Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, June 17, 2016

 

[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 201 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Emily Nagoski!  Back in March, Amanda and I did an interview with Emily Nagoski, and she agreed to take listener queries from all of you once her semester was over.  Her semester is done, and you’ve got questions, and we have answers.  So we discuss pain, orgasm, shame, fantasy, sex and sexuality, masturbation, orgasm, pain during sex, better paths towards orgasm, sex games for fun and enjoyment, ethical and feminist porn.  So you might want to wear headphones if you’re at work is all I’m saying here.  I want to say thank you very, very much for trusting me with your letters so that I could relay them to Emily, and thank you for trusting us both with your problems.  You are definitely not alone, and I’m really very honored that you would share with us so that we could share with everyone.

Now, two things:  one, this is really, really long.  It’s, like, an hour and a half, which is a nice long podcast, right?  I’m here for you – and so is the dog, who’s digging a hole in the carpet.  Honest to God, it’s like I get out the microphone and he’s like, I should totally dig a hole in the carpet right now.  Are you done?  No, of course not.  All right, well, back to being unprofessional.

I do have a warning:  at about the one-hour mark, we begin discussing a letter that may be triggering for many of you.  There’s plenty of verbal warning from both of us, and Emily gives a short sort of TL;DR answer to some of the questions that are raised in the letter, but if you’re sensitive towards discussions of sexual abuse and rape fantasy, please be aware that that portion of the podcast may be upsetting.  I want you to feel safe while you’re listening, so listener discretion is advised.

This podcast is sponsored by romance reader and fantasy author Angela Korra’ti, who writes for Carina Press at Angela Highland.  Her Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is available now wherever Carina eBooks are sold.  You can begin this epic fantasy adventure with book one, Valor of the Healer.  The Rook is an assassin hired by vengeful elven rebels to kill the calculating Duke of Shalridan, the Hawk is a Knight of the Hawk duty-bound to cleanse elven magic from Adalonia, and the Dove is a half-elven healer with no control over her magic.  She’s always been the pawn of the powerful, but after healing two mysterious and very different men she faces a choice that may decide the fate of the whole kingdom.  You can find out more about Angela Highland’s books and the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy at her website, AngelaHighland.com, and you can find the series wherever Carina Press eBooks are sold.

Author and podcast fan Kelly Maher is celebrating her latest birthday, but she’s giving the gift to you!  Her Sweet Heat collection of backlist titles is available for half price at all outlets through the end of July, and her short story “Blizzard Bliss” is available for free through the link in the podcast entry.  Volume one of the Sweet Heat collection contains eight short stories and one novelette wherein two friends from culinary school are paired together on a competition show, and their longtime friendship simmers to a boil.  Each collection is on sale for $1.99, and you can find links to all three volumes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

If you are a regular listener and reader of the transcripts and you’d like to support the show, I would like to humbly ask you to have a look at our Patreon campaign at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  By listener request, I set up a Patreon, and you can contribute by making monthly pledges starting with as little as $1 a month.  You will be helping me reach goals like commissioning transcripts for the episodes that don’t have them, and you can see the rewards and options at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.

Now, because the end of the podcast may potentially be triggering, I wouldn’t want to take the risk that someone who has a compliment coming to them would miss it, so I’m going to put the compliments in the beginning of the podcast.  Are you ready?  Okay, here we go.

Killian:  Your talent at your favorite thing to do is remarkable, and you should never stop doing it.

Naomi:  You are entirely constructed of biscuits, cookies, crisps, and the best candy from every part of the world.

And Pamela:  Your state library is planning to create a rare collection of everything you’ve written, including your grocery list, because you are that legendary.

And if you’re wondering what is going on, have a look at Patreon.com/SmartBitches, and you can find out.

We have a special treat for the music this month.  This music is provided by Crime and the Forces of Evil from the album Bone Walker, which was the soundtrack for Angela Korra’ti’s Free Court of Seattle urban fantasy series.  I will have information at the end of the podcast about where you can find all of this cool music, and we have another original piece next week too!  Pretty rad, huh?

And now, without any further delay, we are going to get started with the podcast and our first letter to Emily from a listener named Elizabeth.

[music]

Dear Emily,

Hi!  My name is Elizabeth, and I just got your book Come as You Are.  I started it tonight, and it has me thinking.  I have never gotten off.  I have been with guys, and no one ever has done it.  I feel like something is wrong with me.  Like, why haven’t I?  Do I just not know I am getting off or I don’t know?  I’m so confused on that.  Also, sometimes sex hurts.  I don’t know what it is, but it hurts.  Sex to me isn’t something I absolutely need because I don’t get off or get that thrill, and I sometimes hurt from it.  I feel like something is just wrong with me and it’s not normal.  I would love to hear your input.  

Thank you!!

Elizabeth

Emily Nagoski, Ph.D.:  Okay, so there’re a lot of things we don’t know about this person, and there’re really two big things that I’m hearing.  The first is the pain.  Physical pain with intercourse, or I don’t know if there’re other things, other things that are painful, but pain, unwanted pain with sex is the one and only thing that I’m willing to call abnormal.  That is the thing for which you seek medical help.  There are many different diagnoses that go with genital pain, especially genital pain associated with sex:  vulvodynia, and – there’re all kinds of things – dyspareunia and vaginismus.  There’re a lot of different diagnoses, and you must have a doctor go and actually look at your stuff in order to come up with a diagnosis, and yes, there are effective treatments available for a lot of these.  One of the –

Sarah:  What, what are those things?  ‘Cause if you don’t know anything about medication, that sounds really scary.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, they’re not necessarily going to be, like, medicine.  It’s not going to be taking a pill or something like that?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  Most of the effective therapies for most – and it varies, of course, from diagnosis to diagnosis – have to do with the form of actually physical therapy, where, really, you go to a physical therapist, usually someone who specializes in pelvic floor physical therapy, and they help you to, a lot of the causes of genital pain associated with sex are actually muscular?  The muscles of the pelvic floor muscle have a chronic inhibitory tone, so they’re, like, locked up tight.  Like, if you, like, bunch your fist up hard –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – right, like, and if that muscle stayed that way for a really long time, it would start to hurt, right?

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, so it’s, the physical therapy involves learning to notice when that muscle is contracted and then have conscious, deliberate control over when it contracts and when it relaxes.

Sarah:  Huh!

Dr. Nagoski:  Which physical therapy can help with.

Sarah:  Now, in, in the in-, in the interest of let’s talk about all the things and do all the TMI –

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – I have been to a pelvic floor physical therapist –

Dr. Nagoski:  Hmm!

Sarah:  – for a uterine prolapse, which apparently is extremely common, and no one likes to talk about it.

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.  It is extremely common, yes.

Sarah:  Basically, your uterus and your bladder are trying to switch places –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  – and they’re not supposed to do that?  But you know, when you have babies, that’s, like, a lot of strenuous activity for, you know, an entire –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.  It all gets, like, stretched out, and the, the muscle tone gets beschissen, yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s no muscle tone.  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Right!

Sarah:  So I have actually been to a pelvic floor physical therapist, and it was fascinating how much I learned.

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, good.

Sarah:  It was so cool.

Dr. Nagoski:  That’s – I, I really believe that a whole lot of the future of women’s sexual medicine lies in physical therapy of us, like, being taught how – in the same way that when people get physical therapy because their backs hurt and they’re learning about posture?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  You know, and it feels really basic, like, didn’t we learn to walk when we were, whatever, three years old?

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s like we’re learning how to have genitals?  But we don’t get taught, ever, how to have a relationship, and most of the messages we get about how to live in a body that has genitals come from culture.  They are not intentional, they’re not organized, and most of them are really negative and shaming.  So of course our relationship with our own genitals is going to be screwed up, and it’s a very complex system, so sometimes that’s going to result in things that cause actual physical pain, yes.

Sarah:  Yep.  One, one thing I learned from the pelvic floor physical therapist is that there are really cool technologies that can help you figure out how to activate muscles that, like you said –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – we’re not, we’re not really taught how to talk to.  Like, men, when they have an erection, can tighten their PC muscles to make it bob up and down because –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yep.

Sarah:  – that’s hilarious.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Right?  But we have that same muscle, it’s the muscle you use to sort of stop yourself from peeing when you’re peeing?  But we’re not taught to –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yes, that has a lot of names.

Sarah:  Right.  We’re not, we’re not taught to do that.  We’re not supposed to be, like, mentally aware of the part that, where there’re muscles down there, so I actually had biofeedback sensors?

Dr. Nagoski:  Ahhh, so much fun!

Sarah:  It was – oh, my gosh!  I, I called it my electric ass, because they had to, ‘cause I had a C-section, and then a year later my C-section herniated –

Dr. Nagoski:  Ugh!

Sarah:  – so all my muscles have been cut multiple times, and there are some where it’s like, I, I, I can’t possibly talk to that one; our discussion has ended.

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I have no connection to that muscle, and I get that weird itchy thing when your nerves grow back in a weird place, so, like, if I itch on one side of my body, I have to find where to scratch it so that the nerve feels better, and it’s not the place where it itches?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!

Sarah:  Wow, biology’s fun!

Dr. Nagoski:  Wow!

Sarah:  So with the electro-biofeedback I was actually taught how to identify and isolate specific muscles –

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and then I could watch the little, like, the, the, the sensor become activated and know that I was actually connecting to a muscle, even though I couldn’t feel it?

Dr. Nagoski:  If this question is too intimate, feel free not to answer:  was it the vaginal wand where you get the lights that light up?  The –

Sarah:  No, I did not get a light-up wand!  I feel cheated!

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  No, I had little sticky tabs, and they had to, because of my multiple cuts in my abdomen, they actually had to start, like, on the outside of my hips, which have –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – nothing to do with, like, any of these problems?  And then work their way –

Dr. Nagoski:  Except that they do!

Sarah:  Exactly!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – to work their way in so that I would know how, that the things that I was trying to move with my mind were actually moving, ‘cause I couldn’t always feel it.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I am, I am seriously peeved that I didn’t get a wand now.  I, I kind of want to go back to Jersey and be like, what’s up?  I didn’t get a magic wand?

Dr. Nagoski:  Well, it depends on the, the muscles that you need to learn to reactivate.  The muscular issues that come with childbearing are really complex, and there was actually a physical therapist that I met – when I did my TED Talk, one of the speakers was a physical therapist in California who specializes in back pain, but she and I spent, like, three hours sitting around talking about physical therapy, and her whole deal is that when people are experiencing pain, usually there’s, we overuse some muscles to compensate for the muscles we can’t use?  And so it’s really hard on our own to learn how to use the muscles we haven’t been using, the weaker muscles, the ones we’ve lost contact with, because it’s so easy, and we’ve got so much practice overusing the muscles that compensate for the loss of that other muscle.  Does that make sense?

