make note of all the things you like about what you see. Write them down. You’ll notice that your brain tries to list all the things you don’t like, but don’t include those. Do it again every week. Or twice a week. Or more. Each time, the things you like will become a little more salient and the noise will get a little quieter.
“You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.”
“So how do I stop hitting brake?” The million-dollar question. The short answer is: Reduce your stress, be affectionate toward your body, and let go of the false ideas about how sex is “supposed” to work, to create space in your life for how sex actually works.
Feelings About One’s Body. “It’s much easier for me to feel aroused when I’m feeling really comfortable with myself . . . it’s not as easy to feel aroused when I’m not feeling good about myself and my body.”
And in a culture where women have to spend so much time with the brakes on, saying no, it’s no wonder we have fantasies about abandoning all control, relaxing into absolute trust (turning off the brakes) and allowing ourselves to experience sensation.
“Trust,” I said. “Letting go of the brake is about trust.” Merritt shook her head and looked at Carol. “I trust you one hundred fifty percent. I’d jump off a cliff blindfolded if you said there was a crash pad at the bottom, no hesitation.” And then Carol said, “That only leaves one other person for you not to trust, huh?” Merritt blinked at us both and said, “Me. I don’t trust me. Is that what you’re saying?” I said, “Do you?” “I trust myself to pay bills on time. I trust myself as a parent. As a writer. Yeah, I . . . huh.” She stopped and squinted her eyes thoughtfully at me. “You trust your intellect,” Carol said, “and your heart. But do you trust your body?”
Exactly what context a woman experiences as sex positive varies both from woman to woman and also across a woman’s life span, but generally it’s a context that’s • low stress • high affection • explicitly erotic
Trust your body. Listen to it—not to the specific circumstances of the moment but to the deep, primal messages of your evolutionary heritage: I am at risk/I am safe. I am broken/I am whole. I am lost/I am home.
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
As she recovered from her eating disorder, she came to realize that her behavior wasn’t really about the shape of her body—“I needed something to blame for my anxiety, and cultural brainwashing made my body seem like a good target,”
“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.
Physical activity • Sharing affection • Primal scream or a good cry • Progressive muscle relaxation or other sensorimotor meditation • Body self-care, like grooming, massage, or doing your nails
and exactly what human babies do with their moms. And they would abandon their friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them.19 Of course they did. When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even—or perhaps especially—if our attachment object is the source of our distress.
Each of you is 100 percent responsible for your own feelings. Partners in healthy relationships choose to help each other with their feelings, but it is always a choice. We “turn toward” our partner’s needs, as relationship researcher John Gottman puts it, and when our partner supports us, we express our gratitude for that choice.
supported in a world where we are not always safe, where sometimes our only shield from chaos and terror is our chosen family.
At last he looked into her eyes and said, “You really don’t see it. You really believe this stuff makes you less beautiful. Honey, your body gets sexier every day, just by being the body of the woman I share my life with. Your belly is our belly. I’ve got one too. Do you love me less for it?” “Of course not.” “Exactly, of course not.”
Camilla had said, “The images we see—or don’t see—matter. They tell us what’s possible.”
Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are.
When we tell ourselves, “I can’t stop criticizing myself or else I will fail forever!” that’s like saying, “I can’t stop running/fighting/playing dead, or the lion will eat me!” That’s absolutely what our culture has taught us, so it makes sense that many of us believe it. It’s so entrenched in our culture that it sounds . . . sane. Rational, even. But it’s not.
“I just feel a lot more confident in myself, in my body! I know now that I’m amazing to be with and I can revel in that.” “That’s awesome! How did you make it happen?” She said, “It’s like one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?”
If that sounds glib, good. I think it’s stupid and destructive that “experts” have been telling us that we can measure our health by measuring something we can change by removing a limb, torturing ourselves, or going on a plane and measuring it up there instead. You can achieve your medically defined “ideal weight” without improving your health at all; it might even substantially impair your health!
Wtf you talking about
Nor is self-compassion the same as self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is what you do to numb emotional pain rather than allowing it to complete the cycle. Olivia’s moments of compulsive sexuality are an extreme example, but for most of us self-indulgence takes the form of binge-watching Netflix or eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting because “I deserve it,” instead of feeling our Feels. Self-indulgence is a form of freeze, sedating the lion instead of escaping or conquering it.
The shorthand version of this exercise is: Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.
If it weren’t about men-as-default, then we’d all be just as likely to wonder, “What’s up with men, that they have so much overlap?” as we are to wonder, “What’s up with women, that they have so little overlap?” But no one asks about men.
You should expect correlation here
Henry turned everything into low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him. Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention. Like when they were first falling in love—a constant, steady stream of reminders that, “This guy is amazing!”
look what happens if we think of sex as an appetite that drives survival: If sex were a drive, like food appetite, then the 30 percent of women who rarely or never experience spontaneous desire for sex are . . . well, what would we call a person who never experienced spontaneous hunger for food, even if she hadn’t eaten in days or weeks or months? That person is definitely sick! If sex is a hunger and you never get hungry, then there’s Something Wrong With You.
And that’s both factually incorrect and just wrong.
Connect It to Your Identity. Don’t just run, be a runner. Don’t just have sex, be a deliciously erotic woman who is curious and playful about sex. If you run because you have to or you feel like you’re supposed to, rather than because it’s part of who you are, you won’t run very far or very often, and you probably won’t enjoy it much when you do.
Give Partner B space and time away from sex. Let sex drop away from your relationship—for a little while—and be there, fully present, emotionally and physically. Lavish your partner with affection, on the understanding that affection is not a preamble to sex. Be warm and generous with your love. You won’t run out.
Anatomically, physiologically, even evolutionarily, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about kinds of orgasms based on what body parts are stimulated.10 It’s true that orgasms generated through clitoral stimulation often feel different from orgasms generated through vaginal stimulation. But it’s also true that vaginally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other, and clitorally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other.
Just as all vulvas are normal and healthy just as they are, so all orgasms are normal and healthy, regardless of what kind of stimulation generated them or how they feel. Their value comes not from how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it.
women can have orgasms for the same reason men have nipples.
Around 16 percent of women have not had an orgasm, or are unsure whether they’ve had an orgasm, by age twenty-eight.
How you feel about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself.
feeling curious about her lack of desire, instead of wishing it were different. What if she said to herself, “Huh, I notice I haven’t wanted sex much lately. That’s an interesting little puzzle! It’s normal for my desire to change as my context changes, so I wonder what part of my context has changed, to influence my desire? And I wonder what sort of context my partner and I could create that would cause me to want sex so much that I can’t stop myself from jumping his bones?”