EMILY NAGOSKI: 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." And like it actually does.

- [Announcer] Chapter one, Sex education.

- I became a sex educator for the nerdiest possible reason. When I got to undergrad, I knew I was gonna be going to grad school for something, I had no idea what, but I knew I needed volunteer work on my resume to look like a good grad school candidate. And a guy on my floor was pre-med and he said, hey, come be a peer health educator with me. And I thought, I like health. So I applied and I got accepted and I started being trained to go into residence halls to talk to my fellow undergraduates about condoms, contraception, and consent. While I was getting a degree in psychology with minors in cognitive science on philosophy, which I still love the brain stuff, you can tell in my work, I use it all the time. But the work I was doing as a sex educator made me like who I am as a person, in a way, the academic stuff just never could. I could see the impact it was having, people's faces changing as they saw someone talking about condoms and sexual communication as if it were just, you know, talking about nutrition or stress management or sleep, that look, this just can be a normal part of our lives. And watching the impact that it could have on people's lives is what made me choose that path. When I say that I teach people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies, what I mean by that, confidence for me is knowing what is true about your body, your sexuality, your life history, your relationship, your culture, your family of origin. Knowing what's true even when it's not what you were taught is supposed to be true. And even when it's not what you wish were true. And joy is the hard part because joy is loving what's true, loving what's true about your body, about your sexuality, about your family of origin, about your relationship, about your culture, even when it's not what you were taught is supposed to be true even when it's not what you wish were true. When people can begin to understand what's actually true about your sexuality, because virtually everything we're taught about sexuality for the first two decades of our lives is wrong. So we have to unlearn all that stuff and relearn what's actually true. And then come to decide that what's true is something worth being. When people can embrace their own sexuality precisely as it is, it actually opens up space in their minds and hearts to allow other people to have what's true about their sexuality. So I genuinely believe that a key part of world peace is sex education. I was teaching a class called women's sexuality at Smith College. I had 187 students and I, it's a 100 level class, but I crammed in as much science as I could into that class. And at the end of this really long, intense semester, the last question on the final exam was just tell me one important thing you learned in the class. And I thought they were gonna say things like, oh, arousal non concordance or attachment theory. And instead, more than half of my 187 students wrote as the final answer on their final exam. I learned I'm normal, I'm normal, I'm not broken. Just because I'm different from other women doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me. I can trust my body because I'm normal and anyone who's graded final exams will know that it's not usually like this. I sat in my office and graded with tears in my eyes, feeling like something really important had happened for my students and I wanted to do it again. And I wanted to do it on a much larger scale. And that's the day I decided to write "Come As You Are." A mere five and a half years later there it was.

- [Announcer] Chapter two, understanding desire.

- A lot of us were raised in what I started calling the desire imperative that you have an obligation to experience spontaneous sparky desire for your partner and to sustain spontaneous sparky desire for your partner all the time. And so there's a lot of advice about how to keep the spark alive. And what I wanna say is screw the spark. I maybe shouldn't say screw the spark, forget the spark. What I want is smoldering embers for anyone in a long-term relationship so that it is banked and ready to stoke and partners have a shared vocabulary for understanding how to stoke the fire to bring it to life for the times when you are ready to engage sexually instead of doing all the other things that we could be doing with our lives. The number one reason couples seek sex therapy is for desire differential. One person wants to have sex more than the other person does. In heterosexual couples, despite stereotypes, it's actually just as likely to be the man as the woman who has low desire just to do away with that stereotype right now. And the reason people struggle so much with desire is because we have been lied to fundamentally about what desire is and how it works in terms of our sexuality. So how most of us think about sexual desire is as a spontaneous desire where you're just like walking down the street, you have a stray sexy thought, you see a stray sexy person and you have spontaneous desire. Erika Moen, who's the cartoonist who illustrated "Come As You Are," draws it as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom, you just, you just want the sex. And so you take your kaboom home to your partner and you're like, hello partner, I have the kaboom, would you like the sex? And that absolutely is one of the normal healthy ways to experience sexual desire, spontaneous desire. But there's also responsive desire where instead of it just appearing like a lightning bolt, maybe you have a date night, you have like a sexy times night and instead of being kaboom, you're thrown the last of the toys in the toy box, you're doing the last of the dishes, you trudge up the stairs, you take off your clothes, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and your body goes, oh right, I really like this. I really like this person, that is responsive desire. It emerges in response to pleasure. Whereas spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. Just that information alone can resolve people's sexual desire problems because they realize they don't have a desire problem, they just have responsive desire. And if they set up the right context where they can put their body in their bed with their partner and their partner touches their skin and it feels good, you are already doing it right. There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde who uses this wonderful party metaphor. She says to the couples in her office, suppose your best friend invites you to a party. You say yes 'cause it is your best friend and a party. But then the day of the party starts to approach and you're like, we have to find childcare, there's gonna be traffic. Am I really gonna wanna put my party clothes on at the end of a long week? But you know what, you said you would go, so you get the childcare, you deal with the traffic, you put on your party clothes and you show up to the party. And what happens, a lot of the time you have fun at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right. And my thing is, there's no amount of spontaneous longing to go to a party that will make the party you show up to worth going to. And if you're not having fun at the parties that are available to you, no wonder you don't want to go to the party. So there's sort of two situations. There's another sex therapist, she's a sex therapist and researcher, Peggy Kleinplots in Canada, who in addition to doing group partner sex therapy, she also does solo partner sex therapy. So suppose a couple comes in to see her and one partner says, I'm sorry, this hurts my partner, but if we never had sex again, I would be fine. Peggy, as a sex therapist, her response is, so tell me more about the sex you don't want. Because it turns out a lot of the time the sex people describe is as Peggy puts it, dismal and disappointing. And Peggy as a sex therapist will say, you know, I'd rather like sex, but if that's the sex I were having, I wouldn't want it either. And the question that her research asks is what kind of sex is worth wanting? If I were gonna go all the way to the extreme, I would go so far as to say that there's no such thing as a disorder of desire. There's only a disorder of pleasure, a lack of pleasure, a lack of access to pleasure. So that's one type of couple that comes in with a question about sexual desire. The other type of couple comes in and says, yes, I really like the sex we have when we have it and I want to want it, but I am just, I just can't, I'm exhausted. I feel like the sexy place in my mind is a million miles away. And for these couples, it's not about figuring out where the pleasure is, it's finding a pathway to the pleasure. One of the pieces of science that I love the most for this is Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, developed what he calls the primary process emotions. Lust is one of them, seeking, curiosity, exploration. Ooh, what's that, that's a second one. And often the seeking space, the curious exploring part of our minds will have a doorway directly into the lust space in our minds, there's a play space. Play is a fundamental essential mammalian instinct. It is the fundamental social instinct, play is bonding. When you're