Ep 143: Gender Scripts, the Dual Control Model and Sexual Expression with Emily Nagoski

Illustration by the talented @reesabobeesa

Why is understanding our uniqueness important to having great sex? What is the dual control model in the context of sexuality and how does it affect our desire? What steps can we take to develop a healthy relationship with sex and sexuality after experiencing trauma or sex negative conditioning?

In this episode, Effy and Jacqueline have a rich conversation with Dr. Emily Nagoski about how the societal scripts we are handed according to our sex-at-birth impact our sexual expression and how these scripts are endorsed through many channels throughout our lives. Emily explains how there are accelerators and brakes that calibrate our desire and talks about her upcoming book about the three characteristics of the couples who sustained strong sexual connection.

Recommended books that you have to check out:
Come As You Are
Burnout
The Come As You Are Workbook
The Body Keeps the Score
Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers

To learn more about Emily Nagoski, PH.D (she/her/they)
Emily Nagoski is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestselling Come As You Are and The Come As You Are Workbook, and coauthor, with her sister, Amelia, of New York Times bestseller Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. She earned an M.S. in counseling and a Ph.D. in health behavior, both from Indiana University, with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute. Now she combines sex education and stress education to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. She lives in Massachusetts with two dogs, a cat, and a cartoonist.

IG: @enagoski
TikTok: @emilynagoski
Website: emilynagoski.com
Emily’s Newsletter
Come As You Are Podcast

Connect with us on IG and more:
Curious Fox @wearecuriousfoxes
Effy Blue @coacheffyblue
Jacqueline Misla @jacquelinemisla

Email us: listening@wearecuriousfoxes.com
Join the conversation: fb.com/WeAreCuriousFoxes

TRANSCRIPT

Effy

Welcome to the Curious Fox podcast for those challenging the status quo in love, sex, and relationships. My name is Effy Blue.

Jacqueline

And I'm Jacqueline Misla. And today we're talking about how to have great sex with a person who we've been looking forward to talking with for a

Emily

while. I'm Emily Nagoski, and I'm a sex educator I teach people to live with confidence and joy in their bodies.

Jacqueline

Dr. Emily Nagoski is the author of several books including burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle, and the wildly popular come as you are the surprising new science that will transform your sex life. The research insights and takeaways from come as you are helped me look at my own sexuality and intimacy with new eyes. As someone who believed that I was destined to be in partnerships with mismatched libidos. The ideas in this book offered a new perspective on how to view desire, and the environments that excite or inhibit that desire.

Effy

Emily threads together sexual scripts, dual control model of sexual response, social influence, and other various important studies on gender and sexuality, to help us understand how to connect with our bodies, or partners, and our pleasure. And what disconnects us from all of this in a super accessible way.

Jacqueline

We started off our conversation by talking about a reoccurring theme in the book.

Effy

So, Emily, when I think about you, I think of you like an anthropologist, I think that you have looked at different factors within one's body and one's environment to better understand why sex may or may not be enjoyable. And in a world where we hold ourselves to one set of standards, and that's what we should look like. And that's what sex should be like, can you talk a little bit about the need to understand our uniqueness? To help us better understand our sex

Emily

lives? Boy, can I could spend an hour just on that question. On the day you're born, you get handed a script that's very much shaped by the shape of your genitals, somebody looks at your body and goes, it's a boy, or it's a girl. And that determines the instruction manual that you're supposed to follow for the rest of your life. And in the it's a girl script, the ideal for you, is to be pretty happy, calm, generous, and unfailingly attentive to the needs of others. And because you have a moral obligation to be this way, if you fall short in any way, in any moment, you deserve to be punished. And if there's no one around to punish you, you just go ahead and beat the crap out of yourself. Right. And on the other side, if you get the it's a boy script, it says you have to be confident, strong, invulnerable, infallible, and independent. Have no needs, Nobody's allowed to have any needs of their own in this system. So there is this model of the ideal sexual self that is out there. I think of it as across like an enormous Canyon. And then there's where you are. And there's where this ideal is this fictional fantasy. Ultimately, like a tool of the oppressor ideal that you're supposed to be and the more you are not that thing, the more there's something wrong with you and you need to keep working on yourself. And how dare you sit still unlike yourself exactly as you are because you're failing to be that thing right now is blanket permission to stop trying to be that thing because you never will be a million I have a Emily actually wrote a song about it called the abyss, which is about the unbridgeable chasm between who you truly are and who the world expects you to be. Because no one is that ideal thing. Everyone is who they actually are, does not exist even a little bit. And I think that the real having it all is being able both to be fully who you are, and being accepted and welcomed in your community, in your family, being safe to walk around on the street, being exactly who you are. That's having It all it's not about what you own, or how many family members you have, or how often you have sex or anything like that. It's just can you be fully yourself, and also simultaneously have permission to participate fully in your community. Because of the reason we're working so hard to be that ideal is because if we fall short, we get punished and ostracized and left out. And we desperately longed to be included and feel welcome and able to participate. And we ruin our opportunity to have any level of friendship, connection or intimacy when we believe in the fictional self, because we walk around wearing masks, pretending like we are the thing. And so the people we meet, get to know the mask, and they like it. And you want to become more intimate with them. And you start to maybe like, show them some stuff behind the mask. And maybe they love that. Or maybe they can't cope. I thought I knew who you were, and now you're doing all these things. So that's why that's why uniqueness. Sure,

