Sexual Pleasure, Desire and the Impact of Stress with Emily Nagoski | Transcript
Find the episode shownotes here!
Hannah Witton
Hi everyone, welcome back to Doing It, and welcome to season five. If this is your first time tuning in, hi, hello, lovely to have you here. And if you're a returning listener: a pleasure to have you too. And thank you for your patience during our little break as I moved into a new office and got my own podcast recording area all set up and prepped for this season. Some exciting news about changes to the podcast before I introduce our guest today who, oh my god, I can't believe it. We've had a bit of a rebrand, a refresh, in terms of colors and branding. Check out our fancy new website if you like: doingitpodcast.co.uk. And also we've got video! You may see video clips from the podcast popping up on social media and my YouTube channel, and the full video episodes are available to watch on Patreon. And thank you so much to my patrons, members of The Common Room, who support this podcast and make this all possible. Thank you so much.
Hannah Witton
Okay, our guest today is the one and only Emily Nagoski, sex educator and author of Come As You Are and Burnout. You may have heard her name before because either you've read one of her books, or you've just heard me talk about her constantly on this podcast, on my YouTube channel, all over social media. Reading Come As You Are was a massive turning point for me as a sex educator, but also just as a person on their own journey, understanding their own sexuality, and navigating sexual relationships. I am thrilled and honored to get to interview Emily and for her to kick off season five of doing it.
Hannah Witton
In this episode, we really get into it. Emily takes us through the very important differences between pleasure, arousal, desire, and consent. We of course, talk about responsive and spontaneous desire and how the model of responsive desire can be misunderstood and cause some ethical problems. We get into stress and the impact of stress on sexual desire, what the stress cycle is and how you can complete it even if the thing that is stressing you out won't go away. And we talk about Emily's new book that she's writing currently, the world of sex research, and arousal non-concordance, I hope you enjoy listening to two grown women completely nerd out about sex. And I hope you find this conversation interesting or insightful in any way. As usual, you can find more info and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the shownotes over at doingitpodcast.co.uk where you can also find a full transcript available. And please let us know what you think over on our Twitter or Instagram, which is @doingitpodcast. And if you like this episode, please give us a rating and review over on iTunes. It really helps us out and very much appreciated. And without further ado, here is the fabulous Emily Nagoski.
Hannah Witton
Emily, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome.
Emily Nagoski
It's a delight for me. I listen all the time.
Hannah Witton
How are you doing? Really?
Emily Nagoski
I'm pandemic swell.
Hannah Witton
Good. Good, good. Good.
Emily Nagoski
How are you?
Hannah Witton
I'm doing great. I'm honestly so honoured to have you on the podcast. When I said on Instagram that you would be coming on, there was just so many people just being like, oh my goodness, she's amazing. Her book changed my life. Like, tell her she's an absolute hero. So just from me and many of our listeners, thank you and I think we're all just like very excited and having a bit of a like a fanboy/girl/person moment right now.
Emily Nagoski
Aw! Well, I feel the same way.
Hannah Witton
It's all mutual. We love it. So first I guess I just wanted to talk about the main book, the one that like kind of everyone - everyone - feels like everyone in my circles has read. Come As You Are. And you've probably heard so many stories about the impact that that book has had. But what I wanted to talk about was the new edition, because whilst it's had really amazing positive impacts on people's lives, you recently published a new edition with some changes and updates. And I would love to hear about those.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. I mean, Come As You Are, the original version, I worked really hard on it and I feel like it helped a bunch of people and I like it a lot. And over the year - so it was originally - it went to press in 2014.
Hannah Witton
Oh wow. Long time ago.
Emily Nagoski
And the new one went to press in, like fall of 2020. I spent my pandemic rewriting my book. In those years, a bunch changed in the science. So I wanted to make sure that it was as current as it could be in the science. And also, I learned a lot from readers about what was working and what was not working in the way I explain these concepts. Because the difference between how scientists talk about the basic ideas of human sexuality and the way just regular people, everyday people, talk about it are different from each other in ways where wires can get crossed very badly.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Nagoski
The most salient example of this was in the difference between arousal and pleasure. And it really like the main theme of the changes I made was being extremely careful about the differences between arousal, pleasure, desire, and consent.
Hannah Witton
Okay.
Emily Nagoski
Making sure we were like very clear that these are four different things. They're related to each other, but they are separable, and they do not mean the same thing.
Hannah Witton
Okay, can you take us through the differences then?
Emily Nagoski
Okay, so, pleasure is the tiny hedonic hotspots in your emotional brain. It's the thing that lights up when you put sugar on your tongue, just innately your brain goes, oh, wow, yay. And it's a very, like tiny, specific areas in your brain. And that's pleasure. It's - liking is the technical term. "Liking" in quotation marks. Whether or not something is inherently rewarding or in context rewarding - because whether or not something activates the liking system in your brain varies depending on the context. If you're in a relaxed, fun, trusting state of mind, then more of your emotional brain becomes dedicated and willing to interpret a sensation, any sensation, as pleasurable.
Hannah Witton
This is like the tickling example.
Emily Nagoski
Exactly. And spanking and all kinds of other things. And when you're in a worse context, when you're in a stressed out, overwhelmed, exhausted, untrusting, unsafe context, your brain shifts to a place where like 90% of your brain is dedicated to avoidance motivation. So it will dislike and want to move away from virtually any sensation. Even if it was a sensation that in a different context, your brain might have interpreted as something that's like, ooh, what's that, and would move toward with curiosity. Right. So that's pleasure. I wish it were just simple, like, touch me here. Don't touch me that way. But actually, it's today, given our current circumstances, touch me this way and in this place, but not in this other way.
Hannah Witton
But tomorrow, a different story.
Emily Nagoski
Right, tomorrow, different story, one of the big myths about women's sexuality is that we're just, we're just so complex, we don't even know what we want. And like, the thing is, like, brains, our human brains are amazing. How spectacular is it that there's part of our brain that stays in tune with what's happening in all the other parts of our brain - which shift because of what's going on in our life - and it changes how it interprets the sensation based on all that contextual information. That's amazing. And it's true for everybody. It's not just women. So if today, I'm like touch me here, this is what feels good, and tomorrow, I'm like, no - that's, that's normal. That's healthy. That's my brain working correctly and appropriately. It's not that I don't know what I like. It's not that I don't know what I want. It's that what I want changes depending on the context.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And you can approach that as like, oh, we've just gathered some more information about you.
Emily Nagoski
Exactly.
