Emily NagoskiCritiques

I found the suggestions and explanations in this book helpful but also felt like there was a lot of overgeneralizing going on - at least for me. There's no denying there are a lot of harmful messages out there for women. Maybe I have just always been good at ignoring them or maybe I was just lucky to be raised by parents whose positive messages were more powerful than the harmful ones?½

I think this book could potentially be very helpful for many cisgender women in long term monogamous relationships. The book discusses trauma and emotions quite a bit, which is important. It also asserts that everyone is normal, which is nice, but I doubt the sincerity of it.

Here are my issues, some of which are ridiculous things for me to even care about, but alas:
This book focuses exclusively on issues faced by cisgender women in long term monogamous relationships, those issues defined mostly as wanting to have more or less sex than their partner.
The book completely dismisses non-monogamy and polyamory out of hand.
What about single women? If you were an alien dropping in on earth and you happened to pick up this book to learn about sexuality, you wouldn’t even realize that single women exist.
I strongly suspect this book oversimplifies male sexuality, and that’s a problem. I didn’t pick up this book so I could read about that, but often the book compares women to men, and it just seems really oversimplify how men experience sex.
It’s not that analytical, but the author warns us about this up front.
I don’t think the word “dildo” appears once in this book. How??? Feel free to prove me wrong, though. 🍆

This is a pop-science self help book on long-term sexual partnerships. If neither of those categories are non-starters for you, then you might have something here.

This is the second book I've read from Nagoski, the first being "Come as You Are." Apparently she and her sister wrote a book in between that I don't know much about called "Burnout."

Regardless of the content of the book, if you're picking up a book of this size on the subject of long-term sexual partnerships, then it demonstrates a commitment to inquiry, so regardless of whether or not you get anything out of the book, at least you're spending ten or twenty hours musing over the subject as you turn the pages.

There is a paradox is the book (which isn't inherently a bad thing): on the one hand, Nagoski unequivocally proclaims her support of self non-judgementalness in the first half of the book; "there is no normal," or "you are normal, no matter what you are," are two common refrains. The second half of the book then moves into an unequivocal takedown of gender norms, condemning and shaming those that identify with them. This may not come across well to those that identify with aspects of gender norms, as Nagoski, as an external authority, is telling the reader what they should think, as opposed to asking reflective questions that evoke self-reflection on the part of the reader. If we combine these two segments of the book, we might come away with a message like, "you are normal, but if there are ways in which your normality overlaps with societal norms around gender, that is a problem." In other words, part one of the book is focused on a developmental process of self-observation, and part two of the book takes on an expert paradigm where the reader should accept the authors words as rote.

One of the primary frameworks Nagoski employs in the book is that of the "emotional floorplan." This analogy takes a two-dimensional spacial configuration (an architecture schematic) and imposes it on the connectivity between our emotional spaces. Coming from the world of automatic energy, where people have little or no ability to shift their internal state, it tells them, "what is the probability I could move from an emotional state of, for example, upset to one of arousal?" This is useful information to know, and in some ways this reminds me of the "Blueprint of We/State of Grace" framework's approach of "Questions to Return to Peace." On the other hand, when we take a metaphor that comes with fabricated constraints (such as the fact that on a floor plan, you can't move from one end of a space to the other without crossing spaces in-between), self-sabotage can be the result. As a child, my father introduced me to the spiritual belief that we can have the ability to influence our emotional and energetic state. For example, when we're upset, we can ask ourselves the question, "do I still want to be upset right now; what is this state doing for me?" Sometimes the answer to this question is yes. Sometimes this questions might have us realize that what we really need is a hug, or to go running barefoot in the woods, or to lie down in the cold rain and let the droplets wash over us. In actuality, humans have the potential to move between any two energetic states; unfortunately, the metaphor of an "emotional floorplan" inhibits rather than enlivens this possibility.

There is one bright spot in the book for those interested in phenomenology and the numinous—towards the end, there is a brief segment on "magic and the field of self." This part is about practices associated with accessing higher levels of consciousness, and might be a transcendent elevator for those of us stuck in the cartesian coordinates of our emotional floorplan. Why is this chapter an afterthought rather than the core of the book? Maybe Nagoski feels this intuitive approach is too "woo woo" and wouldn't sell. Maybe we should ask her publisher. Maybe we'll need to wait for her fourth book.

Despite the hypocrisy and static/dead frameworks of the book, if you're taking the time with your partner to discern about your relationship together, good things will come. But in that case, you might not need this book to guide you.

Come together. Door: Emily Nagoski.

Come together is een soort van vervolg op Come as you are. (Als je dat boek nog niet gelezen hebt: zeker doen, ferme aanrader.) In Come together focust Nagoski zich op de seksuele relatie van koppels die langdurig samen zijn. Zoals ik en mijn man: 26 jaar samen ondertussen.

