The science (and art) of creating lasting sexual connections | Emily Nagoski on TED Talks Daily Summer Book Club

0:01Hey, TED Health listeners. Today, we have one of our favorite episodes from the TED Talks Daily Podcast. is from our Summer Book Club series. In this series, Elise Hu interviews TED speakers about their books and digs deeper into their big ideas beyond the page. This episode is a conversation with Emily Nagoski about her book, Come Together, the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections. If you enjoy it, check out the rest of the series on the TED Talks Daily Podcast, wherever you're listening to this. Now onto the episode.

0:35You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu, and I want to welcome you to the July installment of our Summer Book Club series, where we check out new books that will spark your curiosity all summer long. These reads are coming from our very own TED Speaker community. Each month, we're having conversations with authors to dig deeper into their big ideas. These days, sex advice is everywhere. You can't even go to the grocery store without being tempted by the seven secrets to a great sex life, and the ten positions for a mind-blowing orgasm. But what are these messages really teaching us?

1:09And how much of it is true? Today, I'm talking to the sex educator, author, and TED speaker, Emily Nagoski. She recently published a new book called Come Together, the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections. And in the first few paragraphs, she basically takes a sledgehammer to the most common sexual narratives that surround us. And then she carefully replaces them with ideas that are more healthy, human, and true. We'll talk about her book, then we'll open it up to questions from our audience of TED members. But first, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

1:51And now back to TED Talks Daily's Summer Book Club. Emily, I'm so thrilled that you're here. Thank you for writing such a thoughtful book and for being with us today. I'm so excited to talk about this today. As I just mentioned, the introduction to your book really blew all of our minds because in a matter of paragraphs, you tear down some of the most mainstream ideas around sexuality that are all around us. I kind of had to realize this for myself, like, oh my goodness, I've just been thinking that this is just the way it is. What are some of the ideas that need tearing down? And how did you begin to realize how wrong they are?

2:29Well, the origin story of the book is that my first book, Come As You Are, I started writing it just a couple of months after I got married. And I was so stressed from writing about sex and thinking about sex and reading about sex and learning about sex and talking about sex all the time that I lost all interest in actually having. any sex with my brand new husband. So I did what any good sex nerd does. I went to Google Scholar, and I looked at the peer-reviewed science on how a couple sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. And honestly, what I found in the science contradicted the entire mainstream narrative and discourse about sex and long-term relationships.

3:11Because that discourse, as I was hearing it at the time was, okay, so closeness is the enemy of the erotic. You need distance to keep the spark alive. Or closeness is the foundation of the erotic. You need intimacy to keep the spark alive. And when you look at the research, when you actually talk to people who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, they don't talk about spark. Right. What they chase instead is pleasure. Say more about that. Because it turns out, the crazy thing is, it is not dysfunctional not to want sex that you do not like. Which when I say it out loud like that, you're like, well, no kidding, Emily, of course.

3:59And yet the number one reason why couples seek sex therapy is low desire, lack of spark. So when those couples can refocus on like, do we actually like the sex we're having? What kind of sex is worth the time and energy that it takes not to watch parks and recreation instead? Right. Is there a common thing that people who aren't wanting sex with their partners don't want that has been a running thread? What have you found? So I asked a few thousand people, both in person and a lot of them online, like when you want sex what is it that you want because it's not orgasm right 95 of people can have an orgasm on their own and if you can't there's whole books and workshops about specifically that and the number one most common thing people say is connection it is a unique and powerful way for us to experience connection um more important for others than for some people uh people also talk about sharing pleasure, really specifically, not just experiencing their own pleasure, but wanting to witness their partner's pleasure and allow their partner to witness their pleasure.

5:16There's something really important about that for a lot of people. The third most common reason people offer is feeling or being wanted. And no wonder, I mean, a lot of us grow up in a world where we're taught that the sexual parts of ourselves are dirty, dangerous, and or disgusting. And so to have those parts of ourselves be not merely acceptable, but desirable, longed for, of course, that's appealing. We want a place in our lives where that part of ourselves is welcome. And the fourth most common reason is something I called freedom, which really is about being able to close the door on all our other responsibilities and obligations and identities and just vanish into this pleasurable experience in the here and now sharing in this moment, this pleasure that is unlike anything else humans experience.

