after it sold, I had to write a second one because it’s often a two book deal. So I got to write another one.
I would come home from work and, oops, I just hit a thing. So I would come home from work and start working on the second novel, and I had one day in particular at work when four different students told me that they had been sexually assaulted and I was the first person they had told. And even for me, four in one day is a lot. So my usual course of action would be to sit in the bathtub with a big glass of box wine. But instead, I sat down in front of my computer and I worked on the novel and I had this dark, difficult day and I know that every single one of those four women will find their way to a happy ending of their own. Because it happens, people heal from these experiences and grow. And I will never get to see that. It was agony on that day to have so much pain presented to me. So I sat down and I wrote the proposal scene. I wrote the last scene of the book.
Emily Nagoski: I felt like all of that vicarious suffering inside me just purged and melted from my body, and that did not happen when I was writing Come As You Are. I did a lot of thinking about sexual violence because you can’t talk about women’s sexuality without talking about survivorship. There’s these very big, deep, dark days or weeks at a time, where I was thinking about it a lot. And it didn’t have that purgey cleansing kind of feeling. So it was on that day when I was writing a proposal saying that I was like, “This is good for me in a way that writing nonfiction isn’t.” And I decided if I never sell another romance novel ever again, I am going to keep writing fiction, because it is a place for me to put this stuff and turn it into something that I choose – something joyful, something pleasurable, something where I can create a happy ending.
Dawn Serra: I love that so much. Yeah, just having that outlet for you sounds beautiful. And I have to say, I’m so ready for December to be here so that How Not to Let Go (How Not to Fall) can be in my hands.
Emily Nagoski: I promise. The first one, it ends with a cliffhanger. People should know that before they open the book. I know it’s a romance novel. You’re expecting a happy ending but you get at the end of the second book. Hopefully it is worth getting through all 160,000 words that the pair of books is. I tried to make the happy ending large enough scale to be really worth having gone through all that.
Dawn Serra: For people who enjoy romance novels, I have to say How Not to Fall is one of the best that I’ve ever read. I loved how emotionally intelligent it was. I loved how self-aware both of the characters are. The sex was so hot. Oh my god. The sex was so hot – the teasing and the drawing it out. Oh my god, it was delicious.
Emily Nagoski: The service top all romance heroes should be service be the service top.
Dawn Serra: Hell yes. One of the things that brought me so much delight was how fucking totally nerdy this book is. Really nerdy. I mean, it’s so great the depth that you go into like talking about research and brain science, and psychology and even climbing and dancing. I mean, there’s just these really wonderful, delightful details. And the way these characters speak to each other is like you can hear the scientists just freaking out together. He even incorporates anatomy lessons into their sex and like, Oh my gosh, every single one of those things feels so much so much enjoyment.
Emily Nagoski: Yay! To be clear, so the hero is a psychiatrist, right? He’s an MD PhD psychiatrist who does research on trauma and the brain. So the nerd part is built into his character and the heroine is about to go to medical school, and does research in the same laboratory. So it’s not random that they’re nerds. I made them those things on purpose.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yeah. I could be totally wrong, but I felt like so much of you was in the book – the things that you know about, the things you’re excited about, the way you talk about research. And I felt that kind of coming through in their characters. I loved that. It just felt really authentic, the way that they talked to each other. The knowledge that they had. It didn’t feel like me trying to go write about being an astronaut.
Emily Nagoski: Again, I did that because I was writing what I know. The reason he studies trauma is because I get that his father is an alcoholic, my father’s an alcoholic. So it’s easy for me to write a neurotic character whose father is an alcoholic. I know what that’s like. I can write that really easily and I also know the brain science of why it happens. So I’m going to write that which is why I could write it in three months. The second one took longer, it took about eight months to write. The one I’m working on now I’m on the third draft and it is not as much like me and the things I’m already good at. The heroine is a professor of comparative literature. And the hero is an actor, which are things I know a little bit about, but I’ve had to do a lot more effort to get to their headspace.
Dawn Serra: So is this new fiction that you’re writing one that you’re going to pitch to your publisher?
Emily Nagoski: Yes. Actually, it’s been… I mean, how much do you want to talk about the next novel? It’s another duology, probably. The one sentence summary is an actor, during his Oscar acceptance speech, blurts out the name of his long lost love. The paparazzi find her and that’s how he finds out where she went and how he can get her back.