in play, that space in our minds, when you can get to whether it's word play or rough and tumble play, when you're in that space, it often has a doorway directly into the lust space. Care is a complicated one. Some experiences of care like caring for someone and feeling cared for, that's an experience that for a lot of people is directly connected to the lust space. So if you can get there, that's when you feel really good. But then there are the more aversive spaces, there's the fear space. If you are anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed, and you're in the fear space, that is as far away from your lust space as you can get in your brain just about. If you're in the rage or anger space that's really far away. People ask me this question, Emily, how am I supposed to want sex when I am so frustrated with my partner because they're not listening to me about all these other things in our relationship? How am I supposed to want sex with that person? You are not supposed to want sex in that situation. That's not a situation where it is easy to get from the mental space you are in in terms of the primary process emotions, all the way to anything in the vicinity of the sexy space in your brain. So the key is to get out of these aversive spaces and closer to the spaces that are adjacent to lust, which means that when you're a couple who enjoys the sex you have when you can get there, the solution has nothing to do with the sex and everything to do with learning how to navigate through your emotions. How do you get out of the anxiety fear space in your brain and into a play space? How do you get out of the anger rage space in your brain and into a care space? Understanding each other's brains and what states you're in and how to help each other get into and out of different spaces is the key 'cause you already know how to pleasure, you have sex that you like. The key now is just, how do I get there? So you map it out. The history of the science of sex therapy really has three major phases. The first is grounded in the work of Masters and Johnson whose fundamental four phase model of sexual response was what sex therapy was based on, which aspect of those four phases was someone struggling with? Were they struggling with the orgasm phase, were they struggling with the arousal phase? It was usually those two plateau, where they struggling with the resolution phase and interventions, sensate focus therapy specifically were designed to address the phases of the arousal process. But when you listen to those phases, you've got arousal, plateau, orgasm, refractory period, you know what's missing in that? Desire, because of the way Masters and Johnson were doing their research, people were just coming in knowing that they were gonna get paid to masturbate to orgasm for science. They didn't have to want it. They didn't have to experience desire the way in a relationship. You'd really hope that everybody involved in that sexual experience would want it, not just because they were doing it for science, though I'm in favor of people doing sex for science. When Helen Singer Kaplan came along in the 1970s, she noticed, she looked at the clinical notes of all the therapists in her practice and found that the cases where they were not being successful were the cases where there was a desire problem. And notice that desire was nowhere in the model they were using to treat sexuality. So she created the desire, arousal, orgasm model, the triphasic model, and it was a revolutionary to add desire. So now we can develop interventions targeting specifically when and how much people want sex. And then just as it was starting to feel really complicated in the late nineties, Rosemary Bessel for example in Canada was developing the model of responsive desire and we were needing a more neurobiological understanding of how this process worked. And Eric Jansen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute had the wacky idea that sex works in the brain just like all the other things in our brain, which is that it is a pairing of excitatory impulses and inhibitory impulses. And so they started doing some survey research and it turns out yes, there is a sexual excitation system and a sexual inhibition system. So the sexual excitation system is colloquially, it's the accelerator or the gas pedal, and it notices all the sex related information in the environment. That's everything that you see, everything that you hear, smell, touch, taste, and crucially all the sensations in your body and everything that you think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as related to sex. And it sends the turn on signal that many of us are familiar with, functions unconsciously at a low level all the time. Here we are talking about sex. So there's just a little bit of sex related stimuli. So there's just a little bit of turn on signal being sent. But fortunately at the same time, your breaks, the inhibitory impulses are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. Everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and everything in your body sensations and everything you think, believe or imagine that your brain codes as a potential threat and it sends an off signal. So the process of becoming aroused is a dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. And it turns out even though a lot of the sex advice that happens in the mainstream when people are struggling with any aspect of sexual response, pleasure, desire, arousal, orgasm. If people are struggling, mainstream advice is usually about adding stimulation to the gas pedal, porn and role play and vibrators and handcuffs. And if you like those things, great, go for it. But it turns out when people are struggling, it's not usually because there's inadequate stimulation to the accelerator, it's because there is too much stimulation to the brakes. So developing interventions that focus on getting rid of all the things that are activating the breaks, which is a lot of them have nothing to do with the sex itself, but have to do with stress, body image, trauma and relationship issues. Well sex is far more a brain process than a genital process. We can experience sex anywhere in our bodies. If someone has a spinal cord injury so that they don't have any sensation in their genitals, they can still have orgasms by training their body to respond to other kinds of stimulation because orgasm is a brain response, arousal is a brain response. The biggest sex organ in your body is your skin, but the most important sex organ in your body is your brain.

- [Announcer] Chapter three, what gets in the way of great sex?

- When people are struggling, it is much more likely to be too much stimulation to the brakes that's causing the trouble rather than not enough stimulation to the accelerator. What are some common things that activate people's accelerators? The sight of their partner, the smell of their partner. Reading a sexy book or watching a sexy scene, feeling a sexy sensation when you are already in a frame of mind where your brain is ready to interpret that sensation as pleasurable, there's only one sense left. And the taste of your partner's skin, potentially. Things that can hit the brakes. I mean it can be so many things. Stress, actually for 10 to 20% of people stress can actually increase their interest in sex. It's like their body wants to use sex as one way to reduce their stress level, but for other people stress may not impact sexual response or it can absolutely slam the brakes on. So stress is an important factor. Body image is an important factor if you are there with your partner and instead of noticing the pleasurable sensations happening in your body or noticing the sexy things happening with your partner, your brain is instead like worrying about like the shape of your thigh and the what's happening with your neck and your facial expression. And then is your partner accepting all the things that are happening? Are all those thoughts activating the accelerator? No they are not. Those thoughts are all hitting the brakes. So body image stuff is a major factor. Sexual trauma is a major contributor. One third of cisgender women, one in six cisgender men and over half of transgender people have experienced intimate partner violence, power-based personal violence, sexual violence. And if you've had sex used against you as a weapon, what that has taught your dual control model in your brain is that things that are sex related are also a potential threat. So as you become aroused, you also have the brakes turned on. And look, if you try to drive a car somewhere with your foot on the gas pedal and on the brake at the same time, you might get where you wanna go. It's gonna take a lot more gas, it's gonna be slower and more frustrating and you could potentially do damage to something. So the process of healing from trauma and reclaiming your sexuality, which let me emphasize, people do every day, there are great evidence-based interventions for rewiring your brain so that your brain no longer pairs the arousal process with this is a potential threat. When you can decouple arousal from uh-oh, your brain is freed up to do all the things that the accelerator can do and your body becomes entirely yours again. When you come to a sexual encounter in a long-term relationship