Chapter 146: Emily Nagoski on exuberant erotic exploration

Listen to the chapter here!

Emily:

Writing this sex book kind of destroyed my sex life. Our habitat is increasingly hostile to our continued existence. The wildest stuff happens when you pause in your pursuit of the ideal and consider the possibility that the body you have is already worth loving.

Couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time.

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neal Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to 3 Books. Yes, you are listening to the world's only podcast brought in for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. We are counting down the thousand most formative books in the world on every single full moon from 2018 all the way up to 2040, that is 333 lunar cycles.

We are talking to people that we find inspiring and interesting, like today's dream guest Emily Nagoski, New York Times bestselling author of Come As You Are, Come Together, and an incredible book that she wrote in the middle with her twin sister Amelia, Burnout. All three books are wonderful. We're going to talk more about Emily in just a second.

If you want to jump over to the conversation, just go ahead and skip ahead. We always like to hang out before, we like to hang out after. This show is a hangout.

We are with you on your dog walk, on your long drive, on your basement workout at the hotel gym in Mongolia, wherever you are. And so we always like to kick off with an overture from the Three Booker community. Three Bookers, I love your letters.

I love your reviews. I love your notes. Keep them coming.

Address is on 3books.co. Email address is on 3books.co. And of course, if you want to do it formally through Apple or Spotify or YouTube, you can always leave a comment online. I will find it. I will read it.

Today's letter comes from Tyler S. Tyler says, Hey Neil, love the podcast. I'm late to it.

So working on becoming a cover to cover member, just wanted to reach out because I heard you mention your favorite book was A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. I started it a week ago and I'm about 200 pages in, but I got to say, all caps, THANK YOU! Exclamation mark.

This thing is incredible. It is very rare to be reading something and hope it goes on forever. This is one of those books.

Man, what a hidden gem. This is well on its way to being one of my top five books of all time. In brackets.

By the way, number one of that list is The Brothers K by David James Duncan. You should read it if you haven't. So good.

Thanks for all you do. Tyler. Okay.

Tyler, thanks so much for your note. Did you know, I'm sure you did, that Steve Toltz, author of A Fraction of the Whole, was our guest on chapter 119, so click on over to that if you want, but maybe not before you're done. And I will say, I took your advice and I ordered The Brothers K, which by the way, in my head, I got confused with The Brothers Karamazov, the classic, like Dostoyevsky, I think, right?

But no, this is a contemporary book, The Brothers K. And so I'm looking forward to reading it. It looks very big, thick, heavy, and intense, but that's just how it looks, it's not how it is.

I'm going to dive in. I promise. This sounds great.

Thank you so much for your note. And I have added you, by the way, on the 3books.co page, with your permission, I wrote back and asked you if I had your permission, to the FAQ where I have a list ongoing of every single cover-to-cover club member. That would be anybody who listens to the show, who is attempting to listen to every single one of the 333 chapters, drop me a note, and I will add you to our page.

Okay. Now, the other thing we'd like to do before we kick off the show is talk about one of our 3 Books values. And so today I want to talk to you about the value, what are you reading, greater than sign, what are you watching?

This value came about because, I don't know if it was like Netflix early days, I think it was. When like Netflix early days happened, it's like we all suddenly went from watching the same six shows, you know, like pretty much everyone had been watching whatever it was, The Wire, Soprano, Six Feet Under, and now we were splintering. And of course, with Netflix expanding into every single streaming option potentially available and everybody going down their own personal rabbit holes.

That's all great, except that what are you watching conversations now spike everywhere. You go to a party. So what are you watching?

Have you seen this? Have you seen that? Have you streamed this?

Have you streamed that? No. I haven't because I've been reading.

And so I like to switch the conversation back to what it was when I was growing up, when I saw my cousin, Adrian, I was 10 and he was 11 and I was 11 and he was 12 and I was 15 and he was 16. He'd always say to me, Neil, what are you reading? He just asked it all the time.

And I love that because it created a conversation where I got to learn what he was reading too. I got to talk about books. I got inspired and excited the way I did from Tyler's letter about the Brothers K and it is a great question because it promotes reading and you know, it helps make sure that all of us have something on the go.

So value is what are you reading over greater than sign? What are you watching? Try it at your next party and see how it goes.

All right. Now let's jump in with the incredible sex educator and New York Times bestselling author and TED speaker. That's by the way for TED Talk.

And she also calls herself an activist and she calls herself a nerd. We got connections there as I'm sure we do with all of you. Emily Nagoski.

That's N-A-G-O-S-K-I. Emily began working as a sex educator 30 years ago at the University of Delaware. We get to hear a great story about how this happened.

Involves a bike, a library and a thick book. Before she went to Indiana University for a master's in counseling psychology and then she worked at the very famous Kinsey Institute, right? This is maybe the most famous sex institute in the world.

She has taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human sexuality, relationships and communication, stress management and sex education. She was director of wellness education at Smith College for eight years before jumping from there to writing full time. She is a trained Gottman seven principles educator with extensive specialized training in bystander intervention, motivational interviewing and cultural inclusivity, including race, gender and class.

Her mission in life is to teach us how to live with confidence and joy inside our bodies. I highly recommend her books. I have all three on my bookshelf and Leslie's bookshelf.

Leslie loves them too. They are Come As You Are, Burnout, which she co-authored with her equally magnificent twin sister Amelia Nagoski. And by the way, there's a wonderful conversation with Emily and Amelia with Brené Brown on Unlocking Us, which I can't recommend enough.

It was so good. I was in tears listening to that. And her latest book, which is Come Together.

We talk about a lot of stuff, neurodiversity versus neurodivergence, maintaining long-term sexual connection, Alok Vaid-Menon, OkCupid, masturbation, ADHD, pleasure, teaching kids about sex and much, much more. Stick around to the very end of the show for the end of the podcast club, where I play your voicemails. We talk about great quotes.

We do a little bit of etymology, nerding out. But until then, please enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Emily Nagoski. Let's flip the page now.

We both got matching glasses, kind of the big thing, just like giant black glasses. Yeah, exactly. We've moved past the like the invisibility, you know, that because there's two trends you can go with glasses or braces.

And, you know, it's like shockingly in your face or trying to make sure nobody sees them, you know?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So, Emily, it's so great to have you on Three Books. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this.

I really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

[Emily]

Me too. And... Can I say I feel self-conscious about my choices?

Because I made them based on your questions. And then I looked at what everybody else chose. And it looks like other people are all like, let me impress you with my hyper intellectual blah, blah.

And I'm like, first book, children's book. Oh, well, I was like, if this is for readers by readers, isn't everyone starting with a children's book?

[Neil]

Well, yeah, exactly. And most many people do. So if you're on the top 1000 on threebooks.co so far, there are at least got to be 30, 40, 50 children's books. So we have a lot. We go down. And children's books are great because they go way out there, you know.

You know, Tim Urban in Chapter 22, author of the blog Wait But Why, gave us the Stinky Cheese Man, you know, which was just a classic that I'd never heard of. And it always happens on the show that I guess I've never heard of. So I'm sorry that you feel self-conscious, but please don't.

I thought your book choices were wonderful. I have spent time with all books, all the books you gave me. I really enjoyed them all.

[Emily]

One of them is, for the record, over a thousand pages.

[Neil]

I know. So that one, I was kind of like feeling like a dictionary, like I was like going through bits and pieces of it. And I like love your whole vibe, your aesthetic, your wonderful podcast, Feminist Survival Project, the books you've written.

I had Come As You Are when Come Together came out. So it was like a really natural extension. I've seen all of your TED Talks, all three of them.

I've watched all of them multiple times, I've sent them around to friends that have told me that they're experiencing X or Y or Z in their relationship. I use your resources heavily. I think you're putting out such great education and knowledge and wisdom in a world that's very desperately lacking on sexual health, wisdom, and so on.

So I thought we might start with your last Instagram post, which I looked up right before I was reaching you yesterday. You said, had a dream I had to go back to high school at age 48. Hated, but was weirdly excited to do something so easy?

Is this a metaphor? And then I like your hashtag. Hashtag 365 Feminist Selfie.

Hashtag we are not going anywhere.

[Emily]

Oh, so you don't have a reason to know this, but that is actually the hashtags are big feelings for me. So I truly just did have this dream where my experience was like, oh, no, I have to go back to high school, but man, glad to do something easy. I have a variety of disabilities, like I'm physically disabled by long COVID.

I'm autistic. The one thing I'm good at is school. And if all I had to do in the world was go to school from like eight to three, like that's a breeze, I can do that.

But the 365 Feminist Selfie hashtag comes from a friend of mine. Her name's Anna, a librarian and fiber artist who did this 365 Feminist Selfie during the first Trump administration, taking photos of herself every day somewhere without like posing, without putting on makeup, without making herself look great. And in January of 2022, she died of cancer.

And after the second Trump election, her wife, whom I still follow on Instagram, posted a selfie and said, I'm going to do this again for Anna. And I'm going to add the hashtag we are not going anywhere. And I was like, well, then anytime I post a selfie, I'm going to do the same thing.

And I'm not going to pose or put on makeup. This is just what a feminist looks like living my day to day life. And I still miss Anna and fuck cancer.

And her wife posted a picture not long ago saying, if you know where I am, then you know why I'm here. And it was sitting on a bench with a little brass plaque with a quote from Anna. Queer joy matters.

Stay safe. I quoted at the end of Come Together, and now I can't remember the whole thing because my brain is like, all right, it's in the conclusion.

[Neil]

Queer joy matters. Yeah. And I read the conclusion of Come Together, and I really and your writing is so accessible.

You have this incredible, you know, it's blogger accessible with a tremendous amount of research punch behind it. So I have your conclusion here. Queer joy matters. So stay safe, stay fierce, practice hope.

[Emily]

Yes.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's right. That's a sentence above the one I'd highlighted, by the way, which is life is too short and too uncertain to have sex you don't like, or at the very least, aren't curious to try, which I love that quote.

[Emily]

She was right around my age. I'm in my late 40s now. She did not make it to her late 40s, which is why I say life is too short and too uncertain.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Have sex you don't like.

[Neil]

Yeah, absolutely. And appreciate you opening with your heart open. Yeah, PS fuck cancer.

And you were also really open there just to talk about your health challenges, because I listened to this incredible 2020 interview that you and your sister, identical twin sister Amelia did with Brené Brown on Unlocking Us. And in that podcast, I remember you, I think it was you or Amelia or both of you saying long COVID.

[Emily]

Like at that point, it was Amelia. I didn't get COVID for the first time until 2022 until August of 2022. And I pretty much immediately got long COVID.

Yeah.

[Neil]

And so now three years later, ish, the symptoms persist.

[Emily]

Yeah, I'm better than I was in 2023. In 2023, I couldn't walk from my house to the road to get the mail. Now I can.

[Neil]

Wow. OK, so not only do symptoms persist, but they're like pretty acute and you sense them daily.

[Emily]

Yeah, it affects me every day.

[Neil]

And it feels like long COVID has disappeared from like the news. You know what I mean?

[Emily]

Yeah, one of the books I almost chose was Ed Young's An Immense World. Oh, I haven't read it. Which is like the modern version of the book that I did list last chance to see.

It's less funny than Douglas Adams books, but it's more journalistic. It is so gorgeously written. And it was Ed Yong's reporting on long COVID that let me know the long COVID is what was happening with me.

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. OK, this is so interesting. OK, Ed Yong is a dream guest for three books.

Last name is Y-O-N-G. He was the science editor of The Atlantic through the pandemic, carried a lot of people, including me, through with his in-depth, detailed, fact-based reporting.

[Emily]

And I believe a Pulitzer for it.

[Neil]

I believe he won a Pulitzer for it. That's right. And has a wonderful email list called, I think, The Ed's Up or something.

And he's also become a birder, which I have also become. And so his bird photography is like delightful in and of itself. And I know he's working on a new book.

An Immense World We're added to the show notes there. Now, you also threw in there, I'm autistic, which I think you wrote about that being a relatively recent diagnosis as well.

[Emily]

It is. So in 2021 is when I finally went through a formal neuropsych evaluation. Self-diagnosis with autism is very common and it is entirely valid.

Uh, my first degree is in cognitive science. So like the kind of autistic I am really wanted a formal diagnosis. So I went through many hours of formal neuropsych evaluation.

It was actually pretty fun. And yeah, it came back like knocked it out of the park. One hundred percent for sure.

Definitely. This is this is not your childhood trauma. This is autism.

[Neil]

OK, right. And you are also open about the I'm learning because I was trying to research this as well that like the DSM or the sort of standard long term medical diagnosis journal has reclassified autism many times over the years to the point where now it's how is autism now classified, labeled, et cetera, because. I think it's changed quite a bit, if I'm not changed a lot.

[Emily]

So currently in the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is how I got diagnosed, you can be diagnosed as autism, autistic, ASD, autistic syndrome, just ASD levels one, two or three. And the level reports the level refers to your level of support need. So I am ASD level one.

That is the lowest level of support need. And let me tell you, a low level support need is still like a very high level.

[Neil]

What level of support need is it or what level of support is that?

[Emily]

I have handed my email over to my spouse like I really struggled with email and he was like, I don't struggle with your email. Let me take your email over so that you don't have to do that. I have a literary agent who deals with all of the business stuff.

So I never have to negotiate anything. Um, I also have a publicist who negotiate like all the like hard work people stuff gets managed by somebody else.

[Neil]

So I can tell you Eileen, who's amazing and who I've known for years because she was the publicist on my 2017 journal, two minute mornings with Chronicle Books.

[Emily]

Isn't she amazing?

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. I've known her forever.

[Emily]

Totally love her. And, and she does, she's extraordinary at things that I literally cannot do. And that I would have worked really hard to try and be capable of doing, but still wouldn't have done even a quarter as well as she does it.

[Neil]

So this is autism level one. And by the way, you know, some of my, my oldest child just got labeled gifted, which is a really poor word in general. I think you probably agree.

[Emily]

I was also gifted.

[Neil]

You're also gifted and I was not. But as I spoke to his class teacher, I was saying, hey, what are the issues that are you seeing? Because, you know, we're going through some diagnosing stuff, etc.

He's like autism by far and away, number one. And as a child, I didn't, that wasn't a word I had in my vocabulary, but it seems like there's a massive increase also in the number frequency range of diagnoses.

[Emily]

Yes, because we're figuring out what it is in a way that we didn't before. It used to be that autism was only, was mostly diagnosed among boys, especially white boys, but boys who also had intellectual disabilities, which is not part of the autism diagnosis, but sometimes co-occurs. Autism is basically a diagnosis of extremes.

There are three sort of categories of diagnosis in the DSM. You're probably in Canada being diagnosed under the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases. I think we're up to 11 now, which has finally caught up and is classifying autism in the same way.

So if your kid's diagnosed as autistic and gifted, chances are probably hyperverbal.

[Neil]

Yeah, my child hasn't been diagnosed with autism. I was asking his teacher what she's seeing a lot because I will put this out there. I wasn't sure if I should or not, but I think I will because my kid has been diagnosed with ADHD.

As we went through the ADHD process with the tools and the forms in the meeting, it became very clear that I have undiagnosed ADHD, as I'm sure happens all the time.

[Emily]

Happens all the time. My brother, my brother's 50, and he was diagnosed with ADHD way the fuck back in 1991. Old school.

Back when the age wasn't even in it. Yeah, yeah. There was ADD and ADHD, and he was diagnosed with ADD.

And while that was being diagnosed, the person doing the diagnosis was like, and your father almost certainly also has the same diagnosis. So he went through the diagnostic procedure and got formally diagnosed. Wow.

Yeah.

[Barbie]

And that happens with autistic women.

[Emily]

That happens very, like their kids will get diagnosed on the spectrum. And the person doing the evaluation will be like, hi, mom, have you considered seeking evaluation for autism?

[Neil]

So like, are we all neurodiverse then, Emily?

[Emily]

We're all neurodiverse. We are not all neurodivergent.

[Neil]

Oh, bam. One of many what we're going to get like that. We're all neurodiverse.