Hannah Witton
This is interesting. I wonder why you felt differently about this today than you did yesterday. Okay, let's explore
Emily Nagoski
When you figure it out, when you have that sort of like, well, this is interesting. I wonder what's going on with this. When you figure it out, then you have just a tiny piece more, like, control over, like, so if I want to feel a different way about what's going on right now, what I have to do is change the context. There's nothing wrong with me, I don't have to change me. There's nothing wrong with you, I don't have to change you. We change the context that surrounds us s that my brain goes, oh, see, now I can interpret that sensation as pleasurable. So that's pleasure.
Hannah Witton
Yep.
Emily Nagoski
That's one of the four. The second is arousal, right? And this is the arousal concordance chapter, chapter six, where - the one about unwanted arousal because one of the things that happened in the science after 2014 was it became really unambiguous that the people who have a mismatch between how much their genitals are experiencing blood flow and how turned on they feel is straight women.
Hannah Witton
Oh, interesting.
Emily Nagoski
Right? Which - we still don't know why.
Hannah Witton
Okay, yeah. Because Because I read the first edition, and it was more like this happens in cis women. But it's like even more specific than that: it's straight cis women.
Emily Nagoski
Straight women. And let me say that we just don't have the research on trans women or non binary people. One of the things that I really wish was going to happen was that the research will become more inclusive. More inclusive in a way where I could refer a trans or non binary person to the research itself and be like, here is some research and have it not be -
Hannah Witton
Yeah, actually. I don't have a specific information. But a friend of mine is a doctoral researcher, I think he might have just finished his PhD. He's a trans man. And he did the genital non concordance research on trans men. I will leave this to him to explain if he's ever going to talk about it unlined. But very briefly, what he's told me is that trans men behave in a similar way to cis men. Which in terms of concordance - ,
Emily Nagoski
Amazing. That's so cool. And that's exactly the research that I have been looking for. Research led by trans and non-binary folks -
Hannah Witton
I'll put you in touch!
Emily Nagoski
Yes, please, seriously, for - as like for 15 years now, I've been saying, here's a limitation in the research, it's very cis-centric and I believe over the next 10 years, it's going to get better. And when I went back to the research in 2020, like, it hadn't gotten much better.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Okay.
Emily Nagoski
In particular, like, the language that researchers use is not language I would want any trans friend of mine to be exposed to.
Hannah Witton
Right. Yeah. So, so - arousal.
Emily Nagoski
That's exactly - right, so arousal is blood flow to the genitals. When researchers talk about it, they don't actually just mean blood flow to the genitals.
Hannah Witton
Right.
Emily Nagoski
They're talking about activation of the relevant pathways in the central nervous system. Like when you talk about arousal -
Hannah Witton
Okay. So is this because they're like, got people in like machines looking at their brains? And so they're like, oh, it's firing.
Emily Nagoski
It's because that's what the word arousal means in other domains of research. It means like activation.
Hannah Witton
Oh, yes, the senses are aroused.
Emily Nagoski
Right, yes, exactly. The senses are aroused. But it turns out -
Hannah Witton
But we think of it as just sexual arousal.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, and mostly you think of it as genital arousal. Sometimes we'll go so far as to talk about like, the other physiological arousal cues, like when your eyes dilate, and your blood pressure increases, and you get like a flush somewhere in your body, or an increase in heat and prickling. These are all like arousal, physiological arousal responses, but they're generic. They happen in response to sex related stimuli but they also happen in response to all the non sexual stimuli, of just excitement, fear -
Hannah Witton
Being cold.
Emily Nagoski
Anger - like, being cold - you just, they're just, they're just arousal symptoms. But when I used the word in the book, I was using it the way that uh, that researchers use it, not recognizing that there's a difference between how the scientists use it, and how regular people, my students, use it. And so when I was talking about responsive desire, which is one of like, the really important ideas in the book, I said, that responsive desire emerges in response to arousal, which is correct from a scientific point of view. You increase activation of the relevant pathways, and with enough of that activation, in the right context, as we were talking about, that is when desire emerges. So I was saying that desire emerges in response to arousal, haha -
Hannah Witton
But in fact, it's pleasure.
Emily Nagoski
I, it's - it's not incorrect that it's arousal -
Hannah Witton
Or, or, how like, people would understand it.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. Here's what happened. So I'll give you an example. I talked to a journalist actually. Just as I was finishing up the rewrite of Come As You Are, and so she was not the first person to tell me a story like this. But it was just such a clear example. Right? So it's the pandemic, she and her husband both have PhDs, they're both working from home, they have a small child, they are experiencing what so many people experienced during the pandemic. So they had both read, Come As You Are, they both completely understood what it said based on the words I used. And so she puts kid to bed, they're both sitting down on the couch in front of the TV, to watch through something, and he puts his hands down her pants.
Hannah Witton
Right.
Emily Nagoski
And she's like, no, I am not turned on. I'm not interested right now. And he said, but you will be.
Hannah Witton
Right. Which actually feels like a very common phrase that I've heard. Unfortunately.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. And like the super dark extension of this - cuz like when she was just like, get - would you not - no, he went away. But this actually gets used as a weapon against women saying "but you will be." Like if I can make your genitals respond, if you can be aroused in that way, then therefore you want and like it also.
Hannah Witton
Right. Yeah.
Emily Nagoski
And pleasure only happens in a context.
Hannah Witton
Because somebody on Instagram actually asked about like, how do you find the line between responsive desire and coercion as well? Because I think that this is something that comes up for a lot of people, of like, wait, but is it response to desire or are you just like pressuring somebody else to like it because you know that their body will eventually give in?
Emily Nagoski
That is - oh, yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly it. And oh, boy, oh, boy. So the very first time it happened was actually just a couple - yhe first time I heard a story like this was a couple of months, after Come As You Are came out. And I like in the conversation, I was another journalist I was talking to - I couldn't figure out how to make it clear that like - her struggle was like, how do you start having sex before you want it? And I was like, responsive desire, like -
Hannah Witton
There's your answer!
Emily Nagoski
It will emerge in response to arousal. And it was only a couple of days later,that I remembered some Victorian porn that I was exposed to as part of my sexual attitude reassessment training, where over and over the story is that he starts sexually touching a woman. And she resists and says no, and tries to get away. But eventually her lubricious temperament will not allow her to resist anymore. So if you just like grab a woman and start doing things to her, eventually, she will not be able to help liking it. And I realized that people were reading arousal first then desire as like, just do stuff and eventually, the person won't be able to help it. And I was like, oh, no, no.
Hannah Witton
So how does it actually work?
Emily Nagoski
So the thing is, technically, that is how it works. Which is why I was like, why do I do? And that's all I had to do was recognized that when I said arousal, people were hearing genital response. I was like, no! Okay, so what's a word I can use that means the thing I intended to mean, and the word I can use is pleasure.
