So. When Olivia finished her master’s degree, he set up a kind of sensual treasure hunt for her, involving most of her collection of toys, two kinds of lube, at least one instance of being carried, naked, handcuffed, and blindfolded, down the hallway to another apartment in their building, and several of their very good friends. (Which may be the best “science made my sex life better” story I’ve ever heard.) At the end of it, over a giant meal, Olivia, swimming in endorphins and oxytocin, asked Patrick to marry her—mostly kidding.
Mostly.
Olivia is One Big Yes. It’s a gift. It’s a challenge. She maximizes her sexual potential when she allows her sexual response to grow to capacity, without pushing in any specific direction.
Slow down. Stay still. Don’t push or pull. Allow sensation to grow. positive meta-emotions step 1: trust the terrain The first step in changing your meta-emotions is recognizing the difference between the goal state dictated by the script and what you’re actually experiencing. I have two general rules of thumb for navigating this difference: • When the map (the script) doesn’t seem to fit the terrain (your experience), the map is wrong, not the terrain. • Everyone’s terrain and everyone’s map are different from everyone else’s.
What these two rules mean is that your best source of knowledge about your sexuality is your own internal experience. When you notice disagreement between the terrain and the map—and everyone does, at some point—always assume your body is right. And assume everyone’s body is different from yours—as are everyone’s maps. Which means everyone’s journey from lost traveler to master navigator will be different.
I’ve used hypothetical twins a few times throughout the book, but this time I can use real-life twins to illustrate my point. My sister Amelia and I are identical twins. We have the same DNA, were born within ten minutes of each other, grew up in the same house, went to the same schools, watched the same TV shows, and read many of the same books. And yet by the time we started our sexual lives, we had very different maps in our heads.
I had my own unique version of the Media Message in my head. I believed that the Ideal Sexual Woman was an adventurous, noisy female whom men lusted after for her skill and her enthusiasm. She was—of
course!—easily orgasmic from penetration, she experienced spontaneous desire, and her vagina got so wet. Any woman who didn’t want to try new things was a prude, hopelessly hung up and neurotic.
Notice that the Ideal Sexual Woman does not necessarily enjoy a great deal of pleasure; she just appears to experience pleasure. That’s what a sexual woman should be, as far as my culture had taught me, and so that’s what I performed. By the time I started my first sexual relationship, I was a sexual product, processed and packaged for the pleasure of others.
This map was so potent and persuasive that I couldn’t separate what I believed I should be experiencing from what I actually was experiencing.
At eighteen, in my first sexual relationship—with a man who would later become my stalker and threaten to kill me—I would dream that my partner was hurting me, and in my dream I would laugh. I would laugh until even I didn’t know if I liked being hurt.
At the time, I had no idea how screwed up that was.
It was toward the end of that relationship (which ended when I called the police) that I first looked at my vulva and wept.
I had the improbable good fortune of beginning my training as a sex educator in the same semester that I got into that abusive relationship. At the same time that I was marketing myself as a sexual product, in accordance with my instruction by women’s magazines, romance novels, and porn, I was learning the truth about sexual wellbeing. Over the next decade, I gained a vast store of knowledge, but more importantly I gained a radically more healthful attitude: that a woman’s body and her pleasure belong to her and no one else; that it’s possible to say no to intercourse without saying no to all the other things that come with it—the love and the affection and the pleasure and the play; and that my own internal experience was a legitimate guide for whether or not I wanted to try something.
Perhaps most compelling of all, I recognized that it is normal for my internal experience sometimes to be self-contradictory (I’m a flock!), and the more gently and patiently I pay attention to the full depth of my own internal experience—especially if I am gentle and patient with the uncomfortable feelings—the more I experience confidence and joy.
Amelia, by contrast, had her own unique version of the Moral Message in her head by the time we got to adolescence. Smart women didn’t want sex, she believed. Smart girls were interested in minds, not bodies; only stupid girls were ruled by their “base, animal instincts.” This is a classic
middle-class Victorian attitude. She believed the Ideal Sexual Woman was more or less asexual, and she took her own lack of interest in sex as evidence that she was intelligent.
And then she started having sex, and eventually even liking it! So she opened up a new area on the map, explored new territory. She created space for the idea of sex as recreation, a fun thing to do on a Friday night, as long as X-Files wasn’t on. She redrew the map to allow for both being smart and enjoying sex as a source of pleasure, but still she was navigating through a fairly narrow band of terrain.
It was only when she met the man she would eventually marry that she began experiencing sex as something through which she could discover human connection and a deeper pleasure than mere entertainment, a pleasure connected to her personhood. This was a whole new map, which included terrain she had never known existed—though it had been there the whole time, unexplored.
She’s been with the same partner for fifteen years and has had many of the same pleasures and struggles that so many women experience in long- term relationships. And while I had the great good fortune of becoming a sex educator, she had the good fortune of having a sex educator for a sister, so she could be among the women who called me or emailed me to say, “Is this normal?” She’s like the majority of women—context-sensitive desire and nonconcordant arousal. And so, like a lot of women, she sends my blog posts to her husband and says, “This! See?”
We’re an example of how even genetically identical gardens, planted with very similar seeds, may still grow into very different terrains. It turns out she’s got a slightly more sensitive brake than I do, and I’ve got a slightly more sensitive accelerator. So perhaps the Media Message was a slightly better fit for my native sexuality and the Moral Message a slightly better fit for Amelia’s, and so different ideas took root and grew.
For both of us, by the time we began having sex with partners, we had some set ideas about what that experience was supposed to be like. And both us of, like nearly all women, went through a time of realizing how poorly prepared we were and then relearning what it meant to be a sexual woman.
For both of us, education about the science of sexual wellbeing helped us draw maps that better represent our sexual terrains, which in turn allowed us to communicate about our sexual wellbeing more effectively