It’s 54 years since the arrival of the pill in Australia liberated women’s sexuality from reproduction. 45 years since Germaine Greer dared women to taste our own menstrual blood. And 42 years since sex-ed pioneer Betty Dodson encouraged women to confront their vulvas with a mirror. Yet too many women remain crippled with the medieval conviction that the sexuality of their body is an individual source of shame.



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Which is perhaps why Emily Nagoski’s book, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, has been described by other sex educators as “a master-class in the science of sex” and “the best book I have ever read about sexual desire”.



A former researcher at the Kinsey Institute, Nagoski lectures in human sexuality at Smith College, as well as maintaining the popular sex blog, thedirtynormal.com. Repeated requests from overwhelmingly female students, blog-readers and anxious strangers regarding what is, can, or even should be normal about human sexuality provoked her to write the book.

As a literary work, Nagoski’s book deserves plaudits for the rare achievement of merging pop science and the sexual self-help genre in prose that’s not insufferably twee. A few too many gardening metaphors aside, Come As You Are resists the temptation to antique, smirky puns and offers up hard facts on the science of arousal and desire in a friendly and accessible way.

Amidst talking through experiments on how the male and female genders differ in their physical response to sexual stimuli, she also presents graphs. In one startling comparison, Nagoski explains that there’s a 50% overlap between what a male’s genitals respond to as “sexually relevant” and what a male brain responds to as “sexually appealing”. In women, this overlap is only 10%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Graph: Come As You Are. Photograph: Scribe

“Men’s genitals are relatively specific in what they respond to,” writes Nagoski, “and so are their brains. Women’s genitals are relatively general in what they respond to, while their brains are more sensitive to context.”



It’s the lightness of Nagoski’s tone combined with the book’s happy, of-course-you’re-normal message that illuminates a dark and depressing realisation: so ingrained is a cultural loathing of women, their bodies and their sexuality that it has taken until 2015 for this book to arrive with due fanfare.

In this context, Come As You Are is something of a spoiler-alert, not merely for the book but for our culture as a whole: “stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it”.

Citing science is apparently needed to justify facts about sex that anyone born in a female body should already, implicitly know. No adult should really need a book to tell them that getting enough sleep, eating well, avoiding overwork, feeling good about yourself and not banging a loser are essential to sexual happiness.

Yet if there’s one great revelation in Nagoski’s book, it’s that when it comes to sex, the cultural beliefs we’ve inherited from ancient misogynies still override the materially bloody obvious.

Women grappling to understand how the feminists who fought the sexual revolution weren’t able to bring home complete victory perhaps underestimated the willingness of the other side to war-profiteer.

Even in our era, which enjoys historically unprecedented sexual acceptance and an ocean of accessible explicitness, vast new industries of sexual therapy, treatment, advice and surgery have repurposed sexual stigmas of the past into profitable anxieties of the present.

There’s money to be made from portraying women’s bits as freakish, their sexual performances deficient and their libidos somehow faulty. I salute those who can resist this mythology; even porn-star Jenna Jameson, whose vagina once enjoyed enviable popularity, eventually herself succumbed to an unnecessary cosmetic vaginoplasty. By the way, the surgery wrecked her career.



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Nagoski’s book is, of course, part of this industry. A cynic might say she’s just carving out a her own share of the market by selling women a gentler message than they’re used to. “We’re all made of the same parts,” she reassures, “but in each of us, those parts are organised in a unique way that changes over our life span.”

This statement shouldn’t be revolutionary – but an optimistic view is that by making allies of science, research and hard data in her work, Nagoski’s book will boost the forces fighting for women’s true sexual liberation.

“You are normal!” doesn’t sound much like a battlecry, but in a world keen to sexually homogenise women from the gap of their thighs to the shape of their mons pubis, the sentiment lands like a bomb.