Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 65 of 299 · 20 per page

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Merritt had believed all her life that orgasm was supposed to be easy, and that her struggle with it made her a freak. She believed that it was supposed to feel a certain way and have a certain effect. But she wanted to learn to trust herself, so that she could open the door wide to pleasure. So she stopped comparing her experience with her expectations and simply allowed her experience to be what it is. She just enjoyed the sex she was having instead of worrying about whether it was the sex she “should” be having. She created an environment of acceptance, where the parts of her mind that needed to worry, that needed to avoid something bad happening, could instead move toward something good. It took time. And practice. And positive nonjudging. Did it work? For her, it did. Merritt is a writer and she was raised religious, which might explain the email she sent me near the end of her don’t-have-an-orgasm-with-Carol experience. Or it might not. Lots of people start talking about God and spiritual experiences when they find their way to ecstasy. The language of mundane human experience, anatomy, physiology, even relationship doesn’t feel large enough to contain it. Anyway, this is what she wrote: No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that rock I’m clinging. Since Love is lord of heaven and Earth, How can I keep from singing? It’s from a hymn called “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Pete Seeger and Enya and many others have recorded it. It’s about what happens when you make contact with the peace at the center and core of yourself, which is the same peace at the center and core of the universe, and it resonates through you, like you’re a bell that’s ringing. That is what happens when you turn off all the offs and allow all the ons to focus on one shared goal: pleasure. tl;drOrgasms happen in your brain, not your genitals. Less than a third of women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone. The remaining 70+ percent are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic from penetration alone. The most common way for women to orgasm is from clitoral stimulation. And we are all normal. All orgasms are created equal. It doesn’t matter what stimulation generates them, the quality of an orgasm can only be determined by how much you enjoy it. To have bigger, better orgasms, turn off more of the offs, and turn on the ons more gradually. ninelove what’s trueTHE ULTIMATE SEX-POSITIVE CONTEXTLaurie and Johnny had tried all the tricks. But in the end, what made the difference was when Laurie chose pleasure—for herself.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I am a creature of evidence and method; I want to understand the brain mechanism underlying joy—and I found some science about that, don’t get me wrong. If you, too, need evidence, I’ve done all I can to offer it here. But the science can only lead us as far as to the edge of what is known. What I have learned in a quarter century as a sex educator is that joy is what happens when you jump off the edge of what is known, into the adventure of what is true. I’ve said it over and over in this book: Trust your body. Trust it so completely you’re willing to jump with it into the unknown. That jump is joy. tl;drThe most important thing you can do to have a great sex life is to welcome your sexuality as it is, right now—even if it’s not what you wanted or expected it to be. Letting go of old, bogus cultural standards requires a grieving process, going through the little monitor’s pit of despair. To facilitate that letting go, develop the skill of “nonjudging.” When you give yourself permission to be and feel whatever you are and feel, your body can complete the cycle, move through the tunnel, and come out to the light at the end. conclusionYOU ARE THE SECRET INGREDIENTSo what have we learned? We’ve learned that we’re all made of the same parts, organized in different ways—no two alike. That sexual response is the process of both turning on the ons and turning off the offs. That context—your environment and your mental state—influences how and when the ons and offs activate. We’ve learned that genital response and being “turned on” aren’t always the same thing. That desire can be spontaneous or responsive, and both are normal. That some women orgasm pretty reliably from intercourse, most don’t, both are normal, and neither is a bigger deal than you want it to be. Above all, we’ve learned that it’s not how your sexuality functions that determines whether your sex life is characterized by worry and distress… or by confidence and joy. It’s your capacity to welcome your sexuality as it is right now. To get there, we’ve discussed anatomy, physiology, behavioral and comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, health psychology, moral psychology, gender studies, media studies, and more. I’ve used metaphors, stories, my quarter century of experience as an educator, and a century or more of science. The depth and complexity of women’s sexuality demands all this, and more. why I wrote this bookLike many of you, I was taught all the wrong things as I was growing up. Then as I reached adulthood, I made all the mistakes. And I spent many years stumbling with unspeakably good fortune into settings where I could learn how to get it “right”—settings like the Kinsey Institute and one of only a handful of Ph.D. programs with a formal concentration in human sexuality.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  For Henry, sometimes just seeing Camilla walking around after a shower was all the pleasure it took to activate desire. He said, “And I like that! I like seeing her walking around all damp and naked. I wouldn’t want her to stop doing it just because I wasn’t turned on before I saw her. So… if the equivalent is true for you”—he turned to Camilla—“I don’t have to feel uncomfortable creating equivalent contexts for you, right?” “I want you to!” said Camilla. “Tease my ticking pilot light! Build up the water pressure!” So that’s what they decided to do. Henry turned everything into low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him. Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention. Like when they were first falling in love—a constant, steady stream of reminders that, “This guy is amazing!” Henry loves Camilla’s enthusiastic desire, and all it takes to get her there is enough pleasure, built up gradually. This is not a story we see very much in pop culture because it’s not about tension and ambivalence. But it turns out this is how it works for many couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term. good news! it’s probably not your hormonesIf you’re experiencing pain with sex, talk to a medical provider—there may well be hormonal issues involved, along with a variety of neurological and physiological factors. But if you’re experiencing low desire, hormones are the least likely culprits.5 Lori Brotto and her colleagues tested six hormonal factors to determine which predicted more or less dysfunction in women with low desire, and not one of them was significantly predictive of low desire.6 So if it’s not your hormones, what has the research found to be predictive of low desire? According to Brotto, “developmental history, psychiatric history, and psychosexual history.” In other words, all that stuff from chapters 4 and 5—stress, depression, anxiety, trauma, attachment, etc. People sometimes feel more comfortable with the idea that their sexual desire has everything to do with their chemistry and nothing to do with their life. After all, these days it’s easy to change your chemistry! But hormones are a small—often negligible—part of the context that shapes a woman’s sexual wellbeing, so changing them can make only a small—often negligible—impact. Stress, self-compassion, trauma history, relationship satisfaction, and other emotional factors have far more influence on a woman’s sexual desire than any hormone. If you sometimes experience low desire, unless there’s some medical issue interfering, chances are you don’t have to fix you—you’re not broken—you only have to change your context. It’s Not a Drive

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I know for sure that what I’ve written in this book can help you. It may not be enough to heal all the wounds inflicted on your sexuality by a culture in which it sometimes feels nearly impossible for a woman to “do” sexuality right, but it will provide powerful tools in support of your healing. How do I know? Evidence, of course! At the end of one semester, I asked my 187 students to write down one really important thing they learned in my class. Here’s a small sample of what they wrote: I am normal! I AM NORMAL I learned that everything is NORMAL, making it possible to go through the rest of my life with confidence and joy. I learned that I am normal! And I learned that some people have spontaneous desire and others have responsive desire and this fact helped me really understand my personal life. Women vary! And just because I do not experience my sexuality in the same way as many other women, that does not make me abnormal. Women’s sexual desire, arousal, response, etc., is incredibly varied. The one thing I can count on regarding sexuality is that people vary, a lot. That everyone is different and everything is normal; no two alike. No two alike! And many more. More than half of them wrote some version of “I am normal.” I sat in my office and read those responses with tears in my eyes. There was something urgently important to my students about feeling “normal,” and somehow my class had cleared a path to that feeling. The science of women’s sexual wellbeing is young, and there is much still to be learned. But this young science has already discovered truths about women’s sexuality that have transformed my students’ relationships with their bodies—and it has certainly transformed mine. I wrote this book to share the science, stories, and sex-positive insights that prove to us that, despite our culture’s vested interest in making us feel broken, dysfunctional, unlovely, and unlovable, we are in fact fully capable of confident, joyful sex. The promise of Come as You Are is this: No matter where you are in your sexual journey right now, whether you have an awesome sex life and want to expand the awesomeness, or you’re struggling and want to find solutions, you will learn something that will improve your sex life and transform the way you understand what it means to be a sexual being. And you’ll discover that, even if you don’t yet feel that way, you are already sexually whole and healthy. The science says so. I can prove it. part 1the (not-so-basic) basicsoneanatomyNO TWO ALIKEOlivia likes to watch herself in the mirror when she masturbates. Like many women, Olivia masturbates lying on her back and rubbing her clitoris with her hand. Unlike many women, she props herself up on one elbow in front of a full-length mirror and watches her fingers moving in the folds of her vulva.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  He said, “I understand that genital response doesn’t tell me what turns you on. You tell me what turns you on, and I believe you. But what I don’t understand is how you get turned on without first wanting the thing that turns you on.” Which is maybe the most complex—and controversial—element of sexual wellbeing. The answer to Henry’s question is: Pleasure comes first—before desire, that is. And desire is the subject of chapter 7. tl;drBlood flow to the genitals is response to sex-related stimuli (learning), which is not the same thing as liking or wanting, much less consent. Men and women seem to be different in the concordance of their genital response and subjective arousal. But, as in every other chapter, this difference between women and men doesn’t mean women are broken; it’s means they’re women. Arousal nonconcordance is not a symptom of anything; it’s just a normal part of how sex works sometimes. If you need lube, use lube! The best way to tell if someone is aroused is not to notice what their genitals are doing, but to listen