Wie Emily Nagoski nog niet kent: zij is een wetenschapper en haar boeken zijn ook zo geschreven. Dat wil niet zeggen dat ze niet vlot leesbaar zijn maar wel dat het dikke kleppers boordenvol wetenschappelijk onderbouwde feiten zij . Wat haar verhaal belangrijker maakt maar als je op zoek bent naar een makkelijk tussendoortje begin je er beter niet aan.

Naast wetenschappelijk onderbouwde theorie komen er ook veel verhalen uit de praktijk aan bod; van Emily zelf en vrienden/cliënten/… Fijn pluspunt: die verhalen zijn niet allemaal wit, cis, hetero-georiënteerd.

Je leert dat genot belangrijker is dan verlangen, dat het gaat om het wegnemen van remmen eerder dan het proberen aanwakkeren van het gaspedaal, dat normale seks de seks is die jij hebt en dat die in de loop der jaren kan én zal veranderen. Je seksleven bestaat uit seizoenen, je innerlijke wereld bevat kamers en het is handig als je elkaars plattegrond leert kennen en je kan en mag ten alle tijden nee zeggen.

Naast dit boek lezen is praten misschien wel het allerbelangrijkste om goede seks te blijven hebben. Klinkt makkelijk en té eenvoudig als advies maar hoe en waarover je moet praten dat moet je vooral zelf lezen in dit boeiende boek.

Nagoski mag schrijven wat ze wil, ik lees het. Ik leer telkens zo veel bij!

Ostensibly a book focused on women, I found this to be an incredibly useful and valuable book. I think it's good for all genders!

So many of the lessons have remained with me and helped me re-examine so many of the assumptions I'd had before reading it. Highly recommended.

If you have the book that goes along with this workbook, you already have access to all of the information in this workbook. For that reason, I recommend just purchasing the actual book and passing on the workbook. If you are wanting a specific place to take notes as you work through the book itself, the workbook may be useful for you. Personally, I did not find it to be so.

3.5 stars. I think this book is worth reading, particularly if you did not have access to comprehensive sex education when you were younger or if you have questions about how your body works. As someone who did have access to sex ed, I still learned some things from it (the first time I read it, which was several years ago).

To quote the authors, Ugh. Or (ugh). It started out quite reasonably talking about burnout and how it affects us. Moved into ways to deal with both the stress and the stressors. Then suddenly I was Smashing the Patriarchy. I thought they painted with a very broad brush on the Patriarchy but also seemed only interested in women with full time jobs, husbands, and kids. It just kept getting into stranger and stranger jargon they made up and I finally stopped caring if what they said was correct or helpful and found it all irritating. Which is a same because there probably was good information but it was lost in stories of Star Trek (her name is Uhuru no Uhura) and Madwoman in the Attic and way too much other stuff.

I picked this from the library when I started to listen to the authors on a podcast but I found the same things that drove me crazy in that (and caused me to stop listening) were also here in the book. At least no one sang in book.

I tend to be a little bit wary of self-help books, especially if they make pop culture references because I feel like that dates them, but Burnout quite concisely describes the reasons for stress (we tend to freeze or flee or 'just grit your teeth and deal with it' without actually completing the stress cycle to release) and ways to alleviate that in our lives. It neatly packages a lot of what I stumbled into through my university's CAPS after nearly crashing and burning in grad school about self-compassion and recognizing it's okay to be kind to yourself, including thatinternal critical voice as part of yourself as well.

I tend to skim through other reviews before posting mine, just to see if I'm on a similar wavelength as other readers and this one seems to be polarizing- alas, I do wonder if some of the negative reviews would be less harsh if they became aware of the impact that systemic patriarchy has on nearly every aspect of society, and how there's a lot of stress on being a "Human Giver" as the Nagoski sisters put it.

I think self-help really isn't my thing, but this is a subject that is of some interest to me this year and came recommended, so I went in with an open mind. There were some concrete ideas that were definitely of value for me, especially around physically managing the stress cycle so that it can conclude rather than keep spinning, and hammering home the importance of sleep... someday I'll internalize that one. I guess that's the point of this kind of book, take what you need and leave the rest... Anyway, I'm glad I read it even if not all of it stuck.½

No secret ingredient, just you

The book is good if a bit underwhelming. It all pretty much boils down to accept yourself as you are, although that in itself is hard and takes a lot of work.

There IS some useful information about the stress cycle in this book but the overly casual, self-help lite tone wasn't for me.

This book spoke to me on such a deep level. The authors beautifully describe why women are overwhelmed, over-stressed, and over-giving at every opportunity. Every woman I know is burnt out and worn out, yet we #persist, because we're told we have to. Because to do otherwise is seen as a massive moral failure.

The concept of being a Human Giver vs. a Human Being was mind-blowing, and it made so much sense. Women are socialized to seek a relationship to feel 'complete', while men are taught to value independence and sovereignty.

