Come As You Are: Audio Preface Part 3

In this final episode of the audio preface to the revised edition of Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski explores the transformative power of pleasure, joy, and nonjudgmental awareness.

Responding to a listener question about judging positive experiences, Emily examines how many of us have been taught to distrust pleasure — especially sexual pleasure — and how mindfulness can help us reconnect with it. Through personal stories, research, humor, and heartfelt reflection, she offers a compassionate invitation to embrace pleasure without shame or fear.

This episode is a moving exploration of healing, embodiment, emotional awareness, and the radical idea that pleasure is not only our birthright, but also a gift we bring to the people around us.

Transcript

Greetings, Feminist Survival Project listeners. Emily here, Not Amelia because she gets understandably a little skeeved out when she hears me talking about sex. This is a very special addition to the Feminist Survival Project feed. In March, I have an updated and revised edition of my first book, Come As You Are, Being published, And I have created this three-episode series as a preface to the changes that I've made in the new edition. I'm really proud of it, And I hope you enjoy it. You have a whole chapter on healing uncomfortable feelings with non-judgment, But my problem is judging positive experiences. Does non-judging apply to pleasure too? Well, Hello, Friends. I'm Emily Nagoski. I'm a sex educator and the award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller, Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. It was published originally in 2015 and will be released in a revised, Updated edition in March of 2021. Kaya, As I call it, Is being released with updated science and information, Everything I could to make it even better, And it was already really good. It's the kind of book that saves marriages and genuinely does change people's lives. Not to brag, It's a really good book. Therapists use it with their clients all the time. But in this three-part audio preface to the new Come As You Are, We'll hear three of the most important questions readers asked me over the years that motivated me to adapt the book to give even better answers. The first question that you heard in the first episode was about desire, Specifically how to sustain a sexual connection over the long term. Long story short, Pleasure is the measure. Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. It's not how much you crave sex, It's not how often you do it, Who you do it with, What position you do it in, Or anything. It's just whether or not you like the sex you are having. If you like the sex you're having, You are already doing it right. The second question was about the relationship between arousal and desire, And again, Long story short, The answer is pleasure. Pleasure comes first, Then comes the desire. For everyone, When you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being, All the other pieces fall into place. What kind of sex is worth wanting, As Peggy Kleinplatz asks her clients. Are you sensing a theme here? Do you think maybe this episode is about pleasure? I think it might be. So this is the final, Extremely important question, And I will let you know ahead of time, There are going to be some feelings. You have a whole chapter on healing uncomfortable feelings with non-judgment, But my problem is judging positive experiences. Does non-judging apply to pleasure too? Okay. Chapter nine of the original Come As You Are is about meta-emotions. Your emotions are how you feel. Your meta-emotions are how you feel about how you feel. And it turns out, The answer to all your questions about feelings and communication and relationships, The answer is non-judgmental awareness. Emphasis on the non-judgmental. If you're aware of an uncomfortable internal sensation and you tell yourself you shouldn't have that feeling, Or if you are aware of an internal experience and it makes you afraid, Or it makes you angry, Or you deny it or dismiss it, You wind up amplifying the distress. But if you are non-judgmentally aware of your internal experience, So if you notice an uncomfortable internal sensation, Some distress signal coming from inside you, If you can sit peacefully and calmly with it, As you would as your best self with a crying child, Your non-judgment, Your patience, Will allow the uncomfortable internal experience to move through you, To dissipate and come to an end naturally, As the Lord of the Rings person would say, To diminish and go into the West. I don't know why that's what they say. Now, When you apply this to women's pain, That's a little bit complicated, And I addressed that in the original chapter nine. Women are trained to expect that sex is going to be a little bit painful, And the only things that I'm willing to call abnormal in a sexual experience are two things. One, Lack of consent, And two, Unwanted pain. If you're experiencing unwanted pain, That's abnormal, And you should talk to a medical provider to see what the issue is. There are effective interventions for pain. One ironic part of paying attention to your pain, Taking it seriously, And seeking help, Is that one of the key effective interventions is non-judgmental awareness, Mindfulness. Let me talk here just for a quick moment about Laurie Brado's research. I wrote the preface to her book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Which is exactly what it sounds like. She has developed a mindfulness-based intervention for women who have experienced gynecological cancers or sexual trauma. They practice non-judgmental awareness and do some psychoeducational stuff around sexuality, And the result is incredibly powerful. I highly recommend picking up Better Sex Through Mindfulness if you're interested in that kind of thing. So women's