How to bring confidence and joy into your sex life (with Emily Nagoski)
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I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and this is How to Be a Better Human. Today's episode is about sex, which I am not afraid to admit is slightly uncomfortable for me to talk about. You can't see this, but I am already blushing, and I probably won't stop blushing until the end of this episode.

Despite that, I do have quite a bit of experience in talking about this because when I taught fifth grade, one of the strange de facto jobs that I also got thrown into was teaching health class. And health class was supposed to just be like deodorant. It's a thing. You need to wear some. And hair. It's a thing. You're probably going to grow some. But of course, because we had anonymous question cards, it ended up being a lot more about sex and sexuality.

Every year that I taught it, I would get some version of a question saying, how do you know what day puberty is going to happen? I love kind of that idea that it happens all at once overnight, that you like go to sleep as a boy and wake up and are like, I'm a man. Here's my beard. Of course, that's not how it happens. I also got questions like, is it normal to get a boner during math class?

which made me think that maybe I was doing too good a job of explaining long division. And one particularly memorable question asked me if it was true that there were three types of breasts, female breasts, man boobs, and chicken breasts, which I had never thought about it that way, but there are at least three kinds of breasts. Now you've convinced me. One question that I really did not have an answer to, and I still don't, is why does it sometimes feel so awkward to talk about sex?

Sex is such a big part of being human. It's how our species persists. But it's also so much more than that. It's not just evolution. So today we're going to do our best. I'm going to try my hardest to have an open conversation about this. And oof, oh boy, it's funny. I'm so much more nervous to talk about this than I have been about the other topics. I think that that is because sex and sexuality and attraction and arousal, they're so personal.

And for me, at least, they also feel really private. But as I learned from today's guest, sex educator Emily Nagoski, getting past that hump, pun fully intended, and talking openly about sex can give you access to more confidence and joy in your sex life.

There are a lot of cultural scripts around how we're, quote unquote, supposed to behave when it comes to sex. For me, as a heterosexual, cisgendered man, I'm supposed to want sex nonstop and only sex, no talking, no feelings. And I feel self-aware enough now to say that that is actually not a good description of how I feel about sex or what I want. But it can be hard to untangle what you really want and who you really are.

from all of the contradictory messages that we're constantly getting bombarded with. Helping people to do that untangling, that's a big part of the work that Emily does.

She has a Ph.D. in health behavior. She did a clinical internship at the Kinsey Institute, and she taught a class on sexuality at Smith College. So she really, really knows what she's talking about. Thank God she is here and you are not having to rely on me alone. I'm Emily Nagoski. I'm a sex educator and I'm the author of Come As You Are, The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life.

So what reaction do you normally get from people when you tell them that you're a sex educator? There's a pause as people try to figure out how to respond. And usually they want to know what the most common question is that I'm asked. Uh-huh. So, OK, well, let's let's hear it then. What's the most common question that you're asked? It's going to be disappointing to you because the answer is some variation on the question. Am I normal? Yeah.

And it will usually be something along the lines of my experience of desire is this. My experience of orgasm is this. The thing that I like sexually is this. I have a traumatic experience. It's interfering with my current sexual pleasure. Is that normal?

And the answer to all of those questions is yes, yes, that is normal. Yes. There's only actually two things that qualify as not normal in my view. One of those things is lack of consent. Obviously, if everyone involved is glad to be there and free to leave anytime they want, then you're doing it right. And if no one is experiencing any unwanted pain, you are doing it right. If you're experiencing unwanted pain, you should talk to a medical provider.

And lack of consent is like a whole topic of its own. When you said you're not going to like this answer because it's are you normal? I was like, oh, no, it's the answer that I am not normal. But I'm glad that you confirmed we're all normal. Yeah. I mean, at this on the one hand, like no one's normal because we're all different from each other. But also we are all normal because.