Dawn Serra: Oh my gosh, all romance novel lovers out there, I can feel them twittering.
Emily Nagoski: I currently have two options for where it is she went, like what happened. Obviously it has to be something very large scale to keep them apart for years, like something really big has to happen. I have a couple of choices. I wrote it with one big thing and I’m not feeling very confident about it. I think I want to make it something completely different. Should I tell you? Do you care?
Dawn Serra: You can. If you want to give a tease, we’ll take it.
Emily Nagoski: Okay, option one. So this is the dark one that I’ve already written, and it was absolutely just a place for me to purge a bunch of stuff. They were going to meet under the London Eye at New Year’s. And I know someone who had one of the experiences in Europe where they were under a major European capital destination, and they were attacked and raped by a stranger on New Year’s Eve – that was a terrorist attack, right? So that’s what I have happened to my heroine, so no wonder she disappears. So she’s gone by the time he gets there and he never hears from her again, and has to move on. So that’s what I wrote. It’s absolutely a giant scale thing that’s going to keep them apart for years. But it’s very dark and not the kind of thing you expect when you hear Oscar winning actor hero goes to find his lost love. That doesn’t necessarily say to you, deep dark trauma. So my alternative is that she is bitten by a werewolf and turns into a werewolf.
Dawn Serra: Please do that.
Emily Nagoski: Okay. See? Isn’t that so much more fun?
Dawn Serra: Oh my god. I totally love the option of working through trauma because I feel like you of, everyone on the planet, could make that such an anchor for survivors to feel like, “I like romance novels, and this heroine went through trauma and I feel like left alone.”
Emily Nagoski: Here’s how she survived. And I got to give the hero the news and talk about his response to receiving that. Especially because he knows where he was when it was happening and he was delayed and late, and he’s like, “What could I have done to prevent it?” And all the rage that he has, he wants to go attack the people. So I go real deep with it and it gave me a chance to do a lot of neat important stuff, and I just don’t think it’s a story that people are going to be super excited to read and then tell all their friends to read.
Dawn Serra: I will just say, listeners, if you have a vote then tweet it at us if you want the option one, please let us know or if you want option two…
Emily Nagoski: Terrorist or werewolf?
Dawn Serra: Werewolf. Because I don’t know as soon as you said werewolf I was like, “Well now that sounds fun.”
Emily Nagoski: Right? I know it’s bananas, but it’s a romance novel and an Oscar winning actor. Come on.
Dawn Serra: Come on, why wouldn’t there also be werewolves?
Emily Nagoski: How couldn’t there be? It just feels like… And the heroine, I already wrote in an affinity for dogs, and the hero is half Georgian. So Georgia, the nation and the region, Georgia is called Georgia in English is because the etymological root means Land of the wolves. I mean, it was just sitting there waiting for me to realize that it was about werewolves all along.
Dawn Serra: Oh my god. That makes me so happy. We’ll see if the listeners have any votes and I can’t wait to see where you land. Okay, so I would love to circle quickly down to some questions I have about research because I know so much of the work— Well, your entire blog is about better sex based on science. And one of the things that I really admire about the work you do is you make science very consumable and palatable for non-academics in a way that makes it clear like, “This is why this might be relevant,” or “This is how this might impact your life or give you some more permission.” You also break down bad science and people who use science poorly, which is terrific.
One of the things that you also talk about a lot both I thought in Come As You Are and when you’re teaching is how limited science is when it comes to diversity. In that, so much of the research that’s being done right now is specifically on cis heterosexual bodies. Yeah, exactly. White and often very young. So I’d love to know from your perspective as a scientist and a researcher – what do you think it’s going to take for science to become more inclusive so that the results are more meaningful to a larger body of us?