pain, Non-judgmental awareness, Helps us to be neutral and thus accepting, Welcoming, Recognizing the distress signal that our body is sending us. But shortly after Come As You Are was published, I was talking with a student who was healing from depression. She was beginning to access experiences of pleasure from sunshine and friends and learning new things and even sexuality. So I'm just going to read what the conversation is as I put it in the new Come As You Are. She said, It feels wrong. It doesn't seem right to feel good when so much of the world is such a mess. I reminded her of the conversations we had had about non-judging as a way to cope with her depression. That skill applies here, Too. Don't judge it. It's not right or wrong. It's just what's happening in your body right now. You don't have to be ashamed of it. You don't have to worry that when it passes, It will never come back. You don't have to do anything but say hi to it and let it be what it is. She looked at me skeptically and then we talked again a few weeks later. She said, So I tried that non-judging pleasure and joy thing and she bit her lip and tears filled her eyes. After a long silence, She sniffed and said, If you don't judge it, It grows. This is a strange truth about non-judgment. When you turn toward suffering with non-judgment, The suffering diminishes as wounds heal. When you turn toward pleasure with non-judgment, It expands to fill the space judgment once filled. I don't know why this is true, But it's an essential fact about non-judgment. You didn't warn me about that, She accused me. I said, If I had warned you, Would you have tried it? Oh hell no, She agreed. But I also like it. And how do you feel about the fact that you like pleasure? I prompted. She rolled her eyes at herself or me, I still don't know. And she said, Well, When you put it that way, It seems pretty normal. And it is. It's normal to enjoy pleasure, To like pleasure. But you know, It's also normal to dismiss it, To judge it, To as soon as you notice it, Lock it down, Shut it down, Close it off, Put it in a box. Because many of us have been trained from very early on to believe that pleasures of all kinds, Especially sexual pleasure, Is wrong and bad. I was told the story by someone who read Come As You Are, Who then watched her adult brother change his baby daughter's diaper. When she was all clean, And he went to get the clean diaper, When he came back, She, The little child, Was touching her own genitals. And dad goes, Ah, Don't touch that. Now, What would his response have been if his baby had happened to have a penis instead of a clitoris? And what if his baby had been touching her feet instead? Don't we love it when babies find their feet? But we are taught that pleasure, And especially sexual pleasure, Is something to be ashamed of. This is a moment that that one little child is not even going to remember, But it will accumulate with countless similar moments in her life that she also will not remember, And will culminate in there being a dark place in her brain where pleasure should be. And she'll spend her 20s, Like a lot of us, Trying to figure out what's going on, Realizing what happened, And healing from it. I have plenty of hope for her. And, Man, What if we could just not teach people that they're not allowed to experience pleasure? I find myself in a common situation for a sex educator where I can make something make more sense if I talk about it in the ways it shows up in non-sexual domains of our lives. And, Oh boy, Does judgment of pleasure show up in other domains of our lives. The erasure of joy in general, But pleasure in particular, Is something that shows up in American culture all the time. One word, Food. Now, Food is not just straightforwardly delicious, Like when you drop sugar water on the tongue of an infant, The liking system in your brain sets off fireworks. It's also a way that we communicate love and affection. My maternal grandmother was a significant part of my childhood, And she was famously the best cook in the family. She didn't cook fancy stuff. It was, You know, Pot roasts and chicken fingers and cheese sauce and boiled vegetables. But it was so fucking delicious, And we always joked in the sarcastic way that characterized the emotional constipation of my family, You can taste the love. But it was true. You could taste the love. She cooked her love for us into her life-giving pot roast, Her unparalleled gravy, Her heartbreaking cheese sauce, And even those boiled, Unseasoned boiled vegetables. But how many of us feel permission to prioritize experiencing the love baked into our food rather than feeling obliged to eat based on, You're supposed to count specific macronutrients or have a sense of what the right food is versus the wrong food. There is something missing in the place where delicious is supposed to go. There is a dark place where yum could potentially exist. A non-food example, Like a pop culture example, Marie Kondo's enormously best-selling book Turned Empire, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Big fan right here. She talks about a particular method of folding clothes. Like, The folding clothes got a lot of media play. She did TV interviews and demonstrated this folding method. There are YouTube videos of her being challenged to fold all kinds of difficult-to-fold kind of clothes, Like a plastic raincoat. And people got obsessed with folding their clothes in this way and taking pictures of how tidy it looked and posting it on Instagram because it was beautiful. And look, I too adopted the file-folding method for my jeans and my leggings. I also no longer bunch up my socks like a potato ball. I learned my lesson, Marie Kondo, Thank you. But what the interviews and the YouTube videos largely ignored is something I consider to be the most important part of the KonMari method. It is not about the folding. It's