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| Book cover for "Come As You Are" by Emily Nagoski. |
I recently read the book Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life so I want to do a little review here. (The one I read was the 2015 edition, but apparently there is a revised edition published in 2021.)
So yeah, I bought this book because I saw it recommended on the internet, and the title claims that it "will transform my sex life" which I definitely wanted back then. (I bought it several years ago, and since then I have figured out my sex life on my own, by my own damn asexual self, so I guess I am no longer interested in things that claim they will "transform my sex life.")
Anyway. My thoughts:
1. I don't understand the main problem this book is trying to address
My main experience reading this book was being completely mystified, wondering what exactly the problem is that Nagoski is even trying to solve. Women, uh, want to have sex more? Okay, then have sex more? Oh but they don't want to. Uh, okay, then don't have sex? I just... I can't seem to get my asexual mind around what exactly the issue is here. (The examples given in this book were women in long-term relationships- so the issue wasn't finding a partner.)
The best I can figure is, the problem is this: A lot of women partly want to have sex and partly don't want to have sex, so the book is telling us how to change the "partly don't want to have sex" part. Like maybe they emotionally want to, but physically can't get aroused- I guess the issue is something along those lines?
Or... maybe they have this vision in their mind of the specific type of sexual experience they want to have, which isn't necessarily straightforward to achieve- it's not as easy as "just have sex" because "sex" isn't just one thing. Emotionally, it can be amazing or it can be meh, etc etc etc. Maybe the issue is, they want to have sex that feels a certain way emotionally, so the book is about how to set up a relaxing environment and how to have the right mindset so that when you have sex, you feel those emotions that you were hoping to feel.
I guess? Something like that?
I just... I am too asexual to figure out what this book is about. I can theorize that it's something like what I described above, but it's never clearly explained. It talks a lot about "turning on the ons and turning off the offs" but like, why? I guess as an asexual, I choose to have sex for more, uh, intellectual reasons, so I don't see why it's would be necessary to .... like carefully set up an environment that makes me emotionally want to have sex (or maybe it was actually referring to physical arousal??? I don't know???)
Or... wait, maybe this book is based on the assumption that you need to have sex drive in order to have sex, so then for people who want to have sex more, it's necessary for them to figure out how to get their sex drive to be higher...? But, uh, again, I am super confused about why this is an issue- I have sex without having sex drive/ sexual desire/ sexual attraction. Or, is it like, without the sex drive, you won't be aroused, so then physically it's too difficult to have sex? Uh ... I mean yeah I have had vaginsmus-related problems along those lines, and I figured out how to use my fingers and a sex toy to get physically aroused even without feeling "sexual desire" or whatever- that's how I solved that problem- but the book is not about that at all. So again, I'm lost.
And also the book talked about how for a lot of women, stress "hits the brakes" and makes them not want to have sex/ it's harder to have sex, but also there are some women for whom stress is an "accelerator" (the main metaphor in the book is the "accelerator"/"brakes" of choosing to have sex). And I just... yeah I have heard people saying that stress leads to not having sex... but I don't really get it. I don't really see a relation, in my own life, between stress and having or not having sex. It's like, sex is a thing on my to-do list, which I put on the list for various reasons of my own, and yeah sometimes it would be the case that I was stressed about how I haven't had sex with my husband frequently enough so I'm worried that I'm not a good enough wife, and so I choose to have sex in order to solve that problem... (And yes I know that ideology about being required to have sex with my husband is really problematic, but that's really how I thought back then. Things are way better now though- see this post about vaginismus and this post about pregnancy.) That's the only real connection I can make in my own life between stress and the decision to have sex or not- but seems like that's not what the book was talking about at all.
2. There are A LOT of metaphors
So the book starts out talking about the "accelerator" and "brakes", and how this is how we should understand sexual desire. Don't just work on doing things that turn you "on", but also work on removing things that turn you "off." Again, as I write this I am like "oh wait, when I say 'turn you on', that's a euphemism for one's genitals being physically aroused (I think???) so maybe I shouldn't use that wording because the book wasn't just referring to that, it was a bigger concept than that- uh, or, uh, wait maybe it actually WAS just referring to physical arousal??? I don't know???"
So anyway. Yeah the beginning is a lot about how to tell what activates your "accelerator" and "brakes" and how some people have "a more sensitive brake" and everyone is unique etc. So I thought that was going to be the overall metaphor of the whole book.
But then some more metaphors started appearing, like the "sleepy hedgehog" and "little monitor in your brain" and "flock of birds." And I didn't really put much effort into trying to understand the nuances of each new metaphor, because I assumed that the overall metaphor of the book was the accelerator/brakes thing, and these other metaphors would only matter for like 1 paragraph. But oh geez, no. The book keeps introducing new metaphors and then continuing to refer to them for the whole rest of the book, so you really do have to remember what each thing was supposed to represent.
Probably part of my problem was that it took me several years to actually finish this book, due to, you know, having a newborn baby... And that the book wasn't what I expected; I expected it to just be about the accelerator/brakes thing, so I wasn't mentally prepared to really pay attention to every new metaphor that came along.
From an asexual perspective, the metaphors themselves are not bad. Okay, as I said, the accelerator/brakes one I don't really get, but the other metaphors relate to emotions and things that don't even necessarily have to be about sex, and therefore they are understandable for me as an asexual.
But there really are a lot of metaphors, and I was not expecting that.