and there's a lot of gunk built up in your brain about frustrations, little conflicts, the person was late to pick up the kids or didn't take out the trash when they were supposed to. That chatter in your brain about the frustration about things that are not happening right now but happened in the past, that stuff is all hitting the brakes. And there's a pretty simple solution which is to resolve the conflict so that your brain is freed up. It makes sense to struggle with interest in sex with a partner when you are feeling frustrated with them. When you are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by caretaking of children or when the demands of living modern life, nobody has sex particularly often, we are busy. Why would we ever stop all the other things we could be doing? The kids we might need to raise, the jobs we might need to go to, the other friends we might wanna hang out with, the other family we might want to pay attention to. Or God forbid we just wanna watch some TV and go to sleep, right? Why would we stop all those other things and just do this frankly pretty wacky silly thing we humans do of like touching our bodies together and putting our mouths on each other's genitals and putting our tongues in each other's mouths. Why, it makes sense that you would not want to do that when you are frustrated with a person for other reasons. And it does make sense that you might wanna do that because it can be really pleasurable. When I ask people what is it that you want, when you want sex, the first thing they say is connection. The main reason people make the choice to have a long-term sexual relationship, for example, is so that they can have that moment of connection. So overcome the relationship conflict, which builds an opportunity to build even more connection between the two partners. Between partners, it doesn't have to be two. There is a little cosmo quiz type survey in "Come As You Are." You can actually get it as a free download too, where you can take a sort of sexual temperament questionnaire to assess the sensitivity of your accelerator and your breaks 'cause people do vary in that. And you can imagine if a person has a really sensitive accelerator and a very not sensitive break, what sort of sexual response are they gonna have? Very easy to arouse and maybe difficult to prevent themselves from doing things when they expect unwanted consequences. This is actually the profile of someone who's at increased risk for sexual compulsivity, for example, and someone who has a low sensitivity sexual accelerator and a high sensitivity breaks. Those are people who are at most at risk for sexual dysfunction in the first place. And actually the research on folks who identify as asexual has shown that they are more likely on these surveys to report having a low sensitivity accelerator. So it is not that they have a whole lot of inhibition preventing them from being interested in sex. It's that it takes an awful lot of sex related stimuli for them to generate any degree of interest in sex. But I will also say that most of us are heaped up in the middle. We are average in the sensitivity of our accelerator and the sensitivity of our brakes. So it can be helpful to take the survey maybe with partners to compare and contrast. But once you know that, the next step is to start making a little list. What are the things that I know activate my accelerator? What are the things that I already know are gonna hit my brakes? This is just a starting point. It can be helpful to think of specific experiences you've had where things went really well and you write down the things that activated your accelerator in that time that things went really well and what sorts of things were not there that might otherwise have been hitting the brakes. And then you think about kind of like a not so great experience, not a terrible experience. We all know what's hitting the brakes in a like terrible experience, but in a sort of like, well that was some sex I had, like pizza. What is it that was hitting the brakes in those situations that prevented it from being great? And what was working, what was activating the accelerator? And this is a great starting point for having a conversation with partners about what you know works for you in terms of creating a context that allows your accelerator to do its job and frees up your brakes to get right out of the way. The most common reaction people have when they learn about the dual control model, especially in conjunction with responsive desire is why did no one tell me this before? It's a kind of freedom to know that you're already normal, you are not broken, nothing is wrong, you just need to work to create a context that allows your particular brain to be ready to respond. And then there's also this frustration and sadness about all the years they have spent trying to force their sexuality to be something else, something that there was no reason for them to have to force it to be that other thing. And then they feel like they know it their whole lives because once you know it, you're like, of course this is how it works. And then they tell everyone they know and I feel like that my job is done. Why focus on sex at all? Like why, why do we do this? Why is it important, why does it matter? The first answer I wanna give is that it doesn't have to. There are some people for whom sex is never a particularly important part of their lives. There are people for whom in certain seasons or phases of their life, sex drops away. The first year of adding a child to your family springs to mind as a time when sex is not gonna be close at the top of your priority list. It's just gonna go away while everyone in the family relearns who they are in this system and re understands what their body means for them and for their relationships. And when I ask people what is it that you want, when you want sex, their first answer is connection. They want that interpersonal feeling. The second answer is pleasure, it feels good. The third answer is a variable that I have started calling freedom. People describe wanting to feel released from all their other life concerns. Everything else where they can't think about those things. Their body is just immersed in pleasure. And this connection with this other person where you simultaneously feel deeply in your body and deeply connected to the other body that you are connecting with. And that freedom experience, they experience it as feeling like you have dissolved into the universe. And why would we want to have an expansive experience of feeling dissolved into the universe? 'Cause that's what being a human is, is wanting to have an expansive experience of dissolving into the universe and when you can do it with someone else. What else do we do where we feel like we've dissolved into the universe with somebody else? The simple beginner advice for how to begin incorporating the dual control model into your own sexual wellbeing is to make these lists of things that activate the accelerators and things that hit the brakes. But the reality of how our brains work is that it's much more complicated because there can be certain kinds of stimulation that in one context feel amazing and in other context make you wanna punch somebody in the face, my usual example is tickling. If you are already in a fun, flirty, playful, aroused, trusting, loving frame of mind and your certain someone tickles you, it's not everyone's favorite, but you can imagine a world where that feels playful and good and can even lead to other things. But if you're in the middle of a fight that exact same certain special someone and they tickle you, it is going to be very irritating. What, it's the same sensation, it's the same certain special someone, but the emotional context, by which I mean the actual activation in your brain is different. That's the internal context is different. And so your brain interprets the sensation as exactly the opposite. It perceives it as being not pleasurable because the context is wrong or pleasurable because the context is right. Spanking goes the same way. There are a lot of circumstances where you absolutely would not want your partner to spank you, but if you are already aroused and have full consent and feel very trusting and your partner slaps you on the butt, that could feel really good even though in a different context it could feel painful and irritating. So that's the power of context. I mean if you wanna look it up on Google Scholar, which I highly recommend, what we're looking at is the affective keyboard of the nucleus accumbens shell. So the affective keyboard means that we shift along the surface of the nucleus accumbens shell so that when you are in a relaxed, playful, positive, pro-social state of mind, 90% of the nucleus accumbens shell becomes devoted to approach motivation, responding to almost any stimulation as something to move toward with curiosity. Oh, ooh, what's that? And when you are in a stressed, non-social, avoidance state of mind, blah, what the hell is that? 90% of the nucleus accumbens shell becomes devoted to avoidance, threat motivation. It will respond to almost anything as something to avoid is a potential threat, even a stimulus that in a different context it might have responded to as something to approach with curiosity. The dual control