Sarah:  Totally!  Absolutely!

Dr. Nagoski:  Which is, that’s why we need the physical therapist to help teach us.  It’s what these instruments are for is to, like, give us some feedback that our body really can’t give us very clearly about what’s engaged and what we need to disengage and turn on.

Sarah:  And, and –

Dr. Nagoski:  And the light-up wand is about that pelvic floor muscle that you were talking about –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – so it’s, also it gets called the Kegel muscle because of the Dr. Kegel who –

Sarah:  Do your Kegels!

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, she was, he was treating women with urinary incontinence after childbirth, and pleasure-based sex educators have started teaching people to do Kegel exercises to strengthen this muscle in order to strengthen the intensity of orgasm.  It turns out there’s not actually much of a relationship between control over the PC muscle and control over orgasm or intensity of orgasm, but still, it’s great to have, like, a relationship with your pelvic floor muscle.

Sarah:  And also, as, as RedHeadedGirl on my website once said – [laughs] – physical therapy, it’s so boring, and yet so effective!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  It’s really not super exciting unless you nerd out about it.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  Practice makes perfect!

Sarah:  So for Elizabeth, who has physical pain –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  – she should see a doctor –

Dr. Nagoski:  – who will give her a referral to a physical therapist, hopefully.

Sarah:  – and you can, people can examine your, your, your internal organs in your – not, like, your internal organs but, like, they can use a speculum and look at things and try to figure out –

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – where it, where it’s hurting and why.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, exactly, and we don’t know that it’s a muscular thing necessarily for her.  It might be something else.  There are some surgical interventions that are showing some promise, but who knows?  There, there’s a great book called When Sex Hurts by Caroline Pukall and a couple of other people – Andrew Goldstein is one of the other authors – which goes through all the different diagnoses and the best available interventions for each of those different diagnoses and the ways that you might be experiencing pain, based on each of them.  So getting more education to find out about the kinds of ways that genitals can hurt during sex and the kinds of treatments that are available.  Not every doctor – I have gotten so, I have a lot of stories in my head about not great experiences that women have had with doctors of having their pain dismissed.  And if a dude went to a doctor and said that his peen hurt during sex, there isn’t –

Sarah:  Or that he couldn’t use it for the sexing.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, yeah.  It, there is no doctor on earth that would be like, well, you know, sometimes sex just hurts, and learn to work around it, right?  Like, somehow women are expected to tolerate pain and to assume that pain is a normal part of healthy sexual functioning, that there’s just no getting around it.  Sometimes it’s just going to hurt.  No!

Sarah:  No!

Dr. Nagoski:  Sex is abnor-, pain is abnormal, and unless you want the pain, unless you’re like, I like that pain! then there are treatments, probably, available for you.  And if your first doc is not willing to listen to you, find a different one.  Ask around on the Internet for referrals to people.  There’s a list of some doctors at the end of When Sex Hurts, and there are treatments available.  There’s somebody who’s going to listen.  But it might take more than one doc to find somebody who can connect you with what you need.

Sarah:  So the short litmus test for does this doctor suck? is it hurts when I have sex, and the answer is, well, sometimes it just does and there’s nothing I can do.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Okay!  Good litmus test; good to know.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I, I, I generally think most doctors who dismiss women’s pain and complaints need to have a, a very significant come-to-Jesus?

Dr. Nagoski:  Boy howdy, right?

Sarah:  [Laughs] I mean, I just did –

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, what are they doing, treating women if they believe that sex is supposed to hurt?  First of all, if they have a partner with a vulva, I feel very sorry for that person.

Sarah:  Yeah!

Dr. Nagoski:  Because apparently they’re going to dismiss their partner’s pain.  Yikes.

Sarah:  Ouch!

Dr. Nagoski:  And what other kinds of pain are we supposed to tolerate and just sort of get, get over it?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.  Pain is a, a, kind of a very prominent indicator that something’s not right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Absolutely.  Pain is the signal that something is going wrong, and it’s your body asking for help.  And there’s really cool complex stuff that happens.  In the original G-spot book, the first author is Alice Ladas.  Beverly Whipple’s one of the authors.  There’s a third author who I can’t think of right off the top of my head, but the original G-spot book, they talk about doing somatic therapy, pelvic floor therapy, around sexual healing, and at, one of the things that can happen is people will just randomly burst into tears or burst out laughing because there’s all this emotional stuff tied up in that tension.  That tension is not just straightforward physical tension?  It’s connected to our emotional life –

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and when we change the way that muscle moves in a dynamic way, we change the way our emotions move through our bodies, and that can be really surprising and sometimes really scary if you’ve grown up believing that, like, emotions have a straightforward cause and effect, and if there’s nothing to cry about then you shouldn’t cry.  Sometimes your body’s just like, I have feelings!  And you just need to, like, go with it!

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  Let it happen!

Sarah:  I mean –

Dr. Nagoski:  Which is actually about the next question, but go ahead.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Is there anything else you want to add for Elizabeth?

Dr. Nagoski:  So, the other thing she mentions too –

Sarah:  Oh, yes, she also –

Dr. Nagoski:  – this is the second question – is the orgasm part.

Sarah:  Yes, she also talks about never having gotten off.

Dr. Nagoski:  Which I take to mean having an orgasm.

Sarah:  Right.  I believe that that is what that means.

Dr. Nagoski:  No one has ever done it.  I have been with guys, and no one has ever done it.  She does not – first of all we don’t know how old she is.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  We don’t know if she has ever masturbated?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  She only talks about being with guys and no one ever doing it.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  And the first way most women are likely to have their first orgasm is with masturbation by yourself.  So we’re going to do a little bit of, like, Sex 101 here.  Re-, I’m going to briefly go over the dual control model, which we talked about last time.

Sarah:  Feel free!  Hit it again!

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay!

Sarah:  Bam.

Dr. Nagoski:  Bam!  [Laughs] Okay, so the dual control model is the mechanism in your brain that co-, that controls sexual response.  There is a sexual accelerator which responds to all the sexually relevant information in the environment, everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain codes as a sexually relevant stimulus, and it sends a signal that says, turn on!  And at the same time that that’s happening, if there’s a sexual accelerator there must also be a sexual brake, and indeed, at the same time that the accelerator’s running, the brake is monitoring the environment for all the potential threats.  Everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that counts as a good reason not to be turned on right now, and one of the th-, there’re all kinds of things that can hit the brakes.  Straightforward stuff like worrying that the kids are going to walk into the room or worrying about STIs or unwanted pregnancy or trust with your partner.  That’s a really big one.  So if you’re engaged in a sexual experience with a partner and part of what’s happening in your brain is that you’re worried about whether or not they’re having a good experience, you’re worried about whether or not they’re judging, maybe, your shape of body or maybe the way you’re responding sexually, you’re worried that you’re taking too long and they’re getting bored and they think you’re broken and terrible and they’re going to leave you, obviously that all is going to hit the brake, right?

Sarah:  Yep!

Dr. Nagoski:  Make sense so far?  That’s why it’s easier, usually, to have your first orgasm by yourself, ‘cause it just takes away one of those things.  When people struggle with orgasm – and just to give some normalizing statistics, twelve percent of women twenty-eight or younger have not yet had an orgasm.  We don’t have any good numbers for how many women will never have an orgasm, but I have heard stories since Come as You Are was published from women in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies –

Sarah:  No, no, no.

Dr. Nagoski:  – having their first-ever orgasms.  But that’s awesome!

Sarah:  That’s awesome, but then I think, oh, my gosh, what a horrible sign that, you know, that women’s pleasure is so not prioritized.  I would hate to wait seventy years for my first orgasm.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!

Sarah:  It makes me, makes me sad!

Dr. Nagoski:  What it tells me is that they grew up in a culture or an environment that for whatever reason trained their accelerators and their brakes to respond to the world in a very hesitant, defended kind of way, and it takes a lot of lifetime to undo decades of being taught that sex is dangerous, dirty, disgusting, and shameful.  Right?

Sarah:  Yes, it does.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, it takes practice, and most of us spend the first two decades of our life totally enmeshed in these cultural messages without any opportunity to pull ourselves out of those messages and think critically for ourselves, now, wait a minute, is it actually shameful?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  Is it actually wrong and bad, or do I actually have permission to experiment with pleasure and experience it without shame and guilt?  If you’ve grown up in a really sex-negative culture, and especially if you’ve experienced sexual trauma, one of the difficult, the most difficult things is that a thing that is sexually relevant that activates the accelerator, your brain has learned that it should also activate the brake.  Right –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – so any time you experience arousal, you’re, it’s like you’re driving by putting your foot on the accelerator and putting your br-, foot on the brake at the same time.

Sarah:  Which is not going to get you anywhere.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.  You might get, depending on how sensitive your gas pedal is, you might get there, but it will use a lot more gas, and you will take a lot longer to get there.  And there are individual differences in the sensitivities of these mechanisms, so some people have really sensitive accelerators – vroom! – and other people have not-so-sensitive accelerators, people who identify as asexual, for example.  When they’ve done research on the asexual community, they tend to score significantly lower in the sensitivity of their accelerator compared to people who identify as sexual, so it just takes a whole lot of sexually relevant stimulation before their brain activates in a way that actually generates any kind of interest in sex.  And there’re also people who have really sensitive brakes.  We don’t know if they’re born that way or if it’s learned over early life experience, but some people have very sensitive brakes, and those are the folks who are most likely to struggle with sexual problems around arousal, desire, and orgasm, and what it means is that anything that does hit your brake, like risk of STI or unwanted pregnancy or not trusting your partner or being self-critical about your body, it just takes –

Sarah:  Or the kids could come down the hall or the –

Dr. Nagoski:  Kids walking down the room –

Sarah:  Yes.  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  – a stray fingernail, like, anything.  Just a little bit will just shut everything down.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  The key question on the survey is, things have to be just right in order for me to feel aroused.  So that’s the basic structure of the problem.  So the process of becoming aroused is the dual process of turning on all the ons and turning off all of the offs, and usually in people who struggle with orgasm – usually when people struggle with orgasm – I’m talking too fast ‘cause I get excited, so –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  – when people struggle, it’s usually a combination of not enough stimulation to the gas pedal, but much more so, too much stimulation to the brake.  For example, there’s, if you’re learning to have your first orgasm, a sex therapist will always recommend that you touch your body; for a while you just touch your body in a nonsexual way and pay attention to what sensations feel like, and gradually over a period of weeks you get more and more sexual in the contact.  You allow your arousal to grow, and at a certain point you’ll notice that your brain starts going, oh, I’m getting really aroused.  I think I might have an orgasm.  What if I have an orgasm?  What if I don’t have an orgasm?  Am I having an orgasm right now?  Is this even what an orgasm feels like?  Am I totally screwed up?  What is the matter with me?  And all that chatter, like, the more aroused you get, the more worried about your orgasm you get?