Hannah Witton
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Nagoski
Is pleasure. Because it's only arousal that happens in a context where a person's brain is willing to interpret a sensation as pleasurable. Because we know from arousal non-concordance and we know from the context sensitivity of pleasure, that just because your body is responding doesn't mean you want or like what is happening.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Especially for straight women, apparently.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, for straight women in particular, for what reason we do not yet know.
Hannah Witton
I really wanna know now!
Emily Nagoski
For straight cis women - researchers are working on it and are looking forward to figuring it out. There are some sort of like biological, like, evolutionary explanations, but I'm actually feeling more attracted right now to the cultural stories. So let's take for example, a lesbian woman who spends her whole childhood being exposed to heteronormative messages about what sexuality is. She discovers somewhere along the line that like, oh, that narrative has nothing to do with me. And she's put in a position of like, recalibrating everything she knows about what counts as a sex related stimulus, because what counts as sex related for her has never matched the cultural narrative. And so she was never chained to conforming with the culturally constructed aspirational cis het normative ideal. And so her brain just like, isn't shaped by the culture in the same way that a cis het woman's brain, which is like yes, that is a description of me and so therefore all of these different things that I'm exposed to count as sex related, and so my body's gonna respond, or you - you expect your body to respond regardless of whether you want or like it. And I think actually the problem not to get super dark real early, but the problem - the problem is this here rape culture, is that the things we're exposed to that count as sex related stimuli -
Hannah Witton
Are sexual violence.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, so many of them are unwanted and unliked and nonconsensual? Yeah. So basically, I wonder if we lived in a culture that were not so dangerous for cis het women - then again, it's dangerous for everybody.
Hannah Witton
All women. And everybody. Yeah.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, for all trans people to and all non binary people in particular are targets of violence, both physical and sexual, and emotional. So if we could raise like 100 women, from little babies in a world where they're never exposed to sexual violence, coerced sex, unwanted sex, any narratives about how their bodies are shameful, dirty, disgusting, and if you touch that no one will ever love you - I wonder what would happen to their arousal non concordance? I wonder if if, if we, if we didn't teach them that their bodies are disgusting, if maybe their brakes would be freed up, and they respond with more - not that I'm holding arousal concordance as like a gold standard of any kind. Because I don't think that it is and the more space we create for the idea of non concordance in people of every body and every gender identity, I know for sure that it makes the world a better place. Like I have heard from cis het dudes who were told that they - their experience of having been assaulted must be their imagination. And that's not actually what happened because they got an erection.
Like the myth of arousal non concordance - that if your genitals are doing something, then that's the same as consent. That damages everybody. And it also puts men at risk if they believe this myth that like, well, like you said no but your body said yes, like but you were so wet, that kind of thing -
Hannah Witton
Yeah, yeah.
Hannah Witton
Which is such a part of our culture that there's like literally songs.
Emily Nagoski
Literally songs.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Emily Nagoski
Literally songs!
Hannah Witton
In terms of like, the dominant culture - so this was an idea that I came across in Katherine Angel's book, which I think you read as well.
Emily Nagoski
Oh yeah.
Hannah Witton
And she has a lot to say about the dark side of responsive desire.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. And the whole time, I was like, no, I fixed it in Come As You Are!
Hannah Witton
I know! But one of the things that she said that I thought was really interesting, was - because you talk about the differences between spontaneous and responsive desire and a key idea that she has is around: actually, is all desire responsive? And -
Emily Nagoski
All desire is responsive, that's correct.
Hannah Witton
Okay. Yeah. And her theory about like, we think of men, cis men, as having more spontaneous desire but that's just because their desires -
Emily Nagoski
Their threshold is different.
Hannah Witton
They're reflected back at them, like everywhere they go, like, oh, your desires are completely normal and expected and encouraged. And so then you're just more likely to then experience desire, which you then think of as being spontaneous, but actually, it's just in response to the society that welcomes you.
Emily Nagoski
Right? Yeah. It's like anything with privilege. Yep. I don't understand why anybody would struggle with this. It seems fine to me.
Hannah Witton
Because I thought of myself as someone who like experiences a bit of both, like, I definitely have had experiences of just like, oh, okay, now I'm horny. But then trying to look at it and being like, what actually triggered that? Like, what was that actually in response to? Like, it didn't come out of nowhere. Like, what actually, was it? Yeah. Okay. So all desires is responsive. Good to know.
Emily Nagoski
My favorite thing about Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is that Katherine Angel does not at all shy away from being like, here's what's actually going on in the research. Which is like, there's a bunch of stuff in there, I had to skip. So I was like, just somebody wrote that down. Somebody put that in a book. Like, because, like I say, really briefly, that like, actually all desire is responsive but people experience it as spontaneous so we're just going to talk about it as if it's spontaneous. It's absolutely a shortcut just to make the language accessible for people. And like Katherine Angel's like, no, no, we're going to be extra precise. We're going to talk about what is actually happening, not just about what it feels like is happening. Loved that.
Hannah Witton
Okay. Have we been through all of those four things? Pleasure, arousal, kind of desire?
Emily Nagoski
No.
Hannah Witton
We've talked a bit about it, but what actually - what actually is desire then?
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, so, the thing I changed - the thing I got wrong about desire was saying that it emerges in response to arousal, which it does, except only in the way that scientists mean arousal. Like when I read my rewrite of this to my writing group - there's a physician in my writing group. And she was like, I'm so glad you said that, because I think of arousal as activation of the relevant pathways in the central nervous system. So it's very painful for me to know that other people are hearing something else. Thank you for clarifying that. And I was like, oh, thank God. I'm not the only one who was like oh shit. That's not what people mean when they say arousal. So my language has change that spontaneous desire emerges in response - no spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. Right? So there's a sort of like there's a tingling happening in the brain, there is some activation happening. But like no explicit sexual content is happening in their world necessarily. There's an anticipation of pleasure. Whereas responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
Hannah Witton
Got it.
Emily Nagoski
Which only happens - because you've read the first four chapters, you know that pleasure only happens in the right context. And now you know how to create the right context, which means you know how to create pleasure, which means you know how to create desire.
Hannah Witton
We did it!
Emily Nagoski
That's the order that it goes in. We fixed it! And then consent is something else. Consent is like, a human being's individual decision yes or no to whatever's happening in the moment. And you can be aroused, your genitals can be responding, you can be experiencing pleasure, you like what is happening, you can want more stuff to happen, and still say no. You can be at a party kind of kissing on your certain special someone and be like, this is super hot. It really - but no, not here and not right now. We're gonna have to go back to the apartment. I'm sorry, friend.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Because consent is also context specific.
Emily Nagoski
Right! And it varies tremendously from person to person and situation to situation, relationship to relationship and from moment to moment. Like at any given point, someone can withdraw consent without being required under any circumstances to explain why.