model sort of makes it sound like, touch me here, don't touch me that way. It could be as simple as that, but that's not how pleasure works. The perception of a sensation in our bodies as pleasurable or not depends on the context in which we experience it. And the context means the external circumstances and our internal state. External circumstances, the bedroom door is locked. We know we're not gonna be interrupted. We're wearing the sexy underwear that makes us feel sexy. Our partner made the bed with fresh sheets and we feel very cared for and they know how much the grit on the sheets irritated us and they just, they just took care of that for us. Ugh, that's the external circumstances. The internal state is whether you are stressed, depressed, anxious, lonely, experiencing repressed rage, we've all got it. Or if you're feeling pro-social, playful, curious, exploratory, do you feel ashamed of your own sexuality? That's an internal state that is going to keep the breaks on and it's gonna make it really difficult for your brain to access pleasure. Or do you feel really curious about your sexuality? That's an internal state that will allow the brakes to release so the accelerator can do what it does. Yes, there's research on this on differences between men and women. I mostly don't want people to think about their sexuality in terms of what the research says about them as a category of people, not least because the research is almost exclusively on cisgender people. So when I say here's what's true about men and women, I'm really saying here's what's true in the research about the people who participate in the research. And that's almost exclusively cisgender men and cisgender women. And yes, the research shows that among the cisgender people who participated in the research, women are more likely to have more sensitivity to context while men are more sensitive to their own body sensations, their own arousal sensations, but there is enormous variability. Just because something is true for a group at the population level does not mean it's true for every individual within that population. So if I say women are more sensitive to context than men are, that does not mean that every woman is more sensitive to context than every man. It means there's these tails where people are very different and this huge area of overlap. So men and women are much more the same than they are different. Mostly the ways that we are different are because we have been trained to be different. And until we raise an entire generation of people without prescribing gender norms to them, we can't know how much of the differences that we observe are because of anything innate in our bodies and how much of it is because what we've trained people over the first two decades of their lives to believe is true about their sexuality. If you want to understand yourself, there are worksheets that you can do. There are lots of other books that you can read, talk to a therapist. Unfortunately, if you want to explore these ideas with a partner, you are going to have to talk to your partner about sex. And there are a lot of people who feel like having sex with their partner is a whole lot easier than talking about sex with that same partner. Why, because we are so worried about hurting our partner's feelings. And because a lot of us are so sensitive to any level of criticism, really what it comes down to is tips for how to talk to your partner about sex. And rule number one is praise and positive things. What are all the good things that are happening? And yeah, you're gonna have to set aside whatever frustrations you might be having for now, but you have to build a positive, trusting, you have to create a context for talking about sex that feels safe. And like if I say something that is not about me being 100% perfectly satisfied, that's not a criticism, there is nothing wrong. I'm just talking about my experience and how we're going to make this work for us. One of the positive frames that you can use is that you and I belong together in a sexual way and I am interested in exploring the ways that we can deepen our erotic connection. I want to know what works for you. I want to be able to tell you what works for me in a way that's going to feel good to you and not critical, it's just you, read books, talk to friends, go to therapy, dig deep and explore. One of my favorite questions is to think about how you learned to feel the way you feel about your genitals. So for example, I was not raised in a particularly sex negative household, just sort of like a regular American sex negative household. And when I was about 11, my mom was driving me home from the library. I think I had read the word vagina in a romance novel. And on the drive home from the library, I asked my mom, what's a vagina? I do not remember the word she said, but I do remember this like flash of emotion that happened inside her, this like shock and embarrassment and confusion. So when we got home, I looked up vagina in the medical encyclopedia that we have at home and that's how I learned what a vagina was. But my mom's reaction taught me how to feel about a vagina. And I am totally sure that she did not intend to communicate shock and embarrassment and confusion. She just in that moment had that emotional reaction so that when I was 18 and being trained as a sex educator, one of my first homework assignments as my training was to go home, get a hand mirror and look at my own genitals. And for some reason, as I went to look at my own genitals, I had this sense that I was going to confront an enemy. Why, where did that come? I was never explicitly told there was anything wrong with my genitals, but I looked because it was my homework assignment and I burst into tears because my genitals are just a normal part of my body, like the soles of my feet or the backs of my elbows or the other body parts that I don't look at that often. It's just integrated into all of the rest of me. It's not an enemy at all. And I had this sense of loving kindness and wanting forgiveness for all the enemy messages I had been sending it for all those years without ever even knowing it and knowing that story, being able to trace how I learned to feel about my body and how I transitioned, shifted my way of thinking about my body helps me to remember that I can actually change any attitude that I have about my body, mostly by turning toward my body and my own internal experience with kindness and compassion. Those sorts of histories for ourselves can help us to rewrite the stories we were told about who we're supposed to be as sexual people. The mindset to bring to the process of coming to understand who you are as a sexual person and how you came to be this person is to turn toward your own internal experience with kindness and compassion. So I have learned that people remember things better and they also believe you more when what you say rhymes. So here we go. If I could have people remember only one thing, it would be pleasure is the measure. Pleasure is the measure of sexual wellbeing. It is not how often you have sex or who you have it with or where you do it or in what positions or even how many orgasms you have. It's just whether or not you like the sex you are having. And if everybody involved is glad to be there, free to leave with no unwanted consequences and likes the sex they're having, you're already doing it right and all the other pieces, all the other things that you could be worried about, like desire and orgasm, those things will fall into place, when you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual wellbeing. Are you enjoying the sex that is available to you? If not, no wonder you don't want it. And if you are, all we need to do is make sure you know the pathways from any state of mind you might be in, into the place where the pleasure lives by creating a context that makes it easy for your brain to access pleasure. Couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term are not couples who constantly can't wait to like put their tongues in each other's mouths. They're the couples who know how to co-create a context that allows both of their brains to have access to pleasure.

- [Announcer] Chapter four, the orgasm.