to their words. sevendesireSPONTANEOUS, RESPONSIVE, AND MAGNIFICENTIt’s a basic fact of their relationship that Olivia wants sex more often than Patrick does, so she ends up initiating most of the time. But Olivia’s experience of being the target of Patrick’s placebo-powered rampant lust the previous night had given her a powerful insight: It had felt good to be open to sex, without feeling driven to have sex. It had felt good to allow sexual desire to pull her gradually and gently toward sex, rather than feeling like it was pushing her. So, as the next step in their experiment, they tried flipping their usual dynamic on its head. They set a “date night” and then didn’t do anything to prepare; they just showed up that night in their usual states of mind—Olivia ready to go, Patrick not disinterested, but not actively interested either. And they made Olivia follow her partner’s lead, while Patrick started to explore what kinds of things he could do to shift himself into active interest. They spent a lot of time “preheating the oven”: kissing and talking and massaging—and, surprisingly, a little adventure, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen to feed each other. When Patrick was in charge with full permission to do whatever occurred to him, they tried new things and played together. They learned a lot about what context worked for Patrick, because he had to create that context, had to ask for what felt right. They learned a surprising thing about Olivia, too: When she stayed still enough to move at Patrick’s pace rather than her own naturally faster pace, the gradual buildup and the sustained arousal and the necessity of holding herself back created a context that wasn’t just as good as the context that worked for her. It was unbelievably better.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name. (30:4) Our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name. (33:21) Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name! (97:12) Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. (103:1) Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. (105:3) Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise. (106:47) My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever. (145:21) If God’s name is holy, as those prayers continually proclaim, what exactly is the precise content of that holiness? I begin my search for the meaning and content of God’s “holiness” or “hallowedness” with Leviticus 19. Why? Because it opens with God telling Moses: “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (19:2). The rest of that chapter multiplies examples of what we must do to be holy, but, because (from that opening verse) God is our model for holiness, they must also indicate—with all due respect—how God is holy. As we saw in the last chapter, the divine Householder is a model for the human householder or, as the Lord’s Prayer says, “on earth as in heaven.” One preliminary comment about Leviticus 19 before I focus on God’s holiness as reflected in our own and on how that helps us understand “hallowed be your name” in the Lord’s Prayer. That chapter is from the Holiness Code of Israel’s Priestly tradition. It is therefore no surprise that, unlike the prophetic tradition, seen in Chapter 1, this Priestly tradition resolutely refuses to separate ritual action from distributive justice. Ritual with a God of justice creates and empowers—by interactive covenant—a people of justice. How, then, is divine and human holiness interpreted in Leviticus 19? First, continuing from that opening command to be holy as God is holy, the chapter repeatedly reminds us of that divine model—with three refrains: I am the Lord. (8 times: 19:12, 14, 16, 18, 28, 30, 32, 37) I am the Lord your God. (6 times: 19:3, 4, 10, 25, 31, 34) I am the L ord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. (1 time: 19:36) We are never allowed to forget divine holiness as a model—or better, empowerment—for human holiness. But notice especially that climactic identification of God as the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (19:36). God is the Deliverer, Redeemer, and Savior of the oppressed.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  WE HAVE JUST SEEN that example parables are well known in the biblical tradition before Jesus—with paragraph-length, chapter-length, and even book-length versions. That answers affirmatively this chapter’s second question and brings me to its third question. Are example parables the best model for Jesus’s parables—for some, most, or all of them? I do not ask, by the way, whether there are positive or negative examples in the parables of Jesus, but were such examples their primary focus, purpose, and intention? If Mark thinks of Jesus’s parables as riddle parables, Luke thinks of them as example parables, and he has been much more successful than Mark in making that understanding normative for most of later Christian interpretation. Luke’s example parables are models of how God or Jesus does or does not act. They can also be models of how we should or should not act. Their theme is: “Go and do—or do not do—likewise.” Think, for example, of the three parables in Luke 15. That chapter opens like this: “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’” (15:1–2). The three parables that follow are examples that illustrate and justify the actions of Jesus and thereby refute and negate the accusations of his opponents. They are everyday examples metaphorically and microcosmically supporting what Jesus is doing and opposing what his critics are saying. The first two parables are a deliberate pair. The parable of the Lost Sheep uses an example from male experience, and the parable of the Lost Coin is taken from female experience: Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (15:4–7) Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. (15:8–10) Those are stories of finding a lost article, whether it is a sheep by a man outside the house or a coin by a woman inside it. Once found, of course, the items are no longer lost—hence communal rejoicing is the appropriate response from all concerned.