Effy

sure. I think also with a mask, I can completely understand why the other person would be like, well, that's not that's not who I signed up to. So I think even though those masks might get us to connect with people and be intimate, ultimately, when you do take the mask off, it is a bit of a bait and switch. Right. And I think I see that across relationships all the time. I don't know

Emily

if I'd call it a bait and switch, because that implies like a deliberate manipulation. And it's not at all that all of us are doing this all the time. I mean, just to like, get through the day, to have a perfectly reasonable interaction with the checkout lady at the grocery store. We all like put on our social masks, we smile and are polite. And that's good. We go on a first date with somebody, and we're on our best behavior, we say, and that's not a bad thing to do. If you're too full on, like, if you're like day one, let me explain my trauma story to you. Write Yeah, because of the nature of the way social interactions are formed. It builds gradually, necessarily, when you're first getting to know someone, it is normal to have like, little starting bids of trust and intimacy at to see how the person reciprocates to find out if they're trustworthy. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Jacqueline Misla

Yeah, because trust takes a leap of faith. And I think what you're saying too, is the irony is that we, we are in relationship because we want to have connection, and we want to feel belonging, but our strategy for that involves hiding or masking ourselves, which then gets in the way of the connection and the belonging, and impacts in the trust because we don't trust and they don't trust and there's like this game of who's going to trust first that I can see we've we've just put ourselves in this cycle of being so in our heads, which again, I imagined then takes us out of our bodies. When it's time to be sexually intimate. We're just in this like, game of chess in our minds.

Emily

I want to make sure we're not villainizing the mask, because we wear it for a reason. Oh, actually, because in our childhood, we were punished for being who we truly are. I was raised as a girl, and I was literally told that I look ugly when I'm angry.

Jacqueline Misla

Yes. punished and and highly rewarded when we do the mask? Well, yes, exactly.

Emily

100%, we get rewarded when we do the mask well, so and so in order to avoid outright rejection, because we have been taught to be ashamed of the person we truly are. We're not just gonna like put that out there. That doesn't make because just like rejection after rejection after rejection. Plus people have expectations of people behaving themselves. One of the things that you look for in a good person, potentially, is that they're someone who knows how to navigate the world and be a person just out among other people. It's not an evil, bad thing. It's really important. I get feelings about it because I'm autistic. And I didn't get diagnosed until I was in my 40s. And it took that long because I am so fucking good at masking. And when people are like you've been faking it all along, you've been pretending like No, man, I built that out of me.

Jacqueline Misla

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Effy

Okay, let me bring this bring this back, though. It totally makes sense. And we all experience it, especially as women, especially as people who don't conform and

Emily

women mask as much as autistic men. neurotypical women masculine autistic.

Effy

Yeah, that makes sense. Just all the time. Yes, No, I totally get that and with negative health outcomes, just I'm sure I'm sure scores, negative physical health, mental health. Yes, spiritual health. I mean, it's clear that that is not good for us in any way. I want to bring this conversation back to our sexual expression though. How does that then affect are sexual expression and how we show up in our sexuality? How does the mask then affect that that sexual connection or a sexual expression?

Emily

Right? So in that fictional fantasy self that like who you're supposed to be, there are some pretty straightforward rules about who you're supposed to be, I say straightforward, but actually, they're a bunch of bullshit. So I have an identical twin sister, we were raised in the same household. And by the time I got to high school age, I had a clearer sense of who I was supposed to be as a sexual person, gleaned primarily from romance novels and Glamour magazine. Like I remember reading an article that said, Men really like it, when you make noise and touch your breasts. They like to see that you're enjoying yourself is what it said. So I wasn't having any sex at that time. But when I started having sex, I made sure that I acted like I was having a good time, without any reference to whether or not I actually was having a good time. But I wanted to, you know, I wanted to please my partner, pretty happy, calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others, it will make him feel good, if I show him pleasure. Without any reference to whether or not I actually feel pleasure, which is not great. And I had to spend a bunch of time disentangling myself and becoming aware of my own pleasure. But my identical twin sister, by the time she got to high school, had the opposite message absorbed in her body that good girls don't, they don't have any sexual desire, they can keep their base animal instincts under control, they only have sex in order to please the men in their lives. We absorbed the extreme opposites of who people are supposed to be when they get the it's a girl script, because of small differences in our basic temperament. And Emilia had to do the same thing of disentangling herself from all the lies that she had been told. And she also had to access her own pleasure. For both of us the solution of finding out who we truly are, was connecting with what brings us genuine pleasure. And with that, oh, man, let's talk about masculinity and the ways that that's toxic and dangerous to men, and also to everyone, when you get the it's a boy script that comes with a bunch of very screwed up rules about sex, which is that you can measure your worth as a human, by the number of people you can convince to let you put your penis inside them, that you have a right to sex, that sex is the one and only appropriate way to access connection, and a feeling of intimacy and being held. And that if someone turns down sex, they're not just turning down sex, they're turning down any any degree of intimacy and connection with them. Because that's the only one that the it's a boy people are allowed to have. And the it's a boy folks have access to three emotions. They're granted permission to have three emotions. Anger, we all know is like sort of like the hypermasculine, toxic thing. Second one is winning. You're allowed to feel winning, like I can't, there's not like an emotion name for it. It's just Yeah. And then the third emotion is horny. So given a longing for connection and intimacy, you look at the three, I mean, you're not doing this as a conscious process. But you look at the three options you have available, and you're like, which one is closest? And often, it's sex. And so you ask for sex. And what you're actually asking for is any kind of intimacy and connection with another human being. And when they say, No, they're turning down intimacy and connection with you. And remember, because your identity, your validity, as a human on Earth can be measured by your ability to convince people to let you put your, their your penis inside them. They're also invalidating your existence. It's super screwed up. Yeah,

Jacqueline Misla

you write about, as you're saying, Now, the role that media plays in all of this and creating the scripts for ourselves. And that's something that we talk a lot about him in terms of changing the noise. Can you talk a little bit more about that? How does being mindful of what you're in taking and changing the noise then impact and improve your sex life?