not about the way you lay the layers of clothing together. It's about the love that you fold into them. Marie Kondo says that folding your clothes is a joy. It's a pleasure because it is a moment to pay attention to each article, To notice what's happening with it, To thank it for being in your life, Or to notice that it no longer gives you that ching feeling that the English translator described as sparking joy. If it no longer gives you that ching feeling or if it is a ching of the past that you no longer wish to carry with you into the future, You can thank the article for its service and let it go because it has fulfilled its purpose in your life and it wants to move on to its next phase in life. If you read the book and remember the folding technique, Go back and read it again. Notice that what matters is not merely the technique of folding but the moment that folding gives you to pay attention to what it feels like to be with your stuff. Notice the pleasure you experience from the fabric, The style, The hopes, The history of the object in your care. When you fold someone else's clothes, You fold in your love for them. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I do laundry and I fold my marital euphemisms boxers and I have a little ching with each pair and I fold my love into the boxers. I honestly do that. And then when I see them peeking out from under his jeans, I get a little bonus ching of joy because I know that I had that previous moment. Is this silly? Sure, But the fact is that it increases my access to pleasure and joy and meaning. Staying connected with pleasure is one of the reasons I need dogs in my life. Our puppy Olive comes down each morning wagging her tail and sneezing with the excitement of a new day. I made up a song for her so you get to hear what Olive's singing voice sounds like. You ready? Here's Olive's every morning song. I am alive again this morning. Gonna sniff all the things. Gonna sniff all the things. I am alive again this morning. Dogs are a reminder that you're alive again this morning. You are alive in a body that tastes food and perceives sensations and feels connected and it makes all kinds of noises. And I mean the literal body noises and also the figurative messages, Signals that are coming from inside your body. Olive is just an external version of the signals coming inside my body. She reminds me to pay attention to the signals of pleasure when it is so easy to get trapped in the signals of distress. I have a new vulva puppet. I will put a link in the notes. But when I unwrapped her, She arrived in the mail. My vulva puppets name themselves in their own time. Like I hold them and look at them and I try to figure out what their story is. I have, I have a little bit of a vulva puppet problem and I now have three vulva puppets. My first one is a dark blue velvet. Her name is Ida and she is the seeker of wisdom. She's thirsty for knowledge. My second is a faux leopard print fur vulva puppet named Virginia and she is the playful one who is always ready for pleasure and joy and indulgence in particular. That's Virginia. And then there's this new vulva puppet who comes into my life and as soon as I hold her in my hand she says, Cassandra. Do you know the story of Cassandra? So long story short, There are a lot of versions of it, But basically she's cursed by the gods to always tell prophetic truth and never be believed. The way the term a Cassandra is used these days is usually a doomsayer, Someone prophesying doom, And you know it's intuitive to understand why a person would shut their ears to a message of doom. And we've already talked about an effective intervention for increasing your ability to recognize the distress signals coming from inside your body, Your own internal Cassandra who is trying to speak truth to you. What was it? Do you remember? Non-judgmental awareness is the way to allow those signals not to amplify, Which is what they do when you try to ignore them, But to allow them to dissipate, To move through you by paying non-judgmental attention to them the way you would as your best self with a crying child. But what if Cassandra is like Olive? What if she speaks of pleasure? What if the Cassandra of your own brain and body, The part of you that is cursed to speak prophetic truth and never be believed? What if she was telling you all about the pleasure that was happening inside you, All the joy available in the world? What would happen if you listened with non-judgment to the signals of pleasure in your body? When you pay non-judgmental attention to pleasure, When you listen to it, It grows. And if you can continue to pay non-judgmental attention to that new larger pleasure, It will continue to grow. And if you can continue to pay non-judgmental attention to this new even larger pleasure, It will keep growing. You will find in appendix two of Come As You Are, Both editions, Instructions for mindful extended orgasm, Which is about practicing non-judgmental attention to the pleasurable things happening in your body and allowing it to grow. This is the way we access ecstatic pleasure. I don't know why our brain's response to non-judgment is different for pleasure versus pain. To the best of my knowledge, The brain research doesn't exist yet, Though I think there's enough science for me to imagine how it could be measured. So I can't give you a why, Even though I can give you a how. But I do want to talk about another why question. The real question is not how to gain access to pleasure. The answer to that is non-judgmental awareness of pleasure as it grows. The real question is why pleasure? Why? Take time and attention away from all the other things you could be doing and focus for a little time, Most days, On pleasure. Well, There's a song I learned at a music camp. The lyrics go, Let your little light shine. Let your little light shine, Oh my lord. There