We're not all neurodivergent. Okay.

[Emily]

Everybody's brain is different from everybody else's brain. But some brains are outside what the world is built for.

[Neil]

Right, right. Oh, interesting what the world is built for. So and then can you define autism for me?

[Emily]

Sure. So there are three diagnostic criteria. One is about, I mean, the main thing that people who are not on the spectrum will recognize as autism is social differences.

I experience it. Other people with autism do not experience it the same way. If you've met one autistic person, which you have now, you've met one autistic person.

We are all very different from each other because it's a diagnosis of extremes. I experience it as a social deficit, which is that if I'm sitting like in a circle, in a group of people, people who are allistic, which is to say not autistic, though they may be neurodiverse or neurodivergent in any number of ways, will be able to notice the way one person influences each individual other person. And you can not just feel like a general vibe in the room, but watch what happens with each person and get a sense of what the group dynamic is.

My master's degree is in counseling, and I had a group counseling class. And I could not do that. I do not have whatever the sense is that can tell what's going on in individuals in a room full of people.

So social differences are one of the primary differences. The other one is, there's two other sensory differences. So we're either going to be hyper or hypo, over or under sensitive to any of the extroceptive senses or the interoceptive senses, and also neuroception.

So your extroceptive senses are everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Your interoception is your bodily sensations, the stretch of your muscles, the sensation of your digestion. Your neuroception is your sense of safety.

[Neil]

Wow. Okay. This is so good.

So social, sensory, and...

[Emily]

Rigidity is often how it is talked about. So it's struggling with transitions. Um, so when I was writing Come As You Are, I was also working a full-time job.

So I was mostly writing on the weekends. And I could sit at my desk and 12 hours would disappear. I would sort of like come to from the trance of writing and reading, and there'd be a plate on my desk.

And I could like taste the food in my mouth and realize my husband had brought me food and I had eaten it without my attention ever shifting away from my work. And like, I would like have lunch with other writers and they'd be like, I can write like four or five, maybe five hours in a day. And I was like, I just sit down and like the whole day disappears.

And they'd be like, that must be really nice for you. And it is. But it also means that I very much struggle with transitions in my day-to-day life, like transitioning from work mode to being a person in a relationship mode.

So those are those are those three categories.

[Neil]

And I'm assuming the job you were working while you were writing on the weekends was the director of wellness at Smith College. Right. Which you did for eight years from 07 to 15, right?

[Emily]

Oh, eight to 16.

[Neil]

Oh, wait to 16. Ah, sorry. Okay.

So social sensory rigidity is I never heard that before. And I really appreciate you opening that up for us, as well as being so open about the things that you are working through with your health, because as happens, you know, like I haven't got the formal ADHD diagnosis yet, but you're making me think I should probably go do that because I bet you if I do that, then there will be some things in my life that I will probably feel less shame and guilt around and probably some techniques that I can put into place. I'm like, one of the things is like, how often do you lose stuff and find it in your fridge? I'm like, well, you know, I mean, like, how'd you know? You know what I mean? I had that. And then another thing is like, ADHD people really like clear systems. And like, Leslie opens like the kitchen cupboard door. And like, I have all these like my vacate, my like days away from the family tracker, my like writing days tracker, my like cardio day.

I have like all these trackers like down the inside of our kitchen cabinets. And she's like, you know, you know, so I just got it. But I read a great for anyone that's listening to this is like, hey, I lose stuff a lot too.

The book ADHD is awesome. That came out last year by Penn and Kim Holderness. The Holderness family.

They won the great. They won the amazing race. They do all those funny skits on YouTube.

They wrote this book because Penn had a 20 year old ADHD diagnosis and it's a great book. I've recommended and bought many copies for people. It's just the book I have found to be really helpful for me.

[Emily]

There's a book called ADHD after dark about sex for ADHD people. Oh, OK.

[Neil]

OK, OK, great. You I knew you're going to add to our bookshelf today because you have the sex books. Well, you just have the books coming out that bam, bam, bam, which I love.

And by the way, I should also give a little shout out. I like because this this podcast is like a three hundred and thirty three chapter podcast. So I'm going to shout out Temple Grandin in chapter sixty one, who we opened that show with her talking about how her mind works when I give her like a word and she talks about she only thinks in pictures.

It was a really cool. Right. Right.

[Emily]

That's a great example of how if you've met one autistic person and now you've met two autistic people, at least I have barely any visual imagination. I think almost exclusively in words.

[Neil]

Right. So like complete opposite. Yeah.

But yeah, but on this. And so this is probably because the ADHD, of course, is now changing its name. Edward Hallowell, who wrote Driven to Distraction about 20 years ago, wrote the forward for ADHD is awesome.

And in that book, they both talk about how it should be called vast because it's neither a deficit nor a disorder. And it's actually a variable attention stimulus trait, the trait, not a disorder. And it's variable attention, not just hyper.

It's both. You can be super one way or the other. And so perhaps autism is just simply throughout the course of our lifetime, because I'm also I'm forty five.

I think you said you're late forties. I think you're seventy nineteen seventy seven. I'm nineteen seventy nine.

You know, from our life, it was like I grew up with like I won't say the words because they're so offensive now, but I grew up in elementary school with like these just looking back like just horrible words and and idioms in culture to a point now where we're having scientific based discussions to the point where now probably in five, ten, fifteen years, it'll be at a level of detail that's even makes today look sort of caveman ask.

[Emily]

We're so still at the beginning of these things. The reason my brother got diagnosed so early was partly because these things got recognized in boys when they didn't get recognized in girls. And also these things got recognized because it was really obvious that my brother was an extraordinary intellect.

He's just he's now an ethnomusicologist. He just curated an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Baltimore. He's an extraordinary human being.

He's profoundly compassionate and way too smart for his own good. And he was failing out of high school. And my parents were like, what is going on?

A.D.D. brain differences so profound that at 16, they sent him to college.

[Neil]

Wow. Wow. Seems like the whole family is genius because I've also been listening to Amelia with those conversations.

I'm like, wow, like I thought you talk fast. And then I realized, oh, they both talk super fast and are super smart.

[Emily]

So like we are the kind of autistic that is hyper verbal. You can be hypo verbal. And we are just like, which is when I lived in Indiana for seven years, I was the fast talking east coaster.

And then I moved back to the east coast and I was still the fast talker. Plus, I taught undergrad for a really long time. Eighty percent of college students are dangerously sleep deprived, which trained me as an educator to be walking, talking caffeine.

[Neil]

Well, exactly. And by the way, I still relate to this. I'm a fast talker, too.

And I have always been told to talk slower, talk slower my whole life. And I know you give a lot of public talks as do I. And I was told earlier in my speaking career, talk slower, talk slower.

I'm not told that anymore, which is partly an issue. I think in society that the editing of YouTube and TikTok has sped up our brains. But there is a limit for how fast people can listen.

Like the whole 2.5X podcast thing doesn't make any sense to me because it's past my threshold. But yeah, I don't get told I talk too fast anymore.

[Emily]

Yeah, me either.

[Neil]

Because there's been a ratcheting up of all of our listening.

[Emily]

So this is a... We should probably talk about the books. But while I was working...

[Neil]

I'm over this. It's OK. I even have quotes to lead us into the books.

But yeah.

[Emily]

While I was working at Smith, again, walking, talking caffeine. That's how I got trained with the students.

[Neil]

But you weren't taking caffeine. You were just talking fast.

[Emily]

No, this is like what you're getting now. So this is who I am. But it is my mask.

This is what I call the Emily Show, where I put on a performance that is a highly curated version of myself, intended to be interesting so that you will continue listening to the thing I want to talk about, which I think is really important. It's going to make your life better. So this is the Emily Show.

And I had to present some data to an administrative committee at Smith. And I was undiagnosed. And they were running over time.

So I had less time to talk about my stuff. And I didn't want to leave any of it out. So I just talked like boo, boo, boo.

I just went really fast. And the head of the committee literally contacted my boss and asked if I was on drugs.

[Neil]

Oh, I've had that too. Yeah, that's the worst.

[Emily]

No, man. I'm the wellness director. I don't take any drugs.

Barely even drink.

[Neil]

I know. Isn't that crazy, though? When I was in undergrad, I went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 98 to 02, consumed zero cannabis, consumed zero alcohol, consumed zero caffeine, consumed zero coffee, consumed zero tea. And everyone thought I was on stuff.

You know what I mean? And the joke was always like, you don't want to see that guy on coffee. You know, you don't want to see that guy drinking.

You don't want to see that guy because he's already seemingly super strung out. But this was just how I knew we were going to have a good conference. I knew it was coming.

I could just feel it coming. I'm so excited about this.

[Emily]

As a joke, my brother got me a guarana chocolate bar for Christmas because he's like, I want to if this is what you're like, I want to see what you're like when you're like super hyped up on like caffeine and sugar and blah, blah. And I was like, you're not going to notice a difference. Like, I can't get any faster.

Give me a downer and find out what I'm like then.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Interesting. So is part of your internal...

So now I'm 45. And so now all those things I just mentioned that I didn't use in college, I do use them, not in any extreme amounts, but like I am. So do you stay away from all other stimulants up or down?

Because you know, or how do you navigate your relationship with things like alcohol, cannabis, caffeine?

[Emily]

I'm beautifully medicated. The world has come a long way. Because in addition to the autism, I also have depression that dates back to like earlier than I can remember.

And social anxiety that probably derives from like masking so hard for so long, assuming that everyone is pretending to be a person. And like everybody, when they get home is so exhausted from pretending to be a person that they like collapse in tears every day. I thought everybody was doing that.

Turns out no. So I have great formal medication that I do take as prescribed. Perimenopause, I'm 48.

I'll be 48 in April. Perimenopause has been rough, mostly on my sleep. And low dose alcohol is the most reliable thing to get me to sleep.

My psychiatrist is very much like, let's find a replacement for you for that. And that's a process that is happening. But yeah, I don't.

I drink caffeine now. So this coffee cup, you'll notice it's a Denny's mug. Yeah.

Y'all have Denny's in Canada, right?

[Neil]

A few of them, mostly around the border towns, like Niagara Falls and stuff. We don't mind the occasional Grand Slam here or there.

[Emily]

I stole this from a Denny's in Newark, Delaware when I was 19 years old and in college.

[Neil]

Well, it's really had a substantial life since then.

[Emily]

It really has. It's amazing how the printing hasn't gone anywhere.

[Neil]

Same logo. Oh my gosh. Again, once again, I have 12 other questions that are unrelated to page one of my 10 pages of prepared notes.

Oh my gosh. I have so many things I want to ask you. You're so fascinating.

You're so interesting. Ask me things. Yeah.

You like being asked things, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So my wife's about to turn 40.

Leslie and I have been married for just over a decade.

[Emily]

Congratulations.

[Neil]

And so this perimenopause, I was going to ask you what advice do you have for the partner of?

[Emily]

The best book. I have read all of the perimenopause books, obviously.

[Neil]

And I'm not saying Leslie start. I've heard it. Emily McDowell, chapter 18, told me it lasts between 2 and 20 years from about age 35 to 65.

I was like, oh my gosh. So as a partner, you want to be a bit more equipped than nothing. Yeah.

[Emily]

And even as well-informed as I was and am, in particular, I was not informed of the way it was going to impact my sleep. So that has been the primary impact for me. The book.

The best book is What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corrinna.

[Neil]

That's a great title.

[Emily]

It's a great title.

[Neil]

What Fresh Hell Is This?

[Emily]

They're a non-binary person. So it's an excellent way to get all of the endocrinology that you need from a point of view that is profoundly gender inclusive and intersectional in its approach.

[Neil]

What's the author's last name spelling?

[Emily]

C-O-R-R-I-N-N-A. I'm pretty sure.

[Neil]

OK, great. We'll put that in the show notes. Threebooks.co for anyone that wants all the book recommendations that Emily has given us so far, which are two and the ones that are forthcoming for sure. Now to kick off the three books that I have right here in a pile. Excited to go into. I actually brought forth three quotes that I've picked out from you from different, you know, TED Talks and interviews and so on.

I just want to offer them up to you because to me, I think this helps set the stage for a little bit of Emily and you can comment on them or expand, explain or elucidate as you see fit or as George Saunders told us in Chapter 75, deny if you would like to. Number one, pleasure is the measure.

[Emily]

Yeah. As I was writing Come As You Are, I learned, first of all, that statistics are not how people learn stuff. People do not.

I can't just report the statistical findings and be like, look at this effect size. And people would be like, wow, I understand how to integrate this into my life. The way actual people in real life learn is through storytelling and metaphor.

I am the weirdo because I learned from the science itself. But my job is to translate from the science into stuff real people can actually use in their real life. And while I was writing Come As You Are, I learned that people will remember what you say better if it rhymes.

But more than that, they will believe it more. People believe things are true more if they rhyme. And so I made it rhyme.

Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. It is not how much you want it, how often you do it, where you do it, with whom, how many positions or even how many orgasms you have. It is whether or not you like the sex you are having.

Here's a wacky fact. It's not a dysfunction not to want sex you do not like. That's just normal.

[Neil]

That calls back the title of one of your I think was your second TED Talk.

[Emily]

Yes.

[Neil]

Which was called.

[Emily]

It was the second one is about arousal non-concordance.

[Neil]

That's what I'm talking about. Yeah.

[Emily]

There's a whole big story about there was a so for months you prepare a TED Talk like months. And one month away from TED. It was twenty eighteen height of me too.

And I was like. I have to talk about arousal non-concordance because it is part of a culture that lets people think that like your body says yes, even when you say no, that's bogus. And I need I need to tackle this.

This is a much more important serious topic. And my sister who was helping me prepare was like, oh, yeah, you have to talk about that. So I went to TED and I was like, I'm sure I'm not the only person to do this.

But like I know I've been working on this other talk for months, but I'm going to totally and I'm going to start from scratch. And they were like, don't don't do that. And I was like, well, I'm going to I'm going to because this is much more important.

So I did and.

[Neil]

Thunderous standing ovation. If you haven't watched it, go back 2018.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And we'll put a we'll put a link to that as well as all your TED Talks. They're really fantastic. And they're really I mean, not many people have given three TED Talks.

Just to just I will point that out.

[Emily]

So the only one is like I call it TEDxTED. It's like TED, TED, TED, all the way, Ted. The two others are TEDx.

One is in Nevada and the other one is in Connecticut. The first one is sort of like I thought I'd never be able to give a TED Talk again. So I tried to shoehorn everything into one talk.

That's about confidence and joy as the keys to a great sex life. The TED, TED, TED Talk, which I someone came and found me later at TED to to say, hey, look, I see I have I am required by my job to watch a lot of TEDx Talks. None of them make me cry.

Your TEDx Talk made me cry and that's why you're here. So and then I did one in Connecticut because it was really close to me and it was an opportunity to use the talk I originally wrote for TED.

[Neil]

Oh, that's amazing. The Framington Library one. Yeah.

And our guest in Chapter 12 was Chris Anderson, head of TED. And he has said on the record, TEDx Talks are TED Talks. So just so you know, you could say you have free TED Talks.

He has said he said that. Second quote I want to pull out is this is from your We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon Doyle and Abby Womback. Here's the full quote.

If I wrote it down properly because I was listening and kind of laughing at the same time.

[Neil]

Did you find your pretty little toes? Did you find your toes? Did you find your labia?

Did you find your pretty little labia? She found it.

[Emily]

Yeah. So this is from a story that was told to me in Europe by a woman who read Come As You Are and then watched her adult brother change his baby daughter's diaper. And he turns out she's all clean.

He turns away for a second just to grab a diaper. And when he turns back, his baby has her hand on her vulva. And dad goes, don't touch that.

And this woman who was talking to me was like, I realized, like, how would he have responded if. If his baby had a penis instead, would he have been so harsh and like. Maybe.

[Neil]

Maybe, maybe. Like, I mean, he might have been like a no private part kind of person.

[Emily]

Maybe.

[Neil]

Oh, you think it's just a no female private part thing.

[Emily]

When I have told this story other places. People have all been like, yeah, it's not as big a deal when. Because like a penis is right there.

