Emily Nagoski > Quotes

“Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.”
― Emily Nagoski

“I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire but not subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because those bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don’t already have.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“The moral of the story is: We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“when sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men’s sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to “relieve their sexual frustrations” facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particular—with their 75 percent spontaneous desire—need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself. Because if sex is a drive, like hunger, then potential partners are like food. Or like animals to be hunted for food.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“The good news is that stress is not the problem. The problem is that the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors. To be “well” is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else's opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it's been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they're trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they're saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body. It could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts. But instead, the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body. You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to. I am pissed, on your behalf, at the world for that lie. And I’m working to create a world that doesn’t lie to women about their bodies anymore.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“So how much rest is “adequate”?

Science says: 42 percent.

That’s the percentage of time your body and brain need you to spend resting. It’s about ten hours out of every twenty-four. It doesn’t have to be every day; it can average out over a week or a month or more. But yeah. That much.

“That’s ridiculous! I don’t have that kind of time!” you might protest—and we remind you that we predicted you might feel that way, back at the start of the chapter.

We’re not saying you should take 42 percent of your time to rest; we’re saying if you don’t take the 42 percent, the 42 percent will take you. It will grab you by the face, shove you to the ground, put its foot on your chest, and declare itself the victor.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“But women aren’t broken versions of men; they’re women.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Healing hurts. If you break your leg, there is no stage in the healing process when your leg feels better than it does after it has healed. There is pain and itching and loss of strength. From the moment your leg is broken, it continues to feel bad … until, gradually, it starts to feel less bad. It's appropriate that it hurts.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“It’s true that rest makes us more productive, ultimately, and if that’s an argument that helps you persuade your boss to give you more flexibility, awesome. But we think rest matters not because it makes you more productive, but because it makes you happier and healthier, less grumpy, and more creative. We think rest matters because you matter. You are not here to be “productive.” You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy. And to do that, you require rest.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, 'Exercise is good for stress,' that is for realsie real.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“The problem isn’t the desire itself, it’s the context. You need more sexually relevant stimuli activating the accelerator and fewer things hitting the brake.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong too, try something else. Forever. This”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“The belief that the people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called "trust.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others. Self-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we’re doing well and when we’re struggling—because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.23”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“The problem is not that women don’t try. On the contrary, we’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Remind yourself that the day you were born, your body was a cause for celebration, for love without condition, and that’s just as true today as it was then.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“It’s not about weight or size or fat—weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else—it’s about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Here’s the short version of how to practice mindfuless: 1. Start with two minutes. For two minutes a day, direct your attention to your breath: the way the air comes into your body and your chest and belly expand, and the way the breath leaves your body and your chest and belly deflate. 2. The first thing that will happen is your mind will wander to something else. That’s normal. That’s healthy. That’s actually the point. Notice that your mind wandered, let those extraneous thoughts go—you can return to them as soon as the two minutes are up—and allow your attention to return to your breath. 3. Noticing that your mind wandered and then returning your attention to your breath is the real work of mindfulness. It’s not so much about paying attention to your breath as it is about noticing what you’re paying attention to without judgment, and making a choice about whether you want to pay attention to it. What you’re “mindful” of is both your breath and your attention to your breath. By practicing this skill of noticing what you’re paying attention to, you are teaching yourself to be in control of your brain, so that your brain is not in control of you. This regular two-minute practice will gradually result in periodic moments throughout the day when you notice what you’re paying attention to and then decide if that’s what you want to pay attention to right now, or if you want to pay attention to something else. What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention. This is a sideways strategy for weeding trauma out of your garden. It’s a way of simply noticing a weed and then deciding if you want to water it or not, pull it or not, fertilize it or not. The weed of trauma will gradually disappear as long as at least half the time you choose not to nurture it. And the more you choose to withdraw your protection from the trauma, the faster it will wither and die. Mindfulness is good for everyone and everything. It is to your mind what exercise and green vegetables are to your body. If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two-minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to “cultivate deep respect for emotions,” differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Treat cultural messages about sex and your body like a salad bar. Take only the things that appeal to you and ignore the rest. We’ll all end up with a different collection of stuff on our plates, but that’s how it’s supposed to work. It goes wrong only when you try to apply what you picked as right for your sexuality to someone else’s sexuality.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life

“Relax your belly. It’s supposed to be round. The Bikini Industrial Complex has been gaslighting you.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“Rest is, quite simply, when you stop using a part of you that’s used up, worn out, damaged, or inflamed, so that it has a chance to renew itself.”
― Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

“If you’re anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.”
― Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life