We're all normal. We are all the same. We are all different. We're all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. I've had to think hard about it because for a long time I was puzzled. Like, why are people so interested in being normal? We don't want to be just normal in almost any domain of our lives. The title of your podcast is Being a Better Human. We want to be better.

We don't just want to just be totally middle of the pack and normal human. Yes. You're a very like normal level of attractive. You're a very normal level of intelligent. That's not our goal. Our goal is to be like really good. And part of the narrative around sexuality is that we're supposed to be highly skilled and knowledgeable without ever having to ask any questions. Right.

Or ever have a phase in our life when we didn't already know everything. To be extraordinarily gifted and skilled and whatever the heck that is. And to have our bodies be supernaturally beautiful and quote perfect, whatever the heck that is.

So for a long time I was puzzled by why people want to be sexually normal so much. And as I thought about it, I realized that when people are asking if they're normal, what they're really asking is, do I belong?

in the human community because sex is a social behavior more than anything else. For us as a species, sex is primarily a social function. And how do we learn almost every other social behavior? By watching other people. We don't get to watch other people have sex very often.

were relatively private as a species, sexually speaking. Of course, there's varieties of that, but broadly speaking, we're fairly private sexually as a species. And so the way we learn about this social behavior is different from the way we learn about other social behaviors. And so there's this worry that maybe I'm not doing it right because I'm not doing it the way other people are doing it. And then people watch porn as a way to learn about sex. And porn...

Has its virtues and its problems. Very rarely documentary. Yeah. It's not educational. It's like trying to learn how to drive by watching NASCAR. Those are professionals on a closed course with pit crews.

That is not how you learn how to have sex. But how else do we learn? So people want to know that they belong, that they are socially acceptable, that they are welcome in the human family in the way that they experience and express their sexuality. When you talk about

sex, when you talk about sexual interactions, you use a lot of metaphors that I think really are effective and make people understand exactly what it is. So one of the ones that you talk a lot about is an accelerator and a brake. Here's how you summarized it in your talk at TEDx University of Nevada. The mechanism in your brain that controls sexual response is called the dual control model. The dual control model. That means there's how many parts?

Thank you. And if I tell you that the first part is the sexual accelerator or the gas pedal, that means the second part has to be the break. They don't let just anybody into these TED Talks. So the sexual accelerator notices all the sexually relevant information in the environment. Everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain codes as sexually relevant. And it sends a signal that says, turn on.

And it is functioning at a low level all the time, including right now. Just the fact that we're talking about sex is a little bit sexually relevant. At the same time that that's happening, in parallel, your break is noticing all the very good reasons not to be turned on right now. This is everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat. And it sends a signal that says, "Turn off."

So the process of becoming aroused is the dual process of turning on the "ons" and turning off the "offs." Usually when people struggle with their sexual well-being, it's because - well, sometimes it's because there's not enough stimulation to the gas pedal, but more often it's because there's too much stimulation to the brake. And all kinds of things can hit the brake, like, are you worried about unwanted pregnancy? Are you worried about your kids walking in in the middle?

Are you really sure that your partner loves your sexy body? Are you really sure that you love your sexy body? Did you maybe spend the first two decades of your life in a culture that taught you that sex is dangerous, disgusting, and dirty? Break! Right?

So the first thing science tells us to do when we are struggling with our sexual functioning, when we want to access our own authentic sexual well-being, what we do is start thinking through what are some of the things that hit our accelerator and what are some of the things that hit our brake? And especially, what are some strategies that we can use in order to minimize the things that are hitting the brake?

How do you find the right balance between the brakes and the accelerator? We're going to find out in just a minute. But first, an ad. Don't go anywhere. Don't get out of the car. You keep your seatbelt buckle. We'll be right back.

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Neither do I. I mean, we live in a world where people say vagina when they mean vulva and they say sex drive when they mean sexual incentive motivation system. But sex drive is so much easier to say. I understand. Yes. OK, well, let's just try it for a moment. The sexual incentive motivation system. What is a person's what is a healthy one? Because I think so many people feel like.

