with our partners. It also helped us let go of judging other women for having experiences that contradicted our own—because it turns out everyone really is just different.
But the information gathering, redrawing the map, was not the hard part —not for either of us, not for the woman who learned about sex from porn, and not for most of the women I talk with. positive meta-emotions step 2: let go of the map (the
hard part) Knowing how your sexuality works is important; welcoming your sexuality as it is, without judgment or shame, is more important. And that’s the hard part for a lot of women.
Upon learning that they are normal, many women instantly feel liberated and satisfied with their sexuality in a way they never have before.
The light goes on and they say, “My map was wrong all along and I’m actually normal!” But some women, even though they can accept that their responsive desire or nonpenetrative orgasms are normal, can’t accept that this new kind of normal is something worth being. One commenter on my blog put it this way: “I think you’re glossing over the fact that ‘responsive desire’ is a lesser desire than [spontaneous] desire.”
Eighty-five percent of women have “a lesser desire”? Yeowch.
The construction of responsive desire as “lesser” is not a fact, of course, it’s a value judgment, an opinion. If responsive desire is how your body feels, then lesser desire is the meta-feeling, how you feel about how your body feels. “I shouldn’t have to put all this effort in,” you think. “Desire should just happen.” And beneath that thought is the feeling, “I shouldn’t be like this. I’m inadequate.”
And is the feeling, “I’m inadequate,” going to activate the accelerator,
or hit the brakes?
Right.
So the hard part isn’t knowing that you’re responsive or nonconcordant or whatever else is true right now about your sexuality. The hard part is liking your sexuality as it is, when for multiple decades the world has been trying to convince you you’re broken. The hard part is finding beauty in a
terrain that doesn’t match the map.
Why is it hard?