6:15And all of those things are a much better starting point for a conversation about sex in a long-term relationship than just like, why don't we have sex more often? When you want sex, what is it that you want? And also, what is it that you don't want when you don't want sex? Because usually it's not the thing people assume. Like we have a story in our head about what it means when our partner says no to us. And it's usually wrong. The number one most common thing people don't want is a sense of obligation that they have to, that they're required to. It's really important to understand and that's the accelerator and the brakes system.

7:00It's one way that you use to kind of describe what people want and don't want. So tell me about the accelerator and the brakes. How does it work? And how can people identify some of their own accelerators and brakes? One of my favorite things in the world to talk about. So this is the dual control model, a theory of how sex functions in the brain that was developed in the late 90s by Eric Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute, who were my mentors. Full disclosure, I am a child of the dual control model. And it's a useful metaphor, but it's not just a metaphor. It's a description of the actual mechanism in our brains and the way our brain responds to sex-related stimuli.

7:40So the accelerator technically is the sexual excitation system, and it notices all the sex-related information that gets input. So this is everything from our extraoceptive senses. That's everything we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. All of our internal body sensations and everything we think, believe, or imagine that our brain codes as sex-related. So it receives that stimulation and it sends the turn-on signal that many of us are familiar with. Functions at a subconscious level, including right now, here we are talking about sex. So it's just a little bit of sex-related stimulus. So a lot of people probably have just a little bit of activation of their sexual accelerator.

8:23But if it's called the dual control model, and the first part of it is the accelerator, that means the second part is the brakes, right? And this is the part of our brains that notices all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. And it's the same big long list. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, everything we think, believe, or imagine, all of our internal body sensations that our brain codes as a potential threat. The sexual inhibitory system sends a turn off signal. So the arousal process is a dual process of turning on the ons, yes, but also turning off those offs. And it turns out when people are struggling with any domain of sexual functioning, desire, arousal, pleasure, orgasm, sometimes it's because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator.

9:21Most of the time, it's because there's too much stimulation to the brakes. One of the main things to remember is that people vary tremendously. So some things that activate the accelerator for some people will be on other people's, this hits my break list, and vice versa. And something I have always thought you write about really effectively is also breaking down the myth that men are hornier than women, right? It's just that our systems have more sensitive accelerators or more sensitive brakes. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. We are more similar than we are different. But right now, it looks like if there is a difference, it's that more women have really sensitive brakes and more men have really sensitive accelerators.

10:10But mostly we overlap a lot. At one point, you write quite boldly for a book that, quote, the best sex advice won't come from a book. It'll come from the way you use your knowledge of the accelerator and brakes and of what you each want and like about sex and from the way you communicate with each other about all of that. Why do you think people have such a hard time exploring their own wants and needs sexually? So there's only two ideas and come together that are so complicated that I needed two chapters for them. One of them is something called the emotional four plan, which is some pretty complex affective neuroscience.

10:48And the other is the gender binary. And I think that the scripts that are imposed on us literally from the day of our birth have the most to do with the reasons why people struggle to find out who they truly are as a sexual person. Because from even before the day you're born, you're being inculcated with messages about who you are supposed to be. And that who you are supposed to be is not just like a responsibility. It is a moral obligation. For example, if you're raised with the kind of genitals that on the day you're born, everybody goes, it's a boy, right? One of the things that you're taught from that day on is that the only emotions you're really allowed to experience are angry, winning, and horny.

11:44You are not really permitted to feel sad. You're definitely not permitted to feel lonely. The scripts for women, they go, it's a girl and you're raised to be a human giver, to be pretty above all, to be happy, to be generous and attentive to the needs of others. And so if your partner asks if you want sex, you have a moral obligation to be generous and meet their needs and your pleasure. We've been inculcated with the idea that our pleasure doesn't matter, that really only men's pleasure matters, so that even when you're in a relationship where there's not a man involved, you sort of get stuck in a binary system of thinking, even when there's not a penis around.

