Book Review: Come as You Are
Jul. 4th, 2020 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerEmily Nagoski’s Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science of Women’s Sexual Wellbeing is sort of a reread: I read parts of it years ago, but I was too embarrassed to check it out of the library. However, if you get an ebook no one can ogle your checkouts, so this time I did check it out and read it the whole way through.
There’s a lot of stuff in this book, but Nagoski’s basic thesis is that American society tends to treat women’s sexuality as Men’s Sexuality Lite: just like men’s sexuality, but not as good. For instance, men are more likely than women to feel spontaneous desire (you see an attractive person in the street and go “I’d like to lick that person like a lollipop”), so spontaneous desire is treated as the only real desire. Women are more likely to feel responsive desire (you weren’t thinking about sex till your spouse kisses the back of your neck, and then you’re like “Yeah! Sex sounds amazing!”), and this tends to be considered second-rate, if it’s counted as desire at all.
(But this is definitely a double bind situation: although spontaneous desire is considered the superior form of desire, women who experience too much of it are apt to be viewed as sluts/nymphomaniacs/etc, while women who are too far on the responsive desire end of the spectrum are called frigid. You just can’t win.)
As Nagoski points out, these are statistical tendencies, not universal truths. Enough men experience spontaneous desire that it has become enshrined as The Manly Way to Lust and therefore The Proper Way to Experience Desire, but there’s huge individual variation, men who don’t experience spontaneous desire and women who do etc., and also many people have the capacity to experience either type of desire depending on circumstances.
The book talks about a lot of other things - arousal non-concordance, attachment styles and sex, sexual trauma, orgasm, etc; responsive vs. spontaneous desire is the one I’ve been mulling over, because I feel like it’s got potential to add an exciting new vector of angst to romance novels if the characters’ experiences of desire don’t line up with what is culturally expected.
Although upon further reflection, I feel like spontaneous desire is something that readers expect from romance novels right now? That “Oh my GOD I want to lick you like a lollipop” moment. Hmmm.
There’s a lot of stuff in this book, but Nagoski’s basic thesis is that American society tends to treat women’s sexuality as Men’s Sexuality Lite: just like men’s sexuality, but not as good. For instance, men are more likely than women to feel spontaneous desire (you see an attractive person in the street and go “I’d like to lick that person like a lollipop”), so spontaneous desire is treated as the only real desire. Women are more likely to feel responsive desire (you weren’t thinking about sex till your spouse kisses the back of your neck, and then you’re like “Yeah! Sex sounds amazing!”), and this tends to be considered second-rate, if it’s counted as desire at all.
(But this is definitely a double bind situation: although spontaneous desire is considered the superior form of desire, women who experience too much of it are apt to be viewed as sluts/nymphomaniacs/etc, while women who are too far on the responsive desire end of the spectrum are called frigid. You just can’t win.)
As Nagoski points out, these are statistical tendencies, not universal truths. Enough men experience spontaneous desire that it has become enshrined as The Manly Way to Lust and therefore The Proper Way to Experience Desire, but there’s huge individual variation, men who don’t experience spontaneous desire and women who do etc., and also many people have the capacity to experience either type of desire depending on circumstances.
The book talks about a lot of other things - arousal non-concordance, attachment styles and sex, sexual trauma, orgasm, etc; responsive vs. spontaneous desire is the one I’ve been mulling over, because I feel like it’s got potential to add an exciting new vector of angst to romance novels if the characters’ experiences of desire don’t line up with what is culturally expected.
Although upon further reflection, I feel like spontaneous desire is something that readers expect from romance novels right now? That “Oh my GOD I want to lick you like a lollipop” moment. Hmmm.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 08:39 am (UTC)The historical F/F romance I've read has tended to address the expectations of compulsory heterosexuality more and unfold a bit more gradually, but it's even harder to find competently written historical F/F.
And it's okay if characters' identities don't map perfectly onto sexual identities as we understand them in the 21st century!
Ha, man, I wish, but that may be asking too much...