- So the first thing we should talk about is what an orgasm actually is. Then we should talk about how they actually happen, followed of course by why they sometimes don't. And then at the end, I'll give you some tips to have the biggest, most expansive orgasm you've had in your life. Nobody ever has to have this kind of orgasm. It's like running a marathon. It's a whole hobby that takes up a lot of time. Nobody needs to do it for their own wellbeing. You are fine just running a couple of miles. But if you want to use your free time to have, you know, brain melting orgasms, I can tell you how to do that. I think people believe that orgasm is a genital function, it is not. Ejaculation is a spinal reflex, but orgasm is something that happens in the brain. When researchers measure orgasm, how they do it is they set up all kinds of machines around a person's genitals and they put the person in a brain scanner and they ask the person what their experience is. So we have three different ways of measuring orgasm. The most typical scenario is that a person has measurable contractions of the pubococcygeus muscle, which is that sling of muscle from your pelvic bone to your coccyx. It's also called the pelvic floor muscle. These rhythmic contractions are one marker of when orgasm is happening in the genitals. And sometimes when people exhibit those in the lab, they also report having an orgasm. Sometimes people exhibited those and they report that they did not have an orgasm. Sometimes people don't exhibit those rhythmic contractions and they report having an orgasm. When there is a mismatch between what's happening with the pelvic floor muscle and what a person reports, which one is correct? The person's report, that is right. People know, if they're the kind of people who are volunteering for a sex study, they know what orgasm is. So orgasm happens in the brain and there is a reliable neurological marker for when orgasm happens. And it depends how you measure it, which kind of machine you put someone in. If you measure it one way, at orgasm, the prefrontal cortex goes dark. All of the inhibitory impulses just vanish. Orgasm is the disappearance of the brakes and the total presence of the accelerator. In a different kind of machine, the brain lights up everywhere. So depending on how you're measuring it in the brain, it's a whole brain response, orgasm. You have to have a brain to have an orgasm. You don't need genitals. People have an idea about what orgasms are, mostly from the ways they've seen them represented in the media. Sex is a social behavior, so we learn a lot about it by watching. Unfortunately, virtually all of the orgasms that are available to us in the mainstream media and in porn are fake and not what orgasm actually looks, sounds or feels like. There are some exceptions. The classic example of course, is when Harry met Sally, Meg Ryan, ah, ah, ah, ah. And then she just eats her sandwich. That's the classic. And that's absolutely like the porn kind of orgasm. Ah, ah, ah, ah. I'm sorry if I'm bothering people in other studios. Oh my god, this is my job, I have a PhD. Actually, what orgasm looks and sounds and feels like varies tremendously from person to person. I went to a feminist porn conference in Toronto several years ago and they were talking about how to represent real orgasms because real orgasms don't look like what orgasms are supposed to look like. And a porn star they were working with, the notes for her were, we want you to have a real orgasm from the kind of stimulation that gives you orgasms. And she was like, well it's not penile vaginal intercourse, it's oral sex and it takes a long time and it's not a big show. And they were like, we are looking for what's real. And so oral sex from her partner took like 45 minutes and it looked like this. That's what it can be in real life, even for a person whose job is ah, ah, ah. So we learn about orgasm unfortunately from sources that benefit from showing us things that look and sound really interesting on screen as opposed to things based on how they feel inside our bodies and capturing how orgasm feels, I think to do it really well, you really have to rely on surrealism like a drift into a non-representational image. That's sort of as far as I can go with that about like how do we learn what orgasm, we learn it from media and we learn it from porn and then we think we are doing it wrong, if that's not what our orgasm is like. And we're not, we're doing it right, we're just not doing it the way we were told. And if other people have a problem with the way our orgasms actually are, those are not the people you have sex with. I can't use the sort of consensus definition that science uses because it describes it as a peak of pleasure typically characterized by rhythmic contractions of the pelvic floor muscle. And we know from the research that there are orgasms that don't have pelvic floor muscle contractions. We know that there are pelvic floor muscle contractions that don't have orgasms. And we also know that it's not a peak of pleasure because orgasm like every other sensation, depends on the context in which we perceive it. How we experience an orgasm as pleasurable or not depends on the context in which we're experiencing it. So when you have a great sex positive context, if your partner is around, you have a really loving, trusting, supportive, playful, sex positive shame-free connection, orgasm can feel really good. So when they understand that what orgasm actually is is not a peak of pleasure and it's not about the rhythmic contractions, it is just, here's the definition I use. It is the spontaneous involuntary release of tension generated, neuromuscular tension generated in response to sex related stimuli. Notice I don't talk about how it feels. It might feel like you are melting into the universe. It might feel worse than death. I don't talk about the body parts involved. People can have orgasms from having their toes sucked. People can have orgasms from having their ear lobe sucked. People can have orgasms through breath and imagination. So I also don't talk about types of orgasms 'cause I'd have to talk about toe orgasms and earlobe orgasms and imagination orgasms and an orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm. They're happening in your brain. It's not about what body part is stimulated in order to make it happen. My definition actually goes back to Masters and Johnson and Alfred Kinsey's original definitions of orgasm where it's about the physiology, psychophysiology and not about the body parts and not about the sensation. Orgasm is not, I mean these are the parts of the consensus definition that I can't use. It is not a peak of pleasure. Whether or not orgasm feels good is just like everything else about how we perceive sensation. It depends on the context in which we're experiencing it. It can be a peak of pleasure. It can also be, you know, again, leftover pizza that was an orgasm or feeling like your body has betrayed you and anything in the whole spectrum of what an orgasm can feel like. It is not a genital response. Sometimes genitals are involved, but genitals are not where the orgasm happens. It happens up here. A person whose genitals don't send a sensation signal up to the brain can still have orgasms even though their genitals are not part of the process. And it is not hierarchical. I wish we would just stop teaching Freud to undergraduates. Freud belongs exclusively in the history of psychology because Freud had some good ideas. I'm not saying he didn't, but this idea that clitoral orgasms are immature and vaginal orgasms are mature and all that means is orgasm generated in response to clitoral stimulation versus orgasm generated in response to vaginal stimulation. He called vaginal stimulation more mature because it's the kind of sex that is the baby making kind of sex. He just invented this idea that one was better than the other. The only measure of an orgasm is whether or not you wanted and liked it. If you wanted and liked it, then it doesn't matter what kind of stimulation got you there. Was it chest or breast stimulation? Was it genital stimulation? Was it having your partner lick the back of your knee? Whatever works for you is what works for you and there's no better or worse. And you know what, even physiologically, we can't necessarily differentiate if we're gonna talk about the, it's a girl package of genitals. It turns out now that only about a quarter or maybe a third of cisgender women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone. It's called unassisted intercourse in the researchers, which is one of those terms that just makes me laugh. Only about a third at most of cisgender women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal stimulation alone. The remaining two thirds to three quarters are sometimes, rarely or never orgasmic from unassisted intercourse. And the reason for that is that the vagina is pretty far away from the clitoris. And we don't think it's strange that most people with penises, in the research, it's almost exclusively cisgender men are reliably orgasmic from penile stimulation and we don't worry that they're immature because they don't have prostate stimulation orgasms, which ultimately is the analog, the penis and the clitoris are biological homologues. So doesn't it make sense, if stimulation to the penis is gonna be reliable for those folks, then it makes sense for stimulation of the clitoris to be reliable for those folks obviously. But even with vaginal penetration, because the clitoris is not just like the little nub at the top of the vulva, there's a thing called the silly meter, as a sex educator, how much of a fool are you willing to make of yourself to communicate something clearly? Here's how far I go. If you imagine that my face is a vulva, my mouth is a vagina, my nose is the urethra and my widow's peak is the head of the clitoris. But deep in like where my sinuses is, there's all the internal structure of the clitoris because the head of the penis is not all there is of a penis, and the head of the clitoris is not all there is of the clitoris. There's all this other tissue deep in the body. And in the same way a penis swells with arousal as blood flow increases to the genitals, the clitoris swells internally, taking up more space and shifting its relationship to the vagina. So that for some people when they have their vagina