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Welcome to Read This Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that should absolutely be put at the top of your TBR pile. Recommended books will vary across genre and age category and include shiny new books, older books you may have missed, and some classics I suggest finally getting around to. Make space for another pile of books on your floor because here we go!
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Today’s pick is an older nonfiction book that continues to answer a lot of questions and has a lot of advice and information that can be so helpful.
Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, PhD
I’m a big fan of Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, which I recommend every chance I get and wanted to also recommend Come As You Are. This book is focused on the sex lives and the sexual response cycle of cisgender women. This is because there is a bunch of research on the sexual response cycle and sex lives of cisgender women and not a lot of research on transgender women or nonbinary folks. That being said, a couple of the trans folks in my life have read this and told me they still were able to get some helpful information out of it. The language is definitely gendered, especially around anatomy, and that can turn some people off so I’m making sure you’re informed before you pick this book up.
Nagoski offers fresh ways of looking at things and dispels a lot of common myths around sex, such as the ideas that “women don’t want sex as much as men do” and “women that have a high sex drive have more testosterone.” One of the main, recurring focuses of this book is the Dual Control model of the sexual response cycle which is the idea that there is an accelerator and also a brake and sometimes they work together and sometimes they work in opposition. Nagoski fills the book with both anecdotes and advice on how to “turn on the ons and turn off the offs,” or to put it another way, how to press on the gas and ease up on the brake.
One of the things that Nagoski talks about that I deeply appreciate that is not talked about enough in sex ed is context and the power of context to either hit your gas pedal or hit your brake. And that the context that does one or the other for you may not be the same that does it for your partner. There’s also a context worksheet that helps you figure out these things for yourself as well as other questionnaires that can be helpful in figuring out your own brakes and gas pedals.
Come As You Are is a fun, informative read which I highly recommend.
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That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
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