Come As You Are, by Emily Nagoski

A book on "why and how women’s sexuality works that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy".

I'm not in this book's target/descriptive audience and can't discuss a lot of its claims first-personally, although I've discussed it with several women-friends (a surprisingly large % of my women friends seem to have read this book?) and heard various perspectives. I enjoyed this book and think it's probably useful and positive, but also that there were some flaws in the philosophy and models it presents; my guess is this is one of those topics where just reading/thinking/reflecting about it is really helpful, such that the book can do a lot of good just through that, but I found myself mainly thinking about it as a work of argument and on that front I have questions.

Basically, I think this book was based on a false (or at least, tense) premise that "you are normal and fine exactly how you are"; that your sex-desires (the author says sex is not a "drive", because you can't die from not-having it, unlike water or food etc) are just fine and don't need to be changed. But... I think the book is not-subtly invested in helping people have more sex, and that it's kind of in-denial about that. Now, there are lots of things in life that you can only achieve by not directly focussing on achieving them -- meditation is a good example, you can't clear your mind by focussing really hard on clearing your mind, so sometimes meditation instructions come out seeming a bit self-denying as well. I think that's what Nagoski thinks she's doing, but... for me there was a tension here that wasn't well-resolved. Admittedly, meditation books also often dance around whether it's "good" to seek enlightment ("Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish" is a genuine thing) and often say that if you're seeking the goal you're missing the goal, so maybe this is just the same thing, but it felt different; here it felt more like the book was pretending that everyone is fine as they are, while not really acknowledging why people have a meta-preference (for their own sake or for someone else's) for wanting to have more sexual desire even when they don't.

What does stand out to me in this book is how all the "characters" (the author comes up with ~5 imagined/composite women who exemplify various experiences she's encountered) have partners who 1) are 100% supportive, engaged, and highly communicative, and 2) don't have any needs or desires that conflict in any way with the protagonists' (or at least, don't have any believable degree of investment in their own needs or desires). This is just perplexing. It feels like the real problem of sex for most humans is that your partner(s) have different needs and wants than you do; solving that equation to everyone's true satisfaction is not actually possible; and what's worse, people's relationships are fraught and vulnerable and uncommunicative (in general, and maybe even more so when it comes to sex) This is a really hard problem!, and one that Nagoski's characters don't ever properly encounter. To me this throws into question the whole book.

This is exacerbated by a claim the book is very keen to make but which I think (based on the book's own empirical information!) is completely misleading. Basically, the book says that men have more sexual desire (etc) on average, but that “there's more variance within groups than between groups” (which is hammered home repeatedly). The author uses the analogy with height: that the average height for men is 5 inches taller than the average height for women, but that the variance within each group is bigger than that, so "a lot of women are taller than a lot of men". This is, in my opinion, a completely misleading way to look at in-group and betwen-group variance. Take height: it's true that there are tall women and short men, of course, but for any given man-woman pair it is overwhelmingly likely that the man is taller than the woman. Most men-women couples will have a man who is taller than the woman. The within-group variation doesn't affect the individual couples most of the time, and the between-group variation really really does.

So, if the distributions of sexual desire among men and women is anything like the one for height (I have no idea about this -- I'm skeptical about most empirical social science of this kind, I'm just taking Nagoski's comparison here) then the overwhelming majority of men-women couples will have a man who wants more sex than the woman does. I think denying that is just misleading, given what the author wants to do, and comes back to my feeling that this book doesn't really tackle the actual real-world problems people have around sex; it solves the problems that you might have in some idealised world that you're not actually in.

Another big philosophical issue I had with the book is that the author blames many of the issues around sex on "assumptions built for men": for example, that "a man's genitals typically behave the way his mind is behaving—if his penis is erect, he’s feeling turned on."

This is... false in practice, but also not even "true to stereotype"? It actually contradicts the tropes about male sexuality in two directions -- erectile disfunction (mind says yes, body says no) and erections-for-no-reason (mind says no, body says yes). I don't think I'll ever really understand the impulse to say "this thing is bad because it's normed for men and imposed on women", where it doesn't really seem normed for men either? (Don't get me wrong, a lot of stuff in the world does fit that bill, but a lot of other stuff doesn't -- a lot of stuff just seems bad for everyone, or bad for 95% of people, or whatever, but there's this impulse to say "it's because it's normed for men!" without any need to examine that with evidence, which irks me).

Anyway, the claim here is in service of the idea that a woman's physical response has almost-no relationship to how she feels; specifically that “there’s a 50 percent overlap between blood flow to a males genitals and how turned on he feels. There’s a 10 percent overlap between blood flow to a woman’s genitals and how turned on she feels”. I'm not entirely sure what Nagoski means by this -- if it's false-positives, false-negatives, or both combined somehow. Nagoski's claim is that physical response only means the cue is “sexually relevant”, arousal (openness to the idea of having sex right then) is separate and happens later, and desire (actively wanting to have sex then) comes last. This model seems very weird to me? But what do I know.

The reason this is all an issue is that the author claims “the best way to tell if a woman is aroused is to listen to her words”; basically, the author wants women's partners to ignore physical cues completely because they don't necessarily concord with feelings. I'm a huge fan of words, and I think people (in general) should be way more humble about their interpretations of other people across the board, and open to being wrong about interpretations. But people lie about sex all the time, and one implication of the author's position is that if someone is giving lots of physical and other cues that they don't want to have sex but is explicitly saying "I want to have sex!" their partner should just ignore the other cues completely, which I find mad. Again, the issue for me is that the whole book exists in some kind of idealized world where couples are completely honest and open and trusting and the only obstacle to sex is not-knowing enough about human sexuality. But this is blatantly untrue/inapplicable to most relationships, and I think a lot of it becomes actively bad advice once you acknowledge the possibility of various other dynamics from real life.

There's other issues with the book where I just don't think the model it presents is self-consistent or convincing. Nagoski's model is that expecting, eagerness and enjoying sex are three different things (mapping to: physical response, arousal, desire), but when she tries to explain the sexual appeal of Bad Boys, abusive partners, non-commital partners and "make up sex" after arguments it.... doesn't really make sense within her model, as presented? Similarly when she talks about vibrators, it feels like their very existence/enjoyability actually contradict her model, and it's very unsatisfying that she just glosses over all of this stuff very quickly and hurriedly. It's possible they fit in her model without me understanding how, but I think it's more probable that her model is just a very incomplete picture.

Anyway. I guess my summary might be that I think the author's model explains some things about human sexuality very usefully; at other times, the author observes certain issues that I think are indeed important and relevant, but I'm not convinced that the author's model actually explains their dynamics well; and then sometimes I think the author's claims are just very unconcinving. But overall I clearly found the book very interesting to think about, and I feel like it'd be good if people discussed this stuff more, and would learn more from directly understanding other humans' experiences of this stuff than necessarily from this book's particular model of it.