penetrated, they're actually getting stimulation of those internal structures of the clitoris. So it could be that if you're having an orgasm during vaginal stimulation, it's actually clitoral stimulation that's causing the orgasm, but it's the internal structures of the clitoris. So we can't even necessarily differentiate between which organ in your body is causing the orgasm to happen. So can we please stop talking about types of orgasms? And that's a request that I put out not just to journalists and to everyday people, but to the researchers who need to stop studying types of orgasm. Please study pathways, all the different ways people can access orgasm. But the more we try to break it down into the types, the more we create a context where people feel like they ought to be having all these different kinds of orgasms or else they're doing it wrong. We're creating a performance demand when we categorize them, even if we don't intend to, that is the inevitable impact it has. There's only one, there's a brain orgasm. So imagine you read, you know, a magazine at the checkout counter and it's got a story about here are the five different kinds of orgasms science says you could be having. When you see that it's the five you could be having, it's very difficult not to read that as should be having or else you're not really meeting your sexual potential. And if you're not having those kinds of orgasms, you start criticizing yourself, not having the right kind of orgasm. I shouldn't have an orgasm from this kind of stimulation. I should have an orgasm from this kind of stimulation. Are those thoughts, are they activating the accelerator? Not at all, those self-critical thoughts are just hitting the brakes, making it more difficult for us to access orgasm and to enjoy the orgasms if we manage to have them. The ironic intervention when you're struggling with orgasm is take orgasm entirely off the table for a long time, months at a time and just explore your erotic landscape, experience high levels of arousal and lower levels of arousal and feel what it feels like to approach orgasm. Knowing that you are not going to have one. You're not allowed to have an orgasm. So take orgasm off the table, the goal is pleasure. And when you start getting close to orgasm, oftentimes when people struggle with orgasm, as they get close, their brain starts to go into that spinning mode of like, am I about to have an orgasm? What if I'm about to have an orgasm? What if I'm not about to have an orgasm? Why haven't I even had an orgasm? Am I having an orgasm right now? And all that chatter is just making it more difficult because you have this goal that you're trying to attain and you're monitoring whether or not you're attaining it. So if you take orgasm off the table, the only goal is pleasure. If you are enjoying the sensations you're experiencing, you have already done it, you have already achieved your goal. And if you practice arousal and pleasure for 15 minutes, that's 15 minutes of arousal and pleasure, and learning more about what these sensations feel like in your body. If you do it for half an hour, that is half an hour of arousal and pleasure and learning what these sensations feel like without an orgasm of experiencing arousal and pleasure and what they feel like in your body. And that's ultimately how you learn to keep the breaks off so that you get all the way to orgasm. One of the common experiences for people who struggle with orgasm is this thing that sex therapists call spectatoring, where instead of enjoying the sensations that are happening in your body, you're sort of watching your body and worrying about it and thinking about is your face okay? Should you be bending your spine in that direction? What about the cottage cheese on the back of your thighs? And all of that worry about your body is just keeping the brakes on and making it more difficult for you to enjoy the sex you are having. Charles Carver is a researcher in Florida who with his colleagues developed this mechanism called criterion velocity and the discrepancy reducing increasing feedback loop, which people instantly fall asleep as soon as I say that. So instead of saying criteria and discrepancy increasing reducing feedback loop, I just call it the little monitor. And it's as if there is a little monitor, not the lizard, but like a little watcher in your brain that knows what your goal is. It keeps track of how much effort you put in toward that goal and it notices how much progress you're making toward that goal. And it has a strong opinion about the ratio of effort to progress. So when you are, let's say you're just like driving to the mall, so you've got this goal, you're like, I know how long it's supposed to take. And so you get in the car and you start to drive and you know what? You're getting all green lights and it's really light traffic and it's only been 10 minutes and you are most of the way there. How does that feel? Like the whole world is organized around you, it's so rewarding and joyful, yes, but suddenly there's a car in front of you and it stops too early for a light that you would not have stopped for. And once you get one light, you know you're gonna get all the lights and then there's all this heavy traffic and it's been 20 minutes and you're still not there, you start to feel frustrated. Your criterion velocity is not being met. You're progressing too slowly towards your goal relative to the amount of effort that you are putting into it. And you are therefore motivated to work harder, but still you're not getting to the place that you wanna go and you get increasingly frustrated and ultimately you get enraged. And then one day, for a totally random example, you're sitting on I-95 parked south of Philadelphia at three o'clock in the morning for an hour because a tractor trailer blocked every lane of traffic. And you go from screaming like this, would you just get outta my way, to sobbing. I just wanna go, I just wanna go home. This silly example is about what happens when your little monitor switches its assessment of your goal from being attainable to being unattainable. It pushes you off an emotional cliff from frustrated rage down into a pit of despair. So imagine if that's what happens when you're trying to get to an orgasm and you can't get to an orgasm and you think you're doing all the things you're supposed to do to get to orgasm and you're still not getting to orgasm. Is that frustration gonna make it easier? The reason we take away the goal entirely is to help the monitor relax. Are you achieving your goal? If your goal is pleasure and your little monitor is like pleasure, check, then you're always satisfied and you feel like the world is organized around you and your needs and your monitor is released from the necessity of judging you and trying to motivate you to work harder. Working harder to have an orgasm is rarely the thing that's gonna get people where they wanna go. And if people struggle too long and they feel like there's something wrong with them and they're broken, they absolutely find themselves in a pit of despair. And the number one tip, when you are in that dark, difficult place of feeling like you are broken because there's something wrong with your orgasms, connection with other people, talk to people who will help you understand what's going on with your sexuality. If you have a partner who's fluent in these conversations, talk to that partner. If you have a friend who is, everybody's got like the friend who knows the things about sex, talk to that friend, become that friend, talk to a therapist. The most important response when you get to the pit of despair is connection with someone else. In the Pixar movie "Inside Out," Joy is in an actual pit where things are forgotten. And she has this realization that Sadness, who is another character, Joy and Sadness have been trying to figure out their relationship and Sadness realizes as she remembers what has happened in the past with Sadness, they came to help because of Sadness, the purpose of despair, grief, sadness. It is the bat signal emotion. It is the beacon calling for connection. Even though a lot of us are taught to hide our sadness away from other people, in reality, the most healthful productive thing we can do is to share our sadness with someone else when things get really difficult, when we're really struggling, and we can really struggle around an issue like orgasm, which seems so simple, but we're taught that our identities are tied to our ability to have orgasms. And if you're feeling in a dark place around orgasm, connection is the most important antidote to the darkness. The only measure of an orgasm is whether or not you wanted and liked it. If you practice experiencing pleasure without making it goal-oriented or trying to achieve orgasm, but rather just to experience all the pleasurable sensations your body is capable of, you win every time. And when you have those positive experiences rather than experiences that you judge yourself 'cause you failed or fell short of some goal, somebody set, you are living cooperatively and joyfully in your body, which is actually going to gradually expand your access to pleasure. The more you practice pleasure, the more you deepen and expand your access to pleasure.

- [Announcer] Chapter five, redefining sex.