3. The best part (for me) is "accept yourself where you are"
I think this book has a lot of stuff that can be really helpful for people. In particular, it talked about arousal in ways I haven't really seen talked about before. There are also parts about handling stress and trauma in an emotionally healthy way, and evaluating the messages about sex we have internalized from our culture.
Yeah, useful stuff I guess, but none of it really felt relevant to my life. I was hoping this book was going to "transform my sex life" (as the front cover says) but nope, it didn't. See, back when I bought it, I was constantly looking for and hoping for someone to explain sex to me. My questions were things like this: "How are we even supposed to get the penis to go in?" and "Why does no one ever talk about how you really have to aim the penis in at exactly the right angle, otherwise if it hits wrong then it will hurt so bad that you really just have to give up on sex and try again another day" and "What is the point of doing all this anyway?" I now see that the first 2 questions were very much vaginismus questions, and the third is an asexual question... so no, "Come As You Are" did NOT give me any help there.
No, instead I found my answers through IDing as asexual.
The part in the book that I feel is most relevant to my life is this: First accept yourself where you are, rather than thinking you're already failing because you don't meet somebody's expectations about how your sex life is supposed to be. (I can't find the exact page so I don't have the wording the book used, but it was basically that.) Accept yourself where you are, and then go from there. Honestly, this is the biggest way that IDing as asexual has benefitted me. (So no, the book didn't help me, it just coincidentally mentioned what I had already learned from IDing as asexual.)
Back when I thought I was heterosexual, I was so confused about why sex didn't make sense. I thought, it is supposed to make sense to me, what is wrong with me, and so on. I'm supposed to understand what people are talking about when they talk about sex. I'm supposed to just follow my attraction to my partner and it will naturally lead to sex. None of it made sense, and I was stuck in the worry about why it didn't make sense, or trying to analyze and re-categorize my feelings so they could maybe fit into the kind of sexual desires I was told that "everyone" had.
And I couldn't really make any progress back then, stuck in the problem of being confused about the gap between my own feelings and what society said my feelings were. But when I discovered asexuality and concluded that I was asexual, then it made sense. I just don't have sexual attraction, and that's why I don't know the things that "everyone knows" about sex, and that's okay! Now I know this is how I am, this is a legitimate way to be, and I don't have to worry about trying to force my feelings into the "everyone knows" model of sex that society gives us.
And because I just accept myself and I don't have to worry about "figuring out what's wrong with me," I can then focus on what I actually want. When I started IDing as asexual, years ago, it gave me the freedom to define my sex life in the way I actually wanted, not the way that "everyone wants" or "it's supposed to be."
So that was the bit of the book I liked- but yeah I had already figured it out myself, didn't need to learn it from this book.
4. Link to another asexual review of "Come As You Are"
So I found this 2020 review from Sennkestra, another asexual blogger. Their review is much more negative than mine, perhaps because they had been told that the book was ace-positive (ie, good for asexuals) and that's why they were reviewing it. Wow, holy cow, who on the internet is going around saying this book is ace-positive? It's NOT. Very much not. Like, as I wrote above, as an asexual I really can't understand what problem this book is even addressing. It's about how to help women have more sex- but like, why would that be a desirable goal? Why do we need to have more sex? Why would anyone say this book is ace-positive?
Also this bit from Sennkestra's review:
The other thing that strikes me about the use of these fictional anecdotes to illustrate concepts is that some of them feel weirdly, like......self-congratulatory? Like, at least half them are structured like:
I was talking to Amy, who told me "I am having a sexual problem with my partner Bob, and we can't figure out why it keeps going wrong!"
I then explained to Amy, "[whatever the concept of the book is]"
I could see a lightbulb turn on in Amy's eyes. "Wow, thank you Emily, why did no one ever tell me this! I am having a sexual epiphany! [concept] has solved my problem!"
Lol yes this is spot-on.
5. Also it says people get aroused by overhearing their neighbors having sex
Yeah not sure where to fit this in my review, but damn this was so WEIRD I just have to mention it somewhere. From page 72:
Example: A woman in her twenties told me of a time when she woke up in the middle of the night in her boyfriend's apartment, to the sound of the upstairs neighbors having sex. The rhythmic squeaking and grunting sighs instantly turned her on. She kissed her boyfriend awake and they listened together, then had fast, intense sex.
O_O What on earth
Is this, like, a real thing? I mean I guess it could be similar to watching porn, and I have tried to watch porn and just was totally baffled and not at all turned on, so... But... the neighbors?????? Like, it would only make sense if the neighbors are people you find attractive, right? Or like, if you don't actually know them and can just interpret their sex sounds as whatever idealized fantasy you have. Or??? The neighbors?
I'm just trying to make sense of this and... okay imagine a spectrum, on one end is "your parents having sex" and the other end is "porn that you like", and you can place people along this spectrum according to how interested you would be in witnessing them have sex. (Okay this whole thought experiment is super creepy, don't actually categorize your friends and coworkers like this, eww.) I feel like the average neighbor would be way closer to the "parents" end of the spectrum.
Right? Am I wrong? I know I'm asexual but this is just ridiculous.
THE NEIGHBORS???
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So that's my review of "Come As You Are" by Emily Nagoski. Overall I think it does have useful ideas, some of which I actually hadn't heard before- but none of it really related to me as an asexual. I guess a lot of people love it; there are a lot of good reviews on the internet. *shrug* But yeah, not helpful for me.
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This post uses Amazon affiliate links.
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Related:
How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)
Being Asexual in Pregnancy World
3 Reasons I Need To Identify As Ace
Let me tell you about a fanfic that reminded me of my marriage
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