Emily Nagoski, sexologist: ‘Yes, please, talk to each other about your sex lives’

Beginning an interview by asking a complete stranger about how their sex life is going is bizarre, to say the least. But Emily Nagoski takes it in stride. “Don’t worry! It’s actually 100% appropriate this time,” she says in text exchange. “And I can say that it’s going really well lately. I can honestly say that by following my own advice, things are better than they’ve ever been.” When they were worse, Nagoski wrote a book about them. It’s called Come Together. The public airing of intimacy can be hard for anyone, but even more so for Nagoski, who has been regarded for years as a sex guru, or as she calls herself, “a sex nerd”. She had already put out her first book, Come As You Are, a podcast, newsletter, and a TED talk with 3.5 million views. But as she created all this content, smashing taboos about feminine sexuality, Nagoski was going through a crisis with her boyfriend, with whom she’d been for 13 years.

“Ironically, the process of thinking, reading and writing every day about sex made me so stressed that I had zero interest in actually having any sex,” she writes in her second book. At some point, Nagoski did what anyone would do: talked about it with her therapist and friends. But then, she did something else. “As a science-­loving sex educator, I had a nerdy approach when it came to solving my own sexual difficulties: I went right to the peer-reviewed research,” she writes.

What she found there went against all the best-known narratives that exist about “keeping the spark alive”, an expression that Nagoski loathes for the way it perpetuates a stale idea of what sex should be. “Desire barely makes it into the top 10 characteristics of great sex, and when people worry about ‘spark’, it’s a distraction from what actually matters, and what matters is pleasure,” she says. It’s not about spontaneous and improvised arousal, she explains in her book, but rather, actively searching out timing and intimacy; of getting into bed with your partner and letting your body respond. “Spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. And both experiences of desire are normal,” says the sexologist. For many couples, time and energy are limited, and because of that fact, “the best way to make sex happen might be to plan it, to schedule it into the calendar.”

Nagoski doesn’t conduct scientific research, but she’s good at seeking it out and explaining it, removing excessively academic language and bringing studies down to earth. She popularized the idea that the libido is like a car with an accelerator that detects erotic stimulants and a break that gets slammed down by anything that distracts us from sex. When women have problems with arousal and pleasure, she explains in Come As You Are, it’s not necessarily because they’re not stepping on the accelerator. Oftentimes, it’s because something (stress, work, the patriarchy, motherhood) is causing them to pump the breaks. The idea is simple but powerful, and many women can identify.

Another one of her metaphors that has caught on (and that she takes up again in her new book) is a presentation of sexuality as a garden. When we are children, its soil is particularly fertile. But soon, family, society, and our cultural context begin to plant ideas about bodies, gender, sex, pleasure and love that sprout like invasive species. “Windblown seeds of myths about the ‘ideal sexual person’ and ropes of vines about beauty standards, spreading like poison ivy under the fence and over the garden wall,” as she writes in Come Together. Some people get lucky and don’t have any traumas that can limit their pruning, harvesting and introduction of the occasional new plant. But most people will have to weed and weed for the rest of their lives. “Your sexuality is not a problem you have to solve or a disorder that needs to be treated. Your sexuality is a garden you can cultivate,” writes the author. But we are all better gardeners in solitude than in a shared cultivation plot, where one has to water and prune both one’s own and other people’s plants.

Come Together goes on for 300 pages, but in its first lines, Nagoski drops a spoiler. There are three typical characteristics of couples with a strong sexual connection. The first is that they are friends, they trust and admire each other. They also prioritize sex and put it ahead of other commitments and routines. And finally, instead of accepting other people’s opinions about how they are supposed to have sexual relations, “they prioritize what’s genuinely true for them and what works in their unique relationship.” No two gardens are alike and that which thrives in one, won’t take root in another — or is even seen as a weed.

Even though she defends this idea with militant fervor, Nagoski recognizes that, in practice, sex is a social behavior. It comes from an instinct, but we also learn from observing and listening to others. Pornography, like it or not, is part of this learning. The problem, she explains, is that learning about sex through porn is like thinking that watching Formula One is the same as a driving lesson. “Those are professionals on a closed course with a pit crew, trying to achieve something totally unrelated to what we do in the real world,” she says. “If people have access to porn and don’t have access to real sex education or to real-life conversations about real-life sex, it’s all too easy to believe that sex is supposed to be like porn.” And it’s just not.

Which is why, she says, books like hers are necessary. They improve on the public conversation we have around sex (which she regards as “factually incorrect at best and deliberately harmful at worst”). And they use science to better understand what happens to us. “We should not try to understand anything about our lives from any individual study,” she says. For that, beyond porn, beyond science and that which works for every individual, Nagoski advocates for an idea that seems revolutionary: talking about sex with friends. “Oh yes, please everyone talk to each other about your sex lives and the things you’re learning!” she exclaims. “Telling stories about a variety of people’s experiences helps readers to see their own sex lives more clearly.” This, from a woman who wrote a 300-page book analyzing why she stopped having sex with her boyfriend. She just might be on to something.

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