Hannah Witton
And I think it's important to say here that like, it's all well, and good saying those things but like, it can be so hard in that moment.
Emily Nagoski
So much easier said than done.
Hannah Witton
Exactly. And, and like, I've had moments, like in a long term relationship, where we're like, in the throes of things, but then my brain just is suddenly like, "I'm not into it." And like, then you're doing that thing in your head of like, "I can either carry on and just go with it. Or I need to stop this flow and just be like, I'm not vibing." And it's so hard. And like, luckily, I've been able to, like build a foundation in my relationship, where like, even though I have that internal conflict of like, "Oh, do I - I guess I have to say this out loud now, because I've - because I'm thinking -"
Emily Nagoski
So what makes that hard? What is the like, potential consequence? Or what's the - what's going on?
Hannah Witton
The hurt feelings and the interrupting the flow.
Emily Nagoski
Of your partner?
Hannah Witton
Yeah. But from experience, when I have done that, there have been no hurt feelings. So what's happened is, then it's just like, positively reinforces that it's fine. Yeah.
Emily Nagoski
It's very few people who are douchebags. And most people would much rather interrupt the flow than continue having sex with someone who is not there.
Hannah Witton
Not into it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, not like, yeah, that's kind of how it feels. It's like, I'm not there. Like, I'm really not present. And so I just kind of like have to stop and like, and what often happens, actually, like, not every time - but we'll stop and then like, talk about it, and I'd be like - sometimes you don't really have the words to describe it but you just like, "I'm just not feeling it," and then we're just like lying there having a chat and then somehow, it will then just like -
Emily Nagoski
And it comes back.
Hannah Witton
It comes back, and it just comes back. And it'll escalate into like a really hot, sexy time. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes it's just about having that reset. So I just want to say that like, yes, you absolutely can stop sex in the middle of sex.
Emily Nagoski
Can we also - so there's an idea that's in Burnout, my stress book that I wrote with my sister, that I was tempted to put in the new version of Come As You Are, but I didn't because it would be - my goal is to make it only 100,000 words instead of 110,000. So like, I didn't add this idea, but in Burnout, we call it human giver syndrome. This idea that certain people have a moral obligation to be, here's the list: pretty, happy, yet calm, generous, and unfailingly attentive to the needs of others regardless of the cost to themselves, to sacrifice their comfort and convenience, their time, their attention, their smiles, their patience, their bodies, their hopes and dreams, sometimes their lives. Sacrificed on the altar of someone else's comfort and convenience. And the black and white version of this is - our original language came from Kate Manne's very wonderful Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, which is a book of moral philosophy about male sexual entitlement essentially, and hurt.
Hannah Witton
Fun.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty dark book, but it's not very long. So if you have the spoons for it, I really recommend it. And she wrote a follow up book about Himpathy. Which is - that - our tendency to give men the benefit of the doubt, and to worry about, "oh, this is going to ruin his future" when he's accused of sexual assault and things like that. So, the in the black and white cartoon version, women are the givers and men are the human beings who have a moral obligation to be their full humanity as competitive, entitled and acquisitive, as they need to be in order to maximize their potential. In reality, it is nowhere near that simple. I am married to a cis het dude. And my wife is too - I'm sorry, I'm married to a cis het dude. And my sister is also. My sister is also my work wife.
Hannah Witton
Love that.
Emily Nagoski
So there's, so she's also married to a cis het dude. And both of them are natural human givers. Like they will show up for us and give everything they have to help us. And the dynamic between me and my husband is really different. Because it's our job in our relationship to watch the other person's boundaries more so than even the other person themselves would watch them because they're givers and they're not paying attention to their boundaries, they're paying attention to the other person's needs. And so my partner needs me to pay attention to his boundaries and be like, "hey, check, are you like doing enough of your own stuff? Are you getting it, like, can I help you somehow?" and he does the same thing for me, which is really different than a relationship between a human being and a human giver, where the giver gives and gives and gives and the more that giver gives, the more entitled the human being feels to take whatever it is.
So the cultural scripts, like when you're born and people look at your genitals, they declare what gender you are, and they hand you a user's manual. And the it's a girl bodies get the giver manual, and the it's a boy bodies get a human being manual and as we get older, we get to make choices about how much we actually believe this is true. One of the symptoms of human giver syndrome is the belief that your moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to other people's needs is not a myth. That's real. That's true. I do I have that moral obligation. And if I fall short in any way, then I deserve to be punished. And if there's not someone around to punish me, I'm going to go ahead and beat the crap out of myself.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Mm hmm.
Emily Nagoski
So when - people who find themselves in the position of being a human giver who care more about the other person's well being than they do about theirs? Those are absolutely people who are going to find it difficult to say, "hey, let's pause," when they're in the middle of something, because they don't want to hurt their partner's feelings. They don't want to interrupt the flow. They don't want to inconvenience the other person just to meet their own totally unimportant news. So the more we can like, figure out - and it's not bad to be a giver. It's only bad when you're giving and it's -
Hannah Witton
Sacrificing.
Emily Nagoski
- situated in a context where the other person feels entitled to take whatever you have, and where they actually will. Those handful of people who are douchebags, who will be like, "But hey, I'm entitled to keep having this sex, I don't care how you feel." They usually will not say it as explicitly as I don't care how you feel.
Hannah Witton
"But you usually do this ..."
Emily Nagoski
"Don't you want me?" Yeah. But hey. So human giver syndrome is another idea that I think has an important role to play and how difficult it can be to protect our own boundaries. We really don't feel like we deserve them.
Hannah Witton
And speaking of your book Burnout, which is all about stress, because you have some stuff about stress in comments you are. But I feel like stress comes up all of the time when it comes to experiencing sexual desire and like having any kind of sex life. What did you learn from Burnout, from writing Burnout, that you can apply to the kind of like sexual desire stuff as well in terms of helping people access that if they're feeling real stressed?
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So I actually wrote Burnout because of people's response to Come As You Are, like, there's all this sex science and there's all the stuff about response or desire and arousal non-concordance and orgasm and stuff, and I worked really hard on that and I'm glad it helped people. But when I was traveling around promoting it, over and over, people would come up to me and be like, you know, the thing that really changed everything for me, though, was that one part about stress and feelings. And I was like, "Huh, really?" So I told this to my sister, I have an identical twin sister named Amelia, who is a choral conductor. She has a doctorate in choral conducting and she was like, "Yeah, no shit." As part of her master's degree, she has a performance degree MFA in conducting and her training involves learning how to like express the emotional and musical intention of the composer to her choir. So that her choir could express it. And she was like, "Yeah, so like, complete the song. Go through the tunnel." Yeah. "But just because I learned how to do that on the podium," my sister said, "that doesn't mean I knew how to do that in real life. And you remember that time when learning how to do it in real life has saved my life twice." And I remembered that I had taught her the stuff that would eventually go into Come As You Are, because she was hospitalized during her doctoral degree. Classical music is as misogynist as any STEM field, maybe more so. Very often, it's groups of old white men sitting around in rooms talking about why it is perfectly fine that it's groups of old white men sitting around.