Emily

Oh, yeah. So it's sort of like media nutrition. Only let stuff into your brain that makes you feel better and good about who you are. filter out the stuff that makes you feel bad. It's a really simple strategy with a very simple like, after I watched that, do I feel better about my life or worse about my life, and only include the stuff that makes you feel better about your life? Because the media messages we consume? I mean, I just told you the romance novels and Glamour magazine were basically my sex education Amelia had different inputs. And so she had a different outcome. And both of them were lies. When we got to adulthood, we could make choices about what we accepted and what we weren't going to accept. So I stopped reading women's magazines, that's for skips, they have changed a lot, though, to give them their props, like, they have come a very long way. And actually, I don't think they do very much of the 50 ways to rock his cock, I think the last 10 years have shown a giant improvement in the quality of the stories. So one time I was talking with students about this, and I said, if it doesn't make you feel good, if it makes you feel bad, consider dropping it from your inputs in your life. And it's the student said, but what if I like that it makes me feel bad? And I? Yeah, like motivation. It's the way you can't stop tonguing a cold sore. Or like picking at a scab like, the pain feels like something important. You'd like you're just like, fascinated by the pain. Yeah, I get that. So if people are feeling resistant to the idea of only integrate the media that feels good in your life, like I get that there can be something appealing about the suffering you inflict on yourself. And let's just be aware that that's what you're doing. And ask what function the pain serves in your life. In what way is it making it easier for you to be who you truly are, which ultimately, is the goal. Because sometimes it's about motivation, like if I whip myself harder, yeah, I'll totally be able to my dog, my dog barks at the male truck every day. And every day the male truck leaves, and my dog is totally sure that her barking makes the male truck go away. So a lot of us have been beating the shit out of ourselves for a long time punishing ourselves, exposing ourselves to media, like Instagram accounts that make us feel so bad about ourselves. And we are as successful as we are, like, we got to where we are, at the same time as we were beating the shit out of ourselves. And so there's a part of us that is like, Well, the reason I have gotten this far, the reason I do make any change is because I was beating the shit out of myself. But the mail truck was gonna leave anyway, is my point. You were gonna get as far as you, you didn't get this far You didn't accomplish all the things that you have accomplished. You didn't get to be this person. Because you beat yourself up. You got here, in spite of the fact that you were injuring yourself every day with the negative messages I, I think of critical internal self critical thought as a whip. Like, I grew up with a Irish Catholic father who talked about hair shirts. So I think about his like cat of nine tails whipping myself, and like I got to where I am, despite the fact that like, every day, I was whipping my back with a cat of nine tails and requiring energy to heal from the wounds that I was inflicting on myself, and then reopening those wounds the next time I did it. And here's my question. What happens when you put down the whip? What happens when you put down the social media accounts or the other media that you take in that makes you feel bad about yourself? What happens when you drop it? You don't get worse. Yeah, you start to heal. Yeah. And then you get even stronger than you have ever been before in your entire life. And it's not easy, healing hurts. And you've already been in pain for you know, every day that you've had the whip in your hand. But you have strategies for numbing that pain. And the strategies for numbing this self inflicted pain are not the same as the strategies for managing the pain of healing. And that's, I think, where people fall down, they want to, they're like, I stopped beating myself up and now I hurt more. What do I do? And the answer, I mean, self compassion.

Effy

I mean, we even say better to devil we know, right? So it's like, I know that pain I'd have, like you said, I have strategies for that pain. And then this new pain is unknown. And it's scary, even though the other end of that pain is is relief. Yeah, scary. Because I don't understand that process. And I know how to manage this pain and I've been inflicted on myself for for years. Right. So I think there's familiarity of that pain is probably what keeps us picking up that scab. Right. Right. We

Emily

think that we think that level of pain is the normal way the being alive feels.

Effy

Right. Right. Right. And I think a lot of this in the root of it has trauma, right? We know this sort of negative stuff. Talk, this self isolation, all the stuff has in the root of it. There's trauma, right? So I'm curious, this is some of the work that that you're doing as well that what steps can folks take to develop a healthy relationship with sex and sexuality after experiencing trauma?

Emily

It's such an important question because so many people are survivors of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, relationship violence, childhood trauma, neglect, and abuse. All so many of us are walking around with scars, at least two thirds of us, one in three of the cisgender women listening to this have experienced intimate partner violence or sexual violence. One in six of the cisgender men and over half of the trans non binary agender, folks, is a lot of people, which is why it's such good news that people do heal. I hear from people literally every day, talking about their story of healing from trauma. It's going to sound flippant, and I don't mean it that way. But like therapy is a really good place to start. Yeah, we

Effy

are very pro therapy here. Yeah. And there are

Emily

lots of different kinds of therapy, it doesn't have to be like don't think that therapy has to be going and talking about the terrible thing that happened to you, which obviously, you might not want to do. There are body based psychosomatic interventions like Somatic Experiencing EMDR. Excellent example highly evidence based, especially for recent traumas, but also for distant past traumas. You don't have to talk about anything, you just notice what's happening in your body and recalibrate your body's responses, because trauma happens when you get trapped inside your own stress response cycle. When your fear gets activated, and you lock into that fear, though, you can also do talk therapy, there's also CBT and DBT. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, there are so many evidence based approaches to healing from trauma, there are books specifically about healing from trauma in general and healing from sexual trauma. If you are into the science of these things, highly recommend the Body Keeps the Score. That book will change your life.