As women, we're told we're responsible for everyone else's feelings and so we go through life trying desperately not to disappoint anyone. What we're not taught, however, is how to take care of our own emotional and mental well-being. How to rest without guilt, and how to treat ourselves as though we were someone we loved.

The Nagoski sisters have handed women the key to minimizing stress and managing their emotions. But most of all, they've let us know that we're not crazy, we're not "weak", and we're not broken because we can't keep up with the demands we've been conditioned to put on ourselves

Really enjoyed this. Annie's smart and kind, Charles is loving and helpful. He thinks he's broken and she lets him come to terms with that. Also, good love scenes. It did take me almost a month on the wait list for my library to get the next one, but I like it almost as much, if not more.

This review originally appeared on my blog at www.gimmethatbook.com.

I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway! Thanks to Emily Nagoski and Simon & Schuster for contributing the book in exchange for an honest review.

There are many books out there claiming to be the best source of knowledge about the female body; but this one is pretty much on the money. Nagoski talks honestly about what women experience, and why. Her tenet is: we are all alike, but different, we are all normal.

Women may get their knowledge from social media, and therefore have an unrealistic image to live up to. Women may feel “broken” because their bodies don’t react the way they think they should. This feeling is insidious and permeates the brain and hinders sexual pleasure.

Nagoski explains that women have a “brake” and an “accelerator” and that they need to be aware of what hits them, in essence. She talks about “spectatoring” (thinking about yourself in a denigrating way during sex, effectively hitting your brake) and discusses how to love your body.

COME AS YOU ARE is an uplifting, celebrating, and positive book that all women should read. The ideas she puts forth are simple, and she includes worksheets and questions in the book that the reader can use to help them along their journey to better self awareness.

The author includes a chapter on anatomy, which is very thorough and should educate even the most sexually aware person! She also debunks the myths that women’s pleasure is secondary to men’s, or that the purpose of a female is just to procreate. Her message gives women power on every page.

Intertwined with Nagoski’s wisdom are 4 fictional women, each experiencing a different problem. As the book progresses, each woman’s relationship progresses, concurrent with what the author is saying. This way the reader can see how the principles are applied in real life.

What makes this book different from other self help books is that the solutions are put forth for both the mind and the body. It won’t matter if your sex drive is low or high, as the tenets will make many women feel better, both about themselves and about what they feel. Education goes a long way, and this is the author’s aim: to let women know they are normal, while teaching them why this is so. There can be no better message, especially in these times where the average female has a lot of negativity surrounding her. Every woman should read this book, then give it to their partner. There would be more happiness in the world if that occurred.

(Disclaimer: Listened to this on Audiotape only got to Chapter 4.) I put this down after chapter 4. Her "revolutionary" "ground-breaking" etc.. theory is that women have two parts of their brain dedicated to sexuality--the accelerator which makes you interested and the brakes which stop you from being interested.

Am I a genius so I'm the only person to whom this was obvious way before I read this book? Am I the only person who finds it unbelievably cliché to be told to get out a mirror and really examine your vagina? Here's a hint: if its been in Fried Green Tomatoes, its been done.

I really wanted to like her and to hear amazing theories about why women work the way they do sexually. This just rehashed what I already knew. Waste of my time.

A great book that busts the myths of women's sexuality and provides helpful suggestions on how to find pleasure and joy your way
Backed by close to 50 pages of footnotes and references.

Different from what I was expecting - in such a good way!

Those are some smart, sexy nerds. I learned, like, 3 new things today that I will remember tomorrow and a ton of stuff that is definitely over my head and will be escaping it shortly.

It's definitely not got an HEA or an HFN but I liked the ending, even though I am happily anticipating the followup.

A super insightful book, with several new twists on what "self care" really means and how to approach things in a way they can be completed. This book is definitely aimed at women, but could be beneficial for all people, a lot of the advice is universal.

Thought this was really insightful and obviously well researched. While it is marketed at women, it would be great if more men read it as I think societal thinking will only change if men push for it as well.

Listened to the audio book. I found the beginning of the book the best with the talk of the stress cycle and the difference between stress and stressors. Then it went off in a direction about body image and BMI. I really started to lose interest at that point. However, I feel this would be a good book for lots of women, it just didn't speak to me.

Very informative and well written in an engaging style that is easily understood. Explains mind and body interactions with in depth instruction on body parts and functions. The chapter on stress is a must read.

I read self-help books the way some people read detective novels - just something to relax with when I don't feel like thinking, something to flip a few pages of before bed... If the writing's not that good or it gets repetitive I go ahead & skim it, skip whole chapters, whatever. I don't do the worksheets or anything like that and I definitely don't try to improve myself in any way after reading them.

This isn't a review by the way, it's just me coming out as a person who enjoys the self-help genre as escapist entertainment. I can't be the only one.