Hannah Witton
"It's tradition."
Emily Nagoski
She was bodily unwelcome in her doctoral program, because she was a woman. And so she had to fight every day. And the stress accumulated in her body, until ultimately, she was like, you know, lying on the floor in so much pain she literally thought she might die. They kept her in the hospital for days without ever having a diagnosis. And I was like, what is happening? And I taught her about completing the stress response cycle. And it helped. She wasn't quite in time, she ended up in the hospital a second time and was like, "Oh, I actually really need to take this seriously, huh?" And so when I remember that I was like, yeah, so we should write a book about that.
Hannah Witton
So what is completing the stress cycle, what does that look like?
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, so the way we're usually taught about stress is you just need to relax. Relax. And the deal is, that's not how it works. All of our bodily processes are cycles. Digestion is a cycle, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, right. And if you get stuck in the middle, some not so great things can happen.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, I've had some stuff stuck in the middle before. And that has also led me to being hospitalized. So.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, it's remarkably common actually, like the number of women in the UK in particular, we spent like 10 days in London when Burnout first came out, and the number of women who came up to us afterwards and said that they had been hospitalized. One was like, "I just got out of the hospital three days ago, undiagnosed, pain like I thought I was gonna die. And this is what I needed to hear." So - and sleep is another one. We're not designed to, like, be asleep all the time. We're also not designed to be awake all the time. We're designed to oscillate through the cycle, over the course of the day, right? Connection is a cycle. We're designed to oscillate into connection, and back to autonomy and back to connection and back to autonomy. We have to oscillate into - one of the reasons the pandemic has been difficult for -
Hannah Witton
I feel like me and my partner have been doing that during lockdown together, of like connection with each other and then like be separate again.
Emily Nagoski
"Get the fuck away from me."
Hannah Witton
And then let's come together and then be separate again.
Emily Nagoski
And most of us have been taught to value either one or the other to say that autonomy is the good thing and you just get like tiny little bits of connection and that should be enough for you. And others of us have been raised to believe that, no, we need to be in connection all the time, I want to be with you all the time. And you're - just like eating like you're not designed to eat all the time, you need to like eat some and then rest. Like you can get full up on connection and need to like take some space, some time by yourself to digest and - there's a lot of individual differences in what that appetite looks like. Introverts need more time by themselves, extroverts need more time and connection. And if you've got like a different - if you've got like a biverted relationships.
Hannah Witton
Ambivert.
Emily Nagoski
Where one of you is an extrovert and one of us an introvert and you are locked in the house, it doesn't matter how much you love and admire and respect each other, like you're going to have to do some work to manage the distance and make sure each person gets enough connection but nobody gets like overstuffed because if you get overstuffed on connection, you just end up pushing the person away.
Hannah Witton
That's been - that's been our relationship management for the last year and a half. I'm the extrovert.
Emily Nagoski
And you're like, "Pay attention, let's do things! And your partner's like -
Hannah Witton
He's like, "We did things together yesterday. I'm like, and another day, please, I've got no one else to do things with anymore."
Hannah Witton
Exactly. And that has been the problem with lockdown for extroverts is you're like, "You're you're all I have right now." And the internet is not enough. It really doesn't replace in person contact. So one of the things I learned over the course of writing Burnout was all of these things are oscillations, they're cycles. And wellness is not a state of mind, it's a state of action. It's that freedom to oscillate through all of these processes, these cycles that are built into a mammalian body. And that includes stress which has a beginning, a middle and an end and alas, in the same way that the pandemic interfered with our natural ability to get our needs for connection met, the modern world interferes with our ability to get our basic stress response needs met.
So what completes the stress response cycle doesn't match what deals with the thing that caused the stress in the first place. So like traffic, or even relationship conflict, because if you're stuck in traffic, you're like sitting on the train, and like your body is having the same physiological responses if you're being chased by a lion, right, which is sort of the evolutionary origin of it, like you got this adrenaline response so that you can beat the crap out of somebody or run away and like, that's not gonna help you. It's not going to make the train move any faster. It's not going to make people smell any better. It's not going to get them to like, get off the train any faster. Like, you're just sitting there stewing in the stress juice. Yeah. And then you get off the train you get home. And do you feel better now? Do you feel like, “Ah, the sun shines brighter?
Hannah Witton
And I guess it depends on my friends and family?
Emily Nagoski
Well, also, how do you welcome them when you walk in the door? People receive that energy when you get home. So evenly, you've dealt with the stress or by actually making it out of the traffic. You have to do something that deals with the stress itself, which is stored in the body. It’s like your body wants to purge all this chemistry. And there are seven evidence based strategies for doing this. Just in chapter one
Hannah Witton
Is screaming one of them.
Emily Nagoski
Oh, screaming is one of them. laughing and crying are all absolutely yeah, jumping up and down and shaking any form of physical movement. Hugging until relaxed is one. And connection of many different kinds, where you're just like engaging in behaviours that help your body to shift, out of the stress response and into the relaxation responses. These are the behaviours that tell your body, your body is now a safe place for you to be.
Hannah Witton
So a bubble bath won't help but maybe crying in the bubble bath will?
Emily Nagoski
Absolutely. Absolutely. Though, there is a trick to crying. My sister's the one who taught me this, because she's not good at crying. I've always been like awesome at crying. It's one of my skills.
Hannah Witton
I'm pretty good at crying.
Emily Nagoski
But Amelia is not a good crier. She actually has alexithymia, she is like clinically bad at knowing when she has to cry. So the first time she ever figured it out, she was actually crying in a therapist's office and like talking about a problem. And our therapist paused and said, "So let's just take a moment to notice what the crying feels like. And like, let's let's stop thinking about the thing, the stressor that caused the stress, and just think about what this feels like just in a non-judgmental way notice like, the heat and the prickling of your hair and what's going on with your digestion, muscle tension and your heart rate." And Amelia is like describing all the things that are happening and she takes a breath to keep talking and the therapist says, "And how do you feel now?" And Amelia was like, "It's - it's gone? Just finished."
Hannah Witton
Wow.
Emily Nagoski
And the therapist was like, "Yeah, that's what happens. If it starts. It ends." "Just by itself?" Yeah! The key is to stop feeding the crying thoughts.