Effy

Holy. Yes. Yeah, we've mentioned that book before. And it's in our reading list. It's definitely a book that I recommend to people as well. It's heavy, I say this people, like big, be prepared to put it down, walk away, and come back whenever you're ready. Because I think it speaks about trauma in such a way that it just sees you is one of those very few times that I felt the book was seeing, like I was seen by a book and made me kind of nervous. So I'd like put it down and walk away and then come back to it and, and read a bit more read a bit more. So I always tell people, it's a great book and just read it with self compassion. We like patience and compassion. And it's an excellent book. Yeah. So great. Great. We love your book, too, by the way, your book is some your book comes up very, very often. And the the part that comes up from your book that Jackie and I talk about all the time was the piece around the gas in the breaks. And I connect the dots around that. Yeah, I know exactly. I was gonna pass it back to Jacqueline, because that's something that she you know, she told us about.

Jacqueline Misla

She mind blown in so many places. And I'm going to connect it to us back to actually what we were talking about in terms of media. One of the things that I realized after after reading the book and taking some of the quizzes, and I'll talk a little bit about what I've realized in that moment, too, was in social media right now, it's not just the magazine, where we were seeing like, you know, the skinny woman with the big breasts. Now, every time I swipe, this is the kind of mom I'm supposed to be. This is what my house is supposed to look like, this is what I'm supposed to dress like every swipe up is a new directive to me of what I'm supposed to be like, and that's all gets in my life all

Emily

the ways you're failing. Oh, I love it. It is

Jacqueline Misla

a list of all the ways in which I am failing. And then so when you talk about you talk about the brakes and the gas or you talk about the things that inhibit or excite our sexual desire. And I recognized that the things that are my breaks are the things that are inhibiting are all of those things of noise? Are all of them laid out this morning? I had that conversation with my daughter I should have done that differently. Oh, like this little bit of role fat in my stomach like they're gonna see that and no and oh, like I should have done the laundry. All of those things are the things that just cloud being fully present. Really those

Emily

don't activate your sexual accelerate.

Jacqueline Misla

Right, exactly my perceived failures so sexy.

Effy

Can I just also add one more one thing to that I'm also experiencing I machine. I'm not on social media, I filter it very hard. I severe ADHD, if I if I turn something like that on hours of law, so I don't go near it. And I depend on out even that's why I choose for myself. I also get people telling me that I'm not getting back to them on social media that I'm missing out on things when I'm on social media. So even when I choose not to be on it, I still get flack about it, you know? So there is both like this pool of social media and there's a push of society that said no, what do you mean you're not on social Media, right? So there's the push of society. And there's a pool of the way the social media is designed. So even those of us who are like, No, I don't want to go anywhere near it. That's not working either. So all that stuff is around us. All that stuff is affecting us. And in full on breaks. Yeah. So yeah, tell us about that.

Emily

So, we're talking about the dual control model, which was developed in the late 90s, by Eric Johnson and John Bancroft, to sex researchers who were at the Kinsey Institute, at the time, I am the child of the dual control model. And they made this wild leap of asking what if the mechanism in our brain control sexual response works the same as all the other mechanisms that our brain, which has a pairing of excitatory and inhibitory systems, or as I've taken to talking about it, the accelerator and the brakes. So that's why it's called the dual control model, because it's got two parts and the accelerator notices all the sex related information that's coming into the brain, everything from your external sound tip senses, your, what you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and also everything is you think, believe, or imagine that your brain code says, Oh, that sex related, and it sends the turn on signal at the same time that that's happening. Fortunately, your brakes are noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. Everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste. And as you were saying, think believe or imagined, I should have had a different kind of conversation, we still haven't done the last of the laundry, everything that your brain coats as a potential threat, and it sends a turn off signal. So the process of becoming aroused is a dual process of turning on the ons. Yes. And that's the advice you usually get from from the women's magazines, or, and also turning off the offs. And it actually turns out that when people are struggling with any aspect of sexual arousal, desire, orgasm pleasure, it's not because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator. I mean, sometimes it is, but a lot of the time is because there's too much stuff hitting the brakes. And part of the reason there's so much stuff hitting the brakes is because we live in a very messed up world. That is like constantly feeding us messages about all the ways that we are failing, explaining to us who we're supposed to be, and also that we will never be who we are supposed to be that we don't deserve pleasure until we are that thing and will never be that thing. So we'll never deserve pleasure, and to get back to trauma. Also, if you have had sex used against you as a weapon, then when you begin to feel aroused, the arousal itself might activate the brakes, because your brain has learned that sex itself is a potential threat. Yeah, which interferes with the arousal process and shuts down the arousal process. And so the process of healing from that is really gradually experiencing degrees of pleasure inside your own skin. Noticing that your brakes might be activated, your heart might start beating faster, or you might feel a sort of like adrenaline. Trembley higher blood pressure experience, stay at a low level of pleasure inside your skin. And your brakes will gradually release as they recognize that you're safe. You're experiencing this level of arousal, and you're safe. And after doing this multiple times in a week, the next week, you go to a higher level of arousal, and your brakes will come on. And you stay at that level of of arousal. And your brakes will notice you can talk to your brakes be like brakes, I appreciate the ways that you're keeping me safe. And I want you to see that I am safe right now. Look, I can feel this and I'm safe. And then you gradually increase and increase and increase the level of arousal, the sexual explicitness of the arousal, like none of the things you've done so far involved any genital touching, right? And it's not until you get to like a pretty high level of I can feel safe when I'm experiencing arousal that you actually touch the genitals. Does that make sense? Mm hmm. It's called graded exposure if you want to look it up. Yeah.