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Sex that brings you closer to your partner “advances the plot,” as opposed to gratuitous sex, for no reason other than that you can. To have more and better sex, give yourself a compelling reason to have sex, something important to move toward. fivecultural contextA SEX-POSITIVE LIFE IN A SEX-NEGATIVE WORLDWhen Johnny and Laurie took my advice and stopped having sex, something unexpected cracked open inside Laurie. They cuddled and snuggled a few minutes at bedtime each night, without the awkward are-we-going-to-have-sex-tonight anxiety. Into that silence one night, Laurie asked Johnny why he liked having sex with her. He gave such a good answer. He said, “Because you’re beautiful.” He didn’t say, “Because you look beautiful” or “Because you’re my wife” or “Because sex is fun” or even “Because I love you.” He said, “You are beautiful.” It’s a perfect thing to say—not least because he really, really meant it. Laurie being Laurie, she burst into tears. Until that moment, she had not realized how much self-criticism she was carrying with her every day, how much shame she felt about the ways her body had changed since she had the baby, as if those changes reflected some moral failing on her part—as if a truly “good person” would never allow her body to be changed by a paltry thing like having a baby. She started listing all the things she felt uncomfortable with—her droopy boobs, her squishy tummy, her cottage-cheesy thighs, the deepening wrinkles that bracketed her mouth—a mouth that seemed to have a permanent frown now. And Johnny started touching each and every one of these “imperfect” body parts, saying, “I love that, though” and “but this is beautiful.” At last he looked into her eyes and said, “You really don’t see it. You really believe this stuff makes you less beautiful. Honey, your body gets sexier every day, just by being the body of the woman I share my life with. Your belly is our belly. I’ve got one too. Do you love me less for it?” “Of course not.” “Exactly, of course not.” And of course what happened next is they had totally mind-blowing sex—made all the more mind-blowing by the whispers of, “We aren’t supposed to be doing this!” It turns out the pressure of what she’s “supposed” to be doing works both ways. When Laurie told me about this, she began by asking me if it was true that men weren’t as bothered by body changes as women think they are. “Yeah, I’ve heard that over and over from men,” I told her, “especially from coparenting men. They don’t notice the changes we notice, or they notice and it doesn’t change how they feel, or they notice and they actively like it. We underestimate men.” And so she told me her “you’re beautiful” story, emphasizing that throughout the whole encounter she never felt like he was initiating sex. It just felt like he was giving her love at a moment when she needed it.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  A small study of women using vibrators as part of sex therapy found that women varied a great deal in their response to the vibrator and had a wide range of feelings about the experience.26 Initial resistance (“I should be able to orgasm without having to use a ‘tool’ ”) and concerns about whether vibrator use somehow disrupts sexual connection with a partner (“Am I cheating on him with it?”) often gave way to a sense of freedom and exploration. While there was a great deal of variety, even in a sample of only seventeen women, the overall experience was a new kind of pleasure and opening up their perspective on the idea of sexual autonomy. You’ll recognize the worry that it’s not “natural” as the “sanctity” moral foundation that I described in chapter 5. The idea that there’s a pure, good, natural way to have an orgasm and a wrong, bad, unnatural way to have an orgasm is a cultural pigeonholing of experience shaped by those three messages—Moral, Medical, and Media—from chapter 5. The concern people most often bring to me about vibrators is that they’ll get “addicted” to them, but it doesn’t happen. Here’s what does happen: Orgasm with vibrators occurs relatively quickly for many women because a vibrator provides such a high intensity of stimulation. And some women get very comfortable with how quickly they orgasm with their vibrator, which leads them to forget how long it took without the vibrator. And when they get frustrated by how long that takes, the frustration makes it take even longer. But by this point in the chapter, you probably know the answer to this problem: frustration = impatient little monitor. So change the goal, change the effort, change the criterion velocity. Pleasure, not orgasm, is the goal. If it takes five minutes, that’s five minutes of pleasure. Hooray! If it takes thirty minutes, that’s thirty minutes of pleasure! Also hooray! ecstatic orgasm: you’re a flock!Orgasms can certainly happen in subideal or even adverse contexts—but the brain-melting, toe-curling, turn-the-stars-into-rainbows type of orgasm happens only in a spectacularly good context. And what exactly is that context? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to this question: Why would wearing socks make it easier to have an orgasm? Some students asked me this while I was eating lunch and chatting with them. Brittany and Tiffany and I were talking about sex science, as usual. “Huh?” I said through a mouthful of salad. “I read about it on the internet. Socks make it easier to orgasm,” Brittany said. “Oh! Well, if you read it on the internet, it must be true,” I joked. “No, I read it, too!” said Tiffany. “I think it was a real thing. I’ll find it and send you the link.” She did, and it was true… kind of. It turns out putting on socks made it easier for research participants to orgasm while masturbating in a brain imaging machine.