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  And is all of that going to hit the accelerator?

Sarah:  Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Dr. Nagoski:  No, it hits the brake.  So what you have to do is just notice that those thoughts are happening and gently release them into the universe somewhere safe – put ‘em in the ozone layer; I don’t know – and return your attention to the pleasurable sensations in your body.  So there’re two big neurological systems to talk about here, and I want to be nerdy but not get too nerdy.

Sarah:  You can get too nerdy.

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay.

Sarah:  We appreciate too nerdy.  Bring on the nerdy!  Please.

Dr. Nagoski:  Did I talk about the little monitor last time?

Sarah:  The little monitor?  No, that is not ringing a bell.

Dr. Nagoski:  The little monitor.  Okay, so there’s a thing that I call the little monitor because the technical term is the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop and criterion velocity, and as soon as I say that, everybody falls asleep.

Sarah:  Whaaat?

Dr. Nagoski:  So I call it the little monitor – [laughs] – and it’s this little sort of emotional gauge like a, like a tennis referee in your brain that knows what your goal is – so, say the goal is orgasm – it knows how much effort you’re investing and how much progress you’re making, and it keeps a ratio of effort to progress, right.  And it has an opinion about what that ratio should be.  So if you –

Sarah:  Ohhh!

Dr. Nagoski:  – yeah – if your little monitor thinks it’s supposed to take twenty minutes to get to orgasm and it’s been fifteen minutes and you’re not there yet, your little monitor’s going to start to get frustrated with you.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  And do you suppose that frustration hits the accelerator?

Sarah:  No, nononono, no.

Dr. Nagoski:  Does it hit the brake?  Absolutely.  So there’s this, this is called, well, this is one explanation for a thing that gets called the ironic process, which the classic example of the ironic process is don’t think about a white bear.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Okay.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, the harder you try not to do something, the more difficult it becomes to do, and they’ve tested this in a lot of different domains, including just, like, holding a plumb weight over a target?

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Just try and hold it really, really still, and the harder you try, the more – the higher the stakes are?  Like, if you drop this plumb weight, we will kill your grandmother or something, right?

Sarah:  Ah!

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, you, you become, it’s really difficult to hold it still –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – but if people don’t tell you there’s anything at stake, if they’re like, here, just hold this still for a second while we do this other thing, you can actually hold it still really well, ‘cause there’s not, you’re not monitoring constantly –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – of whether or not you’re doing it right.  So that’s the ironic process, and that is a feedback loop that gets people trapped, and the solution, well, there’re three different ways to go toward a solution here if you look at the structure of the problem.  One is to change the goal.  That is the most obvious way; it’s what the most successful sex therapy does, which is to remove, eliminate entirely, the goal of orgasm.  If your goal is pleasure, you take orgasm off the table –

Sarah:  Then orgasm is not on the table!  Ohhh!

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.  And then if you notice your brain worrying about whether or not you’re having an orgasm, whether or not you might ever have an orgasm, you’re just like, well, that’s all irrelevant, ‘cause the question of whether or not I’m being successful right now is just am I experiencing pleasure?

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Am I experiencing pleasure?  Then I’m doing it right.

Sarah:  Change the goal.

Dr. Nagoski:  And my job is to just, like, experience a lot of different kinds of a lot of different intensities of pleasure, and if I’m doing that, then that’s great.  So you can turn off all those worried thoughts, return your attention to the pleasure that’s happening in your body, and just allow the pleasure to be what it is without trying to judge it or categorize it or make it be something that it isn’t right now.

Sarah:  It’s almost like circling, circling around your brakes and avoiding them altogether.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  Like if that monitoring around orgasm hits the brakes, don’t monitor around orgasm, ‘cause you’re not trying to have an orgasm.  You can just let that go.

Sarah:  Got it!

Dr. Nagoski:  So there’s a great book called Becoming Orgasmic by Julia – you’re going to laugh – Heiman –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  H-E-I-M-A-N.

Sarah:  She was just, just born –

Dr. Nagoski:  Born to be a sex therapist!  And she has been –

Sarah:  – born to be a sex therapist.

Dr. Nagoski:  – a feminist sex therapist since the ‘70s.  She was the head of the Kinsey Institute for a long time, and she’s completely amazing and has been doing really spectacular feminist work around women’s sexual wellbeing for decades, and I love her.  Julia Heiman.  And her book Becoming Orgasmic first came out, I think, in the mid ‘80s, and it’s still the book I refer people to.  It is the go-to resource for people who are learning to have orgasm or who struggle around orgasm, because it has you go through this process of just noticing what pleasure feels like in your body and giving yourself permission to experience it without trying to make it something other than what it is.

Sarah:  Right, and it gives you the opportunity to just do your thing.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.  And my sense is that anyone who’s interested enough in sex to want to have an orgasm almost certainly can, given the right context, and the right context means adequate stimulation of the gas pedal –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and for most people it’s, you get, you preheat the oven, and then once you’re really warmed up and aroused and feel the tingling pleasure – yay – then clitoral stimulation of some kind is most likely to be what gets you there if that’s the package of genitals that you have.

Sarah:  Huh!

Dr. Nagoski:  So hitting the gas pedal in the effective way and then also turning off the offs, and turning off the offs is the difficult part –

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  – ‘cause it means turning off all the body self-criticism and all the cultural am-I-even-allowed-to-experience-sexual-pleasure and is this right, and am I broken, and all that stuff.

Sarah:  And I’ve learned as I’ve sort of changed my own habits and changed the way I do things that, much like you have the autopilot of putting dishes in the dishwasher or, you know, doing something that doesn’t take a lot of brainpower, you have really well-worn neural pathways of thought?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yep.

Sarah:  You know, so it’s really hard to break the mental thought sequence habit of oh, I should be feeling this.  Oh, this is not right.  Or if, if you’re trying to correct, for example, negative criticism of yourself –

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – it’s really hard to say, no, I’m not going to think about my body that way.  No, I’m, how ‘bout if I don’t think about that, about my stomach right now.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, so think about specifically what that language is.  Don’t criticize your body.  Don’t think about a bear.

Sarah:  Yeah, exactly.  You’re, you’re –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right?

Sarah:  – you’re, you’re, it’s really hard to break that established habit –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  – by giving yourself more negatives – [laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  That’s why you have to change the goal.  Don’t have the goal be don’t criticize yourself; have the goal be think something positive about yourself.  Don’t have the goal be don’t have an orgasm – though that’s another strategy that we can talk about –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – the goal is experience pleasure.  Take orgasm off the table altogether.  There are games you can play with yourself and with your partner where you’re not allowed to have an orgasm?  Don’t have an orgasm, don’t have an orgasm, I’m going to get you as stimulated as I can get you, and you are not allowed to have an orgasm.  That is a very fun game that I highly recommend!  With someone you trust a lot.

Sarah:  Right, of course.

Dr. Nagoski:  Including just by yourself if you want.  So you begin the process by yourself and then when you’ve got the process down on your own, then you introduce a partner.  I often recommend introducing a partner in a gradual way, like having a picture of them in the room first, and then having them maybe on the phone, and then maybe just lying next to you while you go to orgasm and you show them what works with the lights off, and then with, you know, candles on, and then finally with the lights on, and then you get their hands on you and teach them what kind of sensation works for you.

Sarah:  That’s very cool!

Dr. Nagoski:  So, almost anybody who wants to have an orgasm can.  It will not necessarily be easy or happen in the way that you expect it to, because we do have these cultural scripts in our head about how orgasm can happen, and how it’s supposed to happen, and how long it’s supposed to take, and almost all of those things are wrong, and people vary a lot.  Because she’s talking about it, Elizabeth is talking about it only in terms of being with a guy, she might have this script in her head of only having orgasms from penile-vaginal intercourse, from vaginal stimulation, and we know that only about a quarter to a third of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal stimulation, the other two-thirds being sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic from that kind of stimulation, and mostly it really is all about the clitoris.

Sarah:  [Laughs] That might have to be the subtitle of the, of this episode.  It’s all about the clitoris.

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs] All about the clitoris.  It’s the hokey-pokey:  it’s what it’s all about.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Which is not a terrible thing for things to be about.

Dr. Nagoski:  Really!

Sarah:  Yay, clitoris!

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay.  So that’s the, that’s how to have an orgasm, and also I was, be-, the, because she’s reading the book, Appendix 1 in the book is specifically how to have your first orgasm.

Sarah:  Appendix 1 of Come as You Are.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, and Appendix 2 is how to have a massive, extended orgasm.

Sarah:  Ohhh, yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, you’re welcome.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Everyone says thank you now.  So let’s move on to Danielle’s letter –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  – and she has a couple of things to ask you about.

Dear Emily,

Thank you for allowing readers to ask questions 🙂

The question I have for you is basically about a lack of sexual experience.  I am having trouble feeling empowered or embracing my own sexuality because, well, I’m a thirty-year-old woman who is still a virgin.  There are a few reasons for this, and this is mostly down to physical and sexual abuse, extreme social anxiety, and shame.  I sometimes feel like I can’t feel sexual, or like I don’t have the right to enjoy reading sex in romances, or like I don’t have the right to write sex in the romances I write as a hobby.

Is it normal for a woman to be a virgin at this age?  If someone has been this inexperienced for this long, how might that affect their first sexual experience with a partner when and if it happens?  Is it wise to tell your partner about your inexperience in order to create a more relaxed state, or does revealing this somehow affect the mood?

I was wondering if my questions could be asked under the name: Danielle.

Thank you very much for your time!

