Come as You Are

This is a nice self help book that will answer a majority if not all your questions and will basically reassure you that you are normal! I would recommend this book to anyone who is feeling like they are not comfortable in their bodies. This book is offered more towards straight women but I feel like some of the information in this book could be useful to anyone. This book, to me, feels quite repetitive. I was listening the the audio book and sometimes I thought it had repeated the cd because I felt like I heard everything before. If there is ever an abridged version of this book I think I would have given that a higher rating.

~Ashley

More books like this please! It's great that it exists & more people should read ut. What it's saying should not be revolutionary but unfortunately for many, it will. Many readers will find reassurance & information that should have been accessible to them a long time ago. As far as self-help books go, it does use legit research & contains some useful exercises! Therapists should read it!

A pleasure to have my map changed.

I learned quite a bit from this book. It was informative and digestable, not to mention easily actionable, and I can definitely begin to see certain elements of my body in a new light now that I have been shown the tools to do so. What brings the score down is that I found the narrative stories a bit contrived and I got completely lost in all the metaphors (monitor, flock, garden, one ring, and so on). As a STEM girl myself I appreciate clarity over metaphorising everything, but I also understand some audiences may need the illustrative style. 

I would recommend this book for every woman.
Emily Nagoski does a great job of creating analogies for complex systems of sexuality. The text is easy to read, but works best if you take the time to stop and think what she's discussing and how it may have applied to your real life experiences.
I found it provides a very interesting framework for understanding sexuality and arousal, even though the intended audience is women, there is enough in common for men to learn something new about themselves and their sexual partners.

This is a really good book with a lot of super helpful information, i just knocked off the star and a half for obnoxious organization and writing things. She would do this thing where she would present an idea and then say “well get to that in chapter 5” or whatever and it happened so. often. like every few paragraphs. it happened mostly in the fictional examples of the four women recurring throughout your book. they almost always ended with “she needed to do this thing we'll talk about in a later chapter” and it was just tiresome. It was also an extremely repetitive book; perhaps it's because she's a teacher but it recalled itself so so often that it felt like when you haven't gone to class for a couple days so the teacher does a big recap, but in this context I was reading it quickly so i was just being hit over the head with not only the same information, but the same phrasing. Anyways, besides those I think this is a really helpful book with a ton of great information that could've easily been whittled down.

Though it's longer than it needed to be and contains way too many metaphors, the info in here is revelatory. It is mind blowing how society's expectations of female sexuality are so, so wrong because the male experience is used as the benchmark.

This was ultimately not the book I needed, but I learned some valuable lessons (looking at you, responsive desire) and it included recommendations for books in the realm with which I do need help. At a time I was feeling quite broken, it also showed me how much is going well and normal that I do have to be grateful for.

10/5

I read this on the recommendation of a friend who suggested it might help clear things up for me. She winked when she said it. And so, as a man, I realize I am not the target audience, which makes this a difficult thing to review.

The good: several of my female friends have told me that this book changed their lives. Evidently there is good advice here, and it definitely cleared up some misconceptions I had around women's sexuality. To that extent, if you can suspend your disbelief, this is probably a great read.

The bad: I mentioned suspension of disbelief. Nagoski often refers to “the science,” claiming that whatever study proves her point. However, my overwhelming feeling throughout the book was that Nagoski had ideas that empirically seemed to work out, and was trying to justify them through the literature. While there are quite a few citations (none of which I followed up on), the studies she describes simply /reek/ of bad science. They are either studies about rats that she's extrapolated to human behavior, or they are unreplicated studies of n<50. This is a classic failure mode in the search for truth; mining the literature for claims that support an a priori belief, rather than synthesizing the literature into a coherent worldview.

While the facade of science probably lends an air of legitimacy to what otherwise would be a book of just-so stories, it completely falls flat to a scientifically-minded audience. And so I'm stymied here. Nagoski's methods are clearly bunk, but due to how many people I know personally whom have been helped by this book, I feel that I need to credit where it's due.

Should you get points for accidentally being right, even if your methods are completely wrong?

Another gripe: the prose here is rather egregious. It comes off a lot like having a chat-room conversation back in the early 2000s. For example, Nagoski doesn't seem to know the word “feelings,” and instead, exclusively refers to “getting the Feels.” There are a lot of strained analogies to popular culture, almost none of which I was familiar with — and the ones I was, the metaphor didn't really connect. For example, she spent a few pages describing the plot of Groundhog Day, and then when she got around to her point, it really didn't seem to be related to Groundhog Day at all! I think it was about “why do vaginal and clitoral orgasms feel different from one another if they are REALLY AND TRULY JUST THE SAME THING?” but I can't remember.

Relatedly, the book espouses particularly bad ontology. As alluded to above, Nagoski decides by fiat that ALL ORGASMS ARE THE SAME. She adopts a non-standard definition of orgasm, and justifies this claim based on her new definition. She says, if you notice a distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms, that you are wrong. Because they are the same thing. “And besides, every orgasm is different from one another, so why differentiate?”