Like this is their shame or there's confusion around their either lack of desire or too much desire, the sense that there's like they're not matched up perhaps with what is supposed to be. And I'm putting that in quotes supposed to be supposed to be. Yeah. Should what your sex life should be. One of the things sex educators like me say is that you should stop shooting on yourself.

There is no way that it should be. A healthy sexual response mechanism is one that responds to context. Context is both your external circumstances and your internal state.

So, for example, if your context is you are in the hot and heavy fallen in love stage of a relationship, your life is relatively stress free. You live in a world that treats you fairly, where you feel safe most of the time.

That's a context that's going to activate the accelerator and drop away a whole lot of stuff that could have been hitting the brake. And you're probably going to find yourself pretty responsive to sex-related stimulation in that context. But if you are...

in the middle of an enormous conflict in your relationship, if you are hugely stressed out in your life, if you've got young children in your household, if you live in a world where you don't feel safe a whole lot of the time, those are contexts that are going to hit the brakes. And it makes sense that you would be less responsive to sex-related stimuli because the brake is so strongly on. Information is absolutely missing. People need to be taught stuff.

basic things about how sexuality works. Like we should all already know about the dual control mechanism in our brains. We should know that should be common knowledge. Every single human should be taught that we should all know what our body parts are. And every single human should be taught the basic idea that everyone should

has autonomy over their own body. They get to choose when and how they are touched, and they get to choose how they feel about their body and their sexuality. Period. That's what sex positivity is. It's just basic bodily autonomy for every single human. Information is missing, but then there's the big emotional shift that has to happen to undergird the basic knowledge

Because to say we all deserve basic bodily autonomy, the right to control when and how we are touched and to decide how we feel about our bodies is one thing. I was not raised in a particular religion that taught me to feel any kind of way. I was just raised, you know, like lockjaw puritanical New England white people.

When I was about 11 years old, we went to the library and my mother's driving me home. I'm sitting in the front seat and I must have seen the word in a book because I asked my mom, what's a vagina? And I do not remember the words that my mother said, but I do remember the enormous flash of emotion that went through her body. And I was like, whatever this vagina thing is, I should never ask about it again because it is a source of enormous embarrassment. Yeah.

So I went home and I looked it up in the medical encyclopedia in our house. The medical encyclopedia told me what a vagina was, and my mother taught me without saying anything how to feel about it. And so when I was 18 years old and being early in my training as a sex educator, my leader told us all, your homework when you get home is to get a mirror and go look at your genitals.

And again, I did not have a particularly sex... I had no explicit messages in my life that anything was wrong with my body. And yet when I got home and did my homework, like I was told, because, you know, I'm a nerd who does what she's told. I got my mirror and I had this sense that I was going to confront an enemy. No one had ever told me anything negative about my body. And yet I had this feeling like, all right, let's do this. Fine. Fine.

And I looked and I burst into tears because it turned out my vulva was not my enemy at all. It was just this normal part of my body. It was like the bottom of my feet. I didn't get to look at it very often. And when you just are looking and don't know exactly what it is, it can look a little bizarre, just like the bottoms of your feet. But it was just this like integrated part of me. It was...

a part of me. And I had spent almost two decades feeling contempt and reluctance

toward this part of my body, carrying that around with me every day. And from that moment on, I have known that the single greatest source of wisdom that anyone has about their sexuality comes not from any expert, not from any book, not from any religious source, but from their own internal experience and their own body. If we can turn toward ourselves with kindness and compassion, seeing ourselves with compassion

actual biology rather than through cultural lenses that tell us how we're supposed to feel about our bodies, we will always know what the right answer is. You touched on this as well in your TEDx talk. Let's listen to a clip of that. Confidence comes from knowing what is true about your body, your sexuality, your internal experience, knowing what's true about

Knowing that you have a break, for example, as well as an accelerator. Knowing that they are sensitive to context. Knowing what's true, even if it's not what you were taught to expect would be true. Even if it's not what you were taught should be true. Confidence is knowing what is true. Joy is loving what's true.

