Instead of desire being the north star for people in long-term relationships, she advocates that pleasure be the measure of a good time in bed – that is, asking yourself whether you like the sex you’re having, without orgasms being a KPI.
Most people will agree that pleasure may be hard to access if you’re busy worrying about whether your sexual desire for someone is going to show up. If desire is stubbornly elusive, you might find yourself irritated – at your partner for not stoking it in you or at yourself for not being stoked. And irritation inhibits pleasure.
Nagoski describes pleasure as “sensation in context”, explaining that when we are stressed or frustrated, angry or afraid, our brain interprets a sensation differently. When this happens, something that might feel good in one context suddenly doesn’t feel so good. Think of being tickled when you’re annoyed, compared to being tickled when you’re feeling playful, for example.
If something hits your sexual brakes when you’re getting intimate, Nagoski suggests being transparent about it with your partner, or partners, by saying: “I want to be here, I’m glad to be here, this thing just happened, and I need your help moving through it”.
That can be hard when we don’t want to hurt a partner’s feelings but, she tells me, “Eroticism can explode [when] you are exposing vulnerable emotions together, instead of being afraid and hiding it.”
Making pleasure the measure of sexual success liberates you from worrying whether desire will RSVP to the party. “Choosing to be with someone long-term means they’re always going to be there, and that may not be a great context for spontaneous desire. But it is a great context for pleasure,” Nagoski says.
In Come Together, she suggests that if the seven primary emotions – rage, panic/grief, fear, play, seeking, care and lust – were rooms in a house, there are some rooms from which it is harder to access pleasure and get into the “lust” space.
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The longer you’re with someone, the more likely you’ll experience times with them where you are in the pleasure-adverse rooms. It’s part of the deal of sharing your life with someone, for better or worse.
For many people, it’s hard to get to lust from fear, for example. Perhaps you’re worried about work or your kid getting a hard time at school. Or maybe your partner did something irritating that sent you barrelling into the rage room. It could even be what Nagoski calls a “floating niggle”, like constantly leaving their shoes in doorways for you to trip over. These things aren’t serious, but they can make it harder to get to lust, and you might have to go through another room first (just watch for the shoes in the doorway).
The key is understanding which rooms make it easier for you to access pleasure. Do you find it less effort to get to “lust” if you’ve been enjoying play with your partner by travelling or enjoying a hobby together? Or do you find it easier to access lust when you’ve been feeling cared for?
Mapping our emotional floor plans and pleasure contexts can mitigate the impact of the desire imperative on our sex lives, freeing us to access pleasure more readily and consciously.
“The primary cultural barrier to abandoning the desire imperative is pleasure-shame,” Nagoski says. “We talk about guilty pleasures all the time – when do we talk about pleasures that are not guilty? Can we talk about pleasure in a permissive and nurturing way?”
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