12:35But I want to normalize why people don't know what pleasure feels like. For a lot of us, it's because we learned to have sex in terms of what we do, what behaviors we engage in. Maybe we got no sex education, but we did get exposure to porn. And so we're just duplicating the behaviors that we saw, or we didn't know anything. And so we just went along with whatever our partner wanted to do. So we never had an opportunity to even wonder what pleasure feels like in our bodies. So of course, there's a lot of people who don't even know what pleasure feels like, but you can begin to learn by exploring with curiosity and compassion for this body that has been walking through life all this time without being granted the gift of the pleasure that is the birthright of every human.

13:28It reminds me of how important context is, and you write about this, about sexual context, relational context. Talk a little bit about context and its crucial role. Yeah. Pleasure is nowhere near as straightforward as we have been taught to believe it is, which is why you can be in like a loving, flirty, sexy, playful, connected state of mind with a certain special someone and they touch you. They can tickle you even. Tickling is not everyone's favorite. It is some people's favorite. But when you're in that state of mind, your brain receives that stimulation and categorizes it as sex related and it can feel erotic and lead to other things.

14:14But you take that same certain special someone and you shift the emotional context so that you're like in the middle of an argument about money and your partner tries to tickle you. How does that feel? Right. Not so great. Right. And it's the same sensation. It's the same partner. But because your brain state changed, how your brain interpreted that sensation reversed. That's the importance of context. Context is made of a variety of factors. One, it's your own mental and physical well-being. It's your partner characteristics. It is your relationship characteristics. It is other life circumstances like money and stress and work and family and the white supremacist, this heteropatriarchal, rabidly exploitative, late capitalist culture that we are embedded in and trying to navigate through like sludge every single day.

15:13And my favorite is ludic factors. So ludic comes from the same root word as ludicrous, and it means to play. So the freedom that you feel in this moment to be playful, to try different things and have there be nothing at stake, nothing to lose. Play turns out to be kind of the magic secret to everything. So if you think about when it was easy for me to transition into a playful, sexy, turned-on state, and what was going on? What was the context? What was my well-being like? What was happening with my partner? What was happening in our relationship? What was happening in our lives? And how playful and connected and free did I feel in times when it was really not easy for me to be interested in turning on.

16:03So as a sex educator, do you encourage those of us who are trying to figure out what it is that we like, what it is that we dislike, what our sexual contexts are, to actually do a little bit of the homework? Oh, don't do a little bit of the homework. Do tons and tons of homework. Do all the homework. There is a come as you are workbook. There's not a come together workbook yet. And read other books. Talk to other people. If you're not going to talk Talk to your partners. Talk to your friends. Like, okay, so here's this idea, the dual control model, the accelerator and the brakes. What hits your accelerator?

16:37What hits your brakes? And compare. Because it's not that one of you is doing it right and the other one's doing it wrong. It's that people vary and you can learn from their story. Oh, I can see how that would work for you. That would not work for me. And I started thinking about this because people would tell me stories about what they figured out about their own accelerators and brakes. I think the thing you quoted follows me talking about a woman who told me that she and her husband and three kids went every year on vacation in the Mediterranean. Right. European family. Right. I love this story.

17:12And they would always rent this same Mediterranean house. And the couple had great vacation sex. Vacation sex is absolutely a thing. It has to do with play and being able to shed your identities. but one year their usual house was not available uh so they're like that's fine we'll just rent a different house and you know what in this different house mediocre vacation sex here's what they did so right instead of saying what's wrong with me what's wrong with you is there something wrong with our relationship they just went what happened what changed what was different and they went through like what the factors were and what they realized together was that in this really old Mediterranean house.

17:52This house was so old that the bed was built into the wall, which means there was no squeaking, which means no distracting noise and less risk of waking up the kids and being interrupted. That one little change was enough to make a difference between great vacation sex and meh vacation sex. And I, as a sex educator, could never be like, so here are the things to bear in mind, does this bed squeak? Like everybody should build their beds into the wall. Like it's people vary too much. Our circumstances are too different and our lives change too much for there to be like a static list that I can offer.

18:34So you have to think about like your own life situations. So do you have any advice then to better sort of broach and get past the shame and make talking about sex, especially with our partners, make it more comfortable? Yeah. So the question really is, what is it that's stopping me? What are the barriers between me and that conversation? What is it I am afraid will happen if I say, hey, can we talk about our sex life? And there's two big, almost universal barriers. One is we're afraid that we're going to shock and horrify our partner and they'll never be able to look at us the same way again.