Nagoski makes this misstep many times throughout the book. Maybe it's just me splitting hairs, but she willingly and oftentimes redefines a word. Clearly she is attempting to remove stigma or get past some cultural blocks, or whatever, but make no mistake — this is the work of a marketer, not a researcher. Nagoski evidently has something to sell here, which she admits, but it's unclear whether she's aware she's doing this, or whether her thinking really is this sloppy. Like it or not, words mean something, and we use them because they usefully carve distinctions that we'd like to make. It's fine to show us that these distinctions are mistaking the forest for the trees, but a better approach than saying “you're wrong, orgasm doesn't REALLY mean that” is “here's a better word that better carves reality at its joints.”

The ugly: the major takeaway of this book seems to be “no matter what your sexuality is, it's normal.” There's a lot of dark-arts psychology in the prose of this book, in an attempt to reassure the reader that they are “not broken.” My initial, uncharitable response to this was “what sort of sad, weak person needs to seek reassurance from this?” But then I remembered the women who have praised this book to me, and quite a number of them are remarkably strong, wildly inspiring humans.

As such, I have reconsidered my view, and instead interpret the book's reaffirming attitude as evidence of just how fucked up women's sexuality must be in our culture. As a man, this is never going to be a thing I will experience first-hand, so any evidence is helpful to gain an honest understanding here. Maybe it's not weak people who feel that they're broken; maybe it's just everyone. If so, I guess I can get onboard with the book's approach, but it still feels a bit dishonest.

Overall, if you are like me, this book probably isn't a great investment of your time. There are definitely things to be learned here, but the vast majority of it is an owner's guide to contextualizing women's sexuality. My primary takeaways are that the expectation of sex leads to sexual excitement, regardless of whether or not the brain is into it — and that getting rid of the expectation of sex from intimate touching can help alleviate stress and, paradoxically, lead to significantly better sex.

I'm going to be recommending this to lots of friends.

Just to get it out of the way at the beginning: I found the way this was written to be dreadful, trying too hard to be hip and conversational, which just came off as strained. The tone would drift in to more neutral territory some of the time and when it did, it was great.

This book in an insightful analysis of a lot of data and anecdata from the author's work. I think it's a useful way to frame the relationship to one's own body in a healthy, productive manner. Even the parts that weren't exactly new information for me were framed in ways I hadn't necessarily thought of. There is a lot of science grounding this but also a lot of reminders that the cultural messages that make us second guess our bodies for doing completely innocuous things or looking the way a body looks are not worth listening to, we're basically all normal and fine.

I learned a TON from this, not just about sex and desire, but also about psychology and social sciences in general: how emotions work (fight/flight; tend/befriend), how stress changes the way you engage with the world, how patriarchy has perpetuated myths about sexuality, attachment styles in relationships, the importance of self-kindness and mindfulness, emergent theory of mind (as a flock of birds!) and probably more things that I'm not remembering offhand. Just so many really fascinating insights! It's super engaging and interesting to read and definitely worth it if you want to understand more about what makes you / your partner(s) tick.

While it is a book on sex, it just as much a book on psychology and the human experience. It seems to be written for women but since so much of the book is about introspection I would recommend it to any man, or non-binary identify person. If I ever have kids this book would also be the centrepiece of a conversation around sexual expression.

Another book I struggled to rate! It's not what I was looking for – I wanted science; this is more self-help. Lots of discussion of the toxic programming women get fed about sex, this book will be really REALLY helpful to a lot of women, I am sure. But for me it was a little on the ‘fluffy' side.

Exceptionally Informative, Also for Men

This book brings a lot of scientific fact to what I've observed in my own experience, in really easy to understand terms. Though the book is written for women, I believe that men with women partners can benefit from better understanding their sexuality. After all, as her partner I play a huge role in her sexual experience. This book gave me a lot to consider, and better sex for her means better sex for me. Now to get my girlfriend to read this!

This book is for everybody. It's written to women, but the information is equally applicable to men. My husband found this book and started reading it, then bought me my own copy. It opened our eyes to what is actually “normal,” and gave us a shared vocabulary for talking about our sexuality. It was vastly encouraging and also challenging.
The author does an excellent job of using science and studies and research to form her conclusions, and then giving examples and metaphors to describe and explain the science so that the reader can easily understand and apply it. And as a sex educator, she herself is an expert in the field, and has life experiences of her students to draw from. She's also completely nonjudgmental and erases the fears we all have of being weird or broken.

In short, this is an excellent book and it has implications that far outreach “just” sex. There are principles in this book that I can translate into every area of my life. I'm buying a copy for my sister, and I highly recommend it to anyone, and it's especially great for couples to read together.

I think my only complaint is that it is basically for partnered cis-gendered women-persons. otherwise pretty awesome take-down of sexual mythology that refocuses sexy-times on pleasure vs society crap.