order to keep their story their story. And second, I believe I can describe the widest possible variety of women’s sexual experiences by focusing not on specific stories of one individual woman but on the larger narratives that contain the common themes I’ve seen in all these hundreds of women’s lives.
And finally, at the end of each chapter you’ll find a “tl;dr” list—“too long; didn’t read,” the blunt Internet abbreviation that means, “Just get to the point.” Each tl;dr list briefly summarizes the four most important messages in the chapter. If you find yourself thinking, “My friend Alice should totally read this chapter!” or “I really wish my partner knew this,”
I you might start by showing them the tl;dr list.Or, if you’re like me and get too excited about these ideas to keep them to yourself, you can follow your partner around the house, reading the tl;dr list out loud and saying, “See, honey, arousal nonconcordance is a thing!” or “It turns out I have responsive desire!” or “You give me great context, sweetie!” a couple of caveats First, most of the time when I say “women” in this book, I mean people who were born in female bodies, were raised as girls, and now have the social role and psychological identity of “woman.” There are plenty of women who don’t fit one or more of those characteristics, but there’s too little research on trans* and genderqueer sexual functioning for me to say with certainty whether what’s true about cisgender women’s sexual wellbeing is also true for trans* folks. I think it probably is, and as more research emerges over the coming decade we’ll find out, but in the meantime I want to acknowledge that this is basically a book about cisgender women.
And if you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry about it.
Second, I am passionate about the role of science in promoting women’s sexual wellbeing, and I have worked hard in this book to encapsulate the research in the service of teaching women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. But I’ve been very intentional about the empirical details I’ve included or excluded. I asked myself, “Does this fact help women have better sex lives, or is it just a totally fascinating and important
empirical puzzle?”
And I cut the puzzles.
I kept only the science that has the most immediate relevance in women’s everyday lives. So what you’ll find in these pages isn’t the whole