Hannah Witton
I feel like I know people who when they cry, instead of just letting themselves cry, they're like fighting it. Because they are physically uncomfortable crying, and they're like, ugh, and I'm just like, no, just like, let it happen, like, let it wash over you.
Emily Nagoski
Let it go, let it.
Hannah Witton
Exactly, yeah, I'm a big fan of crying.
Hannah Witton
And there's like all kinds of cultural messages that tell us why not to cry. And there might be hormonal reasons that make it more difficult for some people to cry than others. I know a trans person who said that, as he transitioned onto T, it suddenly became more difficult for him to cry, like, you'd have to create a context. Like, go be alone in a room and really focus and like, create as much space as possible to let the crying happen because it was like his body was resisting and fighting it. I don't know if that's a universal or typical experience for people on T.
Hannah Witton
I've heard that from a couple of trans men on T as well that they found crying harder. But again, just anecdotal at this point,
Hannah Witton
Right? Yeah. And if you're raised with the it's a boy user's manual, you are certainly also told that crying is for girls, and there's nothing worse than being like a girl. So there's cultural messages obviously too that stands in the way but crying is like one of those super good for you - crying, screaming, laughing moving your body, connection. It can be hugging a human, it can be connection with animals, sometimes it's easier with animals. Sometimes it can be with nature, it can be with the divine, creative self expression, just your imagination, like going into a room and like closing your eyes and very vividly imagining beating the crap out of whoever it is who activated your stress response cycle. Not allowed to do that in actual real life, but you can do anything you want in your imagination. And when you complete the stress response cycle - for most people stress hits the sexual brakes - you complete the stress response cycle. That is how you release the brake and prevent it from interfering with your interest in pleasure. In sex.
Hannah Witton
This has made me think as well, like so if we're separating the stress from the stressor then you could be in a situation where the stressor still exists, but you still allow yourself to go through the response cycle, because you could have something that's like stressful at work, but you don't want to bring it home. And so you complete the cycle, so that you don't have to bring it home, but the stressor still exists, the stressor is still out there, but you're just like not dealing with it right now,
Hannah Witton
This is the good news is that you can deal with the stress, even when the stressor still exists. And it's important that you do, because in order for you to be well enough to deal with it again tomorrow, it's better if you can like recalibrate your body into a more relaxed place. And hopefully there are some people out there thinking like, well, if this is the case, then I am walking around with some decades of incomplete stress response cycles in my body. I'm like, yeah, a lot of us are.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And also just like the general stress, like especially if you're somebody with a marginalized identity, and just like, living in a world that is sexist, transphobic, homophobic, racist, like, ablest, all these things, that that is just like a constant stress on your life. And it's like, well, like that stressor, unfortunately, isn't going away anytime soon. Like, we can do stuff to help. But like, we can't just like snap our fingers, and it's gone. So I guess you do have to find ways just like on a daily, weekly, basis to move through this cycle. So that that stress isn't - yeah.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, in fact when it comes to identity stress, when just going out into the world is a stressor, it is an act of revolution, it is an act of rebellion, to engage in completing the stress response cycle. In a world that doesn't really care whether you live or die, for you to care that your body stays healthy and well, and to dedicate time and attention - as Audre Lord said, "Caring for myself is an act of rebellion." We should look up what the actual quote is. "Caring for myself is not self indulgence. It is self preservation, and that is a revolution." It's gonna be something like that. I'm sure you'll find the actual quote.
Hannah Witton
Paraphrase.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, yes. And if there's anybody still not following The Nap Ministry, Tricia Hersey is the Nap Bishop, and she's got a degree in divinity and does real deep profound work. Before the pandemic she was creating live installations of Black people napping in public in the United States, which has such a dark and atrocious history of enslaving people of African descent. When someone owns your body, then your rest is theft from the person who owns your body. Yeah, I - even saying these sentences out loud gives me a gross feeling inside me but like - this is - like I live in America. I'm a white person. I am descended on both sides, from people who either owned humans or condoned it. And it's like, it's a difficult place to live. So what that teaches us is that to centre and celebrate the rest, joy, and pleasure of Black people, people in the equatorial South, is to heal the deepest wounds of our culture.
Emily Nagoski
And in the book, one of the ways we address it is by talking about the bubble of love. I got asked - back when I had a day job, a student asked me, "So what if there literally is no place that my body is safe out in the world?" Because I talk about completing the stress response cycle is like your body is in a safe place now, your body is a safe place to be. What if there is no safe place to be? The answer is the bubble of love. You create a pocket in the world full of people who reject the idea that your life doesn't matter. You create a bubble of people who care about your wellbeing as much as you care about theirs. And you help to remind each other and protect each other. To do - like, get the sleep you actually need, to complete the stress response cycle, to - what - the ultimate moral of the story is that whenever a person is told that they need more grit, or believes they need more grit, what they need is more help. And when they believe they need more discipline or persistence, what they need is more kindness.
So the bubble of love is the place you can go where you will get help and kindness, because those people value your wellbeing as much as you value theirs. And the moral of the story is that burnout - the solution for burnout can't be self care. The thing about burnout is you have nothing left. How are you supposed to care for yourself when you have nothing left? But you know, self care is the fallout shelter you build in your basement because apparently it's your job to protect yourself from nuclear war? Okay, like, if you've got the resources, you go for it?
Hannah Witton
Yeah, there's a comic that I read where it's like self soothing, self care, and then community care and then structural care.
Emily Nagoski
Deanna Zandt is the author's name?
Hannah Witton
Yes, I think so.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. Right. So the cure for burnout can't be self care, it has to be just all of us caring for each other. Which in a sexual context, like if your stress is interfering with your brain's access to pleasure, arousal, desire, consent, then you can do things to complete the stress response cycle, but it is also fully appropriate if you've got a partner who would love for your sexuality to be moving more freely through your body because it's not obstructed by stress, they can help to complete your stress response cycles, and to eliminate the things that are activating your stress.
One of the things we recommend is actually John Gottman's 30 minute stress relieving conversation, where for 15 minutes, partner A just like talks about all the stuff that's stressing them out. And partner B's job is to respond with 100% support, like we're on the same team. Don't try to give any solution just be like, "I can't believe that asshole said that thing to you. Oh, that was a shitty thing to happen. Oh my god. Yeah, I hate that person too. Oh, that traffic. Why don't they fix that road?" Like just 100% support, no solutions, not trying to fix it. Definitely no criticism. And then after 15 minutes, you switch. The other person talks about the things that happened to them that were stressful. And partner A is now in the position of responding with 100% support. And at the end of that conversation, you have helped each other to purge the stress that was in your bodies. And you have helped to reinforce the bond between the two of you.
Hannah Witton
Like as a team.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, us against the world.
Hannah Witton
Love that.