Emily Nagoski: I think it’s already happening. What made Come As You Are possible is the fact that for the last 30, and especially the last 15 years, more and more women are becoming sex researchers. So they read the research and they see the way that traditionally male sex researchers have written about women’s sexuality and have been like, “Oh, I think you are missing something.” Because the assumption is always that we know what goes on for dudes, so what goes on for dudes must be what’s supposed to go on for the lady girl types. So the extent to which a lady girl type is different from a doodly bro type is the extent to which that lady girl type is broken. So the women’s sex researchers have come in and been like, “I’m pretty Sure that’s not a safe assumption to make.” And this has been happening since the 70s, for sure, but it’s really accelerated in the last 15 years. Without those researchers, Come As You Are wouldn’t have existed.
So one of the things is we need greater representation or greater diversity among the researchers themselves. I would say that sex research is doing a pretty okay job of getting women into the fold. But only white women, we have done a terrible job of making that space accessible to people of color. Of course there are – there’s an extra layer of stereotype and stigma around sexuality for people of color. It was a challenge I faced when I was writing Come As You Are, because I have these stories that you follow – these four women whose stories you follow through the book, and it was really essential to me that it not be for white women. But it was also really essential to me that I help avoid and counter the stereotypes and shaming stigmas that get applied to people of different races and ethnicities, just on the basis of that. So for African-American women, there’s this Mammy stereotype or else the Jezebel stereotype. It was really important for me that if I was going to read an African-American woman, that she not conform with either of those things.
Emily Nagoski: So it makes sense to me – the further I got into the complexities and pressures around sexuality for people of color, the more I was like, “Well, it makes perfect sense to me that a person would, even if they’re really interested in the science, they’re just not going to choose sex research because if they stand up in front of a group of people, especially because that room is going to be 90 plus percent white people, they in their body of color are going to be received differently.” And I already know what it’s like to stand up in front of people in a woman’s body and be judged in a particular way, because I’m talking about sex. I can only imagine the ways that that would escalate tenfold if you are not a white woman. So that’s going to get better, but it’s going to be slow. We’ve done a pretty good job of attracting people who are non-heterosexual. And I think we’re going to do an even better job – one of the pieces of this is that the technology is improving, making it easy for us to get meaningful sample sizes of people outside the kyriarchy – the cisgender, white, heterosexual 20-30 something. So, the better the technology gets, the more we can find ways to be inclusive of communities that wouldn’t otherwise participate in sex research, and communities where we would usually get such a small number of people participating that we can’t necessarily draw a meaningful conclusion.
One of the most exciting advances for me is when you read about ambulatory kits, so when the researchers can ship you a piece of technology so that you can participate in the survey from home. So you strap yourself into the device that’s going to measure blood flow to your genitals, and the heart rate monitor and everything, and they give you a computer and you watch all the videos and you respond to the questionnaires. Then you ship back the hardware.
Dawn Serra: That’s awesome.
Emily Nagoski: So you don’t have to live in Toronto or New York or Amsterdam, or in a place where they’re doing the research in order to be a participant and have your information count.
Dawn Serra: Oh my gosh, I’m so excited about that.
Emily Nagoski: So even more than the internet, I think the development of really effective ambulatory hardware is going to help us to be way more inclusive.
Dawn Serra: I am so happy to hear about that development, and I hope that it gets used widely and creatively to get better sample sizes and better representation in the research.
Emily Nagoski: And people who wouldn’t otherwise go into the lab might be more willing to participate if they can do it from their house.
Dawn Serra: Yes. I think you’re so right, that so much research happens in a very local, local to the university, that’s conducting the research. And all of the people who live in rural towns or the suburbs or who can’t take time off work to go in the middle of the day to a university for the study – this greatly increases access.
Emily Nagoski: It even reduces the ethical question of paying people to participate in research, because then if you’re a person who’s living below the poverty line, and we’re paying you $500 to participate in sex research that $500 could change your life for a month at least, right? That’s really important. So is it really fair to offer a person – how free are they to choose to say yes or no to participate in that research? So I think it helps with the ethical questions involved in doing human subjects research on sexuality also.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. So speaking of research, I’d love to know personally for the work that you’re doing, what is something that you really, really wish we had more research around like, a place where we don’t have enough data and you just feel like, “Oh, God, I wish we had some really good data about this thing,” because it doesn’t exist. What would you say?
Emily Nagoski: In chapter three, I talk about the brain mechanism that governs all motivation, really, it’s the wanting liking, learning. I call them expecting, enjoying, and eagerness. So almost all that research is done exclusively in rats.
