Emily Nagoski

It doesn’t help either you or your Feels if you shove them in your partner’s face and say, “ACCEPT THIS!” How would you respond if your partner did that to you? Unless you’re a saint of unrivaled patience and tolerance, you would get defensive—and fair enough. Shoving your Feels in your partner’s face is using your feelings as a weapon, and that’s never okay

Here’s what I need you to know right now: The information in this book will show you that whatever you’re experiencing in your sexuality—whether it’s challenges with arousal, desire, orgasm, pain, no sexual sensations—is the result of your sexual response mechanism functioning appropriately . . . in an inappropriate world. You are normal; it is the world around you that’s broken.

Expecting (anticipating), eagerness (wanting), and enjoying (liking) are separate functions in your brain. You can want without liking (craving), anticipate without wanting (dread), or any other combination.

But suppose the stressor is one that your brain determines you can’t survive by escaping and you can’t survive by conquering—you feel the teeth of the lion bite into you from behind. This is when you get the brakes stress response—the parasympathetic nervous system, the “STOP!” activated by the most extreme distress. Your body shuts down; you may even experience “tonic immobility,” where you can’t move, or can move only sluggishly. Animals in the wild freeze and fall to the ground as a last-ditch effort to convince a predator they’re already dead; Stephen Porges has hypothesized that freeze is a stress response that facilitates a painless death.1

Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress—“There’s a lion! Run!”
Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress—“There’s a lion! Kill it!”
Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress—“There’s a lion! Play dead!”

Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress—“There’s a lion! Run!”
Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress—“There’s a lion! Kill it!”
Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress—“There’s a lion! Play dead!”
And none of these indicates that now is a good time to get laid.

First, in modern life, we are, as I mentioned, almost never chased by lions. Our stressors are lower intensity and longer duration—“chronic stressors,” they’re called, in contrast to “acute stressors,” like straightforward predation

If our stress is chronic and we don’t take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all that activated stress just hangs out inside us, making us sick, tired, and unable to experience pleasure with sex (or with much of anything else).

But third, even without medication and an emotion-dismissing culture, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response midcycle because, “Now is not an appropriate time for Feels.” We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation—i.e., not freak anybody out. But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels. We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.

Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.