Come as You Are

So what’s the right context?
Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do?
You run.
So when you’re stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do?
You run . . . or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise is good for stress,” that is for realsie real

At the end of one semester, I asked my 187 students to write down one really important thing they learned in my class. Here’s a small sample of what they wrote:
I am normal!
I AM NORMAL

Sexual Inhibition System (SIS). This is your sexual brake.

Sexual Excitation System (SES). This is the accelerator of your sexual response.

But feeling your Feels is safe. Being emotionally uncomfortable isn’t inherently dangerous. It’s not even scary—when you trust that allowing the discomfort to move through its cycle will always and inevitably end in feeling better.

But it’s men-as-default in a different way from how it worked with arousal and desire. Culture sanctions spontaneous desire as the “expected” kind of desire because that’s how men experience desire, and culture sanctions concordant arousal as the expected kind of arousal because that’s how men experience arousal . . . but if women’s expected kind of orgasm is whatever men experience, then that should be clitoral stimulation, since anatomically the clitoris is the homologue of the penis. To say that women should have orgasms from vaginal penetration is anatomically equivalent to saying that men should have orgasms from prostate or perineal stimulation.

Certainly many men can orgasm from that kind of stimulation,15 but we don’t judge them if they don’t, and they don’t usually wonder if they’re broken if they don’t.

And that’s why it sometimes feels like an unpleasant internal experience. It’s not the desire itself that feels unpleasant, it’s your criterion velocity being unsatisfied. In other words, it’s not how you feel . . . it’s how you feel about how you feel.

This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.

Orgasms differ from each other because the context for those orgasms differs. The quality of an orgasm is a function not of orgasm itself but of the context in which it happens.

In other words: Creating a great sex-positive context for the lower-desire partner resulted in a context that was mind-blowingly, almost painfully erotic for the higher-desire partner.