One of the main reasons why it’s not done in humans is the technology necessary to measure these fine grained distinctions in human functional brain studies, is not fine enough. We don’t have hardware to effectively measure these distinctions and really see the dynamics of how these three different systems are interacting with each other. As a result of which, we still have people writing about the pleasure centers of the brain as if it’s all about reward and not about a distinction between what you like, what you want, and what you expect. We must know more about that. The reason my arousal non-concordance work and writing is different from what you’ve seen other places is because I’ve read Kent Barraages and Morten Kringelback and those folks, rat research on the wanting-liking distinction. And if you don’t know that distinction, then you’re going to be really confused when you read about arousal non-concordance, but it’s only when we have studied it in humans, especially with functional brain imaging, that we’re really going to have a strong empirical foundation for all the things that I really think we’re going to find are true about arousal non-concordance.
Dawn Serra: Well, I hope that that happens in the next couple of years.
Emily Nagoski: That was a really nerdy answer. Sorry.
Dawn Serra: No, it’s great. For people who read the book, you’ll completely understand what Emily is talking about…
Emily Nagoski: We need to be re-imagining magnets, that’s the problem is that magnets aren’t good enough.
Dawn Serra: That’s the part of your TED Talk where you’re playing out little rats, right?
Emily Nagoski: Right. Yes. That’s about the sensation being context dependent. There’s other studies that are specifically about distinguishing between wanting and liking, so if you give a rat salt water like the salinity of the ocean, the rat goes, “[disgusted sounds]” Because it tastes terrible and they know that. You can teach them, “Hey, when this little light turns on, we’re going to give you salt water,” and they go, “Oh, don’t give it the salt water!” But then if you give them a drug that depletes their sodium levels, which is sodium, you have a drive for sodium. We have to keep the right levels of electrolytes, that kind of thing. If you deplete their sodium levels, they hate the taste of the salt water, but they will go over and chew on that little light and try to make the light come on so they can get the salt. They don’t like it, but they want it.
Dawn Serra: Interesting.
Emily Nagoski: Right? So that’s some of the behavioral rat research that’s been done to help illustrate the difference between wanting and liking. People experience addiction, go through this sort of process with greater incentive salience. It means that when you’re presented with something that activates memories of the thing you’re addicted to your brain goes like… It doesn’t have a pleasure light up. It has a wanting light up, which is a very different thing.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Oh my gosh, there’s so many awesome things that we still need to learn about and expand on. Okay, well, we’re almost at the end of our hour and what I’d really love to end with is you recently made an announcement that you are going to be spending the next year writing a science-based guide for women who feel exhausted and overwhelmed, but also they’re somehow not doing enough. You mentioned that the title of the book is “Burnout”.
Emily Nagoski: The working title.
Dawn Serra: I know in your previous book, Come As You Are, was all about desire and libido and sexual pleasure. And you’re shifting now to talking about women’s overall well being based on the science, which of course has a big impact on sexual pleasure and sexual experience. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what brought this about and what you’re digging into with this book.
Emily Nagoski: It’s not necessarily the obvious next step after you’ve written a sex book, usually, especially a book about women’s sexuality. The next step, obviously, is to write a book about men’s sexuality or maybe write a book about relationships. But what really became clear to me from writing Come As You Are, and then especially traveling around the country talking to people about Come As You Are is the section I wrote.
So chapter four is about a combination of stress and love. So many people told me that the most impactful part of the book was the section about the stress response – about fight, flight, and freeze, about having to escape the lion, and just because the stressor is gone, doesn’t mean that the physiological stress is gone and learning how to complete the cycle of stress response. So many people were learning how to manage my own overall well being was the most important factor in bringing my sexual well being up to where I wanted it to be. So it became obvious to me that the next step had to be a book about women’s overall well being, which is the foundation of sexual well being. I’m actually writing it with my twin sister, who is a choral conductor.
Dawn Serra: Oh my gosh, is that fun?