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Armed with the decision to start paying attention just to what it feels like, Laurie went to a weekend mindfulness retreat called something like Awakening the Feminine Divine. She practiced yoga and slept nine hours a night. She ate mindfully. She breathed mindfully. She shared her feelings with strangers, made new friends, and found a renewed sense that she was not alone in her struggles. And, let me just emphasize this, because Laurie would want me to: She slept nine hours a night. She focused for twenty-one hours (the time she wasn’t sleeping) on really noticing what it felt like to be alive and move through the world. And she came back a new woman. “I can’t be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love if I can’t even be a source of joy for myself,” she announced. “And what I want, more than anything, is to be a source of joy in the lives of the people I love.” “Wait a second, Johnny and I and everyone else who loves you, we’ve all been saying that for months,” I said. “What did they do to you at that retreat?” “I stood in the Divine Gaze of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Auspiciousness, and I felt my own power and beauty,” she recited seriously. Then she cracked a grin and said, “You’ll probably tell me that’s just a metaphor for activating something or other in my mesolimbic whatever, but I don’t give a damn about the science. It frickin’ worked.” This chapter is about the science Laurie doesn’t give a damn about. It frickin’ works. Here we are in the final chapter. So far we’ve learned that in some important ways your sexual response may not follow the “standard narrative” of sexual functioning: You may have more or less sensitive brakes and a more or less sensitive accelerator. Your genital response may not predict your subjective experience of being “turned on.” Your sexual desire may emerge in response to pleasure, rather than in anticipation of pleasure. All of which may come as a surprise if you’re among the 10–20 percent of women whose sexual response is similar to the “standard narrative.” (We also learned that people, especially women, vary widely from each other and change substantially across their life spans.) Which brings me to confidence and joy. “Confidence and joy” is a phrase I’ve used a lot for many years, but it didn’t become the core of my work until, one semester, a student raised her hand in the middle of a lecture and said, “Wait, Emily. Could you please define those terms? What are confidence and joy?” “Uh…” I said. “Let me get back to you.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Second, though there wasn’t much she could do to reduce the actual stressors in her life, she reduced her stress by taking more deliberate effort to decompress and complete the stress response cycles that life activated. She let herself cry. She slowed down her showers, paid attention to the sensation of the water on her skin, and instead of slapping on body lotion like she was greasing a loaf pan, she paid attention to how nice it felt and how healthy her skin was. As she exercised, she visualized her stress as that orange monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoon—the one Bugs gives a manicure—and imagines herself running away from the monster, through her front door, and into Johnny’s arms. She started experiencing the discharge of stress as pleasurable—or at least not a source of suffering. And finally, she became much gentler with herself when she noticed herself being self-critical about her body or feeling guilty about pleasure. She didn’t say to herself, “Stop it!” She just thought, “Yup. There are the self-critical thoughts again.” She practiced nonjudgment. Perhaps these three changes would not have lasted as they have if it weren’t for Johnny recognizing the opportunity in all of this. Once he clicked onto the idea of turning off her offs, he started noticing more and more things he could do to help Laurie let go of the brakes. Sometimes it was a simple thing like doing the dishes and wiping down the kitchen counters. Sometimes it was, “Let’s take a night off of worry ing about whether we’re going to have sex and just lie together and talk.” Sometimes it was setting up a date night with plenty of time for her to unwind. Higher-desire partners might think, “She should just be able to want it as much as I do!” They have negative feelings about their partner’s sexual feelings. But Johnny realized it’s not about just wanting sex, it’s about creating a context—really, it’s about creating a life—that makes space for both people’s needs. He brought a sense of curiosity to the puzzle of turning off the offs. He brought a sense of wonder to the surprising way Laurie’s sexuality can spring and blossom from fallow winter ground. He brought a sense of awe to the ecstatic way her passion overflows the garden walls, under the loving warm rain and sun of the right context. Joy is the hard part. As a matter of fact, even writing this chapter about joy has been the hardest part of writing this book. Joy isn’t obvious or simple. It isn’t a destination you arrive at and it isn’t “the journey.” It’s how you feel about your journey toward your truest erotic self. You are allowed to love your sexuality as it is right now, even—especially—if it’s not what somebody else says it “should” be.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And then she started having sex, and eventually even liking it! So she opened up a new area on the map, explored new territory. She created space for the idea of sex as recreation, a fun thing to do on a Friday night, as long as X-Files wasn’t on. She redrew the map to allow for both being smart and enjoying sex as a source of pleasure, but still she was navigating through a fairly narrow band of terrain. It was only when she met the man she would eventually marry that she began experiencing sex as something through which she could discover human connection and a deeper pleasure than mere entertainment, a pleasure connected to her personhood.3 This was a whole new map, which included terrain she had never known existed—though it had been there the whole time, unexplored. She’s been with the same partner for decades and has had many of the same pleasures and struggles that so many women experience in long-term relationships. And while I had the great good fortune of becoming a sex