Hannah Witton
Emily, we have like, questions from people on Instagram, but I'm going to paraphrase them all because I feel like this is a question that you probably get asked a lot and try and do like, let's do like as quick fire answer as possible, because I feel like you answer this question a lot. And I'm like, let's go, we can do it. Because this is a really common question, which is about relationships where you've got mismatched desire, and like managing that.
Emily Nagoski
Oh, yeah, differential desire is the most common reason people seek sex therapy in heterosexual relationships. The man is just as likely to be the low desire partner as the high desire partner. And, yeah, there's literally no such thing as a relationship where both people always have the same level of desire, because context influences our level of desire. So literally everyone experiences it.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And for more like specific stuff somebody asked about, like, what advice would you give to a sexless couple where one partner is unwilling to discuss it?
Hannah Witton
Yeah. That's a difficult one. And I want to know, what is it that makes this person unwilling even to discuss it? Because it sounds like a situation where there's been so much pressure placed on whether or not to have sex that the person just shuts down instantly at the mention of it?.
Hannah Witton
Mm hmm.
Emily Nagoski
This may be a couple who have been through the chasing dynamic where one person tries to initiate and the other person says no, and then Person A who was trying to initiate feels rejected and bad and so they initiate some more and now Person B, who was the declining now feels pressured, but also feels bad about themselves. But also Person A feels bad about themselves for pressing so hard. And like everybody feels terrible. And it gets into this chasing dynamic where you're just like stuck. And eventually Person B, who keeps saying no, may get to a place where they're like, "I'm not even going to talk about it anymore. Because like, you just make me feel like shit every time you ask." And again, it's just as likely to be the man as a woman in a straight cis het relationship.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So how do you get out of that pattern? Yeah. So
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So. I apologize for this answer. You turn toward the difficult feelings with kindness, and compassion. Which -
Hannah Witton
How dare you say that!
Emily Nagoski
It's hard to say but it's, it's like, it's really hard to do, because there's going to be hurt feelings on both sides. And so the higher desire partner in a situation where one partner doesn't even want to discuss it - you begin with a kind, compassionate invitation. "Whenever you choose to, at your own pace, I just want to hear about what it feels like for you even to think about talking about this." It's helpful to frame it as like, "Our relationship matters more than any thing about our sexual connection. I love you, I want you to feel happy and safe in our relationship. And I'm worried that after all the stuff we've been through, there's a part of you that doesn't feel safe with me. And I want to learn about that. And I want to know how I can help to heal that without any agenda for rebuilding any kind of sexual connection between us."
You have to - the higher desire partner in this situation that's as extreme as "my partner will not even talk to me about it" has to set your needs and desires entirely aside and just be like, "How can I help you? This clearly hard for you. You shouldn't have to carry the burden of this by yourself. Hand some of it to me." Meanwhile, the higher desire partner can also do a little work of their own to get - it's important for people - because people lack education. Like just like basic vocabulary, like the difference between pleasure, desire, arousal, and consent.
People have a script in their head of how sex is supposed to be that is so dominant that they can't even recognize the ways what a great sex life for them looks like, in the absence of somebody else's standard. So a really helpful exercise for anybody in a situation like this, whether the higher desire partner or the low desire partner, is to answer a series of questions. One of them is: what is it that I want when I want sex? It's not orgasm, you can do that by yourself. What is it though, that I want? What in particular? Is it about having sex with this person that I want? And and what is it that I like when I like sex? Recognizing that desire and pleasure are not the same thing. Desire is: what is the place I want to go? What is the state I want to achieve? What is what is the outcome I'm looking for when I want sex? What is it that I want? What is it that I like is: what do I enjoy in the moment, as our bodies, or our voices, or our texts are there in the moment? Like, what am I liking? What does that pleasure feel like?
And then there's also the questions: what is it that I don't want when I don't want sex? Especially if you're the a lower desire partner? These are questions that I developed in inspiration from Peggy Kleinplatz's miraculous genius brilliant work on people who experience optimal sexual experiences. Her book just came out last year. It's called Magnificent Sex. Highly recommended.
Hannah Witton
What a title!
Emily Nagoski
Yeah. Best title of any book ever. Like I love my book's title, but wow. So she's a therapist. She has people come into her office and partner A will say, "Yeah, I'd be perfectly satisfied if we never had sex again. I'm only here because my partner said we had to."
Hannah Witton
Hmm, good start. Yeah.
Emily Nagoski
Peggy's question, Peggy's genius question is, "So tell me more about the sex you don't want."
Hannah Witton
Ooh! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Nagoski
Right. Cuz it usually turns out that they describe the sex and it is dismal and disappointing.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And you're, like that makes sense that you don't want that.
Hannah Witton
Like, yeah, yeah. It's - here's the radical conclusion from Peggy's work: it is normal not to want sex you don't like. And so she asked a couple who's ready enough for change to come to therapy: what kind of sex is worth wanting? And I would add, what are you willing to do to create that in your life. Because there's a limit on how much people can change in their lives. And if you have kids, you cannot sell them to the circus anymore.
Hannah Witton
And we also assume, we assume that sex is like this natural thing that we're all just gonna be naturally good at. And like, you don't need any education around it when you're young. Like as soon as you hit that ripe old age of wherever sex is legal a you are, you're just gonna know exactly what you're doing. And it's gonna be amazing. And you know -
Hannah Witton
Like the fairy godmother of sex is gonna come down and bibbidi bobbidi boo you into sex queenliness.
Hannah Witton
You don't need to put any effort into having the kind of sex that you want and like.
Emily Nagoski
You don't need to recognize any way that your body or relationship changes over time. That's all irrelevant, it should just happen.
Hannah Witton
It's just human nature.
Emily Nagoski
In her interviews. Peggy and her and her team interviewed dozens of people who identified as having extraordinary sex lives. And so in addition to finding out what extraordinary sex looks like for these folks, she also asked, so how do you get there? How do you get to be a person who has extraordinary sex? And thing number one that people said was, "I had to unlearn all of the scripting around the idea that sex is supposed to be spontaneous, or natural, or that it should just happen. I had to reconsider all of my ideas about gender and bodies and love and safety. And really start from scratch in figuring out - paying really close attention to my own body and my partner's body and internal experience, and creating a sexual connection that was for us, and not for anybody else. Not paying attention to anybody else's rules. Nobody else's approval or disapproval, mattered, it was just us, whatever your relationship structure was." One of the best things about her research is that it included people of every sexual orientation, people of every relationship structure, vanilla people and kinky people. So like this thing of extraordinary sex shows up in many, many different ways but it has the same features and the same process of letting go of all that nonsense you were taught.