Emily Nagoski: Yeah, it’s really great. We have very similar sorts of working styles. So we’ll write a bunch of stuff and then send it to the other person who then changes everything. It’s really, really good. So my master’s degrees in counseling psychology, and her master’s degrees in choral conducting. And there was a moment a few years ago when I looked at that, and I was like, “Huh, we both got master’s degrees in how to listen to people and to have feelings.” Ever since then, we’ve been seeing more and more places of overlap between her as a choral conductor and me as a sex educator. They’re really remarkably similar because they’re both about bringing your full authentic personhood to the moment and having that be an inspiration for other people to find their authentic personhood, and be present in the moment.
So we’re writing a book that’s basically looking at the science and the practices people engage in, in order to drag themselves out from under the exhaustion, and sense of overwhelm. We just started. I mean, the book is sold, we’re writing the book, but we don’t know where it’s going to end, ultimately. But it’s looking very much like we’re going to talk a lot about shifting the way we frame the goals of our lives. Do you remember in the desire chapter I talked about the little monitor? A little monitor who knows what your goal is and how much effort you’re investing and it keeps a ratio of effort to progress. That little monitor applies to sexual desire, of course, that applies to orgasm, but it applies to every domain of our life. And it’s actually immediately to the phenomenon of learned helplessness versus optimism.
Emily Nagoski: So what we’re going to talk a lot about is how to use our understanding of that mechanism, the monitor mechanism, to make sure you always feel successful and like you’re making progress, and learning what you can let go of, and also using science to figure out what counts as enough. When can you look at your life and be like, “I did it. I’ve done all the things and I can feel satisfied and good.” How can we create more moments in our life where we’re like, it’s not just, “Yes, I have plenty more to do,” and you’re allowed to celebrate.
One of the key moments for me in deciding to go in this direction with a book was when the Supreme Court heard the case around same sex marriage. On the day that the ruling came down and same sex marriage became the rule of the land, most of my Facebook was like rainbows and “Yay! This is fantastic. This is amazing.” There were a couple of people who were like, “Marriage between a man and woman.” I just ignore those people. Then there were the people who were like, “Just because we’ve got same sex marriage doesn’t mean we’re done, people. There’s still so much inequality in here, all the ways we’re not equal blah, blah, blah.” There isn’t anybody who thinks we’re done. There isn’t anybody who heard “Yay, same sex marriage and now we’re all equal, and everybody has…” Nobody thought that. Yet these other people really felt like they didn’t have permission to celebrate this multi decade fight that the community and the entire nation had been participating in, just because it wasn’t the end. You’re allowed to celebrate winning a big battle. That’s a win. That’s a joy and a delight. So what’s going on when people feel like they don’t have permission to celebrate something that’s an incomplete win, given that there is no such thing as a complete win?
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Emily Nagoski: Clearly. I have feelings about it.
Dawn Serra: I’m really excited to see where you go with this. I know, part of what I do is sex and relationship coaching primarily with cis women, sometimes with couples. But one of the things that comes up for me over and over again and with clients is I see, for instance, someone say, “I thought I’d be more successful than I am. I thought I’d be making more money than I am, and I’m almost 40. What does my life mean? I can’t stop thinking about how unsuccessful I am compared to what I thought I would be.” Then having these conversations about, “Let’s talk about success versus fulfillment, and what’s fulfilling for you and how can you find small moments of joy.” And so often, they just can’t. They just feel like they need to do more, even though they’re already working 11-hour days and they can’t let go, and then they wonder why they can’t connect with their partner and they never want sex and they feel terrible, until they’re halfway through the sex. This is just chronic. I’m really excited to see what the science says and where you go with this, because I know that it’s something so many of us are in need of hearing.
And that is it, dear listeners. I just want to take a quick moment to thank Emily for coming on the show and being so fun and gracious, and sharing all of her amazing consent-based romance novels, and her information about science and research and what’s next for her book all about Burnout and how our overall health impacts our sexual health. If you want to stay in touch with Emily, you can follow her amazing blog, the dirty normal, and you can also find her on Twitter – @emilynagoski. Of course, all those links will be at sexgetsreal.com/ep123. You can also get links to her book Come As You Are, which is about libido and desire and also a link to her romance novel How Not to Fall. So head to sexgetsreal.com/ep123, check those links out. Also, that’s where you can send me notes and messages and stories and questions. You know I love hearing from you. Next week’s episode is me and Dylan together again. So stay tuned until then, this is Dawn Serra with Sex Gets Real. Bye.