19:17We say something that we want and they're like, and the other is we're afraid we're going to hurt our partner's feelings. All of us are really tender around sexuality because again, it's part of our moral obligation to be good at sex without ever asking any questions about sex or learning anything about sex or talking ever to our partner about sex. We're supposed to be like, I don't know, magically already. Just instantly download everything our partner wants and needs. This is the thing about the conversation about sex is we want it to be an invitation to greater intimacy and greater eroticism.

19:57And we are so afraid that by having the conversation, we're going to ruin it. So start out with a conversation about the conversation. I would love intense eroticism in our sexual relationship. And I don't have any idea how to talk about it. And I'm really afraid that I'm going to say something that will horrify you or that will hurt your feelings. I'm really afraid that you might say something and I might act shocked, even though like I want to be as accepting as I can be. Or you might say something that hurts my feelings. And I want to make sure we know how to process that. Can we talk about what it would take for us even to start the conversation?

20:41What do couples or groups that you have worked with who do this well, what is the outcome for them? Extraordinary communication leads to extraordinary sex. Good communication leads to good sex. Peggy Kleinplatz is the leader of the Optimal Sexual Experiences group. She and Dana Maynard wrote a book called Magnificent Sex. So first of all, she interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex lives. And what do you suppose is the typical age at which the people she interviewed had their first experience of extraordinary sex? I'm going to go with later in life. Between 35 and 45?

21:2855. 55 yeah when you talk to people the people who have extraordinary sex about how they got there a big part of what they talk about is unlearning everything they ever thought they knew about sex bodies shame love intimacy and oh gender and replaced it with what's genuinely true about them you erase other people's opinions about who you're supposed to be as a sexual person and how you're supposed to do sexuality. And you work with what is genuinely true in the here and now. We'll be right back with more of our conversation after a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

22:13And now back to TED Talks Daily's Summer Book Club. Let's go back to something that we started out talking about, which is that we need to dispel the notion of the spark and keeping a spark alive that instead of centering this notion of desire, we should actually be centering pleasure instead. What is the difference between desire and pleasure? Thank you for asking that question. They're completely different. The neuroscience is very clear on this. So wanting is when you feel like there's a gap between you and this other thing that is desirable to you. It's like you want to, whoo, what's that?

22:56You want to go after it. It is longing for. It's actually a sign kind of that there's something wrong. There's something missing. There's a problem to fix. Liking is savoring and enjoying what's actually happening in the present moment. And often we think that pleasure is a consequence of successfully obtaining the thing you desired. But it is 100 % possible to enjoy something that you didn't first chase. And people get confused because it is possible for desire to feel good, right? Like there are some circumstances where desire is pleasurable, like mostly circumstances where you feel pretty darn confident that you're going to be able to get the thing that you want.

23:43That can make desire feel pleasurable. But desire can also feel awful. Yeah. If you feel like there is no way that you can get the thing that you want, if you're chasing it and failing and chasing and failing and chasing and failing, it can wear away at your soul and lead not just to frustration, but rage and ultimately despair. Desire can be agony. It sure can. So pleasure, by definition, always feels good. Isn't it so much easier to center the thing that no matter what, 100 % of the time, is going to feel good for you and also feel good for whoever else is involved, and then you get to share the thing that feels good and that just amplifies the feeling good?

24:34When I was trying this, when I was trying to like put your body in the bed, let your skin touch your partner's skin. And a lot of the times what happens is your body goes, oh right, I really like this person. I really like this. This is a great idea. I am so glad we are doing this. That is often what happens for a lot of people when they schedule it, they show up, someone they really feel good about being with, with a sexual connection that is full of pleasure. I would put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I would cry and fall asleep. Oh. Which is not great. And that's the point at which I went to Google Scholar.

25:13Right. Because I needed to figure out how I got from where I was stuck in the stress response in my brain. How did I travel out of that and into the lust space, the sexy, playful space, where my brain could release all the other obligations that I have in my life and just enjoy this connection in this moment. The thing is, when I worked this out, truly, I mean, I'm reading like dense, difficult neuroscience. And when I got to the end of it, I understood what was happening with us. And I brought it into a book. And now I have this manual that whenever anything goes wrong for me and my partner in the future, I've got a book to like remind me how to get back to it.

