Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski Read Free Book Online Page A

normal and healthy and beautiful and perfect just as they are.
• The genitals you see in soft-core porn images may have been digitally altered to appear more “tucked in”; don’t let that fool you into believing that all vulvas look that way.
• Find a mirror (or use the self-portrait camera on your phone) and actually look at your clitoris. Knowing where the clitoris is, is important, but knowing where your clitoris is, is power.

two
    the dual control model
    YOUR SEXUAL PERSONALITY
Laurie hadn’t actually wanted sex with her husband, Johnny—I mean, really craved it—since before their son Trev was born. At first she figured it was the pregnancy. Then she figured it was a postpartum thing.
Then she figured she was just tired.
Or depressed.
Or maybe she didn’t actually love her husband.
Or maybe she was broken.
Or maybe humans just aren’t meant to stay erotically connected after the months of cleaning baby puke off each other’s shirts.
They’d had a great run. Right up until she got pregnant, their sex life was the kind of thing you find in romance novels—hot, hungry, passionate, sweet, loving, and just kinky enough to give them something wicked to think about as they locked eyes over his parents’ Thanksgiving dinner table.
So maybe that was all they got. Maybe the rest of their lives would be sexless.
Still, they’d been trying. They’d bought some toys and massage oil. They’d tried tying her up, tying him up, using flavored lube, videoing themselves, playing games . . . and sometimes it worked, all this exploration.
But mostly it didn’t. Mostly Laurie wound up feeling sad and lonely because she loved Johnny, loved him so much it hurt, yet she couldn’t make herself want him, not even with all the novelty and adventure available to them in a twenty-first-century world of technology, fantasy, and permissiveness.
One side benefit of this whole situation was that Laurie found she could have an orgasm in about five minutes with the vibrator, and that made falling asleep easier. So she’d go to bed early and buzz herself to sleep. But she hid it from Johnny, because she was pretty sure he’d be unhappy to learn that she was having orgasm on her own but not with him. It puzzled her, this interest in solo orgasm, when hardly anything could prompt her to want sex with her husband.
So she felt stuck and confused and crazy when she sat down to talk with me about it.
Her perception of the situation—and her sense of hopelessness—changed completely when she learned what’s in this chapter: Your sexual brain has an “accelerator” that responds to sexual stimulation, but it also has “brakes,” which respond to all the very good reasons not to be turned on right now.
    Imagine it’s 1964 and you’re working in the laboratory of groundbreaking sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, at Washington University in St. Louis. You’re on the cutting edge of science, working to understand what has never been studied before, and you spend a lot of time posting want ads in the local paper. You’re looking for people, ordinary people, who are not only willing but also able to have orgasm in a laboratory (“research quarters”) while connected to machines that measure their heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, and genital response, with you and the team of scientists in the room, observing.
    When a woman responds to the ad, you invite her to the lab, where you take a detailed medical and sexual history, you conduct a physicalexam to check for any health issues, and you introduce her to the research quarters and its equipment. Next time she comes in, she practices having an orgasm in the research quarters, first on her own and then with the research team there in the room with her.
    Now she’ll be observed, measured, and assessed as she stimulates herself with the equipment in the research quarters, all the way to orgasm. For science.
    This is what you’ll observe:
    Excitement. As