Loving your brake as much as your accelerator. Loving that they are sensitive to context. Loving what's true even if it's not what you were taught to expect would be true. Even, especially, if it's not what you were taught should be true. Ready? Thing number one, what I want you to do is to stand in front of a mirror as close to naked as you can tolerate. It gets worse.

So what you're going to do is you're going to look at what you see there and you're going to write down everything you see that you like. And of course, the first thing that will happen is your brain will flood with all the culturally constructive messages about the ways your body falls short of the culturally constructed ideal. That's fine. You have every other minute of the day in which to have those self-critical thoughts. Just set them aside temporarily. And right now, you're going to write down the things you see that you like. If it is your eyelashes, write that down. If it's your toenails, write that down.

and then do it again tomorrow, and then do it again the next day, and the next day. And the more often you do it, the more obvious it will become to you what a frickin' frackin' miracle your body is. And the more immune you'll become to all that cultural, noisy crap that's hitting the brakes. Option number two. If you genuinely cannot imagine looking in a mirror and seeing anything there that you would like, here's what I want you to do instead.

I want you to get into a calm, quiet state of mind just for a couple minutes each day, and I want you to visualize that door, that door that stands between you and your authentic sexual well-being. And what I want you to do, when you can see it really clearly, is that I want you to shine a beacon of kindness and compassion on the door.

Here's the thing about the door. It's not innate. You were not born with it. It was constructed in your brain by your life experience and by your culture. And you may hate the culture that built that door. You may work to change the culture that built that door, but never turn toward the door itself with hate because the door is part of you too.

And it is not random. It's there to do some work. If you have been shamed for what's on the other side of that door, if you've been shamed for your sexuality, who hasn't? That door is there trying to protect you from social isolation and judgment.

If you have had what's behind that door, if you've had your own sexuality used against you as a weapon, if you're a survivor of sexual violence, your door is doing the hard work of helping you to survive in a world where your own sexuality can be used against you as a weapon. And I don't know if your door might be ready to open a little bit or if your door needs to stay closed a little while longer, but I know that the first step is always to turn toward the door with kindness and compassion.

Confidence is knowing what's true about you, your sexuality, your internal experience. Joy is loving what's true, even when it's not what you were taught should be true. More honest conversation and more actionable advice from Emily Nagowski is coming up right after this. But first, an ad.

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Emily, one of the things that's really resonating with me from our conversation and from listening to your talks is that we need to figure out how to turn inwards a bit and lose our preconceptions and our hangups and just experience who we are and figure that out. You're saying that that is a big part of healthy sexuality.

Are there exercises or practical things that you recommend people do to get more in tune with themselves sexually? Oh, gosh, there's so many things. There's so many things you can do. I have a whole workbook. In addition to Come As You Are, there's a Come As You Are workbook. That's like I took all the science out and I was just worksheets here. You don't care what the source is just like here, do a worksheet. What are like the top three? If you take these away, these are things you should be trying. I think it is very worthwhile to think about what your sexual scripts are.

So when you think about what a good sexual woman or a good sexual man or like a good sexual non-binary person, like what behavior is the script for how you are supposed to behave? What would you do if you were good? What partners would you have? What behaviors would you engage in? With whom? How often? Like what is the script against which you're comparing yourself?

And the deeper you can go into understanding what the script in your head is, the more clearly you'll see the ways that you are not that script. Your body does not conform to the culturally constructed aspirational beauty ideal. Your behaviors don't conform with the script of what you should be doing. Your desires do not conform with the script of what you should be doing. And in the space between who you truly are

and who the world has taught you you are supposed to be, lives this abyss of self-criticism and self-doubt. That's a normal part of being a human being, around a whole lot of different aspects of our identity. But with our sexual identity in particular, if we can get very clear in our understanding of the ways that we are falling short of what we were told we should be, we can get really clear

in our ability to let go of that stuff. Because with sexuality, unlike with many other aspects of our identities, we're taught that our worth can be measured by...

the behaviors we engage in or don't engage in, by the shape and size of our bodies, by our attractiveness to others, by our... that to be attractive to others makes us less valuable. And if you're a woman, you get to be told that your attractiveness makes you... is your ultimate value, but also makes you completely valueless. So that's fun. So that's why it's so important to like get deep down into what is a good sexual person. What are the ways that you are falling short?