Emily Nagoski
In Come As You Are, I say that I teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. And I ended up having to define confidence. Confidence is knowing what's true. And that knowing about like, the brakes that we've been talking about, knowing about arousal non-concordance, knowing about responsive desire, knowing what's true about your relationship and your body, knowing what's true even when it's not what other people have said should be true. Even if it's not you yourself wish were true. Confidence is knowing what is true. I was just talking to someone who was like, "Yeah, I found out that turning on the lights hits my brakes. And I'm confident in that. And the confidence means that when my partner says I really want to see your body, she can be like, nope, click it right off."
Hannah Witton
Yeah, those lights are turned off.
Emily Nagoski
You do not have - you are - because you are confident about what works for you, you can do a better job of like, I would like to enjoy the sex as much as you do. Therefore, we're going to keep the lights off this time. Thank you very much.
Hannah Witton
Thank you.
Emily Nagoski
But Joy, joy is - joy, is the hard part because joy is loving what is true. And loving what's true, even when it's not what everybody has been telling you should be true. Even when it's not what you wish were true, right? We all get taught spontaneous desire is the right good, normal, you just happen, spontaneously, it should be natural. First of all, when we look at the research on couples who sustained a strong sexual sexual connection over the long term, whether they're in open relationships or monogamous relationships, spontaneous desire is not a characteristic of their sexual connection. Mostly. Mostly, it's responsive, it's setting up a time that works for both of you, setting the stage, getting kids out of the house. And like making time on purpose. So responsive desire, actually, is the desire associated with sex in a relationship that lasts decades. But how do you kick out the script in your head that says it's supposed to just happen that it shouldn't be all this effort?
Hannah Witton
Like this isn't good enough? Like we should be striving for this like unattainable - like what the perfect sex life is, like the script of it all.
Emily Nagoski
Right, yeah. The perfect sex life as defined by I don't know who, right.
Hannah Witton
Exactly.
Emily Nagoski
So joy - what makes joy difficult is that it means you do have to let go of the possibility that you will ever be whatever that perfect thing is.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Letting go of those expectations.
Hannah Witton
So that you can create space for embracing who you actually truly are.
Hannah Witton
By acceptance.
Hannah Witton
You have to believe that you deserve great sex. Right now. With the body you have. With the relationship that you have. You don't have to wait for your body to be perfect. You don't have to wait for desire to be spontaneous. You don't have to wait. You can show up. Create context.
Hannah Witton
You can literally make it happen, make the good sex happen. Love it.
Emily Nagoski
Is that a thing?
Hannah Witton
I don't know.
Emily Nagoski
You made it up right now?
Hannah Witton
Just like create like a pep talk. Just like make it - like I'm trying to imagine like a Tony Robbins style like motivational speech where it's like, you can make good sex happen today, like you go out and get it, honey.
Emily Nagoski
But also, you could just not because sometimes it's too, no. Sometime you have so much other shit to deal with.
Hannah Witton
Sometimes it's like effort.
Emily Nagoski
Because sometimes all you need is 10 naps and a good cry.
Hannah Witton
That's also true.
Emily Nagoski
Make it happen or not!
Hannah Witton
Or not! Whatever you want. This has been wonderful! You're currently writing another book, can you like, quickly tell us about what that is about? Give us the scoop, give us the scoop.
Emily Nagoski
So like, very early stages. But the idea is that writing a sex book, and promoting a sex book, entails thinking and talking about sex all the time but it was so stressful that I myself lost all interest in actually having any sex for a chunk of time there while I was writing and promoting Come As You Are. And so my partner and I experienced all this stuff people experience when sex goes away, like for months at a time, months at a time. So what do you do? So it's a book about what we did. How I applied what I knew from the science. It talks about some additional science that there wasn't space for in either Burnout or Come As You Are to help people - so here's one of the ideas, for example. For all that I talked about you just like you get in the bed and you accept that you're setting a date night, sometimes like you cannot get yourself to the bed, you're just like, ugh. You're like that TikTok video style, where like you're just standing up and then you fall backwards onto a couch and as you fall, magically you transition into your, like, flannel pajamas and you're just never getting off that couch. So the question is not just how do I get to the lust place in my head, because sometimes you're in a place where it feels like there is no direct path from where you are - stress, overwhelm, anxiety, depression, mommy mode, all that. parenting mode stuff, work - how you get from there to sexy.
And there's - the father of affective neurosciences, Jaak Panksepp, wrote about the seven core primary process emotions, one of which is lust. And a few of the others have doorways directly into lust. Like for example, care. Feeling cared for Like if you get to a place of feeling cared for or for caring for someone - in an adult way not in like child parent way, right - that can have a doorway into the erotic. Play can have a doorway, like when you can get into a play state. Laughing, telling jokes, rough and tumble play, story play.
Hannah Witton
Oh, I love this.
Emily Nagoski
Like if you - you don't have to go right to lust. You can be like, "Let's go do a play thing. And that will lead me to a place that has a doorway into lust." For me, in particular, it's curiosity, seeking, exploration, intellectual conversation, like learning new things, where you feel the connection of like the excitement of learning things and exploring, going new places, having adventures together. That room has a doorway into lust. So if you can't go into lust -
Hannah Witton
I think of it as like, instead of banging on the door of lust and being like, why won't you open, like open up, instead, you're just like, opening all of these other doors and exploring through all these different rooms and tunnels. And maybe at some point, one of them you'll find like a secret, hidden passage that will take you to lust.
Emily Nagoski
Exactly. I call it the room next door to the room where it happened.
Hannah Witton
Nice. Yeah. With a little side door.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, so one of my tricks is instead of going right to the last room, find a room that's got a way intp the less room.
Hannah Witton
Adjacent.
Emily Nagoski
Yeah, lust adjacent. Which for me is mostly play and curiosity.
Hannah Witton
Love that. Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you, Emily. This has been such a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate all of your time and your knowledge and wisdom and kindness. Where can people like find you online and find your books?
Emily Nagoski
The books are everywhere that books are sold. And they're the place to find me like I put a lot of work into writing the books. So they're the main thing. I'm on Instagram @enagoski but mostly it's pictures of my dogs and the books I am currently reading.
Hannah Witton
There you go, if you want book recommendations.
Emily Nagoski
I also have - I will very soon have a newsletter so if you go to emilynagoski.com you'll be able to sign up for the newsletter, you'll be one of the early people, getting the earliest possible. So that's going to be - it's called the Confidence and Joy newsletter and it's gonna be like, answering people's questions and diving deep into nerdy stuff that I think is really fun and interesting.
Hannah Witton
Oh my god. Yeah, I'm signing up. 100%. Love that.
Emily Nagoski
Okay.
Hannah Witton
I'll be there. Subscribed. Thank you so much. And thank you all so much for listening. Bye.