Madeline’s Reviews > Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life > Status Update

“Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves. If we dare to say that we like ourselves as we are.”

Ex: showing up to dinner w friends and saying ‘I feel so beautiful today!’ would typically be seen as outlandish/narcissistic, but showing up and saying ‘I feel so fat today’ is totally normal

3 core cultural messages about women’s sexuality:

Moral: you are evil
Medical: you are diseased
Media: you are inadequate

“Hardly anyone fully buys into any one of these messages, but they are there, encroaching on our gardens. The better we are at seeing them for what they are, the better we’ll be at weeding them out.”

“If you want to have a healthy garden, a garden you choose, you have to go row by row and figure out what you want to keep or nurture and what you want to dig out and replace with something healthier. It is not fair that you have to do all that extra work. After all, you didn’t choose what got planted by your family or culture. No one asked for your permission before planting the toxic crap.”

- body shame

Idea of our minds/bodies being gardens + love being the water of life & sun being the stress/adversity, needing both in balance but some climates (contexts) and people (different gardens) need more water or more sun

“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 eachother. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened. Counterintuitively, when attachment is at its most secure, it can take a back seat in your sexual arrousability.”

“For everyone, stress changes the context in which you experience sexual response which changes your perception of sexual sensations. The key to managing stress so that it doesn’t interfere with sexual pleasure, is learning to complete the cycle, unlock freeze, escape the predator, conquer the enemy, celebrate, like glitter settling in a snow globe.”

“Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others registers in your stress response as completing the cycle.”

- texting a friend(s) when you’re sad after a hard day or stressful fight w family

- offering comfort to someone else when you’re stressed, diffusing your own stress by helping someone else

Affiliative stress response: dealing with potential threats by connecting affectionately with people

- being cuddled after a hard day or given physical/emotional comfort

- anoñe

Attachment style is an inescapable factor in sexual response & relationship satisfaction & it varies, not just from person to person but also from relationship to relationship. And it can change. Yet, these deep emotional patterns are not always tractable and sometimes require therapy. Many people, though, can make a great deal of progress by increasing their nonjudgmental awareness of their own emotional responses.

Co-survivor: the partner of survivors of sexual trauma/violence, who live with the aftermath/long lasting effects of their partners’ trauma and must help their partner cope, live with the history of abuse, and heal.

- not a lot of support for peeps in this position exists