It's out there. to be found.

[Neil]

Oh, I see.

[Emily]

Whereas a vulva. So this, this goes back to sort of like the English language origins of women's sexual shame as specific and special to women because our parts are tucked away and private as if they want to be hidden because they are a source of shame. Whereas a penis is out and proud and the scrotum is right there.

So like women's sexual shame is special and different from the sexual shame that comes with having a penis. And I'm currently talking in cisgender biological terms because we're talking about the deep history of the Western world around gender, which is a deep history of the gender binary and colonialism where my ancestors traveled all around the world and erased the complexity of gender all over the world, insisting there were only two genders and two biological sexes. There's like the two of them overlap all the time.

But you know what? Even if it weren't about genitals, don't we get so excited when a baby finds her feet? Did you find your feet?

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

Oh, you put your feet in your mouth. There's some delicious tiny little baby toes. Like what would the world be like if we were just as excited?

Like, did you find your own genitals?

[Neil]

I mean, it starts there, right? Encouraging kids to explore their bodies and allowing their natural curiosities to be unchopped off. I mean, I completely agree with that.

[Emily]

Because neurologically, what's happening?

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Neurologically, they're learning that their body belongs to them, that those sensations of their body are shame-free and all of them are acceptable and they can learn to listen to the signals of their body and what feels good and what doesn't. So we're creating a grounding of them being able to communicate with a sexual partner. And this baby is not going to remember this story, but it's going to accumulate with countless other similarly culturally informed moments so that there's going to be like a blank place in her brain where the sensations of her genitals are supposed to be.

And she's going to wonder why she struggles with orgasm or why she can't tell what feels good or she doesn't have a vocabulary to explain to her partner what feels good to her. If indeed she grows up to identify as a girl.

[Neil]

Right, right, right, right. So a few things. It's weird because when I talk to you, I keep having like 12 questions when I want to ask one.

But first of all, shout out to Chapter 106 with Alok Vaid-Menon, whose wonderful book Beyond the Gender Binary.

[Emily]

Oh God, Alok is so amazing.

[Neil]

Yeah, Alok is amazing. They have this 40 or 50 page chapbook, which has sold over 100,000 copies. It's done really well, Beyond the Gender Binary.

I own two of them. Oh yeah, okay, great. Wonderful.

So a conversation on a park bench in Central Park to point people to, but also...

[Emily]

If you haven't watched their comedy special, Biology, you should definitely watch it. It's so good. It's on YouTube.

[Neil]

YouTube, Alok's comedy special. Okay, great.

Biology. It's called Biology?

[Emily]

It's called Biology.

[Neil]

Okay, great. I'll check that out. And the third quote, I got to keep moving because I want to get to the third book.

The third quote is, the question I get asked most is the question underneath all the other questions. Can I get addicted to my vibrator? Can you help me with my erections?

Underneath all that is the question, am I normal? To which my reply is, what even is normal? And why is that what you want your sexuality to be?

[Emily]

Right. So, so many things. Because in the first place, you don't spend the time that it takes to read a hundred thousand word book because you want your sexuality to be normal.

You want to be the sex, the best sex partner that your partner has ever had. That's what you want to be is not normal, but excellent at sex. And I absolutely am here to help you be excellent at sex, but you're not going to be excellent at sex until you are willing and able to turn toward what's genuinely true about your sexuality right now, as it is with kindness, compassion, affection, joy, and a sense of play.

So when people ask, am I normal? I think what they want to know is, do I belong within the human community? And I, it's like the midpoint, there's a sort of like false idea that there's broken, there's normal, and there's extraordinary.

And you're sort of on a trajectory away from the broken that you were through the normal that you hope to be to the extraordinary that is the aspiration.

[Neil]

Wow, I love that visual.

[Emily]

That is not how it works.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

Everyone is already normal.

So normal is just normal sex. People ask me so often, I put definitions of it. Normal sex is any sex where everybody involved is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.

That includes no unwanted emotional consequences.

[Neil]

And no unwanted pain.

[Emily]

Yeah, and no unwanted pain.

[Neil]

I've just heard you say that a lot, yeah.

[Emily]

None of this like, but you said you would, or if you loved me, you would. None of that stuff. When I made a podcast, I had a co-host named Mo, and she identifies as a lesbian now, but in high school had a lot of sexual experiences with men.

And she was like, the whining, the whining I had to deal with from men who were like, come on, but you have to. And I'm not shitting on men. Many of my best friends are men.

The person I'm married to, cishet dude. And y'all, cishet men get very screwed over by the patriarchy also, in particular in the ways that they are taught that they are supposed to pursue sex at any cost or else they are not truly a man. So that whining is coming from a place of like, not, but like you said you would, but They're trying to fit in with their peer groups too, right?

But if I don't push, if I don't press, then I am not an adequate man.

[Neil]

How does that fit in with all the new data coming out that shows that people aren't, like teens today aren't dating and sleeping around anymore?

[Emily]

I don't know what's up with that. Part of me is like, good, because adolescent brains are not yet developed to the point where they understand long-term consequences. And sex is the kind of thing where like, you can absolutely have life-altering consequences.

So delay. What I don't know, what doesn't get talked about in that research, to my knowledge, I haven't seen like a study that asks, but like, do you masturbate and enjoy those sensations? Do you make out with people and really love how that feels?

Do you have permission to share and communicate what you like and what you don't like with people? It's being framed as prudery, but like, we don't know what all they might be doing. No, exactly.

Like what is their relationship with their own pleasure?

[Neil]

Do you have a healthy, erotic self?

[Emily]

Yeah. And I want to live in a world where people develop a sense of their own erotic self. At least the beginnings of it come before they build a sense of themselves in an erotic relationship.

I've gotten asked by people in their 20s, myths they heard in high school. So I heard, girls, I heard that if I masturbate, that's going to make it impossible for me to have an orgasm with a partner. Is that true?

No, on the contrary. Learn what pleasure feels like for you. Learn what feels good and what makes orgasm happen for your body so that when you're with a partner and your attention is sort of divided between what it feels like inside your body and like what's going on with your partner, there's like all these worries we get taught to feel about like, am I meeting my partner's expectations?

Are they okay? All this attention that we put onto our partner, do you still have a basic grounding in what's going on with your body so that when, as any good partner should, they say, do you like that? You know the answer.

Because if you don't actually know the answer and you were raised to be a good girl and your partner's doing whatever they're doing and they're like, do you like that?

[Emily]

What's the answer? Because the only right thing to do is to make sure your partner's okay.

[Emily]

And what will it do to your partner if you say, actually a little lower to the left, less pressure and faster?

[Neil]

Well it makes you both better

[Emily]

Yes. If the partner receiving the feedback is not so fragile that they shut down and their whole sense of sexual self breaks because they've received feedback about how to be the best possible erotic partner with this other person who has the gift of being able to communicate clearly about what they want and like.

[Neil]

Yeah. And that feedback getting presented in the form of, for example, like devastatingly unreal internet pornography, et cetera, et cetera. So we got, I got a lot more questions about sex.

Fortunately for me, you picked a sex book. So it's coming. And I've got a lot there.

And so what we have done in this opening kind of 40 ish minutes, 45 minutes is we have met Emily and we've gotten to know Emily. We've made a vibe connection with Emily and we've opened up some of Emily's kind of what I call, or at least for me, famous phrases like pleasure is the measure. And by the way, hilarious that not only does rhyming increase, they believe you more. Yeah. Memory. Like we are far right federal political candidate in, in, in Canada. And there hasn't been an election called yet, but you know, the prime minister is resigning and so on. But he, all he says is ax the tax.

That's all he, that's all he says. So, you know, the, it's just interesting. The rhyme increases the believability.

We've talked about, you know, being more cognizant, understanding, empathetic and supportive of explore, exploratory, even from very young ages, from imprinting perspective, which is really helpful for me as a dad, but also for, I think a lot of people as who have grown up and, you know, your flower and your dink, like we've, we don't even label them. Right. Right.

Oh yeah. That was ding-a-ling, dink. Oh yeah.

[Emily]

You're Duda. PP. We, we, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Neil]

I mean, certainly there were many more, you know. My wife grew up. Yeah.

When she grew up, I think they called it your privacy. You know what I mean? There was always, there was always euphemisms at play here.

But as a result, people don't, people don't know what a vagina is like, you know what I mean? Because they don't know what it is. They think it's, they think it's the thing that they see, but it's not, you know what I mean?

Because the internal part. Exactly. And many things like that, you know what I mean?

And so we've talked about that and we've also talked about, so we've opened up, we've opened up the conversation, which is now going to allow us to get into your three most formative books.

[Emily]

I want to give myself credit for not telling these seven anecdotes that got triggered by all the things you just said.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

So me.

[Neil]

Thank you. But they're going to come out just in a later part of this conversation. And for those listening, yes, I'm going to tack on an introduction at the beginning of this, but also like Emily became a peer health educator at the university of Delaware in undergrad, starting her sex education career, like around 1985.

So we're talking like 30 years ago, right? Then you got your master's in counseling from Indiana university, 2002. Then you got your PhD in health behavior from Indiana university school of public health, 2006.

Then you were director of wellness education, Smith college, 2008 to 2016, 2015. Come as you are the surprise, the surprising new science that will transform your sex life comes out. It's a rampant bestseller, which it should be noted.

Not many sex books are like big, huge bestsellers, like selling hundreds of thousands and millions of copies. Like it was a huge hit everywhere. Every single, you know, in front of the book, front of the bookstore type of thing.

Then she takes it only from my perspective, a sort of surprising left turn where in 2020, you coauthor with your sister, the book burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle. And I will say, and I'm going to point people to it in the show notes, but also my book club, the conversation you and Amelia had with Brene was profound. It was so good.

I mean, Brene is so good and you are so good, but together it was like really magical. I'm going to, everyone needs to listen to that 2020 conversation. If you were stressed, if you're experiencing burnout, if you like, it's a must listen.

And then you come back to the sex world here in 2024, we are celebrating, of course, the paperback release, but come together the science and art of creating lasting sexual connections. And so through this lens of your now 30 year long career as a global sex educator, we're going to plumb the depths of the Nagoski archives. And we are going to go into your three most formative books, starting with, and for each of these books, by the way, I will say, I am planning to describe the book as if the people listening are holding it in a bookstore.

The very first book was very hard for me to find.

[Emily]

Yep.

[Neil]

But I did find it though.

It is not in print. I found it on thrift books online. It is called what to do when your mom or dad says dot, dot, dot, clean your room, exclamation mark by Joy Berry B-E-R-R-Y.

Oh my gosh. This book published in 1982 by Children's Press covers white. It's got a full color like exaggerated, almost like editorial cartoon style of a redheaded boy frowning with one eye fully open, the other eye squinting suspiciously wearing a white with yellow text number 10 jersey and blue shorts and white sneakers standing in the middle of a messy room complete with a baseball baseball cap on a bedpost posters dramatically off kilter on the walls, trucks and balls and drums and yo-yos and clothes all over the floor and even a cross-eyed green fish swimming, seemingly holding its breath and discussed in a large aquarium on the table.

The top is written in this super round Seraphia, what I call like a Garfield type font. And at the top, of course, it says the survival series for kids. Joy Berry is actually alive today.

She is an 80 year old American writer, teacher and child development specialist who's written over 250 self-help books. What's it about? It's basically an illustrated book offering step-by-step instructions for cleaning a dirty bedroom, including how to make a bed, fold the clothes and make different piles of your stuff.

Hilarious Dewey Decimal heads file under 643.534 technology slash home and family management slash housing slash remodeling. Emily, tell us about your relationship. They're like, I guess remodeling, you know what to do.

Melville Dewey didn't solve everything. What to do when your mom or dad says clean your room.

[Emily]

So this book was gifted to Amelia and me. We shared a room until we were about 16. I think we got this book when we were about seven, which would have been just a couple of years after it was published.

We were... To say that we were messy as children does a disservice to messes. We were disgusting.

We were totally incapable of keeping our room clean. And so we got gifted this book. And as you say, it's step-by-step instructions on what to do, how to clean your room.

And we now know that Amelia and I are both autistic. Step-by-step instructions are like, yes, please. So over and over and over again, we would take turns every month.

One of us would sit on the bed and read each page of the book out loud, and then we would do the step. And then we would read the next step aloud, and we would do that step. And then we'd read the next, and then we'd do the step.

So it literally... We read it out loud to each other so that we knew what to do literally when our mom or dad said, clean your room. You were showing a picture of the step-by-step instructions for folding, for example, a shirt.

That is how I folded a shirt until the KonMari method taught me about the envelope fold.

[Neil]

I do not know the envelope fold. This fold is, of course, one sleeve backwards, the other sleeve backwards, behind, picked up, and, you know. But what's the KonMari method?

[Emily]

So, in...

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I'm sure is a book somebody has talked about.

[Neil]

Nobody's mentioned that, actually. It has not changed anyone's life yet.

[Emily]

Decluttering has turned into a special interest for me. Decluttering, organizing. So, from this book and my total inability to keep my room clean or organized that stretched deep into my thirties, this is the book that started me looking for a system.

Right. And when you see the illustrations of what this kid's room looked like, our room was way worse than that.

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

I mean, we were knee-deep in crap. Like, you couldn't see the rug. Oh my gosh.

Our beds were never made. It was. But we followed those instructions for how to make a bed.

[Neil]

Like, it would have been harder if one of you was super neat.

[Emily]

Well, the thing is, we were sharing a small room.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Two kids stuck.

[Neil]

Where was this, by the way? Was it in Indiana? No.

[Emily]

Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware.

[Neil]

Wilmington, Delaware. Right.

[Emily]

My one actual claim to fame as my 10th grade English teacher was Jill Biden.

[Neil]

No way. Way!

[Emily]

Whoa. It's a real small state. And what was she like as a teacher?

Really great. So we're in, like, the honors gifted class. And we're pains in the patoot.

I feel moderately confident that she would remember us because there were no other identical twins in the high school. And we were not typical, as you can imagine. But she did say, like, to me, you're a good writer.

You should keep writing. And here I am, three New York Times bestsellers in.

[Neil]

Wow. Wow. I can't wait to hear Jill Biden on Feminist Survival Project down the road.

And by the way, it should be mentioned. Your Come As You Are podcast is evergreen content. And it's so good.

And like, not for nothing, it is very popular still. I mean, I clicked open Spotify, like hundreds, thousands of reviews. You're a multi-podcaster even.

So on top of that. Okay. So cool thing I noticed when I got this book from Thrift Books.

They mailed to you like in a green plastic. It's like super, super sticky. You have to like tear it open, you know.

And then and then as soon as I opened it, of course, I didn't see the cover. I noticed this cover because it's one of those flip over books where the other side of the book is a completely other book upside down. And so you turn it over and it's like what to do when your mom or dad says be prepared.

And of course, it's step by step instructions on like writing down your name and phone number and like piece of paper and memorizing and knowing your address.

[Emily]

We didn't have that. I would remember that.

[Neil]

Oh, really? So yours was not the double flat? No.

Oh, okay. Well, that kind of ruins my next question, which was you also navigate multiple worlds and that you've written, you know, these these sex books and your business book, Burnout, which Brené calls Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, you know, was a remarkable contribution to like the canon of like business books. And also, I know it's not business per se, but I just mean that that that that world is like a different world.

Like, oh, right. Right.

[Emily]

So I was like promotion for my sex books was a very different from book promotion for the stress book.

[Neil]

I wanted to ask you what that felt like, you know, kind of, you know, going to a sex shops, for example, and like, you know, touring around come as you are right. You weren't doing that for the Burnout book. But also, could you also just connect the dots for us listening?

You really talk a lot there about the tunneling of emotions and burnout and then sex. And I thought, if you don't mind, just pairing those together for us. And then I had a couple of questions down this trip, because is it not true that you said during the book tour of Come As You Are when you were having no sex, as you've publicly written about, including in the introduction of Come Together and in a New York Times profile of you, you would end your days tired, exhausted, crying and sleeping like like it was kind of like that was the thing.