Dr. Nagoski:  Sure, Danielle!  And we have so many things going on here also.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, first of all, the question, is it normal?  The answer is always yes, unless we’re talking about pain, unwanted pain.  So, yes, it’s absolutely normal.  What the statistics tell me is that ten percent of women who’ve never been married and are over the age, are thirty or over have never had intercourse, so you’re in a minority, but it’s a pretty sizable minority.  It actually surprised me that the number was that high.  So that’s that:  ten percent.  And is it wise to tell your partner about your background of experience?  I, my blanket advice for people is that it is wise to disclose and to know both people’s experience before you have sex under pretty much all circumstances.  That conversation is really important in terms of knowing your STI risk with that person.  If reproduction is a thing that’s on the table, knowing reproduction consequences potentially.  Knowing more about, like, what this sexual experience means for each of you.  Having that talk beforehand is super-duper important for everybody, regardless of what their experience level is.  And I also know that that is, like, a sex, thing sex educators say that nobody ever does.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  I know, sorry.  But!  There are, it’s, the only reason to do that is if you’re looking to have a sort of, like, intimate experience where it’s you and this person really connecting with each other, and the more you know about the person, the more intimate that connection will be.  If all you want to do is have some sex….  If people’s, both people’s understanding is that what we’re doing right now is having some sex and that’s pretty much going to be it, then there, not under all circumstances is it necessary  to do that kind of disclosure, because the disclosure itself is a form of intimacy in the same way that the sex is, itself is a form of intimacy.

Sarah:  So the disclosure could depend on a number of basic intimacy factors.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.  Like, what is the structure of your relationship, and what is your goal of this sex?

Sarah:  Huh!  I never really thought about it that way, but, yes, that’s absolutely true.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, if you’re just having a random hookup, if you’re protecting yourself physically and emotionally, and your partner is fully consenting physically and emotionally, you’re both on the same page – I mean, it’s like if I’m going to take a job for the long term some place, it’s good that we know what kind of relationship we’re going to have, and so I want to talk to them about a whole lot of stuff, but if I’m just going in and buying coffee, that is also a commercial exchange, and they don’t need to know anything like as much about me.

Sarah:  Right.  Right, right, right.  That makes sense!  So –

Dr. Nagoski:  But that is, that is, that’s a, that’s – what is the word I’m looking for?  Oh, for crying out loud.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s where you say the thing that you’re totally not supposed to say.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Dr. Nagoski:  The party line is always, disclose everything before you have any sort of contact.  Exchange histories before you exchange fluids?  But I know that’s not really realistic.  It’s like saying don’t drink to college students.  It’s just not realistic.

Sarah:  Don’t have sex to horny teenagers.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, yeah.  It’s, it’s not, simply not going to work, it’s not going to give you the outcome, so what I actually, so the expected standard is that you will do that, and we know from, that’s not always going to happen, and so here are some factors to consider when you’re thinking about how much to disclose to him.

Sarah:  Can we make a rule, don’t wear Axe body spray?

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs] I wish!

Sarah:  Can we make that happen?

Dr. Nagoski:  I have a twenty-two-year-old nephew?

Sarah:  Oh, God.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  My, my older son, who is ten, has just started sex ed in school – we talked about this during the last podcast – and he came home with some samples from Old Spice, and I had to smell them.  I was like, okay, I can handle this, this smell is not going to give me a screaming, pounding headache, but I was like, at no time will you ever wear Axe body spray, and if your friends come in and they’re wearing it, I will hit them with the hose.

Dr. Nagoski:  Is there, like, a rule that if you wear Axe body spray you have to use a gallon of it?

Sarah:  I don’t know, but it’s – I remember reading an AMA from a New Jersey transit train conductor, and they, people were just asking him questions about his job.  It was really cool, but one of the things he talked about was that one particular route to a particular prep school would have one car full of middle- and high-school boys, and they used to have to draw straws as to who would go and hold their breath and collect tickets because the –

Dr. Nagoski:  [Sighs]

Sarah:  – the smell of hormones and Axe body spray just made them all sick.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, it hits you like a wall.

Sarah:  It’s, it’s unavoidable, and I’m like, is there some sort of scent disruption that happens at that age among men?

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Like, they don’t smell the smells, and so they add ten times of the smells?  Meanwhile, I smell everything, and I think I’m dying.  Like, what the hell?  Anyway.  So, Axe body spray, automatic brake.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Although I don’t think anyone –

Dr. Nagoski:  Probably not that relevant to a thirty-year-old woman.

Sarah:  No, probably not relevant to anyone listening to this podcast, unless they also have young men in their lives, and they’re now shaking their heads going, I know, I know!  I don’t understand!

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So, aside from the issue of being normal and aside from the issue of disclosure, what about the other parts of, of Danielle’s letter?

Dr. Nagoski:  Right!  So the part that really struck me was feeling like she doesn’t have the right to enjoy reading sex in romances, or she doesn’t have the right to write sex in romances as a hobby, and when I hear that it’s like, I don’t have permission, I’m not allowed to.  There’s a, there’s a giant should, and one of the things sex educators say is stop should-ing on yourself.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s another one of those things we say.

Sarah:  Nice!

Dr. Nagoski:  And of course, like, all of us do should ourselves all the time.  I should be this – and that’s the little monitor having this sense of, like, who you’re supposed to be, and the extent to which you fail to be that person is the extent to which you are not permitted to participate fully in the human experience.  You’re not deserving of love, you’re not deserving of joy, and you’re certainly not deserving of any kind of pleasure.  So I want to, would ask this person, Danielle, to think more deeply about where that idea comes from, because pleasure is, as Good Vibrations says, pleasure is your birthright.  Any sensation that your body can feel is yours to experience under any context that you choose to experience it.  Your body belongs to you, and its sensations are yours.  Your imagination is yours.  The way you spend your time is yours, and if you want to spend it reading romances and enjoying the sex scenes and writing romances and enjoying the sexuality, who says you don’t have the right?  Like, where does that come from?  Do you have ideas?

Sarah:  I’d like to, I would like to cross-stitch that.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  That would make a really awesome sampler.  I could put –

Dr. Nagoski:  Put it on a pillow!

Sarah:  – put little vulvas around the border, couple of breasts –

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, my God, I would love that!

Sarah: – some books to get – [laughs] – books with breasts on them.  I, I don’t know where the idea comes from, to be honest with you.  I, I can, I, I understand why people feel that way, but it’s very difficult for me, I think, to pinpoint exactly why the conclusion is, well, well, my body’s not for me.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  And that, that’s patriarchy, right?  That’s –

Sarah:  That would be it, wouldn’t it?

Dr. Nagoski:  – my body belongs in the public domain, and the ways that my body falls short of the –

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  – soc-, culturally constructed ideal are my fault and my problem, and until I fix it, then I don’t belong, and I don’t deserve anything.

Sarah:  Yes, and you don’t fit that nar-, that narrow ideal, so you are undeserving of, of, of feeling good about yourself or by yourself in any way.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  Yeah, patriarchy, so sexism.  Yeah.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, yeah.  So, as usual, the answer is patriarchy.  Actually I’m at, at the tail end of writing another book proposal about a, a nonfiction book that really is about the way we can, in our individual lives, overcome patriarchy so that we can occasionally experience joy and not feel stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted all the time?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s just an idea that I have, and we, my edit-, my agent was like, can you write just, like, a paragraph definition of patriarchy?  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, God.

Dr. Nagoski:  Sure, sure I can do that for you!

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, no problem.

Dr. Nagoski:  And actually, the definition we came up with is that patriarchy, for our purposes, is the voice in your head that says when things don’t go right it is your fault.

Sarah:  Oh.

Dr. Nagoski:  That there’s wrong with you.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, when you go into a dressing room and the pants don’t fit, that’s because your ass is wrong, not because the pants are wrong.

Sarah:  Yes, it’s – and the fact that women’s clothing sizes are arbitrary and don’t match –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right!

Sarah:  – that’s also our fault.

Dr. Nagoski:  That is a system designed specifically in a way to maximize the crazy-making.

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s bananas.

Sarah:  Yep.  And it, and it baffles men.  Like, if you explain this to them, they’re like, I –

Dr. Nagoski:  Why do you feel so ugh?

Sarah:  – I don’t, I, I, you, you don’t just use a measurement?  Like, I have –

Dr. Nagoski:  Thirty-two?

Sarah:  Like, like, no!  No, no, no, no, I’m a twelve here and a sixteen here and a ten there, and yep!  Sorry!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yep.  And also it varies from brand to brand?

Sarah:  Oh, yes.  And store to store.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yep.

Sarah:  I am pleased to report that there are a zillion gorgeous Fuck the Patriarchy cross-stitches, including one with a rainbow –

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and a unicorn that looks like Lisa Frank just, like, had a mild seizure?  It’s, there’re a lot of options there.

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay, I’ve decided that the subtitle of this podcast should actually be Cross-Stitching and Neuroscience.

Sarah:  Okay, I’m on that.  Hang on, I’m writing it down right now.

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay, great.

Sarah:  Cross-Stitching and Neuroscience.  On it!  Okay, good.  Crafting has been covered.  Check!

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  So when you, when you find somebody who has come to you for help and they’re using the, the should-ing language and the, they’re excluding themselves from, from experiencing pleasure and acknowledging pleasure, what is your best advice for them?  What do you usually say?

Dr. Nagoski:  So, it’s not just me saying a thing; it’s about asking them to think critically about that idea.

Sarah:  Ahhh!

Dr. Nagoski:  Where did it come from?  Where did they first learn that?

Sarah:  Why do you think that?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  Do you, is, is that actually, does your intellectual self genuinely believe that that’s true?  And if you-you really doesn’t believe that, clearly there’s some part of you that does, so let’s go talk to that part and see what it is that belief is protecting you from.

Sarah:  So when you challenge someone by – not challenge someone but just invite them to examine where does that come from, in these cases the, the should-ing on yourself – which is the best phrase ever – comes from external shame that has been internalized very deeply.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  Also, patriarchy.

Dr. Nagoski:  The whole thing is like, this is, it is this giant sort of, like, interwoven, it’s like pollution; it’s just in the air.  It just comes with every time you take a breath.

Sarah:  Ugh!

Dr. Nagoski:  But I would say, like, so let’s take the people who just, you know, hate women, and misogyny, if they went and talked to the part of them that believes that women are inferior and don’t have a right, and should not be allowed to control their own bodies and can’t be trusted to control their own bodies, what is that belief protecting them from?  And the nature of patriarchy is such that, like, the dude-bro manly types suffer from it as much as the lady-girl female bits, and they have the same sort of fear of inadequacy and not belonging and not having a right, and they have to hold onto their idea that we are inferior and can’t be trusted or else that opens up this, like, gaping pit of their own insignificance and failures.

Sarah:  Ohhh, so, so toxic masculinity is toxic.

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s them having – yes, it is them trying to, like, put the poison someplace so that it’s a little bit out of themselves, yeah.

Sarah:  Which is really hard to undo.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, it’s a very gradual process, right?  Like, pointing this out to somebody is not going to motivate them to be like, oh, let me go purge my toxin in a way that’s not toxic to other people.  Let me go get in touch with all my fear –

Sarah:  No.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and my hurts –

Sarah:  No.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and my – no.  Like, they’re not going to do that!