- When we think about sex, people use words like sexual interest, sexual motivation, libido, sex drive. If you're me, you use sexual incentive motivation system. Lots of different words trying to describe the same thing. For the first half of the 20th century, scientists more or less treated sex as a drive. So a drive is a very specific kind of motivational system where an organism experiences an uncomfortable internal experience that pushes them out into the world to go solve a problem. So thirst is a drive. It pushes you out into the world to go solve the problem of a fluid imbalance, consume more water, right? And the consequence if you don't do that ultimately is you could die. Hunger is a drive, thermo regulation is a drive. Sleep even is a drive. You can literally die of sleep deprivation. It takes a long time and your brain will cheat and struggle to steal sleep, but you can ultimately die of sleep deprivation. Sex, it turns out, is not one of those. Instead, it is an incentive motivation system where instead of being pushed into the world by an uncomfortable internal experience, you are pulled into the world by an attractive something or other out into the, ooh, ooh, what's that? Curiosity, exploration is also an incentive motivation system. It is just as innate and just as natural as a drive system. It's just not an uncomfortable internal experience that pushes you to go solve a problem or else you could die. It is very simple to prove this. Frank Beach, who was an ethologist, in the middle of the 20th century, 1956, went to a conference in Nebraska and said, no one has ever suffered tissue damage for lack of sex. The way I put it is nobody ever died because they couldn't get laid. If you want to prove to me that sex is a drive, show me the tissue damage that an organism experiences because they do not have orgasms or because they do not have coupled sex, like what do we even mean by have sex? The thing you need or else you're gonna die is sex. Does that mean you need a partner? Does that mean you need the release? Now at this point, there is almost always, if I'm teaching like a group of students, someone will be like, excuse me, ma'am, miss, Emily. I'm pretty sure I have experienced an uncomfortable internal experience when I could not get the sex I wanted. And that is correct, you have. The sensation you were experiencing is frustration. That little monitor that has goals and keeps track of how much effort you're putting into it and how much progress you're making gets really frustrated that there is something you would like a lot and gets really frustrated. And that's an uncomfortable internal experience. And if you stay in a high state of arousal for a long time, that can eventually feel uncomfortable. But there is no damage, there is no illness, there's no disease, and certainly there is no death as a consequence of either of those experiences. People don't die of frustration. So it's pretty easy to prove. Yet it took 40 years for science to transition into broadly understanding sex as a sense of motivation system instead of a drive. We live in a world where some people are granted cultural permission to be entitled to sex like they need it, it's a basic biological need for some people and not for others. And to say no, it's not a need, unfortunately, historically, one of the ways this argument that no, it's not a need has been used is to say, and therefore no sex except in the context of marriage. And that is not the message that I want to send. The message I want to send is, it's not a basic biological need, which means you are not entitled to it. No one has any obligation to make sure you have enough of it. It is the oldest, most established piece of science in all of "Come As You Are." And yet it's the only idea that has ever caused anyone on Twitter to call me a stupid . People have feelings about this 'cause they feel like I'm taking something away from them when in fact I am giving them the freedom to be able to experience sexual desire and know that nothing bad is gonna happen in response to that desire. Their body is a hundred percent safe. I like to use the analogy of hunger. If someone steals a loaf of bread because they're starving, a lot of us can kind of understand that and feel like really what we need is a world where no one needs to steal in order not to starve so that they don't die. But if someone steals a loaf of bread because they're just really curious about this other person's bread and they feel like they're allowed to steal somebody else's bread because they're so curious and interested in this bread, that's not the same, right? We're not just gonna grant somebody permission to take something that doesn't belong to them just because they're very interested. So seeking exploration, adventurousness, wanting to try new things, novelty seeking, those are all incentive motivations where we're looking for, ooh, ooh, we're attracted to, I wanna try, ooh, that new thing. Ooh, I wanna try that. We can go ahead and say sex drive. I understand that that is much easier to say than sexual incentive motivation system, but we need to recognize that sex is not a thing without which you will die. And therefore when people try to take it without somebody else's permission, that is entirely unacceptable because they're not meeting a biological need. They're just expressing curiosity. The closest thing to a scientific argument for the idea that it might be a drive is okay if it's not about individual survival, it is about genetic survival. What about a drive to move my genes into the next generation? That is not how biological psychologists define the term drive. Drive is about individual survival. Sex is unique as an incentive motivation system because it's the only one that does very occasionally result in the transmission of our genes into the next generation. But almost all of the sex that humans have, even before medical birth control, almost all of the sex we have is non reproductive. It is primarily a social behavior that we use to bond. Play is another incentive motivation system. Our motivation to have sex is almost exclusively social. The way we get motivated to have sex is that something sexually relevant happens in our environment and our gas pedal notices that and is like turn on signal. And you notice a sensation in your body maybe in response to that turn on signal, and that sensation is itself a turn on signal and that goes up to your brain and you get even more turn on signal and it, hmm, hmm, what's that? I wanna move toward that. In the right context, you're like, I would like to explore further this sensation. It's motivating because it feels good in the right context, because it feels good if the context is right. Why do we have sex? Because it feels good. I feel like I need to mention, it is the case that a surprisingly large proportion of the mass murders that happen are committed by people who declare that their motivation is that they're not getting access to the sex that they want and need. And their little monitor has gotten really frustrated and that frustration has escalated past the rage point into the pit of despair. So while it is true that no one has ever died because they couldn't get laid, because we cling to this myth that sex is a biological need to which people are entitled, it is the case that people have died because we continue to believe this idea, and not only can we save lives if we just understand that sex is a pleasure based motivation, not a life and safety based motivation, we can free ourselves into the joy and ecstasy that's available to our bodies when we're not feeling frustrated and angry about a sense of failure to get something that we feel like we're supposed to be able to get, if it's not about getting but about connecting and sharing and feeling the sense of freedom that comes with letting go of the shoulds and embracing what is true as something that is worth being. Truly, truly, I believe it's part of how we get to world peace. You are gonna save lives, I mean literally, like literally. And then we have people making arguments that there needs to be a distribution of sex to men who can't get laid, that women owe sex to men in order to save people's lives, to prevent these dangerous men from killing people. Women should be giving them the sex. And this was presented in a New York Times op-ed, as if it were a radical idea instead of just misogynist patriarchy like we've had for the past several thousand years. That is not a new and radical idea that is same old, same old. The new and radical idea is pleasure is what matters. Connection is what matters. Authentic humanity is what matters. And we don't get those things through an entitlement and a false belief that something we just really want is something we are entitled to and require for our safety. So the term neurodivergence refers to, it's in contrast to neurotypical and it can refer to any sort of difference in the way your brain is wired. Some people include mood disorders or anxiety disorders in neurodivergent, ADHD and ADD. Attentional differences are part of neurodivergence and autism spectrum disorders are part of neurodivergence. The language, just so people are clear, is neurodivergence is the phenomenon. A person is neurodivergent or neurotypical. People may be neurodivergent, but also allistic, which means they're not autistic. A question I have been getting more and more lately is how neurodivergence can impact people's sexual functioning, specifically people on the autism spectrum. Autism is diagnosed based on three criteria. One is sensory differences, which tends to be either hyposensitive or hypersensitive. And when it comes to body sensations for a person on the spectrum, it's one of the standard narratives is that people on the spectrum prefer deep touch and pressure instead of light touch or what we might consider stroking. And this maps onto the mechanoreceptors actually in our skin, there's a different set of receptors that perceive light touch sensations. And people on the spectrum may perceive that sensation as really irritating and annoying, whereas they experience deep touch and pressure sensations as being more comfortable. So sensory sensitivities is one of the variables. Another difference is in social interactions, having a very different way of reading social interactions, wanting things to be structured and have the rules be explicit. One of the questions I've been asked a few times is if there's a relationship between autism and interest in BDSM, and in a way it makes sense just knowing about sensory differences, maybe that's a person who's going to enjoy really intense deep sensations like whipping, rope play, being tied up in bondage into different positions might feel