educator, she had the good fortune of having a sex educator for a sister, so she could be among the women who called me or emailed me to say, “Is this normal?” She’s like a lot of women—context-sensitive desire and nonconcordant arousal. And so, like a lot of women, she sent my blog posts to her husband and said, “This! See?” We’re an example of how even genetically identical gardens, planted with very similar seeds, may still grow into very different terrains. It turns out she’s got slightly more sensitive brakes than I do, and I’ve got a slightly more sensitive accelerator. So perhaps the Media Message was a slightly better fit for my native sexuality and the Moral Message a slightly better fit for Amelia’s, and so different ideas took root and grew. For both of us, by the time we began having sex with partners, we had some set ideas about what that experience was supposed to be like. And both us of, like nearly all women, went through a time of realizing how poorly prepared we were and then relearning what it meant to be a sexual woman. For both of us, education about the science of sexual wellbeing helped us draw maps that better represent our sexual terrains, which in turn allowed us to communicate about our sexual wellbeing more effectively 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 it was our willingness to believe our own internal experience, even when it didn’t match what we thought we “should” be experiencing, that empowered us to embrace that science—the science in this book.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  But what science can’t give you is permission to experience ecstatic pleasure. In the end, that’s the key to spectacular orgasms. And only you can give you that. Science can’t tell you how to feel about your orgasms. Science can tell you only that how you feel about your orgasms changes your orgasms. Science can tell you that feeling shame, judgment, frustration, and fear about orgasm will diminish your orgasmic experience, while acceptance, welcoming, confidence, and joy will expand your orgasmic experience. Science can tell you that your brain is like a collective of desires, and the more the collective collaborates, the more of you can move toward ecstasy. But not one word of that science makes you more or less entitled to the pleasure of your own skin and mind and heart. Your orgasms belong to you, and all the science in the world can’t make you more delighted with them or more afraid of them or more curious about them. The science can’t do that. Only you can do that. You were born entitled to all the pleasure your body can feel. You were born entitled to pleasure in whatever way your body receives it, in whatever contexts afford it, and in whatever quantities you want it. Your pleasure belongs to you, to share or keep as you choose, to explore or not as you choose, to embrace or avoid as you choose. So, if you wanted to, how would you find your way to ecstasy? How would you get all the birds flying together in the same direction? Patience, practice, and a sex-positive context. You already know how to create a sex-positive context. And you understand how to build patience—by training your little monitor to make sure you’ve got the right goal, the right kind and quantity of effort, and the right criterion velocity. Which leaves us with the “practice” part. Practice what? Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how: The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm— stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort—need to be taken seriously and have their needs met. They need to be respected and treated like the sleepy hedgehog from chapter 4. Be kind and gentle with each of the offs, listen to what they need in order to feel satisfied, and then satisfy them. Go back to your context worksheets: What hits your brakes? Consider the things in your environment and also your own thoughts and feelings. What context do you need in order to turn off those offs?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The short answer to this question, as well as the reason the story of Luther is unlike any other, is that he felt that after tremendous and agonized searching he finally—by God’s grace—had found that thing for which every human since Eden had pined. He had found the hermeneutical lever with which the whole world could be raised to the height of heaven. This had been the principal problem of all humanity—how to bridge the infinite abyss between imperfect mankind and a perfect God, between earth and heaven, between death and life. And Luther’s discovery was that this problem had been solved by the promised Messiah of the Jews fifteen hundred years before. In its way, the discovery was more a rediscovery. And it all amounted to only this: by simple faith one could accept God’s diagnosis and solution to the otherwise insoluble problem, and at the moment one did this, the problem was instantly solved. After wandering in the wilderness for centuries, the people of God could be led by this new Moses into the Promised Land. Luther further came to see that to do anything but accept this notion as itself utterly sufficient would be to whistle past the graveyard. It would be to behave as though we might in some way add to what God had already done, which would itself destroy our ability to benefit from it. So like some madman—and yet one who understood he had unaccountably been given the honor of great knowledge—he dedicated every subsequent second of his life and spent every calorie of energy available to spreading these world-changing tidings. He did it fearlessly, too, but not because he was traditionally brave; rather, because in this discovery, he had also come to see that death itself had been soundly and forever defeated and that this was in fact the central point of what he was saying. So taken together, Martin Luther’s is as dramatic a tale from history as one can discover, and as one should expect, its ramifications in history and for us today are similarly dramatic. How it was that Martin Luther came to rediscover this greatest of good news and how he then spent his life publishing it abroad in the wide world is the story that follows. CHAPTER ONEBeyond the MythsTHERE IS NO beginning to the story of Martin Luther. This is because in telling the genuinely extraordinary story of a genuinely extraordinary human being, one immediately stumbles over two perfect conundrums, both of which make a clean beginning impossible. One is calendric, and the other is so odd that it can hardly help seeming more than coincidental.