Sarah:  No.  I, I had a huge conversation the other day about men and emotional labor.

Dr. Nagoski:  Ohhh, yeah!

Sarah:  You, I’m assuming you read that, the whole MetaFilter thread and the, and the annotated PDF.

Dr. Nagoski:  The whole, yes.

Sarah:  Oh, God, it was like I’m a, like, I’m, I am, I am a super amateur nerd sociology wonk, and I thought that was just fascinating.  Like, there’s a name for this!  Oh, my God!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  But, no, you’re excused from having to do it.  You don’t have to.

Dr. Nagoski:  I just – oh, man, I could go on about this forever, but I just watched in a row Ex Machina and Her.

Sarah:  Dude!

Dr. Nagoski:  Having never seen either of them before.

Sarah:  Dude.

Dr. Nagoski:  And I was – okay, so one of the things I’m going to do next is write a novel that flips the genders on those, ‘cause both of those were about men creating female robots –

Sarah:  To care for themselves.

Dr. Nagoski:  – to do, to, to love them.  To want them, to be their sexual slaves, to – and, like, in Ex Machina, the first thing that happens is as soon as the intelligence grows human?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  She does not want to have sex with him.  She wants to get the fuck away from him.

Sarah:  Yep!

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, there it is!  There it is.  I mean, it couldn’t get, like, I was watching it with my jaw on the coffee table like –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  – it could not get clearer:  male gaze, male gaze, male gaze, fear of rejection.

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  Women can’t be human because then they, because if, humans would not want to have sex with me, so they must be subhuman, and they all want to have sex with me.  Ohhh!  I see how that works!

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Dr. Nagoski:  So that was Ex Machina in my experience – [laughs] – as a sex educator and relationship educator.  And then there was Her, which was even more, I mean, so there’re two stories in Her.  There’s – who was the guy in it?

Sarah:  Joaquin Phoenix.

Dr. Nagoski:  Joaquin Phoenix, yes!  So, the re-, the primary relationship is this relationship with the A.I., with the, with the, with his operating system, who he teaches to be who she is, and then she becomes even bigger, more successful, and leaves him because she outgrew him.

Sarah:  Hmmm!

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, she, he gave her hi-, her start in life, woke her up to pleasure and communication, and then she left because she was too big for him, but the thing is, before that his last relationship was supporting a woman through her dissertation process, and then when she was all successful and stuff, she left him because she outgrew him.

Sarah:  Oh, but she wasn’t supposed to do that!  He’s the only one that can end a relationship.

Dr. Nagoski:  Well, so, here’s the thing is, like, his job, what the deal is, he never has to learn how to sustain an emotional connection with a really powerful woman.

Sarah:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, like, the moral of the story is, he’s locked in this pattern.  He’s amazing because he’s, like, very heartful and he connects with these amazing female-type people, and then they grow and they fly away like butterflies, and he never has to, like, push himself to engage and stay connected fully with somebody who’s, I mean, in these cases, smarter than him.

Sarah:  Oh, no.

Dr. Nagoski:  So I had, I had feelings about that.  So both of those were about the emotional labor that women do as just expected –

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and the ways that expectation is potentially used as a weapon against men, which is why women can’t be trusted, even though they’re dependent on them.  I mean, it’s the same dynamic that there is any master/slave relationship or any top/bottom relationship or any power dynamic at all where the top really depends on the compliance of the bottom –

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and the bottom has to agree –

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  – that they don’t control access to anything.

Sarah:  Nothing happens without consent.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  Consent first and consent last.  Like, consent –

Dr. Nagoski:  Ex- –

Sarah:  Yes, consent begins and consent ends the entire episode.

Dr. Nagoski:  And there, it’s so much more complicated than that?

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  And we’re getting into the next question of, like, when do – so in, sometimes when I talk to BDSM folks, they talk about this language of the bottom is always the one in control, and I think that, to an extent, in consensual relationships, that is certainly true, that as soon as the bottom safes out –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – they’re done.

Sarah:  Yes, that’s the end.

Dr. Nagoski:  The top does not have choice there.  Ultimately, it’s the bottom who has control.

Sarah:  If it’s, if it’s being done –

Dr. Nagoski:  When it’s consensual.

Sarah:  Right.  If it’s safe and consensual and following the – I don’t want to say the rules – following the, the, the con- –

Dr. Nagoski:  I feel comfortable calling them rules.

Sarah:  You think –

Dr. Nagoski:  But the contract, the agreements, the –

Sarah:  Yes, thank you!

Dr. Nagoski:  – pre-negotiated all the things.  Yeah.

Sarah:  Yes.  All the things that make this a safe and consensual act.  Yeah, I guess they are rules.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Okay.  Language, man!  Language is, like, hard and stuff?

Dr. Nagoski:  Totally!

Sarah:  Yeah.  My goodness.

Dr. Nagoski:  So before we talk about the big dark stuff –

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  – there’s stuff I want to say that is useful and interesting for people?

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  Without the context of the other big dark stuff?

Sarah:  Right.  So basically, anyone who’s listening, the, the next letter is dark and scary and has a lot of information in it.  Some of it may be very triggering, and so if you want to stop now, we’re going to give you the little micro part and then we’re going to move on into the letter, but if you feel that you would be triggered by some of this, then you can stop now and you’re going to get the, you’re going to get the benefit of the, of having listened to it without having to listen to it.  Yeah?

Dr. Nagoski:  Right!

Sarah:  All right, so hit me.

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay, so just the one thing that I would talk about in a general sense is this phenomenon known as sensation seeking, which is a neurological personality style, essentially.  So the way they study this in research is, so an ordinary brain, if you put on headphones and you start playing music and you increase the volume and increase the volume and increase the volume, the input coming in is increasing, right, and so your brain activation actually reduces to help stabilize the amount of overall activation in your brain.  Right, volume goes up, brain activity goes down to help counterbalance and damp down the amount of information flowing in a brain.  Make sense so far?

Sarah:  Totally!

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay.

Sarah:  I do this all the time.

Dr. Nagoski:  So sensation-seeking temperaments, their brains, as the music gets louder and louder, their brain actually increases activation.

Sarah:  Oh!

Dr. Nagoski:  It wants more and, so this is a really and completely different experience of intense sensations.  So sensation-seeking folks who have brains that respond in this particular way tend to be more risk-taking, they tend to like high-intensity stimulation, whereas people like me in a really big noisy crowd are just like, braaah!  Get me out of here!  It is, like, the ultimate thing for them.  It just feels really good to have massive stimulation all the time.

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Dr. Nagoski:  Does that make sense?

Sarah:  That does make sense.

Dr. Nagoski:  Which is a really useful dimension of individual differences to know about, regardless of what you’re talking about.  And yes, that, the dual control model, the, the gas pedal?  There are folks with a sensation-seeking style of sexuality, where they have a really sensitive gas pedal and sort of anything will have them respond in a big way, and they tend to be more novelty-oriented, more risk-taking, and potentially these are the folks who might be sexually compulsive under the worst possible circumstances, so if they have a lot of anxiety in addition to having a sensitive gas pedal, they could be prone to sexual compulsions.

Sarah:  Huh.

Dr. Nagoski:  So I just thought was a useful thing for everybody to know about without having to know about any of the rest of the stuff.

Sarah:  Okay.  All right, so shall we move into the, into the larger, darker discussion?

Dr. Nagoski:  The big dark, yeah.  Yeah!

Sarah:  Okay, most excellent and lovely listeners, this is the part where if you might be triggered by discussion of sexual abuse you should probably turn off the podcast now.  So if you are turning it off, I hope you have an excellent weekend, and I’ll see you again next week!

And if you’re still with us, this is Sara’s letter.  This is Sara without an H, ‘cause we need more Sara(h)s on the podcast, basically.  All of the Sara(h)s, all of the time.

Dear Sarah,

I have a few questions that I’m really excited to ask Emily!  And dear podcast team, I’m giving you a trigger warning:  if you are upset by discussions of sexual abuse, do not continue. To put you at ease, I have never been abused.

Dear Emily,

Let me start by saying you sound like an incredible person.  Thank you so much for the work you do.  I’m very excited to read all of your books!

TLDR or in brief:

If I’m having an orgasm I am thinking about rape, and I read problematic erotica to get off.  When considering problematic depictions of sex and relationships, do you think that there should be exceptions made for porn?  If 50 Shades is thought of as an abuse fantasy used to get people off, does that change how you feel about it?

The longer version:

I am a queer, cisgendered, 25-year-old woman, and I’m kinky.  (I loved hearing about submissive pain sluts and service tops on your last podcast!)  I’m a switch, I like to be dominated by men, and I like to dominate women.  It was a long time coming, but I’m happy with and proud of my sexuality.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with me, and I love the types of sex and relationships I get to have.  This has not been an easy place to get to, as my primary kinks are about rape.  The more scared, hurt, emotionally manipulated and degraded the sub is, the more arousing it is for me.  I love to experience this myself as a sub.  I don’t have much experience as a Domme, but I would very much like to role play this with others (obviously with super explicit consent.)

What I’m most curious about is your discussion of problematic descriptions of sex and relationships in romance novels.  I love to read a good BDSM romance novel that actually gets to the heart of what Dominance/submissive relationships involve emotionally.  I find them relatable, and they give me warm fuzzy feelings.  It’s also rare that a morally praiseworthy BDSM book gets me off.  The erotica that gets me off describes rape and emotional abuse.  I think the ethical BDSM romance novels don’t work for me because I know the sub is consenting.  It’s a fantasy within a fantasy, and it’s distracting.  Rape erotica truly fulfills something different for me than a good BDSM romance.  Good BDSM novels describe the relationships I want to have; rape erotica describes my fantasies.

I think there are some inherently squishy moral questions when reading rape erotica.  When I see casual depictions of rape or jokes about rape in media I almost always have a huge problem with them.  I believe this contributes to rape culture.  I have many people in my life who are survivors of sexual assault, and my heart breaks for them.  I am an unabashed and angry opponent of these depictions in media.  I believe they have huge negative consequences by normalizing horrific behavior and fetishizing female suffering.  But I fetishize female suffering, including my own.  I’m not trying to be gross or overly personal and specific, it’s just important for me to communicate that this is the reality of my sexuality.  If I’m having an orgasm, that is what is in my head.  The only way I reconcile this is to mentally make an exception for porn.

For the purposes of this letter, I’m using porn to mean something used to help achieve orgasms.  When I get myself off, even with rape erotica, I believe I’m radically taking control of my own pleasure.