And I think a lot of people listening could definitely relate to the fact that they may or may not have as much sex as they want because of stress, exhaustion, burnout work. So tie these together for us. Let us get above it somehow.

And maybe steer us out of that if people are listening and relate to that feeling.

[Emily]

Yeah. So the usual first step, if your first book is about the science of women's sexual well-being, which is what Come As You Are is, the usual next step would either be a relationship book or a book about men. But as I was traveling around in 2015, talking to anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being, a weird thing started happening, which is women would come up to me after my talks all the time and be like, all that sex science is great.

Sure. Thank you for that. But you know, the one chapter that changed everything was a chapter about stress and emotion processing.

And I was like, great. I'm glad that helped you. And I went and told that I was surprised.

So I told Amelia and Amelia was like, am I allowed to swear?

[Emily]

Oh, of course. Yeah.

[Emily]

And then I was like, no shit. Remember when you taught me that stuff about how like stress exists in your body and is a physiological response? And you remember how that, you know, saved my life?

[Neil]

During her PhD dissertation?

[Emily]

While she was earning her doctorate, she was hospitalized twice for what the doctors called just stress. And I believe Amelia remains the only person who is not a man to finish that doctoral program, lying on the bathroom floor in agony, wondering if they're going to die. Kind of pain.

[Emily]

Wakes their husband up. We have to go to the emergency room.

[Emily]

It's the middle of the night. You're sitting in a red light. No one else is there.

And Amelia just goes, can you please go through the red light? Because they're just in so much pain. And so I'm a health educator.

My primary domain is sexuality. But there's a reason there's a chapter on stress and why I fought to keep that chapter, because my editor was like, very gently, is this related to sex? And I'm like, yeah, everything's related to sex because sex happens in a larger context.

So the reason why the second book is about stress is because readers kept telling me that was really important. And then Amelia told me, yeah, I remember when that actually saved my life, though. And I was like, well, I guess I should write a book about that.

But writing a book is terrible. So if we write it together, that'll make it easier. It did not.

It did not make it easier. It was just a very different experience. And so the second book is about stress because of that.

[Neil]

Okay, got it. Got it. And for those who say or feel or think that they aren't having the type of sex that they want because of stress, you would say.

[Emily]

Girl, same. Literally. So while I was writing Come As You Are, you might think that like thinking and reading and writing and talking about sex all day could be real sexy.

It is not. I was so stressed. I had never written a book before.

I didn't know that I would ever have another opportunity to write a book. So like the pressure felt very intense. So writing this sex book kind of destroyed my sex life.

I finished the book, things got better. I went on book tour, things got a lot worse. And I would try to follow my own advice.

So my own advice is, hey, responsive desire. Desire doesn't have to just like spontaneously poof emerge out of the blue. You're super horny.

And so you like go get your person. You can set up a time, take off your clothes, put your body in the bed. You let your skin touch your partner's skin.

And a lot of the time what happens is your body goes, oh, right. I really like this. I really like this person.

This was a great idea. So I try to follow my own advice, but I would put my body in the bed and let my skin touch my partner's skin. And I would literally sob and fall asleep.

And that's when I was like, I need more advice than I give in my own book, which I did what any good sex nerd does. I went to Google Scholar and I looked at the peer-reviewed research on how couples sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. And what I found there contradicted the whole cultural discourse around sex and long-term relationships because the cultural discourse, particularly at the time, so this is 2015, 16, was either intimacy is the enemy of the erotic and you need distance to keep the spark alive, or intimacy is the foundation of the erotic and you need closeness to keep the spark alive.

And the reality is that people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex, having magnificent sex, optimal sex, I'm referring here specifically to the optimal sexual experiences research led by Peggy Kleinplotz in Ottawa, Canadians for the win, where she interviewed dozens of people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex. And these people do not talk about the spark. They do not talk about desire.

They talk about pleasure. Desire barely scrapes into the top 10 characteristics of great sex. They talk about pleasure.

They talk about liking the sex that's available in their relationship. They talk about authenticity and vulnerability and play and exploration. So I understand that a lot of people have desire as their sort of like goal.

And if you have desire as your goal, that's going to lead you down a path that doesn't go anywhere. If the reason I say pleasure is the measure is if you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being.

[Emily]

All the other pieces are going to fall into place.

[Neil]

There's a lot.

[Emily]

This is a difficult idea.

[Emily]

It's a hard sell. It took me three drafts from my editor even to understand what I was talking about. So ask questions.

[Neil]

Lots of questions and good and partly because I have heard you speak so eloquently before on this topic, which is partly what made me so excited to bring it to our three books audience. You're speaking to book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians globally right now. So first up, two types of desire.

I just heard you say one of them. So there are two types of desire.

[Emily]

Right. Spontaneous is the kind that sort of Erika Moen, who's the cartoonist who illustrated Come As You Are, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom!

You just don't want it. And you show up to your partner with, I got the kaboom. Do you want a kaboom?

And life is simple and easy. So your partner definitely has exactly the same level of interest in sex as you in the exact same kind of sex as you literally all the time for decades. That's how that works, right?

No, no. What characterizes most long-term relationships? Yes, spontaneous desire.

I want to not make anyone feel broken just because they experience spontaneous desire. Spontaneous desire is 100% normal. You belong in the human community.

And a lot of people experience what researchers call responsive desire, where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure. Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.

[Neil]

Oh, my God. It so reminds me of the research on motivation, where people think motivation leads to action, but it turns out action leads to motivation.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

In other words, it is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking rather than think yourself into a new way of acting.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

This seems to jive directly with that. There's two types of pleasure. But I've heard you say, quote, you, me, and the red undies Saturday at 2 p.m. Right. End quote. That's like, that's an Emily-ism, I think, is a seemingly unsexy plan until it's executed upon and potentially despite...

[Emily]

Right. You sort of drag yourself up the stairs. You throw the last toys in the toy box.

You've managed to get child care. Thank God. You're like, all right, let's go.

[Neil]

And also being forgiving of yourself. If indeed, let's go. Doesn't always happen.

It doesn't happen sometimes. But prioritizing it. And one thing that I'll just throw in the mix here as somebody who has young children is the prioritization of date nights.

It's so obvious and so cliche and hackneyed at this point. But it wasn't me that thought of it. It was my partner, Leslie, just wanting to have a once a week date night in our schedule.

Here's how it came about for us. We had a new baby. The baby is one hour or one day old.

And she's like, I want to plan a date night for this week. The first week of the baby's life. And I was like, what are you talking about?

We should at least wait a few weeks, months. You know what I mean? And she's like, the way the day is going to work is my mom's going to come over and watch the baby for half an hour while we walk around the block holding hands.

And because we did that with the first child's first week, we then, with some exceptions and so and so traveling, blah, blah, blah. But the weekly date has emerged in our relationship as something that we prioritize. And always I mention it and talk about it is because it has proved to become a vital energy source for our relationship and our system as a whole, including managing children.

And so it is. But yet it's so strange to me. But I totally understand that the majority of couples with young children simply do not date at all, period, for years.

You know, it's like it's just like it's just like sitting right there as like a low hanging fruit thing. And of course, it requires like the babysitter and so on. But like date nights.

[Emily]

But you like each other.

[Neil]

We very much like each other. And we very much love each other. Yeah.

[Emily]

Three characteristics of couples who's a state of strong sexual connection. Number one, they are friends who admire and trust each other.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah. And you define trust with was it Sue Johansson?

[Emily]

Sue Johnson's. Okay.

[Neil]

Not to be confused with the Canadian sex educator, Sue Johansson. I grew up listening to talk sex with Sue Sunday nights on the radio.

[Emily]

Total OG amazeballs. Sue Johnson is a was a god. Sue Johnson died last year, but her work on emotionally focused therapy changed the world.

No research is for everyone, but EFT is great. And the way she defined trust was the answer to the question. Are you there for me?

And R is an acronym for emotionally accessible, emotionally responsive, and emotionally engaged. Notice that all of them are emotional. Trust is emotional, not intellectual.

Are you there for me? And it is so beautiful to me that spontaneously and voluntarily in the first week of your brand new human's life, your partner was like, I want to make sure you and I get to spend time together that is not centered around these tiny humans who didn't choose to become alive. We did that.

But you and I need to stay us so that we can bring these humans up. That is gorgeous.

[Neil]

And she is gorgeous in every way. I wish you can meet her and you hopefully will meet her at some point. I admire her in millions of ways.

[Emily]

So I wrote this in like 2022. It was very obvious in the research, and I thought it would be utterly non-controversial. And then I started like book tour.

And it turns out there's a lot of people who have genuinely, especially, honestly, heterosexual people. I'm super worried about the straights. There's a lot of heterosexual people who have actually bought into the idea that friendship and sexual desire cannot coexist.

You either want your partner or like your partner. And liking sort of kills the wanting. And the opposite is true.

[Neil]

So this is interesting because what we're doing here is I'm just going to from the outside, sort of try to structure us a little bit. So what you've said is, first of all, there's two types of desire. We talked about spontaneous responsive.

You've also talked about you introduced this question. How do couples retain a strong sexual connection over the long term? We've got item number one, which is the friendship component, which is based on the trust component, which you quoted Sue Johnson.

And then you use the definition of trust being emotionally accessible, responsive, responsive or responsive, responsive and engaged. All three, we start with emotion, but also spell the word A-R-E. Are you there for me?

Are you there for me? A-R-E. Are you there for me?

And the second element, I believe, of this answer to this question, how do couples retain a strong sexual connection over the long term is, I've written down what I thought you were going to say, but I don't want to quote you to you.

[Emily]

Prioritizing sex. Deciding.

[Neil]

I wrote down prioritize. OK, OK.

[Emily]

Sex contributes something unique and important to the relationship. And this doesn't mean that sex stays a priority all the time. But because a couple has understands what sex contributes, they're motivated to find their way back to each other.

[Neil]

Yeah. And you even talk about prioritizing it above and beyond almost everything else. I mean, not not.

I've heard you describe in interviews, you know, that the prioritization of sex should take precedent over. Or in healthy long term couples.

[Emily]

I don't use the word should. Sex educators. We talk about like, stop shitting on yourself.

[Neil]

I love that phrase. Sorry, I should.

[Emily]

Would like us to imagine a world where your shared erotic connection is like a shared hobby. It's like your favorite sports team or your favorite musician. We're like you talk about it kind of all the time because you're both really into it.

You both think it's a fun game to play. You talk about one really well last time and like what you're sort of hoping is going to happen next time and you're making plans about it. Couples share all kinds of hobbies.

Often when I talk about sex in these terms of like, yeah, schedule it is actually a really good idea. You people think that if you have to talk about it, that means there's something wrong. On the contrary, couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time.

So this stuff doesn't go wrong in the same way that you communicate every day about like what your plans are and who's going to pick up who from where. Like you talk about your sex life with each other as a sort of like ongoing. This is part of our shared connection.

And so we talk about it.

[Neil]

Right. Okay. So the prioritization and the friendship trust basis are the two ingredients for a long term sexual connection that lasts based on the research.

[Emily]

Okay, no third one.

[Neil]

Oh, there's a third one.

[Emily]

It is the most difficult one.

[Neil]

And that is the thing you just described. Sounds pretty difficult. But okay, what's more difficult than that?

[Emily]

Yeah, the more difficult one is the reason why the second one sounds difficult, which is the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term recognize that they have been following somebody else's rules about who they're supposed to be a sexual people and what their sex life is supposed to be like. And they decide to stop doing that. They decide to get serious about understanding who they truly are as a sexual person.

They decide to get profoundly curious about who their partner truly is as a sexual person and what their erotic connection is like in this season of their relationship. And so they create a sexual connection that is highly personalized and right for them in this moment without any reference to any outside person's opinion about how you're supposed to be doing the sex thing in your relationship.

[Neil]

Which I imagine is probably harder than ever to do given the increasing homogenization of beauty standards and certainly porn, things like that.

[Emily]

I don't know if it's harder than it ever was because fortunately, we do live in a world where sex advice is taking diversity into account, taking variability into account. We're going to talk about the Hype Report, which is really like where qualitative research, understanding of women's sexuality in particular, and the diversity of women's sexual experiences was born in 1976. So on the one hand, yeah, porn is many things.

There are many things I could say about porn, but the one thing porn super is not is sex education. My sort of standard line you may have heard before is that learning to have sex by watching porn is like learning to drive by watching Formula One racing. Those are professionals on a closed course with a pit crew.

Is someone rotating your tires that often?

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. OK, this is I have a lot more here and I'm going to save them for your second book, which you've already nicely introduced for us. But I'm just going to give the people the people listening the I'm holding in a bookstore feeling it is indeed, as you mentioned, the Hite Report by is it Shere Hite?

[Emily]

Shere Hite. Like Shere Hite, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah. And it's like C-H-E-R, but she spells it.

[Emily]

S-H-E-R-E?

[Neil]

E-R-E.

[Emily]

And her friends called her Sherry.

[Neil]

OK, Sherry.

And the last name is spelled H-I-T-E. So the Hype Report is the H-I-T-E report. The Hype Report, published in 1976 by Dell, a revised edition, which I have published in 2004 by the wonderful Seven Stories Press.

Shout out to Seven Stories Press. One of the foremost purpose over profit publishers in the world. They're really an exceptional publishing.

They give free copies of all their books. Oh, shout out to the old version you have.

[Emily]

I have a first edition.

[Neil]

Oh, nice, nice. OK, OK, good. That takes that off my list of because, you know, what I do after every conversation is I usually give my guests a first or signed edition of one of the three most formative books.

But now I know not to give you that one. OK, and so this has been called the 30th bestselling book of all time. Because it has sold over 50 million copies.

It's a dark purple cover with a white square with rounded corners on the top that says and almost like a sultry, if I can say that, like a seraphy sultry font, like where the the caps look like kind of like legs in some way. At least it looked like that to me. Maybe I was seeing things.

It says a nationwide study of female sexuality in green. And then the bottom of the cover has a little text bubble, which that's quite a bit of text. I'm going to read it out to you.

It says more than 3000 women describe in their own words their most intimate feelings about sex, including what they like and don't like, how orgasm really feels with and without intercourse and how it feels not to have an orgasm during sex, the importance of clitoral stimulation and masturbation and the greatest pleasures and frustrations of their sexual lives. That's all on the cover here. Height lived 77 long years from 1942 to 2000.

Twice he was an American born German sex educator and feminist. Her work was sometimes criticized for being based on self-reports. And she also received death threats, which led to her renouncing her American citizenship.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What does this 1976 book declare? It declares that orgasm is easy and strong for women. Given the right stimulation, it declares that most women have orgasm most easily during masturbation or clitoral stimulation by hand.

That sex as we define it is a cultural institution, not a biological one, which I didn't understand what that meant. So I'm hoping you can explain. Oh, yeah.

And that attitudes must change to include the stimulation women desire. Dewey Decimal Heads, you can follow this one under 306.74 social sciences slash cultural institutions slash sexual relations. Emily, please tell us about your relationship with The Hite Report by Shere Hite.

[Emily]

So it's important to note that my copy has all the same text on the front, except it also says with a new cultural interpretation of female sexuality.

[Neil]

Oh, one extra line.

[Emily]

Cultural interpretation. It was new in 1976. But I actually I quote The Hite Report in Come As You Are, because Shere Hite offers a definition of normal sex that is essentially pleasure.

It's about liking what's happening. It's not about what behaviors you engage in. It's not even about whether or not you have an orgasm.

It is not about frequency. It's like, do you like it? Are you doing things you like?

And are you there because you want to be there? And this is a thing I have done in my classes. I'll read Shere Hite's definition of normal sexuality from 1976, and I'll use another sex manual's definition of normal sex from actually 1926.

So 50 years earlier, which is penis and vagina sex with simultaneous orgasm. And I ask my students which one of these definitions, the definition that's only 40 years old at the time, or the definition that is approaching 100 years old. Unanimously, my students were raised with the definition of sex that conforms with norms from 100 years ago, rather than from this book that was published the year before I was born.

