Free Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski

to be “just right” in order for you to get aroused? Do you need total trust in your partner? Do you worry about sex while you’re having it?
Not really, not really, and not really.
Then I asked “excitors” questions. Do you sometimes get aroused just by watching your partner do something (nonsexual) that he’s good at, or by his smell, or when you feel sexually “wanted”? Are you aroused by new situations? Do you get turned on by fantasies?
Not really, heck no, and . . . what fantasies?
Camilla’s low SES. This doesn’t mean she’s not interested in the idea of sex; it means her body requires a bunch of stimulation in order to cross the threshold into active desire for sex.
I asked about orgasm.
“Few in number and slow to come,” she said, “and they don’t often seem worth the effort.” She finds she’s most reliably orgasmic with a vibrator, and that makes perfect sense—mechanical vibration can provide an intensity of stimulation that no organic stimulation can match. But for her, orgasm is sometimes more of a distraction than a goal with sex. She loves being with her partner, she loves playing and exploring. But sometimes she’s just as happy cooking with him as having sex.
“Henry isn’t the most sexually driven guy in the world,” she said. (Henry is her husband. He’s a super-nice guy.) “But he’d love it if I initiated sex a little more often. Is this something a person can change?”
Yes it is.
Part of Camilla’s solution is in chapter 3, but we’ll have to wait until chapter 7 to get to the heart of it.
    different for girls . . . but not necessarily
    If you had to guess which group, men or women, has higher SES on average—a more sensitive accelerator—which would you pick?
    Men, right? Yep. At the population level, on average, men have a more sensitive accelerator. 7
    And which group has higher SIS—more sensitive brakes?
    Uh-huh. Women, on average, tend to have more sensitive brakes.
    But remember from chapter 1 how height varies between men and women, but it varies more within each group than between the groups? Women in particular vary from one another in terms of their brakes and accelerator. A lot. Ask a thousand women how often they would ideally like to have sex and their answers will range from never to five times a day, and all of those answers are normal.
    A more important difference than simply the sensitivity of the accelerators and brakes of men and women is the relationships of these two mechanisms with other aspects of men’s and women’s psychologies—especially mood and anxiety.
    For example, about 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report an increase in their sexual interest when they’re anxious or depressed. 8 But a guy who wants sex more when he’s anxious or depressed probably has less sensitive brakes . In contrast, a woman who wants sex more when she’s anxious or depressed is likely to have a more sensitive accelerator .
    What this shows us is that there’s more than just a population-level difference in the average sensitivities of SIS and SES between men and women; there also seem to be a difference in how these two systems relate to the other motivational systems in the brain, particularly the stress response system. (We’ll really get into this is chapter 4.)
    But hey, look: It’s all too easy to metaphorize the population-level differences in SIS and SES, the way previous generations metaphorized our genitals. Like, “Women are easily turned off and difficult to turn on.” Or, “Women want sex less than men.” As we’ll see in the chapters thatfollow, it’s nothing like that—for most people, arousability depends as much on context as on brain mechanism.
    Your own SIS and SES, and their relationship to your mood or anxiety, are unique and individual. 9 The goal of understanding your brake and accelerator is not to understand “what men are like” versus “what women are like,” but to understand what you are like. Unique,