26:01And things are better now for us than they have ever been 13 years in. And we're so glad that you did this work. And we I love that you're so nerdy because it is a service to the rest of us. Okay, I'm going to build on that with our first member question, which is, how can I improve my emotional intelligence when it comes to uncomfortable topics. So this is part of doing the work. Yeah. So number one answer, you're going to be like, no kidding, therapy. Two, the two chapters on the emotional floor plan are so important because they talk about the seven primary process emotions. So knowing which emotional space you are in, whether it's fear or rage or panic grief, which is isolation, feeling trapped, or play or seeking, which is curiosity, or care or lust.

26:59What emotional space are you in? And how does that change the way you communicate, the way your brain state is, the way your body feels, and the way your emotions move through your body? What gets you into any one of those seven states? And what pulls you out of any of those states? When people are in what I call the pleasure adverse spaces, which are fear, rage, and panic grief, people's ability to communicate clearly falls apart. It just shatters. They can no longer hear their partner and they get into a state of just repeating themselves over and over and over again without hearing what their partner is saying in response.

27:43Shame is somewhere in the panic grief space. The question to ask to find out if you're in the panic grief space is what help do I need? Because shame is an emotion of I don't belong. I'm not allowed to participate as a member of the human collective. And what you need most, ironically, is connection. This shame part is so important. and one of our questioners says that they finally don't have shame about sex, but they also don't know what they like. So common. Yeah. How do they go about the journey regarding figuring out what they like? So much fun exploration is ahead of you. This is the fun part.

28:38this is where you start setting aside time in your calendar just for you so let's say once a week you set aside I don't know half an hour for pleasure first of all I recognize that if you filled in a 24 hour seven day a week calendar with your typical events it would probably be full two bursting. So the first step is to figure out what you are willing to stop doing to create time and energy to explore what pleasure means to you. There are three characteristics of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. The second characteristic is that they prioritize sex. Prioritizing erotic pleasure means making it more important than something else.

29:27so what you're gonna do you can absolutely use media you can read erotica you can watch preferably uh like feminist fair trade farm-to-table uh ethical porn which means porn you pay for for sure and you can do it by connecting with your own body i'm gonna recommend when you first get started start with the periphery as far away from the core of your body as you can get Just touch your fingers to each other. Touch your fingers to your toes if you can reach your toes. If you lie down, you can probably get your foot up near the middle of your body so that you can feel your feet with your hands. And just notice what those sensations are.

30:09Our bodies are capable of experiencing so many different kinds of sensation. And all of them are potentially pleasurable if you are in a calm, curious, playful state of mind. So you're going to turn toward your body and whatever's happening with it with, hmm, what's this? Oh, that's an interesting sensation. Do I like it when I pull at my knuckles? Does that feel like a good, satisfying sensation? Or is that irritating and annoying and I don't like it? Try it four weeks in a row because it might be different each time because the context will be different because your mental state will be different.

30:43And gradually move toward the more core up your legs and down your arms. And make sure you include your scalp and, God, like your earlobes. People who've experienced spinal cord damage so that they have no sensation below the waist can learn to have orgasms just from having their earlobes stimulated. Wow. Turn with kindness and compassion towards your body, especially your belly, the parts of yourself that you have the hardest time being kind toward. For me in high school, it was actually my thighs. Turn with kindness and compassion toward those body parts. and hold them like they're the beautiful, iconic, glorious miracles that they are.

31:19And that's a starting place. Thank you to Emily Nagoski for joining us today. Her book, Come Together, The Science and Art of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, is out now. If you want to hear more from Emily, you can follow her on Instagram at enagoski or through her newsletter at emilynagoski.com. And a big shout out to our TED member audience. Y 'all were awesome. If you'd like to be part of our next book club event, you can join at go.ted.com slash membership. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode of the Summer Book Club series was produced by Kim Nader Vane, Peter Sa, and Daniela Ballarezo.

31:59It was edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Autumn Thompson. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Will Hennessey, and Roxanne Highlash. I'm Elise Hugh. Thanks for listening.