Jacqueline Misla

The concept of to me was also so important because with my partner and I, for example, there was a story at some point in my head that we had differing libidos. I had higher libido, she had a lower libido, right? That was the story. And then we took the sexual temperament quiz. And I realized that it was actually that she has more breaks than I do. I realized I was like, oh, that's an issue for you. That's it. Like I realized, like I was like, oh, all of these breaks that are stopping you from being fully present don't exist for me. But now knowing that they exist for you can allow me to help create an environment where then we can both be in that space. It wasn't about your body and your physical arousal. It was about the things in our environment, in your mental environment that were getting in the way you

Emily

That's exactly what the dual control model is for, to help people understand like, it is not. So for example, writing a book about sex is very, very unsexy. It is overwhelming and exhausting. And while I was writing come as you are, I was so overwhelmed and exhausted, I had even those reading, writing, talking, thinking about sex all day, every day, I had no interest in actually having any sex, months of nothing. And nothing about my relationship had changed. Like, I'm still totally attracted to my partner, I want to have the energy to be sexually engaged. But my brakes are just locked down so hard right now, I got nothing, right. And if I didn't know about the dual control model, I might think there was something wrong with me. Or maybe there was something wrong or changed about my partner, or maybe there was something wrong with our relationship. And really, it was just that the context was real screwed up. And when I could release my brakes, that's when the accelerator could do its job.

Effy

You know, this makes me think of I see the parallels in what you're saying. And it was I was reading the book as well, with polyvagal theory. Right? Yeah.

Emily

I'm so glad you saw that. Because yeah, it's in there. Right.

Effy

So um, it feels like it has the same thing, right? Because polyvagal theory had to go up and down the steps. Like, that's my favorite way of thinking about it. So if you're, you need to go, you know, if you're stuck on freeze, or if you're a fight or flight, you need to come down to stay in play. And until you go up and down, you're not going to be able to change, you're not going to skip, you can't skip one to the other. Right? If you're not feeling safe, and in this sort of social engagement part, doesn't matter how aroused you are, if you're not in ventral vagal. If you're stuck in sympathetic or dorsal vagal, you're not doesn't matter how aroused you are, you're not going to get into that into that space. But you're going to be stuck frozen, are you going to be afraid and sort of fighting back? Yep. So yeah, it's like, there's so many different ways of saying, it's all talking about the same thing. It's just we have different ways of saying it. And I think whichever way is resonating with people, and then, you know, we're coming to solutions, like, like in Jackie's situation, you know, this has been an ongoing conversation, and she's suddenly like, a lightbulb moment going, Oh, okay, let's just instead of trying to fix it here, let's fix it here. And guess what, now we're having sex every day?

Jacqueline Misla

Yeah. And it was and it challenged the sexual scripts or the societal scripts, I should say that we had because the script that I had in my mind from from Young is I'm too sexual all the time. Right. I like I think about too much. I want to do it too much like Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, or I grew up in a religious household, you know,

Emily

high sensitivity accelerator person. Tell me more about that. I don't know if ever so when you do the quiz, did you score high on the accelerator? Yeah, I

Jacqueline Misla

scored high. Yes. Hi. Yes. Hi.

Effy

Brakes. Yes, that's true. Like, just breathe on.

Jacqueline Misla

Essentially, we could just talk about sex, and I'm like, I'm ready. But there was so but to your point earlier around, the arousal itself could be a trigger that was gonna come often what was happening for me, I mean, I had such a tormented relationship with masturbation as a teen, because at any moment, Jesus Christ was going to come down in the midst of my masturbation and everyone would be taken up to heaven, except me. And and then everyone would know, everyone would be up there looking for me, and they would know, they would know what happened, they would know I would, why I was left behind. And so there's, there's been this narrative in my mind that I am too sexual. And then my my partner, she identifies as masculine of center. And I think that there's like this kind of societal script in her mind that she's supposed to always want sex she's supposed to. And so when she didn't, and I always did, and we both had these narratives where she was feeling bad about herself, because she wasn't living up. I was feeling bad to myself, because I want it too much. And we're both thinking it's about us or our bodies or relationships. And then again, we took the quiz, and we're like, oh, it's the laundry, your laundry is not done. that's on your mind. And so then that's why hotel sex and like vacation sex is so great, because there's no laundry, there's no dishes, right? You're like, stepped away from all the things. We just need to address some of those things so that then you can be fully present. And that makes sense to me. Which is why in the in the morning, for example, she's more turned on than I am. Because I think that she's like rested, she doesn't really get a sense of what's going on in the day, at the end of the day. Now she knows all the things that she didn't do and whatever. And I'm like, let's go. So it was really helpful. It was really, really helpful. Oh,