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WritingLuther’s room at the Wartburg contained a tiled oven for warmth, a simple desk and chair, of which he made ample use, and one especially curious object, likely a gift from Frederick, via Spalatin, though any letter in which it is referenced has been lost. It was the gargantuan vertebra of a whale, doubtless from the remains of a cetacean that had beached or washed up someplace very far away, probably on the coast of the North Sea. Whale bones were at that time prized for their healing powers, and one assumes that because Luther complained so regularly of the various maladies affecting him, Spalatin had found it and sent it along as a happy surprise and encouragement. And how could Luther help to have been cheered by something as outrageous and singular as this colossal white bone from a leviathan that once swam endless miles beneath the waves of a distant sea? Luther had never seen the ocean, and never would in his life, so the exotic quality of the object must have been all the greater. One assumes Luther put his feet upon it as he sat at his desk during the endless hours he spent there writing and writing.* The amount of writing Luther did during what would stretch to ten months in the lofty castle beggars the imagination. To be fair, there was little else he could do while he was there. He was unable to regale his friends in person and unable to lecture and preach several times per week as he used to do. Before his tonsure and beard had grown out, he was even unable to walk anyplace beyond the courtyard of the castle, nor could he even do this much for fear of appearing aimless and drawing attention to himself with the other knights there. Whatever he did, he mustn’t appear outside his room with a book. That would be a dead giveaway that he wasn’t a knight at all, for books were such newfangled objects at that time that they weren’t so easily come by, and few noble knights would spend their time with one. Eventually, Luther would be able now and again to take horse rides through the forests that stretched in every direction, but always with a servant or two alongside who must scour the woods for trouble. He was even allowed to walk on the forested paths around the Wartburg to pick strawberries—something he had done as a youth not far from there while in Eisenach with his relatives—but always accompanied by the two noble pages entrusted to him by Berlepsch. But because Luther really had little at all that he must do, he leaped headlong into the opportunity to scratch ink onto paper and wrote furiously, accomplishing more in his ten months of seclusion than many writers do in a lifetime.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Kathie was an energetic, bright, and eminently resourceful person. Their marriage was duly and officially consummated on the night of June 13, and already in October Kathie was showing early signs of pregnancy. They would have six children. But the idea that a monk and a nun were to have a child together struck many as tempting fate. Surely God would show his displeasure for their unholy union, but how? Just what ungodly freak would spring from this dark coupling? Would their child be a monster like the Papal Ass or the Monk’s Calf—or like the headless child supposed to be born in Wittenberg in the previous year? In fact, the most prevalent rumor that circulated in Saxony at that time was that the product of any such union must be a two-headed horror. On June 7, 1526, Luther’s first son was born, happily lacking a second head. Luther could not contain his joy at his first child’s birth, and the very next day he wrote to his friend Johannes Rühel in Eisleben, where Johannes Agricola also lived at that time: Please tell Master Eisleben [Johannes Agricola] on my behalf, that yesterday, on the day which is called Dat* at two o’clock, my dear Kathie, by God’s grace, gave to me a Hansen Luther. Tell him not to be surprised that I approach him with such news, for he should bear in mind what it is to have sun* at this time of year. Please greet your dear sun-bearer, and Eisleben’s Else. I commend you herewith to God. Amen. Just as I am writing this, my weak Kathie is asking for me. Martin Luther23 They named him Hans, after his godfather Johannes Bugenhagen and also after Luther’s own father, Johannes, who was also called Hans. In the child’s first years, however, he would be called Hänschen, the diminutive version of the name. The child was baptized a mere two hours after he emerged from his mother’s womb. CHAPTER EIGHTEENErasmus, Controversy, MusicErasmus is an eel. —Martin Luther

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. St. Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues.18 Luther clearly wished to bring the good news of Christ into every aspect of the world so that the leaven of the Gospel could touch everything, as it was meant to do. As the nineteenth-century Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper had said, “There is not one square inch in all of creation over which Jesus Christ does not say ‘mine!’”19 So everything would be redeemed, including the desire of the common man and woman to sing. But Luther had a very practical consideration in this too. He knew that the best way to inculcate the truths of Scripture into the minds of every man, woman, and child was to put good doctrine into musical forms. If they heard things preached from the pulpit and had them reinforced by their own readings of Scripture and their readings of Luther’s catechisms, that was all well and good. But how wonderful it would be if all of that was further reinforced in congregational