I’m going to find and consume porn; I don’t think that’s unreasonable.  I think reading rape erotica is often better than watching the equivalent live action porn.  I don’t think it’s universally true, but I’ve heard enough stories about questionable practices in the BDSM porn industry to be wary of it.

Since you discussed 50 Shades of Grey in the previous podcast and because of its (unfortunate) cultural significance, I want to use it as a reference point.  I agree with you that 50 Shades of Grey is a terrible book for many reasons.  I hate that due to its popularity it defines BDSM for much of the population.  I’m horrified when people think it shows a consensual BDSM relationship.  It doesn’t; it shows abuse.  I personally found it frustrating because it didn’t work for me as a romance novel about BDSM and it didn’t work for me as porn.  However, I do think it worked as porn for lots of people.  With the dubious honor of codifying the term mommy porn, I think it’s safe to say women were and are getting off to 50 Shades.  While I didn’t, I can totally relate to this.  I think people are aroused because Christian is taking advantage of Ana.  I think they are aroused by Christian basically stalking her, trying to isolate her with an NDA and telling her he’s going to take care of her pesky virginity.  I know I was.  It just didn’t go far enough for me.  I found it arousing at the same time I found it morally repulsive.

I don’t need a preface in the beginning of rape erotica telling me that this is a fantasy and to actually rape someone is evil, but I like it when it’s there.  I know there are people in the world who DO need that disclaimer.  I also don’t know how much good they do.  If you don’t think rape is wrong, I doubt a disclaimer in front of some porn is going to change your mind.  I’m ok with how I consume problematic material, but I’m very worried about how other people do.  I can easily imagine someone holding up 50 Shades and using it to claim things like: ‘women really want to be abused.  It’s mommy porn; all of you are getting off to emotional and physical abuse.  Women are to blame for rape culture.’  I’m amazed this doesn’t happen more often, honestly.

Whenever the topic of the ethics of 50 Shades comes up, I find myself in an odd position.  Most reasonable people are fine with women enjoying a BDSM fantasy but have issues with the specifics of the fantasy.  At the same time, I get the feeling that it’s not their fantasy.  Don’t get me wrong, I have issues with the specifics of the fantasy too, even as porn.  Christian Grey is kinky because he had an abusive childhood?  Such a turn off!  But at the heart of the phenomenon, a bunch of women are having orgasms to a fantasy.  I take comfort in the idea that so much erotica is written by women for women to get each other off.  I’m just torn about the cultural consequences.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Sorry I wrote you a novel.  In another life I would love to be a sex researcher and try and find answers to some of this stuff for myself, but for now I’m just going to bother amazing people like you.  Thank you so much for reading.  You are doing such important work, and I am in awe of you!

All the best,

Sara

Not me.

Dr. Nagoski:  I’m in awe of you, Sara!  Other Sara without an H.

Sarah:  [Laughs] All right, so where do you want to start?

Dr. Nagoski:  This is, this is so spectacular.  Okay, so the reason I’m really excited that we have this question is because for me it’s very much a part of histories, the history of romance novels?  If we count – and some people do – count the first, like, romance novel, in terms of modern romance novels, as The Flame and the Flower –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – which is some hot sauce, crazysauce what-the-fuckery –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.  Yes, it is.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right, there’s, there was recently a, an Avon on the Air podcast where Sarah MacLean was talking about a re-read of The Flame and the Flower, so I will just refer people there?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  To that, or to any conversation y’all have had previously about The Flame and the Flower.  All we need to say here is that the hero rapes the heroine a lot.

Sarah:  Yes.  The, consent is a nebulous concept in the context of that particular narrative, and there’re a lot of reasons for that.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  It’s complicated, and it is, it’s rape-tastic, I think, is one of the –

Sarah:  It’s, yeah, it’s rape-tastic, and it’s, it’s more complicated than Facebook complicated.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, it’s, like, so complicated.  Okay.

Sarah:  So –

Dr. Nagoski:  So I think, and, and there’s been a, a real profound shift in the relationship that romance readers and romance writers have to consent so that now the expectation is that it should be consensual.  We want it explicit.  We want there to be an asking, is this okay, and a saying out loud, boy howdy.  Not always, though!

Sarah:  Yes?

Dr. Nagoski:  Sometimes, I mean, so, for example, I was having a conversation with an alum a few years ago.  We were talking about why a person would participate in creating feminist pornography, and I was like, yeah, I just wouldn’t do it ‘cause I’m, I’m just not an exhibitionist, it’s just not my thing, and she was like, yeah, I think I probably would ‘cause I am an exhibitionist, but most porn, even ethical porn, really, like, there’s not enough rape in it for me.  Because her fantasy life was really dominated by non-consent, true non-consent, in her fantasies true non-consent.  So just as the, the Cliff notes, beginner, just so we’re all starting on the same page, this is a really common fantasy, what the research tells us, somewhere between forty and sixty percent of women – and when I say women I’m always talking about the people who participate in the research, which is almost exclusively cisgender women – sorry – about half have a rape fantasy at some point in their lives, and, eh, ten to twentyish percent of women have it as a regular and pleasurable part of their sexual fantasy life.

Sarah:  That’s rather a lot.

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s more than most people think.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  So for those out there who really enjoy non-consent in their fantasies?  Yep!

Sarah:  You’re not alone.

Dr. Nagoski:  Absolutely.  That is a thing that people like, and the research so far on the relationship between does that make you a person who believes rape myths like, well, if it happens to you it’s your fault?  No!  No, it doesn’t.  It’s just, it’s a totally normal way to experience it, and it’s the, women being dominated by men is women’s most intense non-normative fantasy.

Sarah:  Hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  The most, the high-intensity normative fantasy, just FYI, is oral sex, receiving.  And the best available explanation, the reason I did the, the piece about sensation-seeking is because it turns out that the people who have, are most likely to have rape fantasies are not, as is sometimes the case believed or talked about, that we’re trying to, like, compensate for feeling like we’re not allowed to have sex?  It’s women who are highly erotophilic and potentially sensation-seeking, so it’s just people who are wide open to a lot of sexual experiences –

Sarah:  Hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and whose brains are highly responsive to lots of different kinds of sexuality.

Sarah:  Wow!

Dr. Nagoski:  Beyond that, like, that’s what the research tells us so far.  Beyond that, anything I say science-y is speculation or really early in what’s known to us for reals-y in the research.  So what’s probably happening, when we’re born there is no sexually relevant stimulation that is innate, right.  Like, so nobody’s born being turned on by patent leather red high-heeled shoes.  You learn that, right.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  The only innate sexually relevant stimulus is genital sensations.  So what happens is from birth up into adolescence and probably across the lifespan too, your brain is learning associations between genital sensations and your internal experience and the external world, and it’s creating these feedback loops linking together all these things, so a thing, a tingle happens in your panty area and there’s something happening in the world, and your brain learns, ah!  That’s, that’s a sexually relevant stimulus; I got it.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  So doesn’t it make sense, growing up in patriarchal rape culture, that so many of us would learn that non-consent is sexually relevant, ‘cause that is a whole lot of what we’re exposed to.

Sarah:  Yeah, pretty much.

Dr. Nagoski:  So even if you believe intellectually and politically that consent is mandatory – not just that consent is sexy, but that consent is just baseline, it is, like, the bare fucking minimum, right?  Even if intellectually and politically and emotionally you know that’s true, your emotional brain spent the first two decades embedded in rape culture learning that rape is a sexually relevant stimulus.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  And so that’s, makes perfect sense to me that people would grow up having that be really actively part of what their brain learns to count as sexually relevant, and so when you have sexual fantasies, your brain goes to non-consent.  Makes perfect sense to me.  And!  Remember that ironic process thing?

Sarah:  Yes!

Dr. Nagoski:  You think, don’t think about a bear?

Sarah:  Yes?

Dr. Nagoski:  The more you try not to be turned on by something or the more something is a violation of a norm?  The more it amplifies.  Right?

Sarah:  Yep!  Totally true.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, so you’re trying to hold the plumb weight, and if there’s any sort of stakes involved, it, you, it, your, your brain activation increases, and your ability to stay still decreases.  In the same way, the more stakes there are, the more at stake there is in your not responding to something, the more you will respond to it.

Sarah:  That makes sense.

Dr. Nagoski:  And genital response, and so the next step of the argument is genital response is not necessarily pleasure or desire.  It is just sexually relevant stimulation.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  What creates the desire and the pleasure is the rest of the context, so even people who really love the fantasy, who really get off on the fantasy and love reading about the fantasy and creating their own fantasies, most of them have no interest in experimenting with that in real life.  Because the context of real life is very different.  The, my standard example – for some reason, this has become my standard example – my standard example is, the fantasy of being cornered in an alley by five strangers who all really want to fuck you can be a hot fantasy.  Because in reality the context is that it’s you safe in bed with your vibrator, not actually under any sort of threat.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  In real life, being cornered by five strangers in an alley, no matter how much they want you and no matter how attractive they are, that’s a genuinely dangerous situation.  Your brakes would be slammed on –

Sarah:  Yep.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and it would not be a wanted and liked experience.  It might still be sexually relevant.  Your genitals might absolutely respond, because it is a sexually relevant stimulation, but that’s got very little to do with whether or not you want and like it.  In fact, ten percent, insert the arousal non-concordance conversation from last time here.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I was just going to say, I know that you covered this on the last time, because the, the whole idea of whether you’re wet or not wet does not actually sin-, signify any type of arousal –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right.

Sarah:  – that is, that is having to do with your mind.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  It just means that you’ve been exposed to a sexually relevant stimulation, in the same way that – I hate this analogy, but it does the job! – Pavlov trained his dogs to salivate to the ring of a bell because he rang the bell and presented the food, rang the bell, presented the food, and then eventually you just ring the bell, and the dog salivates, because the bell became food relevant.

Sarah:  Yep!

Dr. Nagoski:  That does not mean the dog wanted to eat the bell!

Sarah:  No.

Dr. Nagoski:  Or found the bell delicious.

Sarah:  No.  Or they –

Dr. Nagoski:  Right?

Sarah:  – or that any bell ringing at anytime, anywhere, is going to produce the exact same response.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  And for humans, we would never assume that a physiological reflex has anything to do with what a person wants or likes in any domain except sex.  Like, if you – my standard – if you bite into a moldy, bruised peach and your mouth waters, there isn’t anyone but a total loony-tune person who would say, well, your mouth watered; you must really enjoy that moldy, bruised peach.

Sarah:  No, it’s gross.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, we would never ever, it’s, we would know that that’s just the reflexive response that people have.  And we would know better.  So just because you respond – and, actually, there’s brand-new research that shows that a genital response to liked sexual, liked visual sexually relevant stimulation is the same intensity as the genital response to unliked sexually relevant stimulation.  The initial –

Sarah:  Huh.