Emily

yeah. You know, my Podcast Producer mo Laborde is a queer woman who was born and raised in North Carolina, conservative Christian family. And she had the same insight that when she was aroused, because she has been taught from very early on that all things related to sexuality are bad. When she was aroused, the brakes would come on and that's going to slow down her experience of arousal. It's going to make it more frustrating and less pleasurable, and she'll be more distracted. And she had read and loved come as you are already, when we started working together, it was only when we started talking one on one that she was like, Oh, so it's not just like sexual assault that can make sex, a potential threat. According to your brain. It's also being shamed for sex, all your life, make sex a potential threat, so that it hits the brakes. Oh, I'm so so so glad that you told that story. That's so good. And

Effy

totally. And if you think about how women are treated, about their sexuality, the slut shaming that is associated with women who own their sexuality. And then there is we're wondering why women aren't as sexual. And there's all these researchers telling us Well, women aren't we wouldn't don't want sex as much. Like, is that true, though? Is it that we had a great conversation with Grace welser. And she's doing research on the orgasm gap, right? And she's sort of she was telling us all about the research. And what she's saying is that one of the things that was told to us is, well, is it really women that women don't want sex, or one, they get slut shame, so it's not safe to want it to the sex that's available to them is so poor quality, then why would they want something so poor quality where they don't get anything from it? So the orgasm gap is huge, especially straight women, and straight men. So if you're not getting off, if you didn't getting stuck, shamed, and the experience is shitty, because we don't talk about sex, Isn't it normal that you don't want that thing? Like,

Emily

there's a sex researcher named Peggy Klein plots whose work I highly recommend? She wrote a book with Dana Menard titled magnificent sex. And the way Peggy puts it is sometimes low desire is evidence of good judgment.

Effy

Ah, love that. Yeah. That's how I feel.

Emily

doesn't have an orgasm gap. Queer couples?

Effy

Yes. Yeah.

Jacqueline Misla

It's so interesting, because it's true. We when we were talking to Grace about that, that it is straight men. Cisgender straight men have the most orgasms followed by gay men, body men and lesbian woman. And then then you go. And it's straight cisgendered women,

Effy

by women, by women and street and yes,

Jacqueline Misla

that's right by women. And then

Effy

yes, yeah, yeah. And the Conklin, you can't you can't avoid coming to the conclusion that once men get involved in women's pleasure, that's why the orgasm Yeah, appears.

Jacqueline Misla

And it goes back to what you were saying about the winning and about the horniness and about the anger, like, these are the things that I get to claim it is about me and my experience, because that's how I've been socialized. As a woman, I've been socialized not to speak up and to be to be of service to you. I can't tell you the amount of times that I was more focused on arching my back and making the noise exact was about my actual pleasure in a situation. And so they think I'm enjoying it poor poor guy was with was like she's having a great time, because I knew how to look like I was having a great time. But I wasn't. And so we're all just again, we go back to where we started. We're all just playing this game.

Emily

But you had to put on the show like, yes, yes. To protect your partner's entire sense of identity. Yeah, you had to put on the show. Yes, there's a really amazing thing that's been happening in the sex research over the last five or so years, which is that they've begun to measure the actual literal patriarchy. Wow. So measuring the orgasm gap and recognizing that, really, it's straight women who are suffering, like that's the patriarchy, there was a vice article about a really good paper. That was like so the reason women in sis hat relationships don't want sex is because of man children. Yeah, like, you wouldn't want to have sex with a man child with somebody who you have to clean up after all day every day. Sure, women's low desire in these situations is not caused by anything about their brain chemistry. Like there's nothing wrong with you if you don't want to have sex with someone who has never cleaned their own underwear during your relationship. Sure,

Effy

exactly. And once you're in that maternal role, oh, we know that's not where the erotic lives because we're not supposed to fancy your fuckup parents if you got these parental dynamic installed into your relationship, because you're not taking not taking responsibility for your actions, and wondering why your partner doesn't want to fuck you. Well, you don't want to fuck your children or your parents. It's just not where the erotic lives so and then we're wondering why there's no sex in relationships.

Emily

Yeah. And the reason is of the patriarchy. Yes. And it's neither person's fault. Like nobody chose to have these scripts handed to them, and just embedded in their brains. Nobody picked that. But it absolutely is the case that couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, do this labor of like digging out all the junk that got planted in their brains about who they're supposed to be all the messages about safety and bodies and love and worthiness and sex and pleasure and the erotic and they discard everything that is not relevant to who they are, and what's happening in their relationship. And this is true no matter what the gender combination is, queer couples have an advantage, because they've already had to do a bunch of that work, just in the process of understanding that they don't fit the SIS hat norm. But that doesn't mean they're done. I interviewed lesbian woman for the book I'm writing right now who talked about coming out in her late 20s. Getting into the lesbian bar scene, and feeling more like she was stuck into a femoral than she ever felt when she was in the heterosexual world. Hmm. And people were like, taken aback when she was like, Okay, I may be the ven person, but like, my pleasure really matters. And I want to touch my partner. And I'm not interested in being with a partner who's not interested in being touched, like, cool if you don't want to be touched, but that's not for me. Like those rigid the rigid rules carry themselves into the communities that exist, because those rules are wrong. Yes. So it's everybody, the more work we do to clear out that gender stuff and picky kleinplatz As researchers on people who experienced extraordinary sex, optimal sexual experiences. And when you how do you get to be a person who has optimal sexual experiences? Their main answer is I decided that everything I had ever been taught about sex was a lie. And I started from scratch honoring what was actually true about what's inside me and what's happening with my partner partners. Yeah.