really soothing and erotic and comfortable because of the difference in how you perceive sensations, but also because the rules of BDSM are much more likely to be explicit, to have a conversation about like, here are the behaviors we're going to engage in, here are the hard limits of things we are definitely not going to engage in. That's a pretty good match for how many autistic people prefer to have their social interactions structured. Make it explicit, tell me what to expect and let me know what my role is here. The third difference in that, that's part of the diagnosis of autism is repetitive behaviors. Having things work the same way, having patterns, having motor patterns, things that you do over and over again. So this is the stimming part where you see some people with autism hop or flap or use their bodies to express themselves in ways that are not the same as for neurotypical, as for allistic people. And it could be that wanting to have these more rigid, repetitive ritualized ways of approaching sex is gonna feel like a better fit for a person on the spectrum. And when you've met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person. Everyone is really different. So how their sensory differences and their social differences and their longing for routine or patterns is going to be very different from individual to individual. A characteristic experience of people on the spectrum is that they may have sensory overload where there is just too much stimulation in the central nervous system and they either melt down or shut down. Melting down is where you like, you lose control, you have your mood and you might rock and cry or shake. And a shutdown is where you blank out. You need to sit in the dark and be totally still. Sex is a intensely sensory experience, right? As people become more and more attuned to what their acceptable level of sensations are, they may begin to notice when they get to an overload place. And there's actually two approaches. The most typical suggestion is to reduce sensation, is to take all sensation away to stop doing whatever it is you're doing, which interrupts the sexual experience. And sometimes that absolutely is the right thing to do. Sometimes the right thing to do is simply to spread the sensation out so it's not all focused in a particular body part. One of the recommendations that I have seen in other places and have given to people, get a weighted blanket and lay it across your chest and arms and shoulders to have like an intense pressure sensation in a different part of your body from where you're being stimulated to spread the sensation out so that it doesn't feel overwhelming. In the same way that if it has rained on a tennis court and you wanna dry off the tennis court faster, do you gather all the water up into place? Or do you brush, do you broom all the water off the surface? You spread it out so that it will evaporate faster. So one of the ways to cope with overload if a sensation just feels like too much, that's too much, I can't do that. Instead of stopping, you spread the sensation out. So it's like rain will evaporate faster in the sun when it's spread out. Because of the social differences with autism, you are trying to learn the rules, how do I do it right? And if how you learn to do it right is by watching porn, then you're going to engage in the behaviors that you see people engaging in in porn. And unfortunately, porn is really poor sex education. Trying to learn to have sex by watching porn is like trying to learn to drive by watching NASCAR. Those are professionals on a closed course with a pit crew. But if you're autistic and you're just trying to learn the rules of how to do this thing, then you do what you saw and you're doing it based on what the behaviors were, rather than noticing what the sensation feels like. What feels good in my body and part of the unmasking is recognizing that what feels good in my body might be different from things that I've seen. And there might be different limits on what kind of sensations my body tolerates. Confidence is knowing what's true and joy is loving what is true about you. This is the research we need to help folks on the spectrum be able to identify what their preferred sensations are and what their limits are and be able to love those as being just as valid and valuable as a neurotypical person's experience. Right now, the state of the research is dismal. One paper I read recently compared autistic people to healthy controls. And what do you notice about that language? Are autistic people unhealthy? No, they're not, thank you very much. Not diseased, please, and thank you. So the research has an extremely long way to go. We have a theoretical framework for exploring, an extremely small number of studies, not all of which are conducted in a way that the autistic people who are participating would feel good about. And for me, when you're studying a vulnerable population, which autistic people are, the research needs to be conducted and written up in a way that feels right for that population so that there's not a way for it to be misinterpreted and exploited by people who are inclined to other or stigmatize people on the spectrum. I have only questions, lots of them. I wanna understand if there is a true correlation so that people on the spectrum are disproportionately represented in the kink community. What is it about that? What's going on with that relationship? And we don't even know yet if there is an overrepresentation of autistic people in the kink community. It does seem like there's an overrepresentation of people on the spectrum in the ase or asexual community. We don't know why that is either. And I really want to know, are there strategies, evidence-based interventions we can use to help partners where one is neurodivergent and the other is neurotypical. Help them to communicate effectively across that difference about what they need and want sexually. Are there differences in how we should be doing sex education for different experiences of neurodivergence? Different ways I should be teaching neurotypical people versus the way that I would teach a group of autistic people? I don't know any of those answers and I need all of them yesterday. So here's an exercise that helps you to expand your orgasms. Anyone with any set of genitals, of any gender identity can practice this. You can do it alone or with a partner. This takes about an hour generally, and it takes a lot of practice. You gotta choose how you spend your time. You could do this or you could just like watch Netflix. It is not necessary in order to be a sexually well person by any means. It is the equivalent of running a marathon. Nobody needs to do it. But if you need a hobby, I recommend this one. Versions of this are part of tantric meditations where they use Kundalini breathing in order to access different spiritual states. But ultimately it's about the physiology of how orgasm tension generates and dissipates. And when you can get to a place where as much tension is coming in as is going out at the same time, it's like every cell in your body is resonating at the same rhythm, like you're a bell that's ringing. You're gonna notice some things about this practice that will probably remind you of mindfulness or other forms of meditation, especially breath meditation. I'm gonna ask you to pay attention to the sensations that are happening in your body. And that comes really easily to some people. And for others it is quite difficult. They get distracted and that's fine. Like a mindfulness practice, if you notice other distracting thoughts come along, maybe it's a thought about body self criticism. Maybe it's a thought about the past. Just hello, distracting thought. I'm gonna put you on a shelf right now and I'm gonna turn my attention back to the sensations that are happening all over my body. Every orgasm is different from every other orgasm, but there are some strategies that work for a lot of people to move in the direction of having quite an enormous orgasm. If you imagine arousal from like zero, not at all aroused to 10, currently having an orgasm, you stimulate yourself in whatever way works for you up to about a five. And then you allow that arousal to dissipate. You let yourself get back down to a one. So a one just feels like just barely any attention drifting toward orgasm. And then you stimulate yourself back up to a six, right? This is a still a middle level of arousal. You're not very aroused, you're nowhere near orgasm. And then you allow your arousal to drift back down to a two, and then you stimulate yourself back up to a seven. And if you are at the beginning of this process, you're gonna be learning what seven feels like versus a three, which you're gonna let your arousal drift back down to a three, and then you're go up to an eight. And at eight, you're real aroused. You might see the orgasm train come into the station. It's not there yet, but you can hear it, there's a whistle. And then you allow your arousal to drift back down to a four or a five. And then you go up to an eight and a half, go back down to a six, and up to a nine. Now when you get to a nine, the orgasm train is pulling into the station and the doors are opening and you would like to get on, but you're gonna put active effort into allowing your arousal to dissipate. Remember it's neurophysiological tension. So you're just going to allow the tension. You're literally going to breathe and soften all the muscles of your body because as you get to that eight, eight and a half, nine level of arousal, you're gonna begin to experience carpopedal spasms, carpal, like carpal tunnel syndrome. Your hands are gonna clutch and your feet are gonna point and your ankles and that's involuntary. And you're gonna make a voluntary choice to soften all of your muscles and let your arousal go back down to a seven, which is a high level of arousal, but it's not an eight or a nine. And you go back up to a nine and a half. Now at a nine and a half, you've got one foot on the train and it might feel like it's pulling outta the station. And you know what? If the train pulls outta the station while you're on the orgasm train, oh dear, you had an orgasm. That's not failure, right? But if you can, you keep your foot off the orgasm train and you go back down to an eight, nine and three quarters and an eight and a half, and a 9.85, where you are really close, like you can feel the orgasm right there. And you're gonna soften all the muscles in your body from your core out to the periphery. And at this point, you are oscillating right at the peak of where orgasm is. And if you can maintain a balance of tension generation and tension relaxation, you can stay in that state and sustain it indefinitely.