Dr. Nagoski:  – genital response is the same intensity?  The difference is that the unliked sexually relevant stimulation, that arousal level goes down really fast.

Sarah:  So I want to ask you about two specific things in the, in the context of Sara’s letter.  One, you mentioned ethical porn.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yes!

Sarah:  I wanted you to, I wanted to ask you specifically what that is, but I also wanted to ask you about the part where she seems to feel a lot of internal conflict because she enjoys rape fantasy but then hates rape humor and jokes about rape in media and, and is actively against rape culture.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  So, I’ll do the second thing first.

Sarah:  Okay.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, as soon as I read that I was reminded of Roxane Gay’s TEDxWomen talk that she just did.  So, Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, sometimes referred to the Bad Feminist.  In her TED talk, she talks about, like, listening to really loud, very horribly misogynous lyric rap music on her way to work, and she knows that when she consumes this media it creates a marketplace for this media which perpetuates patriarchy.  She knows that, and what she says is, why does it have to be so catchy?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  And that’s just true, and I think there is a level, and this is sort of what we negotiate.  The fact is, we were all raised in patriarchal rape culture.  Our emotional brains got taught that, and our emotional brains are not linked to most of what we learned in college, right, so our emotional selves are not closely linked to the grand narrative and our critical deconstruction of the grand narrative.  Our emotional brains are what they are, and we can shape them gradually over time, but it’s okay to – and the moral of the story in Come as You Are is that the sexuality you have is the sexuality you have.  It has changed all across your lifespan, it will continue to change all across your lifespan, and the best way to develop the healthiest, most expansive, sexually pleasurable, sexual self that you can, that’s available to you as a human being is to accept where you are right now in a nonjudgmental way.  You don’t have to love it; you just have to be like, yep, that’s where I am right now.  And the more you can stay still – this is, this is a really deep and par-, a paradox that people are resistant to, that the way to change something is to stay really still inside of where you are right now, not change it.  There’s a quote that – you’re going to hear some clicking while I open a file very slowly, apparently.

Sarah:  Ah, do not worry.

Dr. Nagoski:  There’s a quote I like so much I put it in the mouth of one of my characters.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Okay, here it is.  Kiese Laymon, at the end of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America – best book title ever – in the last essay, what he says is, I believe in transformation, and for the first time in my life I really get how transformation is impossible without honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow.

Sarah:  Whoa.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  When I – so this is constructed as a letter to his mother –

Sarah:  Whoa.

Dr. Nagoski:  – where he says, I get that transformation can’t happen until I accept what I am now –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  – how I got here, and where I want to go.

Sarah:  And for Sara, part of that acceptance might be accepting the way that she is now and why she got there and that where she is is okay.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  That there’s nothing wrong with having these fantasies.  It doesn’t make you a rapist.  It doesn’t mean you want to engage in these behaviors in a real way.  It doesn’t mean you’re not totally in favor of sexual autonomy.  In fact, as she says, I mean, she gets really articulate about the ways that her having these fantasies is in itself practicing her own sexual autonomy.  She gets to choose.  Isn’t there a, a novel – is it coming out this summer? – where the whole story is the heroine wants to construct a rape fantasy?

Sarah:  Oh, no, that already came out!

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, it did.

Sarah:  That’s Asking for It by Lilah Pace.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, haven’t read it yet.

Sarah:  Oh –

Dr. Nagoski:  It’s, like, so on my list.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Did you have feelings about it?

Sarah:  I knew that it was, was not my thing?

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  So I knew that it would not be for me, but I remember (a) several of my reviewers were just blown away by how powerful it was, and at RWA last year there were two reporters from Jezebel, one of whom I knew, and the other per-, the other woman I had never met before, and I think we were at a party for a particular publisher – it must have been the publisher for that book – and I’m talking to, to, to Kelly, who I know, and we’re just chatting, and she’s like, yeah, she’s over in the corner behind the curtain reading Asking for It, ‘cause she started it and she can’t put it down.  So we’re at a cocktail party, and this – [laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – one of the women picked up the book and started reading it and just retreated behind the curtain in the corner of the conference room where we were because she couldn’t stop reading this book.  It was just mind-blowing to her.

Dr. Nagoski:  Wow.

Sarah:  I remember, like, going over and being like, listen, I’m not trying to interrupt you.  Do you need food or water?  Are you okay?

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Do you need any supplies?  ‘Cause you’re going to be here a while.  I’ve been where you are.  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  But that, that book, for a lot of people, just blew them away in the portrayal of someone who’s actively looking to fulfill their rape fantasy.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  And notice that it happens in a highly safe, controlled, ultimately consensual circumstance.

Sarah:  Yes.  It is, it is, ah, sexual autonomy and agency.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right?  So, and it is all about this balance of turning on the ons and turning off the offs?

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Sometimes the things that hit the ons also turn off the offs, and sometimes the things that hit the offs also turn on the ons.

Sarah:  Yes, this is true.

Dr. Nagoski:  It is complicated, and what works – so, I mean, tickling is my go-to example.  Tickling can feel pleasurable if you’re in a fun, flirty, sexy state of mind and your certain special someone whom you trust and like a lot and you’re already a little bit turned on anyway, they come and tickle you?  That can feel good, but if you’re, like, pissed off at your partner or in the middle of just, like, tying your child’s shoes and they try to tickle you, you want to punch them in the face!

Sarah:  Yes.  Yes, you do.

Dr. Nagoski:  I had a, a woman, I was having lunch at a conference and we were talking about this stuff, and a woman was like, can you tell that to my husband, because he, like, in the morning, before we leave, I’m in the middle of changing the baby’s diapers, and he asks me, so, I want to have sex tonight?  The answer is always no.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Dude!

Dr. Nagoski:  And it’s not that she –

Sarah:  She is wrist-deep in poop!

Dr. Nagoski:  Right?  Yeah!  Like, so all of these things are context, sensitive to context, and so the idea is to create a context that works.  And what that context is going to be will differ from person to person, and it will differ from day to fricking day.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  So, ethical porn.

Sarah:  Yes!

Dr. Nagoski:  Given that there is absolutely a time and a place for porn and for BDSM and for non-consenting fantasies, so ethical porn.  It mostly goes under the title feminist porn.  Not all feminist porn is ethical, not all ethical porn is feminist, but some places where you can reliably get ethically made, feminist porn:  Tristan Taormino, anything?  She actually describes it as farm-to-table porn?

Sarah:  [Laughs] Farm-to-table porn?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!

Sarah:  Brilliant!

Dr. Nagoski:  Pink & White Productions, which I believe produces Crash Pad.  The Crash Pad series is feminist.  There’s, there’s, like, if you just Google feminist porn you’ll find a bunch of things.  These are ones that I know about.  More mainstream-y kinds of porn is Erika Lust –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – and Blue Artichoke.  They’re both European-based.

Sarah:  Now what makes ethical porn and feminist porn ethical and feminist?

Dr. Nagoski:  That’s a really good question, and everybody’s got different ideas about that, but for me what counts is that we know for sure that everybody had full choice in being there, full choice over what they did and what they didn’t do, that what I’m seeing is largely real.  There’s real pleasure happening, not just, like, fakey-fake, ah! ah! ah!

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  Like, you are nowhere near her clitoris!  That is not how that feels for her.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  Sorry.  And I really like this – it’s not the case with all feminist porn or ethical porn, but very often there’s much greater diversity of body shapes and sizes, of races and ethnicities, of sexual identity and gender expression, which covers a whole lot of ground, but basically, like, it’s not necessarily always heterosexual.  And sort of, like, all kinds of different people engaged in all kinds of different behaviors, sort of anybody can be penetrated?  Doesn’t matter what set of genitals you’ve got; everybody can be penetrated in some way or other.  Is there sort of, like, equal sharing of the penetration.  And, so, is there pleasure?  Is there full consent?  And often – oh, Comstock Films is another one that I like.  Often you get to watch the scene, and either before or after, and sometimes both, you get to hear a conversation with the people in the scene talking about their experience, how they came to do the scene, how they felt about what happened in the scene, what it was like for them, what worked, what was not so great.  So you know for sure that these are human beings who chose to be there, and you get to know what place this experience has for them in their life, and it’s not just, you know, fifteen minutes of meat and potatoes.

Sarah:  Huh!  Meat and potatoes.  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  That’s what I call the shot of just, like, she’s open for the camera, and the penis is going in and out, and everything is shaved, and there’s just going in and out.  Like, why?  I – like, that’s sexually relevant stimulation, right?  But the reason we add story, but, like, the meaning of that can be different, right?  Is this the pool boy?  Is it a stepbrother/stepsister fantasy?  Is it, like, what’s going on between these two people?  Adding the layer of meaning and story on top of it changes everything.  For me to watch just, like, a penis going into a vagina, in and out, in and out, like, I’m so bored.  I can feel my IQ dropping as I watch it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  But if there’s, like, what is the structure of their relationship?  That could potentially –

Sarah:  Work really well.

Dr. Nagoski:  – really – like, if they’re, like, having break-up sex, like, they’re about, this is the last time they’re ever going to see each other and they’re both really angry and really despairing and also, like, not quite ready to let go –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Dr. Nagoski:  – that in and out, in and out is a totally different thing!

Sarah:  Did you ever see, there was, years and years and years ago – I think I owned it on VHS – there was a porn film based on the idea that there was a romance author, and she was writing her story, so the story would be acted out with, like, all of these incredibly bronzed and shaved people in bad historical costumes.  [Laughs] And then the –

Dr. Nagoski:  That sounds amazing!

Sarah:  It’s so great!  And then the heroines would, like, lift their skirts, and they’re totally shaved, and they’d say weird shit like, give me your seed.  [Laughs] And so her story would come to life, but then of course she had hot neighbors, and there was a pizza guy, and she sent him away and sent him over to the neighbors; there’s a sex scene with the neighbors.  It, it, the whole idea of it being a romance author, I had to see it –

Dr. Nagoski:  Of course.

Sarah:  – and it was just so incredibly goofy!

Dr. Nagoski:  And I, I think goofy has its place!

Sarah:  Oh, it totally does!  I am ninety-nine percent here for goofy.

Dr. Nagoski:  Right!

Sarah:  I re-, I remember, like, I can, this, this is not for me, but this is so hilariously awesome I can’t stop watching!

Dr. Nagoski:  I think – I could be wrong, and I’m sure somebody will write in and tell me if I am – I think that’s a Candida Royalle.

