Emily Nagoski

A revised and updated edition of Emily Nagoski’s game-changing New York Times bestseller Come As You Are, featuring new information and research on mindfulness, desire, and pleasure that will radically transform your sex life. For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart. That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them. In the years since the book’s initial publication, countless women have learned through Nagoski’s accessible and informative guide that things like stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it—and that even if you don’t always feel like it, you are already sexually whole by just being yourself. This revised and updated edition continues that mission with new information and advanced research, demystifying and decoding the science of sex so that everyone can create a better sex life and discover more pleasure than you ever thought possible.

The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

Come As You Are: Revised and Updated

Gloria 💖

My view is that the basic fact of homology—all the same parts, organized in different ways—is more important than either.

The notion of “all the same parts, organized in different ways” is as true for the ways a woman’s body changes over the course of her life as it is for the ways people’s genitals vary. And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful.

Listen to what they say—listen with your heart, not with your fear. 

On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and pleasure. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care. And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life. As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive. Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you.

Knowing where the clitoris is is important, but knowing where 

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.

Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress. Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.”

But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

Knowing how your sexuality works is important. But welcoming your sexuality as it is, without judgment or shame, is more important. And that’s the hard part for a lot of women.

…nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states…

Come As You Are: Revised and Updated quotes

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