What grieving process can you go through to let go of the aspects of your sort of like sexual ideal that are not concordant with who you truly are so that you can love your sexuality as it is? One of the things I say over and over is that my job in life is to teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. But it really is. My job in life is to teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.

So one is to think about who you sexually are and who the world has taught you to be, practicing letting go of the stuff that is not concordant with who you are. I think that so many of the problems around sexuality and people's real pain from sexuality often comes from not being able to talk about this stuff openly and clearly. And I just know for myself, right, like even coming at this as a heterosexual, cisgendered man, there's so much that we're not supposed to talk about.

Right. Even from that position of privilege. And and I felt like when I was first starting relationships, the idea of like being like, well, I actually want to wait or I feel like I want to have an emotional connection with someone that that kind of stuff was like you're broken, that that's like a that's not allowed for a guy. Right. You're just supposed to be a sex machine and that's it.

It's only now. And I think from growing up, but also I think our culture has changed. American culture has changed in a way since, you know, I was going through puberty that we're able to talk about this stuff more openly. And I wanted to bring this up because it's an overlap between the two of us. I used to work as an elementary school teacher. I taught fifth grade. And so one of the things that I did was I taught health class.

And I trust me, I was not a professional and I was definitely not like the way you said that you could say these things without laughing. My career in comedy and my career as a fifth grade teacher involved a lot of being like, I can't say these words without laughing, but I'm going to still give you my best shot.

A few things that I learned from that that I think are worth us discussing. One is I thought about topics like consent as really adult topics. But then you get into an elementary school and you see that so much of kindergarten is are you allowed to touch another person? Are you allowed to take their stuff? Are you allowed to put your hands on their face without them wanting it? And the answer is no. Like you have to have consent is important.

So we think about it as only this like big sex question, but really it's a skill that kids are learning or should be learning at the very beginning. So I'm curious your take on that, because I think we often put consent in this like almost like a crime territory rather than as a skill that you should be learning the whole time. Yeah, we treat consent like it's it's like the final hurdle that you cross. And it's like literally just the knock on the door. Yeah.

Consent is a bare minimum criteria. And consent education ought to begin as early as humanly possible when a toddler is approached by a grandparent and the grandparent says, can I give you a kiss? And the little toddler just goes, no, because they're a toddler and that's what toddlers say. What does the grandparent say and do? What they ought to say and do is, okay,

Let me know if you change your mind. And what they often do is, oh my God, I'll kiss you anyway. Right? And like, that's a fun game. And what is it teaching in that moment about what a person's yes or no says in terms of their physical boundaries? So we don't touch kids if they say no. That's a reasonable place to start. It's more complicated with like parents who have to

touch their kids to take care of them. And when conversations happen about like, who is allowed to touch whom, when and how, if you're beginning from a point of hypocrisy, where you tell a kid that like, this is a good touch, this is a bad touch, you're allowed to say no. And that kid says, well, how come when I say I don't want my aunt to kiss me, I have to let her. That's a good point, kid. Yeah, maybe we shouldn't do it that way.

It seems to me like one of the things that is the hardest about sexuality is that these interactions that we have with another person, we really want them to go well. At least for the first couple of times, it's new and you don't have experience. So it's probably not going to go super well. And we're really afraid of that. And I think that I wish that more people understood that

If you talk about the things that you're afraid of and are open with them, it's being vulnerable makes it more likely to connect in all ways with another person. You are so violating your script right now, and I'm sure you get shit for it. Well, it's, you know, an interesting part that I want to talk about this is I do feel like

A lot of what happens is when people are in these situations, they there's a lot of association of like alcohol, right? It's like, oh, like, let's drink or let's do this thing that's going to make it so that we think less about and we feel less. And I don't think I've talked about this on the podcast before, but, you know, for many reasons, none of which were like a big dramatic change.