So here's my personal story of discovering the Hite Report and sex research in general. My very first day at college, I got on my bike and I went to the library because that's the kind of nerd I am. I don't know why, but I went to the sex section of the University of Delaware Campus Library, and I picked up the Height Report because it was the biggest book on the shelf.

I opened it up, I sat at a table in the library, and I just started reading.

[Emily]

And jaw-dropping, jaw-dropping, this book.

[Emily]

Hearing in women's own words what their sexual pleasure looked like, and felt like, their relationships with men, the ways that men were surprised by what worked for them. This is before, like I had barely ever made out with anyone at this point in my life. I was just really intellectually curious about sex.

A funny thing about the copy in my library is that a big chunk of pages were sliced out. So I never actually read the whole thing for several years.

[Neil]

Wow. Interesting. And this awoke in you the interest that carries you forward to this day, 25 years later?

[Emily]

I wonder why did I go to the library and look for just the biggest book on sex that I could find? Why?

[Neil]

On the first day of school.

[Emily]

Like I didn't have classes yet. The first thing I did when I had access to a university library was go right to the sex research section.

[Neil]

Well, I mean, this is a natural thing. That's what's beautiful about libraries and bookstores in general, is that the wandering tendency helps awaken our own curiosities to ourselves. I mean, how many times I'm speaking about personal experience here, like I've been wandering through a bookstore, there's literature, there's some business, erotica.

I'll just bump into that. I'll be like, Oh, I didn't know there was a section. You glance at it.

You're like, Yeah, there's these... What's this? Of course, you pick up stuff that's naturally interesting to you.

And so I love that that happened to you. And I love that the nerdy, bicycling first day student went to the library and then wandered around and found this book and then picked it off and started reading it.

[Emily]

Yeah. You'll note I sat at a table and read it. I was too embarrassed to check it out.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Emily]

I still had that thing in my head about like, it's embarrassing to check out this book that has the word sexuality on the cover.

[Neil]

Yeah. Oh, right. Even though it's kind of hidden a little bit because it's called The Height Report.

Yeah. But yeah, it's an interesting book. By the way, has there ever been anything like this for men?

Like, is there a Height Report equivalent?

[Emily]

There was an immediate follow up, The Hite Report on Men.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Emily]

And yeah, it was that book.

[Neil]

Funny, you don't hear about that.

[Emily]

That got Cher Height the death threats.

[Neil]

Oh, really?

[Emily]

So the methodology, Shere Hite is not a formally trained sex researcher. This is a qualitative, she mailed questionnaires, physically mailed questionnaires. And people sent her responses either written by hand or recorded on a cassette tape.

[Neil]

Wow.

[Emily]

They would send her these cassette tapes.

[Neil]

Well, how do you have the trust of people to do this though? To send thousands of people like surveys about their intimate lives, seems a bit like, you know, like, where does that come from?

[Emily]

She advertised in women's magazines.

[Neil]

Okay. Okay. It was like, I'm a researcher.

Here's what I'm studying. Help me out.

[Emily]

Yeah. Dakota Fanning, I guess, sort of, I think it's Dakota Fanning. It might not be Dakota Fanning.

It might be the other famous Dakota. Oh, my God. I feel really bad.

[Neil]

We'll put it in the show notes. Don't worry.

[Emily]

There is actually a sort of a memoir. It's not an autobiography. It's not like a biographical movie, but it's a memoir of this time in Cher Height's life of when she was publishing these books.

And it talks about some of her research methodology, the impact that receiving these answers had on her as a person and a professional. But she was just, all right, we're going to backtrack because my formal training that would come in the years that followed, 1995, me showing up at the University of Delaware library. I went to Indian University, which is the home of the Kinsey Institute.

It's called the Height Report after what was colloquially known as the Kinsey Reports, which were these massive best-selling tomes of Kinsey's research on both male and female sexuality is the language that was used.

[Neil]

Circa 1940s?

[Emily]

Yep, 1947 is the male volume. 1953 is the female volume.

[Neil]

Mm-hmm.

[Emily]

And Kinsey's book originates from him being the biology professor teaching one of the lectures in the marriage and family class in the 1920s and 30s at Indiana University. And his students would come up after class or come to his office hours and ask questions about sex that he could not answer. He went and looked for research-based answers because that's the kind of guy he was, could not find any because there weren't any.

And so he did the simple thing of turning the questions around on his students and interviewed, he and his team interviewed thousands of people and asked them really structured, it's much more formalized than here's open-ended questions, tell me whatever you want to tell me. Mm-hmm. So that's the origin of the way this kind of research was informed.

So 20 plus years later, Scherheit is just collecting qualitative research, just asking people questions. Tell me your story. Sure.

What is this like for you?

[Neil]

Yeah. How do you masturbate? What does an orgasm feel like?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

The book is very detailed.

[Emily]

Very. There are so many questions and she includes so many different answers. And we live in a world of TikTok, right?

Where people can cut together a video where they make it seem like, you know, man on the street asking people questions and they can cut it in a way that makes it sound like literally everybody gives exactly the same answer. And that's the only answer that anybody gives. So selection is a bias.

And one of the critiques people have had at the time is that Scherheit was being selective in what she reported. No, when you read it, and when I read it now and I compare it to the stories hundreds, thousands of women have told me, this is women's experience still. This is and we know like there's so much research now on how women's orgasms happen.

And it's all like the clitoris is the hokey pokey. It's what it's all about for a lot of women. Not all, obviously, because people vary tremendously.

And she talks about that variety. She even talks about intersectional issues of how socioeconomic level and race and being racialized in America influences women's experience of their sexuality. So she did the same thing with men.

And the result was men were talking about being really worried about measuring up to standards. And it made men look really vulnerable and concerned. And she would go on all these talk shows, she'd be put on a panel where she's the only woman and the only expert and a bunch of just like douchebags.

And they all be like, that's not my experience. I'm not worried about measuring up and and I'm not worried about being manly enough. And like, obviously, these super duper were because that's why they were there to argue with a woman on TV about sex, like how?

Because it is a direct contradiction of the rules of masculinity to acknowledge that vulnerability of being worried about whether or not you are good enough as a lover. And it was the response to the men's volume that started the death threats and is why she moved to Europe and ultimately renounced her US citizenship.

[Neil]

Right. Yeah. Even to go to renounce your citizenship.

So for you, 1995, Delaware Library, it seems like this was part of your sexual education. How do we teach kids about sex today?

[Emily]

How ought we to or how do we?

[Neil]

How ought we to? I'm thinking about this quite personally. Yeah. Like I have four young kids, and they are all identifying as male today.

And I worry about Internet pornography. I have bought vintage Playboys and tried to leave them around. And that did not go over well because then my kid is like, you know, flip it through a Playboy and my wife's like, what are you doing here?

And I was like, well, I thought this was better than, you know. So I'm just like, how ought we to have? How ought we to be teaching our kids about sex today?

[Emily]

A step one is to teach them about their own basic bodily autonomy, that they have a right to say yes and no about how and when they their body is touched. That includes how and when their parents touch their bodies. If you're like, can I give you a hug?

And your kid is like, I don't want to hug. A lot of adults first response is I'm going to hug you anyway.

[Neil]

I think it's really funny. I know. It's like the tickly uncle kind of thing, right?

[Emily]

Yeah. Oh, every kid says no. And like, they're going to go through a phase where they're like, I'm going to say no for the sake of saying no, because I'm going to test this boundary.

Are you being real when you say that my body belongs to me and I truly get to decide when and how I am touched?

[Neil]

Amen. And that is so crucial and so new for a lot of people, including me, I will say. I read this book, I want to say five years ago called C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison.

And it's so good. And honestly, then I since then I like go to my niece and I'm like, which I used to just hug. I used to just hug her every time I saw her and left her.

And now I say, Lexi, do you want to hug? And 75% of the time, it's yes. I'm proud to say 25% that he's like, no.

And I'll be like, high five. You'd be like, yeah, well, then I'm not remainder of 25%. It's like 75%.

And then 25% she just doesn't not want to have any physical interaction, which I have to respect for the other intimacy to be of any value.

[Emily]

Don't you want every man in her life? Yeah, the rest of her life to respect when she's like, no, man.

[Neil]

100%. And this is like, I'm fully confessing this as a father. This is like, I've gone from zero to one on this.

This is I've totally didn't understand it. And now I think to whatever extent I'm able to with my current faculties

[Emily]

The current narrative around children is their your possession

[Neil]

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. There's an emerging body of work called Sovereign Child, which I've started to look into a little bit.

It's very interesting. But then there's also homeschooling. Anyway, parenting itself has become this like really.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Kind of octopussy.

[Emily]

Let the record show I am child free by choice. I'm not the ideal person to answer questions about like how to raise kids, but I know.

[Neil]

No, no. Step one, you nailed it. Body autonomy is step one.

Okay, now step two.

[Emily]

Step two is that rule that's true for you. That's true for everybody, you know. Everybody, you know, gets to choose how and when they are touched, which means you ask first.

And if they say no, you will listen to their no.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Okay. So we're talking autonomy and consent as like primary education.

[Emily]

And.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Okay. That's great. And that obviously the cool thing about that is it starts at any age.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

It isn't like where I am now, which is I'm like kind of like waiting for moments to like, you know, slipping conversational bits. But this is like.

[Emily]

Do you have to drive your kids places?

[Neil]

Yeah. I find that the non eye contact conversation is the best.

[Emily]

Captive audience.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Your next step, especially when they get into the sort of tween age is to talk about your journey around your gender identity.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting.

[Emily]

The ways.

[Neil]

That's the step two.

[Emily]

You were lied to about what it means to be the gender you identify as the ways that worked for you, the ways you struggled to measure up and the shit you let go of. And freed yourself to be like, actually, it turns out that like it can be like this and you, child, get to decide how you want to be this kind of person or even whether you want to be.

[Neil]

Absolutely. Oh, man. Yeah.

This is so healthy because if I'm interpreting this properly, I think I already do. I think I already do this because I am very open. I'm 45.

I'm very open with my kids about how I did not like my body or my genitals. And I thought they were, you know, wrong size and wrong colored. And, you know, I'm sure this is very common, but for like 30 plus years of my life, you know, like, like, I'm very open about this with my kids.

I don't sort of couch it in gender specific terms, but I do talk it and I do talk openly about it from a body positivity perspective. I'm like, you know, I always thought my penis was too small. Oh, my gosh.

I can't believe how many years I ended up worrying about that. Like, I'll just throw that out there. Right.

Because what I'm trying to do.

[Emily]

Dad, shut up about your penis. You're doing it right. Peggy Ornstein, Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex.

Two really good books about like teenagers in particular and how they're being trained around sexuality.

[Neil]

The two books are called Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex.

[Emily]

Those are two books. One is pink and one is blue. Guess which?

[Neil]

Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex by Peggy Ornstein. Ornstein. OK.

O-R-E-N-S-T-I-E-N.

[Emily]

S-T-E-I-N. I think I could be wrong.

[Neil]

Yeah. I before E except after C. Ornstein.

I got it.

[Emily]

And.

[Neil]

Or Neil.

[Emily]

Yeah. She talks about how her own mom would talk positively about her own sex life. And as a teenager, Peggy would be like, oh, please stop.

Stop talking to me about how good dad is. And. But.

[Neil]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[Emily]

But.

[Neil]

Yeah. But.

[Emily]

That creates a model in her mind of what it's supposed to be like.

[Neil]

Well, you know, that is so interesting because Leslie and I, you know, will kiss and, you know, touch and stuff like that. Right. But but I never saw my parents doing that.

And so in my first marriage where my wife left me for somebody else, I would have probably stayed in that relationship because I just thought it was normal to not be so sexually connected because I didn't see that. So what I'm hearing in step two or maybe step two B or maybe step three is like there's a modeling component to healthy sexual connection.

[Emily]

Yeah. You're.

[Neil]

Right.

[Emily]

Allowed to talk about things that your kids react to, of course, staying age appropriate and not disclosing things that like they don't need to know specifically what all y'all get up to.

[Neil]

No, no, nor does anyone.

[Emily]

But they need to know that you prioritize your partner's pleasure.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. They need to know that you prioritize your partner's pleasure.

[Emily]

Because you're building a model in their mind.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

This is when we get into like the teen years when like they're approaching, starting to have their own sexual relationships with other people.

[Neil]

Right, right, right.

[Emily]

Talking about. So my Amelia has three step kids. And because I am a relative, like I could equip them with all kinds of language.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

So Amelia sat down, which with each one of them, as they got to like third of ninth grade, I was like, this is a condom. This is how you use a condom. This is lube.

This is why lube is important. This is exactly how you use it. This is the box where we're going to keep all of the sex supplies that you might need for safer sex.

You can just go and get it anytime you need it.

[Neil]

Oh, wow.

[Emily]

Your bodily autonomy really matters. Your pleasure really matters. And you're going to take care of your partner too.

[Neil]

Well, I would be afraid of doing that in ninth grade as like way too early. Like I would be probably my instinct, but I have kids much younger than that, but.

[Emily]

Yeah, yeah. And it's developmentally appropriate. People grow at different rates.

We're at a place where only about half of 18 year olds have had partnered sex. So like you're giving this information before they're using it.

[Neil]

Mm hmm.

[Emily]

But I like the piece that comes before talking about partnered sex is them being able to recognize what pleasure feels like in their body. And I'm not necessarily talking about sexual pleasure. They need to be like, what is it like when you eat your like, what's your favorite food?

Kind of love favorite stuff, right? What does it feel like when you eat your favorite food? Like what happens in your body?

That's your you're like, that's delicious. What does that feel like? Get real curious to like learn about their internal experience of pleasure and joy.

If they play a sport, like if they succeed at whatever sport thing they do, like what does it feel like in your body when you win a game or when you score a goal? Like what was that like for you in that moment? Learning what pleasure feels like so that they can identify it when it happens inside them.

If they had. So I had a friend whose mom was real, real sex positive and just truly delightful. He had his first ejaculation, humping his mattress, which is the thing he'd been doing since he was a little boy.

But all of a sudden, instead of just like humping the mattress and having this pleasurable feeling, this stuff came out. And he truly believed he had broken something. And he ran to his mom. Bless this mother. He ran to his mom like, I was doing this thing and all this stuff came out. And I think I broke my penis.

And this spectacular mom was like, explained what happened and it's completely normal.

[Emily]

And we're just going to run laundry and it's fine.

[Emily]

So hopefully you have the kind of relationship where like, you can explain ahead of time that this is the kind of thing that happens. I love how there's so many books. There's so many great books.

I don't know what all the ages of your kids are. If you want to start at the very beginning, there's What Makes a Baby.

[Neil]

What Makes a Baby. I have four steps written down here. There's the body autonomy piece.

There's sharing your personal journey on your gender identity, but also I'm assuming your body positivity is how I was sharing my stories. But that's fair and fine.

[Emily]

Gender is one of the primary obstacles to people feeling like they have permission to go ahead and like their body just the way it is. Yeah.

[Neil]

What do you mean? Sorry. Gender is one of the primary issues.

[Emily]

Well, like you were saying with porn, there's a very specific and narrow culturally constructed aspirational aesthetic ideal for how a woman type person is supposed to look and how a man type person is supposed to look. And there's only the two, obviously. Haven't you read Trump's executive orders?

There's only two. There's not only two. Hopefully, everyone listening to this has met a trans person by now or a non-binary person and recognizes that there's not.

[Neil]

A hundred percent.

[Emily]

Only two.

[Neil]

Abhorrent to be doing this in 2025 and at that level.

[Emily]

Yeah. I find it very difficult to talk about because I get so angry. But there are these very narrowly defined standards of what you're supposed to look like.

And they are deliberately impossible, unachievable. And so there's this gap between who you are and who the world is telling you you are supposed to be. And you have this project.

[Neil]

Yeah. They don't have any hair and I have hair everywhere. They are one color and I'm the other color.

They, you know.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, exactly.

[Emily]

They have muscles here and no fat there. And oh my God, their dicks are so huge.