might be someone down in the valley trying to get home. So let your little light shine. It might be me or it might be you. It might be your brother or your sister too. There might be someone down in the valley trying to get home. So let your little light shine, Shine, Shine. Now when I talk about emotions of all kinds, I say over and over again, So often that my students would roll their eyes, Feelings are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. And that's true. But what I don't say as often is that there's a purpose and a brilliance to that light. When you find your way to the light that lives inside you, When you dwell there by pausing to notice pleasure and joy, When you cultivate the skill of allowing pleasure to grow, You shine. You become the light at the end of the tunnel. And there might be someone down in the valley. There might be someone deep in the darkness of some difficult tunnel and you might be their light. Your joy might be what guides them home. So yes, Cultivate pleasure because it is your birthright. And cultivate pleasure because your pleasure is a gift to the people you care about. Cultivate pleasure for me because I'm trying to make a world where it's impossible for women to believe the lies they're told every day. And your pleasure is an inoculation against the lies. Cultivate pleasure for the world. Friends, Come As You Are was written in the midst of dialogue with my students, With blog readers, With my friends and family. I wrote it thinking of every one of those humans. I tried to shine a light that would help each of them find their way to the pleasure that lives inside them. But when Kaya was published, That dialogue expanded to the entire globe. I traveled from Maui to Moscow talking to people about the science of women's sexual well-being. And when I sat down to revise the book, I thought of every one of those humans. The body worker whose child had just come out as trans. She was working through understanding what it would mean for her son's future, Including his romantic and sexual life. If I could help her feel more confidence and joy, Maybe that would help her turn toward her new son's experience with kindness, Celebration, And compassion. The therapist in Moscow who giggled at my tourist Russian and told me many couples' struggles seem to come from a sense that one partner feels they should be involved in every domain of their partner's life and they feel lonely and shut out if there's even one closed door. If I can make her sex life better, Can she help make her client's sex lives better? The rich white straight dude in California who didn't believe me when I talked about arousal non-concordance. How do I write in a way that will help that guy have a better sex life? Because if I help him, I also help all the people he won't harm if he knows better. I wrote and revised and I tried to shine a light that would help each of find their way to the pleasure that lives inside them. I wrote The Newcomer's You Are to help you find your way to the pleasure that lives inside you. And it's already there. You don't need to make it. You barely even need to try. All you have to do is be still enough. Peaceful enough. Patient and aware enough to allow it to come to you. Pleasure is a shy puppy. If you love it and give it time, You'll watch it grow in size and confidence until it has a fully realized life. My purpose in life is to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. Confidence is knowing what is true about your body, About your sexuality, About your life history. Knowing what's true even when it's not what you were taught to expect were true. Even if it's not what you wish were true. Confidence is knowing what's true and joy is loving what's true about your sexuality, Your body, Your history. Loving what's true even when it's not what you were taught should be true. Even when it's not what you wish were true. But as an educator there's only so far I can go to help you with knowing what's true and loving what's true. As I say at the end of the new Kaya, The science can only lead us as far as the edge of what is known. What I have learned in a quarter century as a sex educator is that joy is what happens when you jump off the edge. Trust your body. Trust it so completely that you're willing to jump with it into the unknown. That jump is joy. Thank you for listening to this audio preface of the new edition of Come As You Are. I hope you learned some things that will make your sex life better. If you read the original Kaya, I hope you'll see how the new edition has been enhanced. It took five years and people from, Gosh, A dozen different nations, Not to mention all the science and the scientists whose work deepened my understanding of the individual stories. The science offered crucial details about how and why sex works or doesn't the way it does or doesn't. Inevitable Pitch, Come As You Are is available for pre-order wherever books are sold. I always recommend supporting your local bookseller if you can. And if you liked hearing me talk, You'll probably enjoy the audiobook, Which is enhanced with music, A PDF of worksheets, And a special guest narrating the voice of the patriarchy. Oh yeah. I'm starting a newsletter-type thing soon, So if you'd like to read a sex-related Q&A once a month or so, There'll be a subscription link in the episode notes. If you have questions yourself, You can email kayapod at gmail. Com, C-a-y-a p-o-d at gmail. Com, And I might answer it in the newsletter Q&A. Let's do some credits. This project was written and performed by me. It was edited by my marital euphemism. Music arranged and performed by Amelia Nagoski. That's as much of a sister. My thanks to everyone who helped with this, And thank you again for listening. The Feminist Survival Project 2020 is a part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you'll love at frolic. Media. Com.