I stopped drinking. And one of the one of the biggest things that I found is that having kind of uncomfortable conversations when you do them, they just get easier. And I think I was avoiding uncomfortable conversations sometimes by being like, well, you know, I have a drink or two, then it's just fine.

It's easier and it's actually not. So I wonder, what do you tell people who are in that situation of like, it's just I feel like my stress response is like through the roof and I don't know how I'll ever connect with another person without trying to like numb that somehow.

Yeah, alcohol. Which makes consent really hard to conversations really hard. It makes it actually not legally possible, technically speaking. So alcohol has what's called a biphasic effect. So the first literally just a drink or two when you get just below the legal limit gets you to what I. So as a as a college student.

health educator. I talked about alcohol a lot and I had to learn to be really realistic in the way I talk about it. So a drink or two gets you to what I call the pleasure plateau. So the first thing that happens is you turn off the offs. You turn off all the chatter, the noise, the anxiety, and then you start turning off the ons.

Because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant doesn't mean it depresses you mood wise. It means it turns things off in your central nervous system. And when you get past the pleasure plateau, it makes your ability to make decisions worse. If you feel like you need to drink instead of have a conversation. I want to say that's a great topic for therapy.

Let me give a better answer than that, though. No, there's something really real there. Like that's a sign that there's something that you need to be working on, probably. First one, if it's easier to have sex with someone than to talk about sex with someone, that's very common. I hear that a lot. And that means you've got stuff to dig out from deep in your psyche. And here is my motivation for doing that digging. Like if you need to drink in order to shut off your brain in order to have sex, that's

Then there's something in your brain that you need to get out. It does not belong in there. It is interfering with your sexual well-being. So how can people who maybe right now are feeling like it's easier to have sex than to talk about sex or like it's easier to have sex when they've been drinking a little bit? How can they start building the skills of talking about it?

Because like you said, not all of us are lucky enough to have been doing it for years since we were kids talking about consent and bodies and then slowly phasing in. What are those first steps if you want to get better at this? Or maybe step one, even just step one. Just step one. Communication questions are hilarious to me. Like, how do I tell my partner that I want to do X? You say, I would like to do X.

So the real question is, what is it that's preventing you from saying the thing you want? What is it that's preventing you from even knowing what you want or what you like? So I want to say step one is getting good information. You have to unlearn everything you thought you knew about bodies and intimacy and pleasure and gender. If you can do that, if you can, instead of believing the lies you were told from the day you were born, instead believe...

what your own body and internal experience are telling you and hear your partner's body and internal experience so that you can connect with them in an intense and profound way so that you're as aware of your own internal experience as you are of theirs. Is it worth it? Yes!

Yes, it's definitely worth it. It's also it makes me think that a lot of times less effective sex education or maybe more problematic sex education. It's really so locked into heteronormativity or, you know, it has to be this way. And I think what's really hitting me about what you're saying is that regardless of how you identify, regardless of gender or sexuality or what you like or what you don't like, so much of what I'm hearing is.

It's about taking all the other stuff away and then just tuning into yourself and being like, what do I like? Who am I? And how can I express that? Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is really beautiful. And it's about so much more than just the small, narrow act of sex. It's about identity and how we can live in the world. Thank you so much, Emily Nagoski. Thank you for being here. Thanks for all of the incredible things that you've said. And thanks for the work that you do. Thank you so much. I could do this all day.

That is our episode for today. This has been How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Thank you so much to our guest, Emily Nagowski. This show is produced by Abimanyu Das, Daniela Bolorezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Karen Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. I am still blushing, and I will continue to blush even as you move on to your next podcast. Have a great week. PR.