[Neil]

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

[Emily]

All of it is absurd and silly and designed to make you continue to torture your body into conforming with this ideal.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

Which the closer you get to it, the more they're going to get. Because if you get real close, they're going to be like, no, but your biceps need to be bigger than that. So that every time you look in the mirror, all you can see is the things that are heavy air quotes wrong.

[Neil]

This is like kind of tipping into the trillion dollar beauty industry and the increasingly normalization of incredibly sophisticated techniques that were almost essentially unheard of mere a decade ago in terms of like, you know, Botox and plastic this and changing face shapes and planing and hair removals and with no judgment on those who do it. And I myself, I'm taking a pill for my hair right now. You know what I mean?

But I'm just saying like, yeah, you tip into that world and you recognize that it's a pretty bottomless pit.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And unfortunately, one that many people fall into.

[Emily]

And that bottomless pit represents the emotional experience of people who are pursuing it. There is a bottomless pit of I'm going to go ahead and use the word self-hatred rather than self-acceptance, because the wildest stuff happens when you pause in your pursuit of the ideal and consider the possibility that the body you have is already worth loving.

[Neil]

I know, I know. Oh, wow. That's so beautiful.

And you know what? One of my very first posts on my blog 1000 awesome things in 2008 was called yellow teeth. And I was like, given an awesome thing shout out to like, gap teeth and yellow teeth and things are like artificially white.

And we don't want to find you like face down on a motel room floor with a pack of crest white strips in your mouth. And I was going on my like blogger nine 2008 blogger rant. And to this day, like to this day, like, like, obviously, almost 20 years later, I saw people coming to me, you know, my favorite awesome thing is like what they're like, that one yellow teeth.

I was always thinking my teeth were too yellow. And I was like, you just made it a good thing instead of a bad thing. And I mean, my future prognostication skills are not necessarily awesome.

But I will say I'm expecting that when I'm in my 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. That one person with the gap teeth, they're going to be the prettiest of all because they that's something that you won't be able to get. You know what I mean?

Like, it's like, you know, well, everyone's else's are straight or whatever.

[Emily]

And there are cultures where a big gap in your front teeth is like the ultimate beauty marker.

[Neil]

Ah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. So step one, here are the collective works of Yava Bley.

Okay, who's that?

[Emily]

Yaba Blay is a public intellectual who studies racialized beauty.

[Neil]

Wow. And how's the last name spelt there?

[Emily]

B-L-A-Y.

[Neil]

Wow. Okay. Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.

Step two, journey, gender identity. Step three, healthy sexual connection with your partner. You know, prioritizing your partner's pleasure, talking about that, being open by that.

Step four, recognizing pleasure in yourself and in your body. But we haven't got to yet. And kind of like, I guess where I was starting, which is like, you know, letter W here, when you are helpfully taking us through the larger conversation is like, what I'm worried about is like pornography.

Because now in fifth grade in Canada, everyone's equipped with a school laptop. Everyone has to sign a form, whether you want to or not. And by the way, it's a Chromebook.

Of course, Google has got its tentacles in the public school system. And everyone has to sign a contract at home. When you get the thing saying.

No one's responsible, basically, for what happens.

[Emily]

Oh, yeah. The school abdicates all responsibility for whether or not your child runs into sexually explicit media on the Internet.

[Neil]

Well, exactly. But also the firewalls are only at school. You know what I mean?

So so I'm like, this is going to happen soon for me, where I've got kids kind of forcibly given computers from the public education system with the waiver saying whatever happens on them happens on them. And I know boys who are 10. Yeah, OK.

Because I was one.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

You know, and so we were clamoring to look at anything with nudity.

[Emily]

Sure.

[Neil]

You know, and so I'm like, I'm very afraid because I also, you know, see pornography today. And I'm like.

[Emily]

And pornography today is super different from pornography when we were kids.

[Neil]

I'm like, I'm like, where do we go? How do we teach? What do we show?

What do we share? What do we leave lying around the house? And that's kind of where I got to my like, maybe false step.

I'm like buying some vintage 70s pornos. There's one there's many wonderful bookstores in Toronto, but there's a four story bookstore called BMV in Toronto. They own their building.

Thank goodness. So that's going to be there forever. Baby blue painted.

And it's like, you know, the fourth floor is like just graphic novels. And in the basement, they have many things. But one of the things they have is like vintage mags, vintage magazines, all like, you know, perfectly kept in mint condition, blah, blah, blah.

But it's like a vintage magazine. So I'm like, oh, my gosh, I should grab some of these for when my kids are interested. And they'd rather than find these than those.

But that's the part I don't know how and when and where to teach if you can. And that's what I'm that's really what I'm really truly worried about is internet pornography at too young of an age and too hardcore of viewing. Yeah, that's that's my I think about that regularly as a big worry.

[Emily]

Obviously, keep safe search on. That's not going to stop everything. But that's a starting place to like set limits on what they're likely to be exposed to.

One of the difficulties is that safe search is probably also going to obstruct sex education. But like, that's why the actual human conversations are so very important. We are living in a golden age of sex education books for kids.

The collected works of Corey Silverberg is spectacular.

[Neil]

I know Corey Silverberg. Yeah, Silverberg. I know those books.

[Emily]

Their books are so good.

[Neil]

Yeah. Are those those books like How Are Babies Made?

[Emily]

What Makes a Baby.

[Neil]

What Makes a Baby.

[Emily]

Yeah, I saw them read What Makes a Baby out loud at a conference back in like 2014. And everybody was like in tears because without gendering anything, it's just like a uterus exists and sperm exists and it comes from somewhere and like this is how a baby grows. And people wait.

And the last sentence of it is who waited for you?

[Neil]

Oh, that's so beautiful. We've given that book as a gift many times to friends that have had surrogates because everyone's got such different birth stories. And that book is almost universally applicable.

So the collective works of Corey Silverberg, you've pointed me to what other books should I be buying here today? Give me two or three like, you know, I don't want to give my kids like, here you go, son, you know, and here's like 50 books. But what are the top two?

[Emily]

Give them all the things. Have a medical encyclopedia in the house so that they can look up stuff.

[Neil]

Yeah, that's a good idea.

[Emily]

Like they can find it.

[Neil]

We do have a gigantic old dictionary that I put yellow sticky notes in anywhere that anybody looked up of. So first it was like, you know, fart and then like, you know, racial slurs and like, you know, because I want them to learn that this dictionary is like a safe space for you to like look up words that you've heard on the playground. So now we have this thick red dictionary that I got in someone's like garbage pile and it's got yellow stickies outside of like if someone were to see it, they'd be like, whoa, your kids are really, you know, have dirty minds.

But what I've tried to do is the dictionary serves its function as a safe place to find the meaning of anything you hear.

[Emily]

As a hyperverbal kid, I was always asking what a big word I stumbled into meant, and that included the word tryst and the word vagina. And the answers, broadly speaking, were look it up, which I did. I learned a lot of words, looking them up in the dictionary.

[Neil]

So smart. So have a medical dictionary around. Check out the Collected Words of Corey Silverberg.

Any anything else?

[Emily]

Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan wrote a book. I'm pretty sure the title is just Let's Talk About It, which is for sort of like tween teen age. There's a brilliant, inclusive, hilarious book called Wait, What?

Which is written by Heather Carina. It's called Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies and Growing Up.

[Neil]

You know what? That title is so good.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Because that is, I remember very clearly in my head for like fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, having this like, what feeling around my growing understanding of what sex was. And I was like, what? Like what?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Everyone?

[Emily]

Really?

[Neil]

Every kid?

[Emily]

When I was in like fifth grade, sixth grade, it was all about biomedical facts is like all I could get access to. And with a book like Wait, What? It's about like relationships and identity.

And it goes so much deeper and is so much more about like what sex is like in people's actual lives.

[Neil]

Okay.

[Emily]

So much better.

[Neil]

A comic book called Wait, What? Okay. You've given us a great literary catalog here.

[Emily]

A character called Weird Platypus.

[Speaker 5]

Weird Platypus.

[Neil]

Okay. That's a good teaser for people when they figure it out. By the way, page 11 of the Hite Report, I should say.

So this is like the intro to the 2004 edition. So I don't know if you have this in yours or not. But she opens by saying women have come a long way in the last half of the 20th century from a time when the existence of the female orgasm was doubted.

And when women were effectively owned as property in marriage, the landmark victory such as the 1995 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Women signed by 140 countries, which proclaims a woman's autonomy over her own body. However, despite today's shrill insistence that women have all their rights now and sexualities all over the place, there is still some way to go.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

How prophetic, because it seems as though there has been an actual backtracking in a lot of places.

[Emily]

I get hard for me to talk about because I get so angry. I'm here in America. It's real bad.

It's real bad. One of the end goals for Project 2025 is removing access to birth control. That's how regressive the agenda is.

It's bad.

[Neil]

Sorry, stupid question. Why is that? What is the thinking behind that?

[Emily]

I mean, there's a lot of different... One is it's a fundamentalist Christian reactionary. Women need to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

And then there's the autocracy explanation. So in 2020, how did you spend your lockdown? I spent my lockdown reading books about autocracy, fascism, and dictatorships.

And one of the things I learned is...

[Neil]

Did you read Autocracy, Inc.?

[Emily]

Oh, that was absolutely on the list.

[Neil]

That's... I'm like a quarter of the way through it. Really liking it.

[Emily]

My favorite one was actually... Yeah. And Applebomb.

Whose new book... Oh, so Autocracy, Inc. is the new one.

The Twilight of Democracy is the one I read in 2020.

[Neil]

Okay. Both. I think at least the new one's a Pulitzer Prize winner too.

Autocracy, Inc. Very small. Heather's pick up here in Canada for Indigo people.

So you spent... You weren't making sourdough.

[Emily]

No, I was worried that Trump might be reelected. And I wanted to understand what my role as a sex educator would be under autocratic rule. So I read all these books.

My favorite one was Defying Hitler, written contemporaneously by Sebastian Hoeffner, to explain what was happening in Germany to an Anglophone audience so that they could understand. I believe his wife was Jewish. And so they got refugee status in the UK.

And that's how we ended up being a journalist there. And so I read all these books. And what I discovered is that across history and across geography, every autocracy, dictatorship, fascism is going to have a them.

The them is going to be different depending on the culture. But all of them depend on a misogynist, patriarchal gender binary. Why?

Because they are relying on the production of enough of the right kind of babies by women who need to be obedient to their reproductive role, therefore. And they need enough men to serve the capitalist machine and then become cannon fodder.

[Emily]

I know that's dark. And that is...

[Emily]

When you look across even just Europe, even just the last 100 years, you see the ways that gender is enforced and punished when people fall short. Of their reproductive role.

[Neil]

Because what you're saying, if I'm understanding, is that in order to maintain the autocracy, which benefits the extremely small minority of people ruling and controlling it, there needs to be a system that...

[Emily]

A population that generates wealth for the elite.

[Neil]

Ah, hmm.

[Emily]

We are the livestock.

[Neil]

Right. Right. It's weird.

Not weird. It's shocking how quickly brazen things like Mark Zuckerberg announcing censorship control, taken off of Metta, wearing a $905,000 watch. And the tech founders all at the inauguration in the front row. And Elon Musk tweeting things like, spent the weekend feeding UCEDD into the woodchipper, which of course is the richest person in the world, taking money away from the literal poorest people in the world.

And it's just like right there. Yeah. It's like right there. It's like there's nothing hidden. I would have assumed that when Hitler came to power, I wasn't around.

But I was like, I would assume there was a bit of a surprise factor. Yeah.

[Emily]

One of the things I really liked about Defying Hitler is that the author makes it very clear that people knew exactly what the agenda was.

[Neil]

Right. Right.

[Emily]

Like people... I'm going to cut out the various stories because this is not the central thing.

[Neil]

No, no. But it's very interesting.

[Emily]

People afterwards could be like, we had no idea what was going on. We had no idea. Yeah, they did.

Everybody knew. It was right out there in the open.

[Neil]

Yeah. You know what you might love if you don't already know it is there's this incredible um, uh, drawn and quarterly produced graphic novel that took the guy Jason Lutz, L-U-T-E-S, like 22 years to make it. And it's called Berlin.

And it is the... Do you know this graphic novel? Yeah.

About like...

[Emily]

I'm married to a cartoonist. Yeah.

[Neil]

Oh, yeah. That you met on OkCupid. Shout out to OkCupid in 2011.

Because I was on OkCupid back then. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

OkCupid. Like I met the most interesting people. That was like a very...

[Emily]

They had the best algorithm.

[Neil]

It was like, well, it was Christian Rutter, right? Who originally ran Sparknotes.

[Emily]

I didn't know that.

[Neil]

Did you not know that? Okay. So Sparknotes. Remember that old like quiz site? Are you...

Like we would in first year of college be like, oh, uh, you know, so and so is the 77% slut and so and so is like 95%. Oh, that totally makes sense. And I'm a 48.

You know, like there was like all these like little surveys that, you know, college kids would love to forward around to each other. And that was a site called Sparknotes, which evolved into OkCupid. Yeah, cool.

Well, nice that I can somewhat add a little asterisk and backstory to your How We Met story to your incredible cartoonist partner, who also was able to set us up with the internet for today. We don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but we will also...

[Emily]

But like if people are looking to understand what the fuck is going wrong, that's sort of like, that's why. That's why they're like, there's only two sexes, your biological reproductive role. That's why.

It's because we're, uh, we're the livestock. It feels yucky in my body to say that out loud. So let me, I just want to create a moment of like, that was yucky.

That felt yucky in my body to say out loud. It probably felt kind of yucky to other people to hear it. Like we could add on a whole level of like the ableism of my autism and the context of Nazis, but like OkCupid back before it was an app, when it was a fucking website.

I met my husband. Let me tell you the How We Met story in order to like get rid of the yucky in my body. Cause like my brain is like, I'm going to lie down and cry now because it's so bad.

So let me tell you about how I met my husband. Um, my therapist challenged me. She said, you are not doing everything you could be doing to meet people.

And I was like, I am. And the way I proved I was doing everything I could is by following OkCupid's mathematically established advice for how to use OkCupid most effectively. Right.

Why did it take me so long to get diagnosed on the spectrum? So, uh, so Rich was one of the people and, uh, we were chatting. I had just gotten home from work and we were chatting on the website.

And, uh, I was like, I'm hungry. I got to make dinner. I'm tired from work.

And I really feel like, and he's like, I could come over and bring you pierogies. And I was like, okay. And I met him outside my building with my 70 pound hound lab mix named Green Bean, who I adopted from a shelter.

Uh, about eight months previously, he had been in the shelter for four or five years having been removed from his home because he was being tortured by the teenage boys in the house. So he did not like men. Uh, so I had this dog.

I met him outside with my 70 pound hound lab mix who came up to my hip. And I took him upstairs to my apartment and he brought the pierogi and they were on the stove cooking. Um, and like, again, Green Bean did not like men and like, I'd bring dates over and Green Bean would pace, like, just so uncomfortable.

Just like, I need this person out of my space. Or he literally would like sit between me and the other person to like be a physical barrier. So Rich comes up, pierogies are heating.

Rich sits down on the couch.

[Emily]

Green Bean lies down on the floor at his feet. And I was like, well, that's it then. That's the one.

[Emily]

Green Bean picked my husband.

[Neil]

14 years later.

[Emily]

Yeah. And that was in 2011. Uh, in 2018, uh, he and the other dog that we adopted both had to be put down and it was, uh, like agony, heartbreaking.

And then we adopted Thunder. Who is our now 15 year old, uh, Pipple, who is a clown and a delight. And, uh, I'm not a full human being without a dog.

[Neil]

Oh, many people can relate to that. I'm sure. I'm East Indian. So like there were no, there were no pets in our culture growing up, but my wife's mother has a 11 year old deaf golden retriever and she travels a lot.

So we often have Chelsea, the golden retriever in our house. And I'm like starting to slowly become a dog person very slowly. Um, let's transition to masturbation on page 53.

A chapter opens called feelings about masturbation. It has the bold conclusion that most women say they enjoy masturbation physically. After all, it did lead to orgasm, but usually not psychologically.