Effy

Beautiful. Can you tell us a little bit about your book that you're working on? Now? got curious.

Emily

Yeah, it's, it's about sex and long term relationships.

Jacqueline Misla

that topic? Yeah,

Emily

the short version is there's three characteristics of the couples who sustained strong sexual connection. One is that they prioritize sex, they decide that it matters for them, that they have sex and look, it is normal and natural for there to be times in a long relationship, especially where sex is not a priority. And the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection, find their way back to each other, because for some reason, it contributes something really important that they stopped doing all the other things they could be doing. Maybe they got kids arrays, maybe they got jobs, to go to our school to go to other friends and family to pay attention to sometimes God forbid, you just want to like, watch a movie and go to sleep. Right? We are busy. Why would we stop doing all those other things and just like, roll around and rub our skins together and lick each other's genitals why? And it's because it matters. For some reason they prioritize sex, they decide that it matters to they have a strong friendship with a foundation of admiration and kindness, and trust, which we talked about. And third, they dismantled the gender shit in their brains and in their relationship, no matter what the gender combination of the people is.

Jacqueline Misla

That stuff is so insidious, I, I was with men only for the first 30 something years of my life, and then almost exclusively women for the last decade. And when I got married to my wife, I realized years in that I kept serving her the bigger portions of food. And I would like make sure she, you know, got her food first before my daughter and I. And at some point, I was like, What am I doing? And I was just replaying what my mom had done with my dad and what I had done with my husband and doing it with her. And we were two women like so that stuff to your point, that the patriarchy I have a mug that I drink from every morning that says I have 99 problems. And the patriarchy is basically all of them. Like yes, it has nothing to do with my queerness it is so embedded in and rooted in my script, that there's constant decoding that I have to do, there's constant like reflection that has to happen, and just breaking it apart and having a discipline of, of trying not to let it creep into my mind. It's my relationship into my parenting all those things.

Emily

And it's so gorgeous, that you're noticing it and making active choices, that you're not just following along with what's in your head without recognizing like, am I actually choosing this behavior?

Jacqueline Misla

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to ask about that because you on your website have a lot of different tools. But we mentioned that the sexual temperament quiz, which I highly recommend, there's the sexual cues, assessment, turning on and offs, you talk about stress. There's, there's different resources there. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit and maybe we can end our conversation around what happens next. So someone's listening to this. Can we talk a little bit about self reflection and dialogue with partners and the importance of that in terms of switching and trying to move towards amazing Excellent, great sex?

Emily

Yeah. There's also the coming to our workbook, which is, if you're like, I don't need to have the science explained to me, I don't have to, like hear examples of other people experiencing things. Just tell me what to do. Come into our workbook,

Jacqueline Misla

love your workbook love it.

Emily

I actually made the workbook because therapists kept asking me like, I need a tool to use with my clients, like, people are not going to read your 100,000 word book of effective neuroscience and metaphors. Just tell them what to do. So I wrote

Effy

I loved it every. Everyone I love with the workbook. I looked at the citations, I followed up with all the research, yes.

Emily

That's, that's what they're there for. I get so frustrated when people like criticize something about the book. And I'm like, that was in the footnotes, and notes. So I love that you're like, let me go actually read that science because the science is amazing. Okay, so And also, if people are listening to this, and they're like, sex is very much not available to me because gestures wildly at the state of the world. There's also burnout, which is the book, there's a reason why my first book was about sex. And the second book was about stress. So if you're like, sex is not going to happen for me go to burnout. And in January, the burnout workbook is coming out. Oh, yay, yeah, my sister was in charge, I co wrote burnout with my sister, and she was in charge of the workbook. And she is a pretty self critical and pessimistic person. And even she was like, the workbooks really good.

Jacqueline Misla

That's a big thing I'm working on similarly working on a workbook around change and kind of the shift that we have to make when we realize when we have that realization that that memo that we got is bullshit. And we want to do something differently. But now I have a family and I have a job. And I have a husband and I have kids. But I realized that actually, it may be by and I don't want to do the same, but like, how do you dismantle and rebuild, and I'm working on with my sister, who's an illustrator. That's amazing. I know that sister love, I love it. I love it. Okay, so reflection and dialogue.

