A Q&A with Dr. Emily Nagowski
Background Info: Dr. Emily Nagowski wrote the New York Times bestselling book “Come As You Are,” so the next generation of people could grow up into sexual adults with the knowledge of things she did not know in her 20s and educate everyone on the dual control model.
Q: Would you rather have an orgy at a retirement home or have sex on a sex swing covered in mayo?
A: Oh, so among people who have great, spectacular sex, the typical age of their first experience of spectacular sex is 55. So like, give me the orgy with the seniors.
Q: Is there research on great sex in your older years?
A: Yes there was a study done on this. It involved people who are outside the norm, because people in the norm have normal, normal, normal sex as opposed to mind blowing life changing sex. So it mostly included seniors, people who'd been in relationships for quite a long time, people who'd been sexual adults for a long time, and people in the LGBTQIA2+ community, the kink community and polyamorous folks. And when they were sort of asking, at what age did you have your first experience of extraordinary sex, optimal sexual experience? The typical first age was 55.
Q: You said that the number one sexual organ is our brains. So how is my brain supposed to help me have better sex when I’ve been told all my life that it’s my vag?
A: We can remove a whole lot of your body parts. If your brain is still intact and you have access to a feeling of safety in your body, your brain can still have access to orgasm. The orgasm is a brain function because it feels like sensations are happening in the periphery in your external body parts.
Q: How can I optimize that part of my brain or that functioning in order to experience pleasure?
A: The mechanism in your brain that directly controls sexual response is called the dual control model.
Q: Can you explain the dual control model?
A: So, the dual control model has two parts. The first part is the sexual accelerator or the gas pedal, which means the second part is the brake. The accelerator notices all the sex related information in the environment, which is everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, think, believe or imagine and all of your internal body sensations that your brain codes as related to sex. It sends the turn on signal that many of us are familiar with. At the same time, your brakes notice all the good reasons not to be turned on right now, which are the same things the accelerator notices, but interpreted as potential threats. And it sends a turn off signal. So arousal is both the process of turning on the ons, but also understanding that there may be too much stimulation and you need to hit the brakes.
Q: What are some things that could cause your brain to hit the brakes?
A: Stress, big one. Relationship struggles, big one. Body image issues, almost universal. Trauma history, shockingly common. All of these things can hit the brakes and it can be small stuff too. Grit on the sheet, being distracted by your to-do list, thinking about the dishes or the laundry, or the homework and all the work things you need to do and being worried that someone's gonna interrupt you.
Q: What has changed about stress in modern society?
A: The thing that has changed is that it went from acute stress, which only lasts a short amount of time, to chronic, never-ending stress.
Q: What is one of your best sex tips for when people are stressed?
A: Turn off your notifications on your phone. You don't need to be notified of almost anything in that kind of immediate way. Turn off notifications, not just during sex, but in your whole life to reduce your overall stress level.
Q: What is the relationship between stress and sexual response?
A: People vary in their relationship between stress and sexual response. 10 to 20% of people find that when they're stressed, they have an increased interest in sex and everybody else either it doesn't have an impact or it shuts things down.
Q: What would you say is the number one way that anybody can relieve their stress?
A: The single most efficient way, which is available to different degrees to different people is moving your body. It can be anything from walking to lying in bed and tensing all your muscles, every muscle in your body for a slow count of 10, but the key is moving your body.
Q: You mentioned the dishes before when we were talking about the brakes and I just love it. I've seen a couple of interviews where you talk about the dishes. So why should I do the dishes before I have sex?
A: For a couple of reasons. If the dishes stay on you or your partner’s minds, and you cannot fully relax until like the sink is empty, doing something as simple and painless as the dishes, can make the sexual experience better. Similarly, itt can communicate “I was thinking about you and I wanted to make sure that your homecoming was as low stress as it could possibly be. I'm really glad you're home now.” It's so much more than just, I did the dishes.
Q: On the topic of chore play, what if someone that is in a relationship, a long-term relationship, has never participated in the doing the dishes part before, started doing the dishes more often and started engaging in chore play more often?
A: In couples with more egalitarian distribution of the household labor, they have better quality sex. Whatever feels like balance and fairness and like my partner is showing up for this relationship, they're not just showing up for the sex, they're showing up for me and for us, then that's the thing that's going to help increase the sense of like my partner is here for me.
Q: In your new book, you discuss this concept of a third thing being essential for relationships. What is a third thing and why is it important to relationships?
A: This idea comes from a poet named Donald Hall who said he and his wife share third things, which are the things you and your partner share with enthusiasm. Whether this is a sports team you both follow, the kids you are raising, or a tv show you love together, they are things which you share together.
Q: How do third things impact sexual relationships?
A:I believe that a shared erotic connection over the long term deserves to be a third thing which you and your partner share enthusiasm and excitement and invest in so that you're constantly having conversations about “What are we doing to make our erotic connection more and more accessible?”
Q: Could you possibly give us an example of the impact having these conversations about errotic connection?
A: Yes. Suppose that wife goes to therapy and says, I know it hurts my partner's feelings, but I would be satisfied if we never had sex again. Very often, when there's a partner who's like, I'd be fine if we never had sex again, the sex they describe is dismal and disappointing. If you do not like the sex that's available to you, of course you do not want it. So the question to ask your partner is, what kind of sex is worth wanting? What would be happening in a sexual situation that would make you glad to be there?
Q: How do you determine the answer to the question “What kind of sex is worth having?”
A: Well that depends on the person and what stage of life they are in. Things change: your relationship, your body, your relationship with your body, and the kind of sex worth having is going to change along with all of those contextual factors. You just need to decide what is worth spending the time doing and how to best experience pleasure.
Q: Are there other factors that impact how your relationship with sex changes and adapts over time?
A: Very much so, yes. I use this silly analogy in Come As You Are, the garden metaphor, where on the day you're born you're given this little plot of rich and fertile soil. However, at a certain point, you decide to create a garden with someone else, and the difficult thing about that is this integration of everybody's favorite things. However, you need to find the balance between you and your partner’s needs and desires in order for your garden to thrive long term.
Q: Your new book is called Come Together. Is there anything else you would like to talk about that is in this book?
A: So after Come As You Are was published, then I was traveling all the time and I would come home exhausted and try to connect with my partner but I would just fall asleep. At a certain point, I was like, I want to fix this. I miss the part of me that plays erotically, and I wanted to bring that back to my relationship.
Q: What are the three things couples have in common to sustain a strong sexual connection?
A: One, they're friends, they admire and as we were talking about before, they trust each other. Two, they decide that sex matters enough for their relationship that they portion out time specifically to do this thing. Three, they co-create for themselves a narrative and truth of who they are as sexual people and as a relationship that is true for them specifically.
Q: What would you say to someone who said, “I don't think I've ever had a vaginal orgasm.”
A: The first thing I want to say is that only about a quarter, maybe a third of cisgender women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal intercourse. The rest are sometimes rarely or never orgasmic from vaginal intercourse. So my advice is, go for it if you want to, but you're not dysfunctional if you're not doing it. The only measure of the quality of an orgasm is how much you wanted and liked it.