hymns. However, there had been no new hymns for many centuries, so Luther was in a hurry to create some. He wrote many of them himself. But he also cast his net far and wide for assistance in this grand project. At the end of 1523, Luther wrote to Spalatin, asking for help in translating some psalms into hymns:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Odder far than the idea that these marriages were consummated before the weddings was the idea that they must be consummated in full view of a witness. So after the small ceremony, the couple were escorted to their bedroom in the cloister, where Jonas did the curious honors, watching the two become one flesh literally and figuratively. He wept to see it, knowing the huge significance of it all on every level. There was often an observation deck above the bed, though this detail seems not to have been observed in this case. It seems more likely that Jonas simply stood someplace in the room, silently beseeching the Lord of hosts not to abandon him to a coughing fit or sneeze. From our vantage point, this scenario cubes whatever ideas we have concerning awkwardness, but for those in Luther’s day who were not prudes about the facts of life, and who considered the marriage bed not less than holy, and who saw in the physical union of man and woman a living picture of the union between the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and his Bride, the church, it was a real place and real time where heaven bowed down to kiss the earth, where alpha embraced omega, and where the dewy newness of Eden was rediscovered. And out of this came that which was impossible, the bounteous miracle of life itself. “Yesterday,” Jonas wrote to a friend, “I was present and saw the bridegroom on the bridal bed—I could not suppress my tears at the sight.”11 In the morning, Kathie—already leaping into her role as lady of the house—provided breakfast for the handful of guests. Presumably at Cranach’s suggestion, the city council presented the young couple with no small amount of wine for this meal. There was a gallon of Rhine wine, a gallon of sweet Madeira, and one and a half gallons of Franconia wine. No one knows why Melanchthon was not invited to the June 13 ceremony, but we do know he disapproved of the marriage, so perhaps Luther intuited this and wished to spare himself and his friend the emotions of their disagreement. Nonetheless, Melanchthon was upset not to have been invited or notified. Our only record of his pique is in a letter three days later to his friend Camerarius, which was cryptically written in Greek:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Thus a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Hereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “Righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.5 This is the earthshaking insight that gave Luther the solidest of all foundations in Scripture upon which to base what may well be reckoned the greatest revolution in human history. But by jesting in 1532 that it happened in that most humbling and humiliating of places—“upon the toilet”—Luther made it a perfect illustration of his theological foundation. That is because it is in keeping with everything he knew about the incarnated God of the Bible. The specific point here is that the infinite and omniscient and omnipotent creator God of heaven did not descend to earth on a golden cloud. He came to us through screaming pain, through the bloody agony of a maiden’s vagina, in a cattle stall filthy with and stinking of dung. This is how humans enter the world, and if God would enter the world as a human being, he must enter it that way. It was the only way to reach us where we are and as we are, and because of his love for us he did not shrink from this approach, vile and difficult as it must be.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor. That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and by crying out for God’s help, we do all we can by acknowledging our helplessness. At this point—in which our faith acknowledges the truth of our situation—we are instantly clothed with the righteousness of God. And it is now our gratitude to God for this free gift of his righteousness and salvation that makes us want to please him with our good works. We do them not out of grievous and legalistic duty or out of a hope to earn his favor but out of sheer gratitude for the favor we already have. Our service to him is redeemed and transmuted into a free servitude. That is the power of faith in Christ. All that is base and dead can be redeemed by faith unto glory and life. Luther summed it up in this typically colorful image. “Is this not a joyous exchange,” he asks, “the rich, noble, pious bridegroom Christ takes this poor, despised wicked little whore in marriage, redeems her of all evil, and adorns her with all his goods?” Paul and Augustine might never have put it that way, but their theology implies it not merely strongly but inevitably and irresistibly and inescapably. Thus this foundational theological idea is the infinitely fecund soil out of which the whole world grows for Luther. If we as hell-bound sinners are redeemed wholly, then every ugly and vile thing in this world can be transformed and redeemed. So all that is in this world—including our bodies and every corporeal activity, including our sexuality—far from being things that must be escaped or transcended through our pious efforts, are things to be fully accepted with our open arms, and then with God’s open arms they are fully redeemed. All things, rather than be lost forever or discarded away into despised oblivion, are joyously and in every aspect redeemed unto God’s eternal glory. Eventually, this period of riotous productivity would end. The new emperor would finally turn his attention to Germany, and Rome would once again resume its furious efforts to catch the wild boar that had been cavorting so destructively in the pope’s delicate vineyards. CHAPTER NINEThe Bull Against LutherBecause you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you! —Martin Luther, upon burning the papal bull