So here we are, you know, 50 years after this book came out, I wondered if you could give us your Emily isms on masturbation for men and women or male identifying female identifying.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

So advice, tips, tricks, how to do it better or how to, you know, what, what do you got?

[Emily]

Uh, I'm in favor of it. Uh, because there's, it's the most efficient way to learn about your body. I recognize that it's not for everyone.

And if it's not for you, if psychologically you don't feel good about it, you are under no obligation to do it. I do really recommend if you don't feel comfortable touching your own genitals, you can touch a whole bunch of other parts of your body. And I would love for everyone to explore what the sensations of their body feel like so that they can recognize those sensations when they're experiencing them with a partner.

Our peripheral nervous systems are wired to let us experience so many different kinds of sensations. There's light touch, which is just like over the surface. There's deep touch, which is pressure moving the muscles around.

There's the stretch of our tendons and muscles deep inside our body. There's vibration. We have specific nerve endings that are good at vibration.

We have nerve endings that are good at detecting when a touch is staying still and other nerve endings that are good at detecting when a touch is moving. So explore all the different kinds of sensations that all the different parts of your body are capable of experiencing. One of the things that boys do that is a disservice to what masturbation can be is that they feel like they have to hide it and get it over with quick.

So it's like 30 seconds in the shower. As opposed to really exploring what the pleasure of their body feels like and allowing pleasure to grow and expand and hit the pause button on the trajectory toward orgasm. Just allow pleasure to grow and be in your body and feel what that pleasure feels like all over.

Same goes for people who don't have penises. Allow your body to experience pleasure whether or not you pursue orgasm. Orgasm is 100% optional.

The goal from my point of view of masturbation is to learn what pleasure feels like in your body.

[Neil]

Interesting. The goal of masturbation is to learn what pleasure feels like in your body. That's a nice way to put it.

[Emily]

95% of people can have an orgasm on their own if you're among the 5%. There's whole books and workshops just about that. Betty Dodson's Sex for One.

Julia, You're Gonna Laugh. Hyman's Becoming Orgasmic. These are books that are products of their time.

I'm looking for... If any sex therapist out there wants to write specifically how to have your first orgasm, or if you struggle with orgasm, book, we need an updated version. Desperately.

[Neil]

I see. Well, I remember... So I was a teen boy who, pre-internet, really, would read the back page of the street mag, the street newspaper in Toronto, which was called Savage Love by Dan Savage, who was also the editor, I think, of the Seattle version of the newspaper.

And I remember being... Like, as a 14-year-old boy, I remember my mind being blown when I read him writing. One of the goals of masturbation is to change it up.

Is to change the rhythm and frequency and touch and duration and length and stimulation. And because of what you are doing when you change it up is you are allowing your body to both expand the sexual terrain that you will have throughout your life. Right?

And I was like, what?

[Emily]

It's not just to have an orgasm as fast as possible.

[Neil]

It was like a... I remember reading that thing on the go train, the commuter train in Toronto. I miss that when people would leave newspapers on things.

And I miss people... I obviously still read books on Subways and so on. And I always give a quiet shout out.

And I would say, it looks good on you, the book. I'm a very extroverted book reader to other people reading. But I miss the fact that when everyone's on the phone, you just don't know what they're reading.

[Emily]

Right.

[Neil]

I like the covers being visible of what everyone's into. That's such a big part of it to me.

Anyway, speaking of seeing book covers, let's get into your third and final book, which is, of course, last chance to see a fascinating book by Douglas Adams with Mark Carwardine. I hope I said that right. C-A-R-W-A-R-D-I-N-E.

Published in 1990 by Heinemann Publishing. I had to hunt for this book too. Covers a grassy green background with the words last chance to see in like a spray-painted sans serif all cap spa and an off-white interspersed with black silhouettes of animals that are crossed out with red Xs.

Mine actually has the covers like the Komodo dragon and the pygmy rhino and stuff like that right on them. The author's name is at the bottom in black, and it says on the New York Times book review, amusing, thought-provoking. Its detail on the heroic efforts being made to save these animals are inspirational.

Basically, Douglas Adams, who everybody knows From Hitchhiker's Guide. As the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Somewhat later in life, sadly, because he only lived till 49.

He died in 2001 in Montecito, California. Born in Cambridge, England. He went on a trip around the world with a zoologist to try and see a number of the world's most endangered species.

And basically, it's like his trip diary. And I didn't know this book existed. I'm so glad I do.

I'm very curious to understand and hear what your relationship is, Emily, with Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams.

[Emily]

Boy, I'm gonna cry.

[Neil]

with the zoologist Mark Carwardine.

[Emily]

So, yeah, he died much too young. I first read the Hitchhiker books because my brother bought one home from a library. And the cover was funny.

And so I read it. And it was the funniest thing I'd ever read in my entire life. And I became a Douglas Adams obsessive.

And I had essentially no friends from fourth grade through eighth grade. Uh, but the guy who sat behind me in the sixth grade, Caillou, I was like, this is the funniest book I've ever read. And he went and read it and became just as much of a fan as I was.

And then Caillou went to MIT for all three of his degrees. And he worked at the Media Lab. And he got to meet Douglas Adams, who came to visit the Media Lab.

Even though I'm the one who introduced him to Douglas Adams' work. He's the one who got to meet him. But when Douglas Adams died, Caillou and I reached in grad school.

I was in Indiana. He was in Cambridge. But he emailed me.

He's like, you probably heard about this. And my first thought was, I should email Emily because she'll understand.

[Neil]

Oh.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

What a heartbreak, eh?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

I mean, 49?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And also a self-deprecating guy.

You've seen the journal entries that have come out that he's written to himself.

[Emily]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil]

Yeah, right. Like a real big-hearted self.

[Emily]

Talk about undiagnosed ADHD.

[Neil]

Oh, oh, oh, really?

[Emily]

Probably. His relationship with deadlines. He used to say, I love deadlines.

I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly past. And it's that kind of humor that makes Last Chance to See. So again, I almost picked An Immense World, which is a really similar book because they're both books that dive really deeply into animal cognition.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. That's the connection point.

[Emily]

Ways animals perceive the world.

But Last Chance to See is more of a travelogue also. It's a book of its time. It was written in, I believe, the late 80s.

And it's actually a book based on a radio show, which you can actually get. You can get the original BBC production and hear the animals. He tells a story of going to find the Baiji dolphin in China.

He tells this very long, hilarious story about they wanted to get sound recording of what the river sounds like from underwater. And so they wanted to put a microphone in the water, and they hadn't packed a waterproof microphone. So they had to use this trick of putting their microphone in a condom.

So they had to find a condom in China. It's a long story. So it's not just about animal cognition and about the efforts to save the animals, but also the struggles of traveling around the world in order to see some of the rarest animals in the world.

Baiji dolphin, sadly, now fully extinct.

[Neil]

Oh, really? Yeah. I was going to ask you how many of the animals that they're cataloging here have made it.

[Emily]

White rhinos, also fully extinct.

[Neil]

Right. Because it's not just Komodo dragons, but there's the lovable Kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphin of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius. Right?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

And his writing on page 28, just to just give people a flavor. It is then quite an education to learn that two cats fighting can make easily as much noise as 40 dogs. It is a pity to have to learn this at 2.15 in the morning. But then the cats have a lot to complain about, and Labuan Bajo. They all have their tails docked at birth. Labuan Bajo, thank you.

Which is supposed to bring good luck, though presumably not to the cats. You know, it's this tone. It's this style.

It's very accessible, tongue in cheek, but like a Surbeck style. On page 16, I was wondering about your comment on this one, because I wondered if it connected a bit to sex here. David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were and seen different bits.

Because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there, sorting out our travel arrangements, was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e. that part of Bali, which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world, for the sake of people who have come all the way to see Bali.

[Emily]

I thought that was really interesting.

[Neil]

Like, you know, we used to only be able to get sushi in Japan.

[Emily]

Right.

[Neil]

Like, traveling itself is pretty unlikely you're going to try a new cuisine.

[Emily]

And that experience of the touristiness of Bali has probably only gotten more and more true in the years since he wrote that. In 2010, Mark Howardian collaborated with Stephen Fry, who was really good friends with Douglas Adams, and they did a follow-up, Last Chance to See, to see the animals that remained and to go see what the conservation efforts were like. There's a very hilarious scene.

It's a full camera documentary as opposed to just being a radio show. And there's this extremely funny shot of Kakapo climbing up on Mark Howardian's head and flapping his wings against his head, basically trying to mate with Mark Howardian. He's like, this is such an honor.

He's got like, bleeding marks on his face from the talons of what Douglas Adams describes as the world's largest, fattest, least able to fly parrot.

[Neil]

Oh, okay.

[Emily]

Not only has it forgotten how to fly, it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. And so it will, in times of extreme distress, run up a tree and jump off and fly very much like a brick.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. I can see why you love this book. It's a really good book.

So there's also a Stephen Fry Carwardine new version we can kind of look up. By the way, I forgot to tell you the Dewey Decimal, which I think you would enjoy, which is 591.529 for science slash animals, zoology slash specific topic in natural history of animals, slash habits and behavior, slash abode, semicolon migration. I'll close with this one, this question.

I'd love to get into a fast money round to close this off. But you mentioned that we are... What was the word you didn't say?

Ponds.

[Emily]

Livestock.

[Neil]

We are the livestock in the...

Because you've done a lot of rich, deep reading, as I know you do on many topics on autocracies. And it's pretty obvious. There's many books on the best list right now about our autocratic regimes around the world, not just the one in the U.S. Madeleine Albright's Autocracy A Warning is another one. Okay. Madeleine Albright, Autocracy A Warning. There's a quote in this book.

We are not an endangered species yet, but this is not for lack of trying. So I thought I might just ask you with your eminent wisdom and your deep, well-readedness in many topics, especially around biology, humans, animals. Where do you see us going?

How do you see this playing out?

[Emily]

So one of the fascinating things about the book, for me, is learning that the way you define endangeredness isn't necessarily related to the number of them. When they go to see the Komodo dragon, how many are there? About 8,000.

How many have there generally been? About 8,000. It's not that there's a small number.

It's that their habitats are being endangered. And when their habitat is endangered, that's how the species becomes endangered.

[Neil]

I see this all the time in the birdwatching, obviously.

[Emily]

And the reason why we lean on charismatic megafauna is because if we can get people's hearts attached to the big species, they'll be motivated to protect the habitat of that big species like the gorillas that they go to see. The western lowland gorillas, I believe, they go to see.

[Neil]

Yeah, polar bears.

[Emily]

Which, that might be my favorite. No, the kakapo's are my favorite, but the gorillas are a close second. And so I think about us, we're not endangered in a number point of view.

There's plenty of us. But our habitat is increasingly hostile to our continued existence. And I believe in the power of human innovation.

I believe that the arc of history is long and bends toward justice. The reason it bends toward justice is because the vast majority of us want it to, and so we pull it like hell. And it's not a straight line.

We're currently in a moment where we're veering away. And I feel very confident that we'll transition back to saving us. But it's going to take all of us working as hard as we can.

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah. Chris Rock has a great bit that he used a lot during Trump's first term where he's like, you look at, and I'm obviously paraphrasing and I'm not Chris Rock by a mile. He's like, if you look at the most extreme elected officials throughout history, they're usually followed by the most extreme the other way.

So he's like, we're about to get Jesus after this. You know, that was his, that was kind of like the punchline. And in chapter 137 with Jonathan Franzen, one of his three most formative books is Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamison.

You're nodding. It's like you've read every book. You're unbelievable.

[Emily]

And... Audiobooks in particular. Reading a physical book now is frustrating to me because you can't do anything else while you're doing it.

[Neil]

Well, I can't do anything else while I'm doing it anyway. If I'm listening to an audiobook, I'm like stopping in the dishes to listen, you know? So you're able to multitask in ways that not all of us can.

And so may we close this wide-ranging and incredibly deep conversation with a few fast money round questions. It is a book show, so I will go this way.

[Emily]

Can I just share my one favorite sentence from Last Chance to See?

[Neil]

Oh, please. I didn't mean to cut off that conversation. I was just being sensitive to your time.

I'm like, I'm like two and a half hours deep with you here. I don't want to take your whole day.

[Emily]

My undergrad degree is in cognitive science. And this book is one of the reasons why I got really interested in animal cognition. Because Douglas Adams is who he was.

My favorite sentence. You can't help but try and follow an animal's thought processes. And you can't help when faced with an animal like a three-ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.

[Neil]

Have you ever? Have you? Have you done any of this yourself?

Have you? Have you? Are you like?

[Emily]

No, I hate to travel. I'm a be at home and read about the animals person.

[Neil]

Yeah. That's fun. But the fact like you are, you must be reading like hundreds of books a year.

Because I've heard you on a lot of podcasts to prepare for this. And like, none of the books you talked about, well, except for a couple like overlap. But the other books you talk like, I'm like, you have you are one of the most well read people I've I've ever talked to.

[Emily]

Books are my lifeline. I learned how to be a person by reading books.

[Neil]

Wow. Oh, my gosh.

[Emily]

I learned how to have relationships reading John Gottman's work. And then Sue Johnson's.

[Neil]

I'm going to write that one down. I learned how to be a person by reading.

[Emily]

I've had the same therapist since 2008. And I felt more connected to her when I read a chapter that she wrote than I've ever felt in all of our many years working together. Aw.

I know people better through their writing than.

[Neil]

You sound like Maria Popova to me. You know her?

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Neil]

Brain brain picking.

[Emily]

I profoundly disagree with about cultural appropriation, just by the way.

[Neil]

Oh, interesting. Oh, OK. Oh, interesting.

Do tell.

[Emily]

Well, so.

[Neil]

Maria says, for the record, there can be no learning without appropriation.

[Emily]

And that's a misunderstanding of what is meant by cultural appropriation. And like as a white lady living in the United States, it's not up to her to decide whether or not it's OK to appropriate. So appropriation is the extraction of an element of a culture from its larger context, generally used by.

It's taken from a marginalized group and used without reference to its larger context by the dominant group and the extraction without context, without referencing the original culture. That's the appropriation part. I'm just going to take this thing that you have probably been marginalized for, like braids, for example.

You've been told that your hair looks unprofessional, but I'm going to go ahead and do it and be told I look cute.

[Neil]

How do we figure that out? Like, how do we figure that? I didn't know that about braids.

How do you know you're doing that?

[Emily]

You listen to people.

[Neil]

Yeah.

[Emily]

And so one of the things we talk about is burnout.

[Neil]

Like if I braid my kids hair, I don't know. I don't really know I'm doing that. You know what I mean?

[Emily]

Braids, dreadlocks, there's different ways of doing it. Like two pigtails is not appropriative because every hair example is a complicated one.

[Neil]

You're saying if I put my six year old son's long hair, he's half Indian, half white into like cornrows. This is what you're saying?

[Emily]

Yeah. Your kid's not going to get any shit for that.

[Emily]

And a Black kid with 4C hair, putting their hair in a protective style is going to be perceived in a very different way.

[Neil]

I see.

[Emily]

But in burnout, we talk about the distinction between connected knowing versus separate knowing. Separate knowing is the sort of science, it's called the doubting game, where you extract a piece of information from its contact and you poke it and prod it and try to figure out the ways that it might not belong. And connected knowing is where you go to a piece of information and you observe it in its native context so that you can come to understand it.

One of these ways of knowing is more associated with men, and another one is more associated with the women. One is treated as a way of knowing, and the other one is treated as just like intuition, women's intuition. And it turns out, it was really important for me as a person with a PhD who just loves science.

It was very important for me to grow into a place where I recognized the intense value of connected knowing, of putting myself in the position of a culture or a piece of information, recognizing how it came to be the thing that it is, and the ways in which I am connected to it and the ways in which I'm not connected to it. And when we understand that connected knowing is a way of knowing, it shifts our relationship with the information. It deepens it and extends it.

One of the reasons my degrees are all in different fields, and I do read very widely and way outside my area of expertise, is because all of that context builds a structure for me to understand the thing that I do know the most about.

