Women's Come As You Are Analysis

Understanding a women’s libido is something people have been wanting to understand for decades. For a long time, women weren’t thought to have any desire and it was only men who wanted to enjoy sex. Women wanting sex for reproduction was the main idea. In Chapter 2 of Dr. Emily Nagoski, Ph.D.’s Come as You Are, she discusses the different spectrum women experience with their sexual desirers’. A huge discussion in this chapter is about a women’s accelerator and break. This is the metaphor Dr. Nagoski uses to describe turn on and turn offs. When she discusses this topic throughout the chapter she is using accelerator as the turn ons and the breaks as the turn offs. Women tend to be more sensitive break operators, which is why they tend not to desire sexual acts as much as men. The last part of this
This concept really hit home for me being a women who struggles with sexual desire. It was easier to understand how I think about things and it help me feel “normal”. Dr. Nagoski writes “According to the dual control model, arousal is really two processes: activating the accelerator and deactivating the brakes. So your level of sexual arousal at any given moment is the product of how much stimulation the accelerator is getting and how little stimulation the brakes are getting.” (pg. 51). This really complicated idea of sexual desire is boiled down into layman’s terms to help understand how the body works. Besides the idea of these two concepts, she discusses the ideas of people experiencing high and low of each accelerator and brake. Some people have high accelerators, which means they tend to be risk takers and have more desires. While some people have high breaks, which means they see many different reasons not to listen to the accelerator. I enjoyed learning about this concept to deepen my understanding on how my own thoughts