Summary: Come As You Are

The GIST

Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski is the book that sex therapists hand to their clients and that readers buy in stacks for their friends. First published in 2015 with the subtitle The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, it sets out what research actually says about how women's desire, arousal and pleasure work, and it reaches a conclusion that most of its readers have waited a long time to hear: you are normal. Nagoski holds a PhD in health behavior, specialized in human sexuality at Indiana University, trained at the Kinsey Institute, and spent years teaching the subject to college students. She writes like the best teacher you ever had, with jokes, metaphors and a refusal to let shame have the last word.

The book became a New York Times bestseller and a fixture on recommended-reading lists, praised by the relationship researcher John Gottman among others. It matters because it replaces a story almost everyone absorbs (that there is one right way to want and enjoy sex, and that anyone who differs is defective) with a better one. Her refrain, repeated until it sticks, is "we all have the same parts, organized differently."

The Big Ideas

The same parts, organized differently

Nagoski starts with the body. Male and female genitals grow from the same tissue in the womb, so every person is built from identical components arranged in different ways. From there she widens the point. Bodies vary enormously in how they look and how they respond, and women vary even more than men. That variety is the norm, not a deviation from it. Your sexuality, she suggests, is as individual as a fingerprint, which makes comparing yourself with anyone else pointless.

This is where a great deal of sexual worry begins, with the suspicion that something about your body is wrong. Nagoski is willing to call only two experiences abnormal: a lack of consent, and unwanted pain. Everything else is a variation. One of her plainest lines is that it is normal not to want sex you do not like.

Accelerator and brakes

The heart of the book is the dual control model, developed by John Bancroft and Erick Janssen at the Kinsey Institute. Your brain, it says, runs two systems at once. A sexual accelerator notices everything sexually relevant that you see, hear, feel or imagine and sends the signal to turn on. Sexual brakes notice every reason not to be turned on and send the signal to turn off. The reasons can be large or small: stress, worry about how your body looks, fear of pregnancy, an argument from that morning, a messy kitchen, even a stray sound or smell.

Everyone's two systems are set to different sensitivities, and the book includes a questionnaire to help you find your own settings. That is your sexual personality. Nagoski's key claim is that most difficulties come from brakes that are being pressed, not from an accelerator that has failed. Sensitive brakes, she reports, are the strongest predictor of sexual problems whatever the accelerator is doing. So the usual advice (more novelty, more tricks, more stimulation) aims at the wrong pedal. Easing off the brakes generally does more than stamping on the gas.

She brings this to life through composite characters based on her students and clients, whose stories run through the chapters. Laurie, after having a baby, lost all desire for sex with her husband and felt guilty about it; nothing was wrong with her, but a great deal was pressing her brakes. Camilla felt little spark from fantasy or from looking at her partner; she simply had a less sensitive accelerator and needed more time and attention to get going.

Context is everything

The same sensation can feel wonderful or irritating depending on the state you are in. Nagoski draws on work by the neuroscientist Kent Berridge, in which stimulating the very same spot in a rat's brain produced eager approach when the animal was in a comfortable setting and fearful behavior when it was in a stressful one. Humans are no different. A partner's touch can be delicious when you are relaxed and annoying when you are overwhelmed.

Two emotional systems shape that context most. The first is stress, which hits the brakes for most people. Here Nagoski introduces the stress response cycle. The body gears up to meet a threat and then needs to finish the cycle before it can settle. An animal that has played dead to escape a predator will shake and spasm after the danger has gone. People need an equivalent, and solving the problem that caused the stress does not provide it: dealing with the stressor is not the same as dealing with the stress. Physical activity, crying, laughing, affection, sleep and rest are what complete the cycle. For people who have lived through sexual trauma the road is longer, because the brain has learned to read sex itself as a threat, and she points to mindfulness and therapy as help.

The second system is love, and it cuts both ways. Feeling safe and connected eases the brakes for many people, while worry about the relationship presses them. Nagoski adds a sharp warning. The sex people crave is not always sex that feels good. Sometimes it is sex that feels like relief, a way to quiet fear and prove we are loved. Wanting and liking are different things, and electric chemistry with someone who is bad for you is no evidence that safe love must be dull.

Then there is the cultural context. Most of us absorb messages that sex is dangerous, shameful or a performance to be graded, and that our bodies do not look the way they should. Women are shamed as prudes if they decline and as sluts if they agree. Every one of those messages is a foot on the brake, and self-criticism about your body is among the heaviest. Research she cites links appreciating your own body with better sex across the board, from arousal to orgasm.

Arousal is not desire, and desire is not a drive

Nagoski's phrase is that lubrication is not causation. What the genitals do and what a person feels are two separate things, a gap known as arousal nonconcordance. She cites research finding only about a 10 percent overlap between genital response and felt arousal in women, against about 50 percent in men. A body can react to something sexually relevant that its owner does not want, and a person can want sex very much while the body is slow to respond. Her analogy is a restaurant: recognizing one tells you nothing about whether you are hungry or the food is any good. Genital response is not desire, and it is not consent.

She then takes apart the idea of a sex drive. Hunger is a drive, because we die without food. Sex is an incentive motivation system: it pulls us toward thriving, and nobody perishes for lack of it. That matters because it removes the notion that a person who seldom wants sex out of the blue has something missing. There are two common styles. Spontaneous desire seems to arrive from nowhere, in anticipation of pleasure. Responsive desire shows up after pleasure and closeness have already begun. By her estimate about 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women experience mostly the spontaneous kind, about 30 percent of women and 5 percent of men mostly the responsive kind, and many people know both. Culture treats the first as healthy and the second as low libido. She insists both are normal.

Pleasure is the measure

Orgasms differ from person to person and from one occasion to the next. Only about 30 percent of women reliably reach orgasm from intercourse; the rest do so sometimes, rarely or never, and Nagoski treats all of that as normal. She calls orgasm a fantastic bonus. The way through difficulty is to make pleasure the goal, since fixing on orgasm as a target tends to make both harder to reach.

The final chapter is about meta-emotions: how you feel about how you feel. Shame and frustration about your own sexuality press the brakes. Curiosity, kindness and acceptance release them. This is the meaning of the title. You can come to sex as you are and work with your sexuality instead of against it.

Putting It to Work

• Map your own controls. List what presses your accelerator and what hits your brakes. The book's worksheets are built for exactly this, and each chapter closes with a short recap to help the ideas stick.
• Take your foot off the brake first. When desire is missing, ask what is in the way before asking what might add excitement.
• Finish the stress cycle. Move your body, sleep, cry, laugh or share affection before expecting yourself to feel desire. Do not push through.
• Tend the context. Nagoski's favorite metaphor is a garden: each one needs different conditions to flourish. Work out what yours needs more of and less of.
• Stop waiting for lightning. If your desire is responsive, create the conditions in which it can appear, and do not read its late arrival as a lack of love.
• Change the conversation. With a partner, trade the accusation that someone never wants to for a question about what gets in the way and what helps.
• Choose your media and be kind to your body. Drop the sources that make you feel inadequate and practice appreciating the body you have.
• Trust your experience. When what you feel disagrees with what you think you should feel, assume your experience is right, and go slowly.

Who Should Read It

Read this if you have ever suspected you were broken, if you and a partner want sex at different rates and it has become a source of hurt, or if nobody ever taught you how any of this works. It is written mainly for women but is just as useful for anyone who loves one. Some readers find its metaphors repetitive, and some wish the research behind it drew on a more diverse range of people, but the tone is frank, funny and kind, and it needs no science background. It is a foundation, not a bag of tricks, and its lessons about stress and self-acceptance reach well beyond the bedroom.