Emily

So recognize that it's not just about recognizing what's true, you're going to have to go through a process of grieving for the opportunity cost of all the things you could have had and known and the ways your life would have been gentler and more pleasurable. If you had known this stuff before. And you're gonna go part of that grief is rage, about the fact that you were lied to for so long, and you believed it and you invested time and energy and your identity and trying to conform with these things. And what did it get you? It got you lied to and pretending and not aware of your own internal experience. So there's rage and grief that has to be acknowledged and worked through. In addition to the like self exploration and understanding what's true about you, the thing I say over and over, that I teach people to live with confidence and joy in their bodies. What do I mean by confidence and joy, confidence is knowing what's true. And that's the reflection part the like, what's actually true about my brakes and accelerator what's true about the way I experience arousal, desire, pleasure, orgasm, was true about my sexual identity and my gender identity and my relationship and the world I live in knowing what's true. Joy is the hard part. Because it's loving what's true about your body and your relationship and your sexual identity and your gender identity and the world that you live in. Loving what's true, even if it's not what everyone has been telling you should be true. Loving what's true, even if it's not what you wish were true. Joy is the hard part. Sure. So the reflection process, when you bring that into a relationship, I'm mostly going to talk about the heterosexual experience here because there's a special barrier, especially in the deconstruction of the binary from that relationship. There is a catch 22 That women have always been put in the role of taking care of men. And we want the man in the relationship to start like dealing with more of his own shit and like opening up and being a whole the whole person that he has always been, but hasn't felt like he's allowed to be. So like, deconstruct his own shit instead of like, just leaning on the partner. And the irony so like, it makes sense that at the beginning of the process of deconstructing the binary in your relationship, you're like, You got to fix your shit. I am not responsible for managing your emotions. I have been doing that work for years and you gotta you got to deal with your own shit. But the thing is, it's really hard. Like it's gonna be really hard and really scary for him. And you're gonna have to help your dude. The key to helping your dude without falling into the trap of just recapitulating the same like I will care for your feelings. I will hold you and make sure you are safe and I will pry I will take on your feelings for Are you so that you don't have to feel them? The key to making sure you don't fall back into the trap is to be present with his difficult feelings about the shame and the grief and the rage that he has about the fact that he's been trying to live according to these rules. And it didn't get him any of the things that he wanted. Be there with it. Turn toward his difficult feelings with kindness and compassion. He's given you cupcakes when he does that. Just return the cupcakes, reciprocal cupcakes, I can be there with kindness and compassion, without feeling all those feelings for him. Is it fair that a woman would have to do even more emotional labor in order to De Binary her relationship? That's not about fair, it's just going to be necessary?

Effy

How do you see that show up differently in queer relationships? Because you spoke to and it makes sense, there's, I completely understand that there's an extra complication in heterosexual relationships. What does that look like in queer relationships?

Emily

It looks like the same thing with a little bit of a head start. Because you can notice why am I treating my partner the way my mother treated her husband, when like, I have visual evidence that my partner is not the same, it's right in front of me. And also, I have done all this other work to like recognize the ways in which I am not like my mother, I don't want to be like that. But here I am doing this thing at the beginning. And you can talk to your partner, and you probably have at least some shared language already about talking about I mean, like I in my relationship, I can use like, the gender binary, and the patriarchy and misogyny. And my partner does not get activated. But there's a lot of people for whom those words are totally unwelcome in their relationship. And how do you have a conversation about internalized homophobia? If you can't talk about misogyny, so the shared language that already exists is going to be helpful, and is not and it's not easy for anybody. This stuff is so pervasive and so deeply rooted in our brains, you will never be done. This is one of the problems with writing the book is like people want an answer so that they can get to their happily ever after and be done forever. And it's your Happily Ever After is that you will get better and better and better. And it will only get better and better and better. Except for the times when it's harder and worse. But then it gets better and better. And you're never done. No, sorry.

Jacqueline Misla

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're right, the awareness makes it the first thing after awareness is that it's really hard. So if you get the awareness place, and you're like, wait, it doesn't feel better. Let's just tell now it actually is going to feel worse first. Yeah. And then eventually can get better. It's like when you open yourself. Yeah, exactly. You're actually feel that pain. And it's going to take some time for you to heal it. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Right. If you

Emily

can go to your partner and be like, so I stopped beating myself up, I stopped within myself, and I am in so much pain as a result of that. If they can be like I get it. I understand that that I want to be here for you. I want to help to care for the wounds that you've been inflicting on yourself that the world has been inflicting on you. It's one of the most connection building, loving, deep human things that we can do for each other is to be present with kindness and compassion for all of those difficult feelings that come with trying to create a relationship that is different from the one the world has been trying to force you to have. I don't know if that sounds made sense.

Jacqueline Misla

No, it did. It lands.

Jacqueline

For more on Emily Nagoski, you can visit her website emilynagoski.com. Or find her on Instagram at ie Nadal ski and on Tik Tok at Emily Nagoski or on the come as you are podcast. You can also find her books comm as you are and burnout on our reading list. If you visit we are curious foxes.com backslash reading list. Once on our website, you'll find blog posts episodes and videos sorted under your favorite categories like pleasure, Kin communication, jealousy, family, dating and more. If you want to share your thoughts on this episode and connect with other foxy listeners, then Head to facebook and join our Facebook group at we are curious foxes to support the show and find a slew of podcast extras including many episodes after our conversations and over 50 videos from educator led workshops, then go to Patreon at we're curious foxes. If you've enjoyed this episode, we would love for you to subscribe to our show on Apple podcast or follow us on Spotify and Stitcher. This tells the podcast gods that content like this matters. And for extra bonus points. Read the show and leave a comment so that others know the kind of impact that this show has had on you and your relationships. And finally, let us know that you're listening by sharing a comment or a story or a question. You can email us or send us a voice memo to Listening. We're curious foxes.com

Effy

This episode is produced by Effy Blue and Jacqueline Misla with help from Yağmur Erkişi. Our editor is Nina Pollock, who allows us to come exactly as we are each and every week. Our intro music is composed by Dev Sahar, we are so grateful for that work, and we're grateful to you for listening. As always, stay curious friends. Curious Fox podcast is not and will never be the final word on any topic. We solely aim to encourage curiosity and provide a space for exploration through connection and story. We encourage you to listen with an open and curious mind, and we'll look forward to your feedback. Stay curious friends.

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