Sarah:  Yes, it is!  Thank you!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  She’s the grandmother of feminist porn.  She just died last year.  It was like –

Sarah:  She died?!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  No!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  Her work was, like, amazing and changed the whole world, and that sounds to me like it, yeah, like it was a Candida Royalle film.  And absolute-, like, right, like, it builds a story.

Sarah:  Yes.  It is definitely a Can-, I definitely remember it being a Candida Royalle.  Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah. What’s the title of that?

Sarah:  [Laughs] It’s the porn of romance novels –

Dr. Nagoski:  So people can go and find it, buy it on Amazon, and – [laughs]

Sarah:  – style for porn for women.  I’m going to be able to find this, ‘cause it –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, man, I can’t believe she died!  That’s horrible!  I mean, it happens, ‘cause humans, but bummer!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I always questioned her name, though.  Candida is a, is a yeast.  That’s what you don’t –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – it’s what you, what you don’t want.  You don’t want that.

Dr. Nagoski:  Other feminist porn people:  Annie Sprinkle, another, you know, performing name.  Annie Sprinkle’s wonderful and profoundly feminist and a performance artist.  She’s amazing!

Sarah:  Really.

Dr. Nagoski:  Nina Hartley?  Again, just, like, spectacular and awesome and has a really profound relationship with her body and really understands the ways that stress influences your experience of sexual pleasure and your access to your own sexual authenticity, and a true exhibitionist.  She says explicitly, if you’re watching me have sex, you know that I am, like, I want you to watch me have sex.  I get off on it.

Sarah:  I heard an interview with her and Sex Nerd Sandra?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  It was mind-blowing.  Just the way she, like, she had this sort of openness of her body.  Like, this is my elbow, this is my arm, this is my vulva –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yep.

Sarah:  – and it’s all parts of my body.  I am in control over what you see.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  Yep!  It’s hers!

Sarah:  Wow.

Dr. Nagoski:  She gets to decide what she does with it, and one of the things she really likes doing with it is having sex in front of people.

Sarah:  Okay then!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  And, like, that’s not the thing that turns me on, but, like, it totally turns her on, and what turns her on has nothing to do with what turns me on.

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Nagoski:  So great!  Awesome!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Dr. Nagoski:  So there’s, there’s a lot of wonderful feminist porn that is spread over the country and spread over multiple decades and is definitely available, and usually costs money, unlike free porn, unfortunately.

Sarah:  Yes.  I’m, I am not sure if it was Candida or if it was Nina Hartley, but now I need to go and, like, unpack the boxes of things that we haven’t unpacked yet and find the VHS.

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I don’t even own a VHS player anymore, but I’m pretty sure I kept this video.

Dr. Nagoski:  I do!

Sarah:  Well, you, you need to find this movie; it’s incredible.

Dr. Nagoski:  I have to find it.

Sarah:  I will, I will find it and send the, send you the link.

Dr. Nagoski:  I’m sure it’s available somewhere on, like, eBay.

Sarah:  It’s ridiculous.  It’s amazing.  Is there anything else you wanted to add for Sara’s letter?

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, the last thing, my last note was that, that she was torn about the, the cultural consequences.

Sarah:  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  And I think that the cultural consequences of women consuming politically imperfect erotica are mostly move-, I mean, many things are both good and bad simultaneously, and I think it mostly moves us in a good direction, because it is about women prioritizing their own authentic sexuality and what turns them on, and if what turns them on happens to be a recapitulation of hegemony, that’s just status quo.  What’s changed is that she’s claiming it.  It’s not false consciousness.  It is really what deeply turns her on, and that shifts her ahead of the curve.  So I don’t think it’s bad; we are not going backward.  It’s a mess.  We’re creating change; it’s going to take a long time.  Hopefully the next generation of women will have fantasies that are really profoundly about consent and about both people feeling really desired and being able to play and prioritizing pleasure over this whole desire.  Desire only becomes really relevant as a sexual phenomenon when there are culturally constructed barriers about why two people shouldn’t be together, and wanting is fun to play with and is the point of a lot of romance novels, but when pleasure is central, that’s where the radical transformation happens, when people are like, this is what I like!  This is what gives my body pleasure, and therefore I’m allowed, and anybody who has something to say about that can go say it to somebody else, ‘cause it’s not my business what your opinion is about my sexuality.  So cultural consequences, I think nothing is perfect.  Everything has good stuff and not-so-good stuff, and I absolutely think that anything that prioritizes women’s sexual autonomy, the good outweighs the bad.

Sarah:  Yes, I agree with you there.  Yes.

Dr. Nagoski:  And I know not everybody will.  People got opinions about what other people should be doing with their sexuality.

Sarah:  Unfortunately.

Dr. Nagoski:  And in the same way that you don’t should on yourself, I’m going to say, don’t should on anybody else.

Sarah:  So your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah!  It’s not for me.  It’s like with romance novels, right?  Like, if it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t for me.  That doesn’t mean it’s not for somebody.  Doesn’t mean it was inherently not good.  It just means it wasn’t for me.  It’s not for you, it’s not for you.  That’s fine!  But that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I liked it and whether or not it was for me.  I don’t mean to be judgy, but, you know.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I don’t mean to be judgy, but stop judging me!

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah, but just, like, everybody stop judging each other and let people be different from each other!  Is that so much to ask?

Sarah:  Yes, yes, it is, apparently.

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I don’t, I am baffled by this too, but yes.

Dr. Nagoski: Yeah.

Sarah:  Thank you for, for taking the time to do this.  I really appreciate it.

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, it was totally my pleasure.

Sarah:  I, I, I think it’s really, really cool that you got some amazing letters to, to respond to, so thank you so much for being so thorough and taking so much time to respond so personally.

Dr. Nagoski:  Oh, it was absolutely my pleasure.  They were amazing questions!

Sarah:  They really were, weren’t they?

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I’m always amazed by – I mean, one of my, one of my goals with Smart Bitches is to create a safe space to talk about all this stuff –

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and I’m, I’m still amazed by the intimacy of online community and the intimacy of voice, that people who hear my voice feel very connected to me –

Dr. Nagoski:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – especially ‘cause I’m going, like, right into their eardrums, and that people feel safe sharing things like that through me –

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – that’s amazing.

Dr. Nagoski:  And did you know when you started that you were doing something inherently political?

Sarah:  Nope.  Not really.  I mean, I know it now, but when I started Smart Bitches, it was sixteen years ago, and I did not realize.

Dr. Nagoski:  You were just like, I love romance novels, I want to talk about romance novels, I think it’s okay to talk about romance novels?

Sarah:  Yeah.  Ah, fuck it.  I’m going to do the site I want to do anyway.  Screw it.  And, and I remember starting it, and my husband was like, yeah, this is, this is going to be, this is what you’re going to retire on, and I was like, no!  Nobody’s going to read this!

Dr. Nagoski:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Nobody’s going to want to see this site!  Come on!  I started, like, three websites.  This is not going to be it.  Nope!  He was right.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Well, I mean, my general attitude is, I want to do this, and you said no, but fuck you, I’m going to do it anyway.

Dr. Nagoski:  Yeah.  People have really strong opinions about women and their sexuality and romance novels.  I think the reason they’re such a flashpoint is because what they’re really about is women’s sexual autonomy, and that is the single most dangerous thing on earth.  By which I mean, the single most powerful thing on earth.

Sarah:  Oh, totally.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this episode.  I hope that that was as mind-blowing for you as it was for me.  I want to thank Emily Nagoski for hanging out with me for a very long time.  We did a lot of preparation for this episode, too, sharing the letters and going over them, and I cannot say thank you enough to the people who wrote, to Danielle and Elizabeth and Sara, for trusting us with your letters and letting me share them with the podcast community as well.  Thank you very, very much for being so honest and so very brave.

This podcast is sponsored by romance reader and fantasy author Angela Korra’ti who writes for Carina Press as Angela Highland.  Her Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is available now wherever Carina books are sold.  Begin this epic fantasy adventure with book one, Valor of the Healer.  The Rook:  An assassin hired by vengeful elven rebels to kill the calculating Duke of Shalridan, Julian walks into a trap and barely escapes with his life.  Healed by a beautiful captive in the dungeons, he’s enthralled and vows to free her from the duke’s clutches.  A Knight of the Hawk, duty bound to cleanse elven magic from Adalonia, Kestar has a secret and heretical ability to sense the use of magic from afar.  He knows something suspicious is happening in the duke’s keep, but he has no idea how deep the conspiracy goes.  The Dove is a half-elven healer with no control over her magic.  Faanshi is the goddess’s to command.  She’s always been a pawn of the powerful, but after healing two mysterious and very different men she faces a choice that may decide the fate of the whole kingdom.  You can find out more about this series and about Angela Highland’s books at AngelaHighland.com.

Author and podcast fan Kelly Maher is sponsoring the podcast transcript and celebrating her latest birthday, but she’s giving the gift to you!  Her Sweet Heat collection of backlist titles is available for half price at all outlets through the end of July, and her short story “Blizzard Bliss” is available for free through the link in the podcast entry.  Volume 1 contains eight short stories and one novelette wherein two friends from culinary school are paired together on a competition show, and their longtime friendship simmers to a boil.  Each is on sale for $1.99, and you can find links to all three volumes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

If you are a regular listener or reader of the transcripts and you’ve had a look at our Patreon campaign, I want to say thank you.  By listener request, I set one up, and for as little as $1 a month you can help me reach goals to improve production, commission transcripts, upgrade equipment, and generally make the podcast more awesome!  You can see all of the rewards and options at Patreon.com/SmartBitches, and thank you again.

We have cool music!  I’m very excited about this!  This episode’s music is provided by Crime and the Forces of Evil.  The track is “The Burke-Gilman Troll” from the album Bone Walker, the sound track for Angela Korra’ti’s Free Court of Seattle urban fantasy series.  You can find this album at Bandcamp, Amazon, iTunes, or CD Baby, and I will have links in the podcast entry, also known as the show notes, for all of those places so you can check it out.

I will also have links to our previous podcast with Emily Nagoski, the link to Emily’s TED talk, to Roxane Gay’s TED talk, to the Avon on the Air episode, to Sex Nerd Sandra, and all of the books and movies we discussed in this episode.

I want to say thank you again.  This was a rather mammoth episode, but I am really honored by the degree of trust that you’ve placed in me and in Emily to talk about the issues that you are having.  We have a very special episode coming up next week too, with an author that I’m certain many of you will be very excited to hear from.  BeginswithLisaendswithKleypas.  Try to control your screaming.  I tried to.  I barely did it.  It was really exciting, I’m not going to lie.

But on behalf of Emily and everyone here and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[fantastic music]