[Neil]

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's partly why we all love listening to you so much. Because you are a sieve and a filter of a lot through an incredible communication skill and nonjudgmental. You're a real gift to the world.

[Emily]

Oh, that's very nice of you. It's not just that I talk fast. I do actually sometimes say things.

[Neil]

No, I felt really comfortable to talk about a bunch of stuff today that I really haven't and don't. And because I have heard a lot of you and read a lot of you that I'm like, oh, you create space for that, therefore the conversation furthers. Thousands and thousands of people will listen to this and take it their own way through their own conversations.

[Emily]

So great that you were willing to disclose the things that you did talk about. It's great.

[Neil]

Thanks. Yeah, we'll see what makes it through the editing, hopefully. All of it.

So hardcover, paperback, audio, or e? I guess you already said audio. Is that right?

[Emily]

Audio is my favorite. Can I brag just a little bit?

[Neil]

Please. Yeah, I want you to.

[Emily]

So the only thing I ever ask for in any of my book contracts is that I narrate my own audiobooks. They matter a lot to me because they make the book accessible to more and different readers. And the audiobook for Come Together just got nominated for an audio.

It's not going to win. No sex book ever has. But the fact that it even got nominated.

Common is nominated in the same category.

[Neil]

It just got nominated now?

[Emily]

Like a couple of... like last week.

[Neil]

And what's the... what else just got nominated in the category? Common?

[Emily]

Yeah, Common.

[Neil]

What's Common?

[Emily]

Common is a rapper and a poet.

[Neil]

Oh, I see. Oh, Common.

[Emily]

Okay. Yeah.

[Neil]

You know. I see.

[Emily]

Oh, and...

[Neil]

So what I think you're saying is you have been recognized for your ability to speak. That's what it is, right?

[Emily]

To narrate. It's a specific skill. I love audiobooks.

[Neil]

Thank you. Well, you're making great ones that are winning awards. How do you organize your...

I know you still have books. How do you organize your books on your bookshelf?

[Emily]

Oh, not in a system that would make sense to anybody who is not in my head, because it's a combination of like... So there's a shelf of books I haven't read yet. There's a...

[Neil]

TBR?

[Emily]

Yeah. There's a shelf of... These are the ones.

These are like the books that made me who I am. Last Chance to See is on there. The Hype Report is on there.

Even What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says Clean Your Room is on there. The Kinsey Reports are... You have a formative bookshelf.

Yeah. I have a shelf of... These are the most important books in the world for my brain.

And then they're arranged sort of by topic. There's a bunch of sex books. And then there's books that are arranged by era of my life.

These are the books that I read in grad school that remain important enough for me to keep them. And then I have the fiction part, which is all...

[Neil]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By genre. TBR, formative, topic-based, era of my life-based, and fiction.

Any other subsections that we haven't hit?

[Emily]

Well, there's... The fiction is mostly divided into... There's the romance novels and the mysteries.

[Neil]

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

[Emily]

Sherlock Holmes was a big thing for me when I was 12.

[Neil]

Oh, yeah. Do you have a White Whale book or any book you've been chasing the longest?

[Emily]

I have been searching for and ordered and may soon have... There's a book called The Hite Report on Shere Hite, which is her autobiography. Oh, cool. Long out of print.

[Neil]

Oh, cool.

[Emily]

Shere Hite died in 2020. And much too soon. And I've wanted to read this book, but it's impossible to find.

So we'll see if it actually makes it to me.

[Neil]

Oh, that's great. That's exciting. Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?

[Emily]

The bookstore in my town is called Book Moon Books. And they're great.

[Neil]

And your town is in Massachusetts? You're in...

[Emily]

East Hampton.

[Neil]

East Hampton. Okay. I was about to say Northampton for some reason.

Sorry. And this is a show by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. It's fair to say all of us listening have sex lives of some sort.

And you are one of the world's foremost sex educators. Would you mind closing us off? I usually ask for writing advice, but it makes more sense, I think, today.

Would you mind closing us off with one hard-fought piece of wisdom, a rule of thumb, or a piece of advice you'd like to close us off with today? Take as long as you feel like.

[Emily]

I'm going to stall for time by saying that I did not choose the book Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, also known as the Nap Bishop, because the instructions were to choose formative, early books. In 2016, I had already written the first draft of the Rest chapter in Burnout. And then in 2017, I saw Tricia Hersey speak, and I was like, I got to deepen my analysis.

Holy crap. This is amazing. So this is not sex advice, but it is like human being advice.

[Neil]

Perfect.

[Speaker 5]

That's where the question was meant to get to.

[Emily]

Yeah. Sleep is the keystone to all of the things.

[Emily]

If you have to choose between, I was so worried about Kamala Harris, because she's like, doesn't matter how little sleep I got, I wake up, I have a workout. And I was like, you need more sleep. Prioritize sleep.

If you have to choose between sleeping and working out, choose sleep. Why? Because sleep is when your body actually generates all the good stuff that happens during physical activity.

When you're being physically active, you're doing damage. You're wearing muscles. You're wearing bones and ligaments and other tissues.

The healing and strengthening happens the next night while you are asleep. Your body recovers and gets stronger than it was before. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

No, what doesn't kill you, uh, didn't kill you. What makes you stronger is rest.

[Neil]

I love that. Sleep is the keystone. Emily and I both learned how to be people by reading books.

A wide ranging conversation dotted with so much advice. I have filled these notes, like every single page I have in front of me is like covered in your sentences, little pull quotes. Emily, this has been a real treat, a real honor.

Come as you are, come together. The two books that we kind of focused on today, but also burnout as well with your sister. Sleep is the keystone.

I learned how to be a person by reading books. As Emily said, I did too. I have so many notes, takeaways, pull out, stick around at the very end of this.

We're going to get into all the weeds. We're going to pull out all of our favorite quotes, play your phone calls, read your letters, hang it at the end. As we always do.

I'm sure we're going to have a word cloud for you, Emily. That is why we pull it all the words. I didn't understand that we talk about the definitions because that's what we do on this show.

Um, this has been a real joy and a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on three books. It's been wonderful to connect hearts with you.

Thank you so much.

[Emily]

Can we end on good news? Yes, please. At the time of writing last chance to see there were 42 Kakapo in the world.

There are now almost 250.

[Neil]

Nice. Shout out to the Kakapo. Thank you so much for coming on three books.

[Emily]

Thank you. It was my pleasure.

[Neil]

Hey, everybody. It's just me. Just Neil again, hanging out in my basement in my studio because I'm doing video this time, listening back to that wide and wonderfully ranging conversation with Emily Nagoski.

Don't you just love her mind? Oh my gosh. The way she just, I mean, that's maybe why I picked the like, what do you read or what do you watch?

Because Emily's just like, I'm reading this. I'm reading that. I read this.

I read that. She is just like, a fountain of book titles. Don't you love people that can just do that and kind of point us in a million different directions.

Make sure you go to 3books.co for the show notes. If you want to kind of get a list of everything mentioned afterwards, there is a lot of energy to take away from this conversation. I have so many quotes highlighted here.

How am I going to limit to three? How about some brains are outside what the world is built for? I think that's a really helpful phrase just to remember.

Because of course, as humans, I'm sure Professor Robin Dunbar would remind us that we've constructed a reality that works for most of us, most of the time. But most doesn't include everybody and most of the time and certainly not all of the time. And so some brains are outside what the world is built for.

And that's tipping back to her great point near the beginning, which is we're all neurodiverse. We're not all neurodivergent. I love her definition of normal sex.

Although I know the word normal is funny, but she says normal sex is any sex where everybody involved is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences. The way she puts that, just so casually, like glad to be there and free to leave. I mean, that's a nice and simple way to do it.

As I chimed into the conversation, I've also heard her describe the no pain part of that, but this is a simple way to remember it. I like this quote. This is three.

Oh my gosh, I'm going to be doing six again. If you put pleasure at the center of your definition of sexual well-being, all the other pieces are going to fall into place. Nice.

Or couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time. Did you write that down? That makes me feel a little less bad.

I mean, I remember in certain conversations with certain relationships, I'm like careful here, not to spill too much. It's like, you're like, are we just talking about this too much? But no, that's a great way to put it.

It's like couples who have great sex lives talk about sex all the time, which makes sense. What you focus on is what you value and prioritize and improve at. How about this one?

Five. Learning to have sex by watching porn is like learning to drive by watching Formula One, period. Professionals, comma, on a close course, comma, with a pit crew.

I'm going to close with one about reading. There's so many to pick out for. I'm going to put way more quotes on the Three Books website, but she says, books are my lifeline, semicolon.

I learned how to be a person by reading books. I learned how to be a person by reading books. Amen.

That's so, so good. I learned how to be a person by reading books. I completely hear and relate to that.

And now three more books to add to our top 1000 from Emily Nagoski, number 574, What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says, dot, dot, dot, end quote, with an exclamation mark, Clean Your Room by Joy Berry, B-E-R-R-Y. Number 573, The Hite Report, H-I-T-E, The Height Report by Shere Hite, H-I-T-E. And number 572.

Oh, I love this book so much. Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams with Mark Karwardine, C-A-R-W-A-R-D-I-N-E. I just put that in my Neal's book club for the month of February that just passed.

By the way, if you don't get my book club, just go to neal.blog and you can get it. It's another ad-free, sponsor-free, interruption-free production where I write a 3,000 to 4,000 word review of every book I read over the past month. Okay.

Lots of emails. I know everyone's inbox full. I know.

No pressure to get anything. But yeah, there you go. neal.blog if you want that, or the podcast letter that I will send out, or my daily awesome thing that I send out every single day since 2008. 5,000 awesome things in a row now. And sometimes I send out like bits of poetry there too. So neal.blog if you want to get on my list. Emily, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books. It's been a joy and a pleasure and a treat. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three-second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. This is the part of the podcast where I talk directly to you.

You talk directly to me. We play your voicemails or read your letters, but we did one earlier. We talk about a funny or interesting word that I didn't know the definition of and we define it.

But for us, let's get started as we always do by going to the phones.

[Barbie]

Hi, Neal. This is Barbie from Goodyear, Arizona, and I'm finally calling you. I put the nerves aside because I just finished listening to episode 46 with Dr. Laura Markham and all I can say is wow, wow, wow. It blew me away. I didn't want the conversation to end. What an incredible and insightful conversation as always, but I think this one touched me more emotionally just because of the current climate in the U.S. right now. I've been feeling so much dread and anxiety the past few months, but between you and Dr. Laura's calming voices and words of wisdom, they just really made an impact on me to stop and calm down and just breathe. I'm putting all three of her books on my reading list, which is quite large, but those will be moved to the top. Neal, I can't thank you enough for your gift to this podcast.

I listen to it every chance I get. I'm listening to each episode in the order you recorded them, so yes, I have a lot of catching up to do, but that's okay. I'm getting off of social media as of today, so I'm going to have much more time to listen and absorb each and every episode.

It's my daily gift to myself. Okay, I'm probably talking longer than the recording time, but please know you are making a difference in the world, Neal, when there is so much hate and negativity out there. Your podcast is positive and uplifting and much needed.

Okay, I'm going to stop talking now, but thank you again from the bottom of my heart, and p.s. I mispronounce words all the time. Thank you, Neal. Bye.

[Neil]

Aw, Barbie, that voicemail made me cry. I mean, it was a beautiful message. Thank you so much for calling in, and it's great to hear your lovely voice, and you are a heart spirit, a heart kindred spirit.

I'm so lucky to have this podcast, to find all these amazing free bookers around the world, and Barbie, you are on a roll. I remember when I got a letter from you in December of 2024, you were on chapter 24 with Jonathan Fields, and now you're mentioning chapter 46 with Dr. Laura Markham. I mean, that's quite a feat.

You're up 22 chapters in just a couple of months. Wow, you are listening on fire. Dr. Laura Markham is very calm and centering and grounding, kind of like my wife. Whenever she's on the show hosting with me, people are like, you're fine, but has Leslie ever considered taking over hosting your podcast? She has this wise and centering and grounding energy. Dr. Laura is so like that. She is entrancing. I love her three books, by the way. I thought if you're ordering all three of her books, I may want to just give them a quick shout out.

They are number 866, Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia M Axline, A-X-L-I-N-E. That book was so good. I still think about it.

In terms of child development, patience, quiet, calm, how to pull kids out of their shell. It's just wonderful, masterful. I highly recommend it.

I got the mass market paperback edition too, so I can put it on my mass market paperback shelf. Power Vs. Force by David Hawkins and Who Dies by Steven and Andrea Levin didn't stick with me as much.

Although I remember Who Dies by Steven and Andrea being forceful, as you probably heard Laura talk about. And then the last thing I wanted to say and shout out is we all need daily gifts to ourselves. I'm so glad that I am part of your daily gift to yourself and you are very much part of mine.

Thank you so much, Barbie from Goodyear, Arizona, for calling. All right. And now, you know, I know I sometimes do the letter here, but we did a letter from Tyler earlier, so let's not do two.

Kind of indulgent, right? So let's skip that. But I think we should probably do a word of the chapter.

And for this chapter's word, let's go back to Ms. Emily Nagoski.

[Emily]

This is just what a feminist looks like. Self-diagnosis with autism is very common, and it is entirely valid. Your interoception, your neuroception is autistic, that is hyperverbal.

I have to talk about arousal non-concordance, basic bodily autonomy, abdicates all responsibility, misogynist, patriarchal gender binary.

[Neil]

Lots of incredible, uh, big words there from Emily. I was taking notes the whole time. I'm like writing stuff down.

I'm like, okay, what does this mean? What does this mean? What is this?

We could have gone with a lot of words, but you know what? That phrase that was just so unusual that I hadn't really processed it myself before, which is arousal non-concordance. So arousal and then non-concordance.

Okay. So when Emily writes about it in Come as You Are and online on Medium, she says arousal non-concordance is the well-established phenomenon of a lack of overlap between how much blood is flowing to a person's genitals and how turned on they feel. So for example, trauma survivors understand that a sexual response can be about nerve endings being stimulated, not about desire, right?

So that's why she says in her incredible TED talk, like when I say no, you know, people can't say, well, you're obviously turned on, you know, you're wet, you're hard, you're whatever. It's what I say that matters more than what my physiological outlay or symptoms might be. So one analogy that she talks about is being tickled.

So a person can be tickled despite not wanting to be tickled, and yet they will still laugh. This can happen despite struggling. So if nerve endings are stimulated, the result is laughter.

She also uses the analogy of how to separate brain and body when it comes to thinking about or talking to people who have been victims of sexual assault. She says, this is a quote for Emily, if I told you my mouth watered when I bit into an apple that was wormy and rotten, would you think, well, if her mouth watered, then she must really enjoy eating wormy rotten apples. No, you would know that salivation is just an automatic response.

So she's pointing out that general response to is automatic, unrelated to whether or not we enjoy something. In a large meta-analysis of 2,505 women and 1,910 men, Meredith Chivers and colleagues in 2010 described studies reporting that, here's four takeaways for us to learn from. Some men report feeling sexual arousal without concomitant genital changes.

Experimental manipulations can increase penile erection without affecting subjective reports of sexual arousal. I think any guy who's experienced erection kind of knows this, like you sometimes have one without it being related to sexual feelings. Some women show genital responses without reporting any experience of sexual arousal.

There we go again. And women can experience genital response during unwanted sex. So this is like such a big topic for Emily that she's given an entire TED Talk about it.

And I want to give you the exact name of the TED Talk, although of course we will put it on our show notes. It is called, here I am pulling it up right now in real time, The Truth About Unwanted Arousal. So she gave that TED Talk in 2018 on the main stage at TED.

And currently, as we speak, here in 2025, seven years later, it has been watched by, I don't know, because the TED website is not loading. Oh, actually, 3,220,451 people. So it's a big popular TED Talk, but of course, 3 million is still a very small minority of the whole world.

Just like the three bookers listening to this, we are a small minority of the whole world, just like everyone and everything and every community that we're a part of is a small minority of the whole world. But I am so glad that you are here with me, hanging out with Emily Nagoski on Chapter 146 of 3 Books and Beyond. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!