31. Answering Your Sex Questions with Emily Nagoski

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So welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

We are with actual sex queen Emily Nagosky, who I'm going to read her actual, I got so excited during the first episode with Emily that I did not read her official bio.

So I'm I'm going to read it right now.

Emily Nagosky is the award-winning author of the New York Times best-selling Come As You Are, newly revised and updated in 2021, and the Come As You Are workbook, and the co-author with her sister Amelia of New York Times bestseller, Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.

By the way, I want to say, Emily, that I did not know you wrote that freaking book.

And I read it twice last year.

I didn't know that you wrote it.

And with your sister, it's so good.

You all need to get burnout.

I love that we both work with our sisters.

I know.

I know.

Another, another,

another connection, the silent sex queen sister.

She earned an MS in counseling and a PhD in health behavior, both from Indiana University and clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute.

And now she combines sex education and stress education.

Amazing, that combo, to teach women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.

She lives in Massachusetts with her two dogs, a cat and a cartoonist.

Freaking, I even love your bio, Emily.

Let's hear a question from our audience.

Let's do it.

Okay, our first question

is a call-in from Wesley.

Hi, Glennon.

Hi, sister.

Hi, Abby.

I don't know if you'll be on, but hi, you all.

I love you guys.

My name is Wesley, and my hard question today

is:

how

do you

deal

with

navigating a relationship where you and your partner have different sex drives?

I feel like mine is much higher than his

and like we've talked about it, we've tried to compromise, we've tried all sorts of things, but he still just doesn't seem to want to do it as much as I do.

And this just causes my mind to jump to all sorts of conclusions and assumptions: like, I'm not good enough, pretty enough.

Maybe he is being satisfied by someone else, and I don't trust him as much.

And

I don't like that, and I just

could use some advice.

Yeah.

Love you guys.

Bye.

Part of me, the pragmatic me, wants to dive in and give as much, like here, concrete, specific advice, tips and tricks to make sure people feel helped.

But I think that's not possible.

Like when you can hear the sadness and loneliness, and I want to make sure we address that, recognize it, honor it for what it is.

That

when a partner declines sex routinely,

the person who keeps trying to initiate is going to have feelings about that.

And that's normal and healthy and fine.

And

the trick to moving forward

is to get very concrete and specific with yourself so that you can bring that to your partner.

So I would like Wesley to make a list on a sheet of paper, right at the top, what is it that I want when I want sex?

And then on the back side of that paper, or maybe like draw a line down the middle of the paper and and on the other side, write, what is it that I like when I like sex?

Sex is doing a lot of work,

or she would like it to be doing a lot of work.

I don't know.

I don't know their pronouns now that I mention it.

They don't know

how much weight sex is carrying

because sex by itself is

joy and pleasure and excellence, potentially, or it's just a fun hobby.

And it can be

a mode of deep emotional connection.

It can be a path for self-discovery and mutual discovery.

So which of those things

is this caller looking for?

Do they want

to feel connected?

And when their partner says no, they feel isolated and lonely.

If that's the case, then

find other ways to feel connected.

Talk about like, what are the things we do when I feel closest to you, when I feel like you are super there for me?

I hear the trust issue also.

Is he getting his needs satisfied somewhere else?

Trust is the

bedrock of relationships.

And fortunately, there's a whole bunch of science about it.

Sue Johnson, the therapist and researcher who developed emotionally focused therapy, which most of us will encounter as the Hold Me Tight workshops,

she defines trust as the answer to the question, are you

there for me?

And R, of course, stands for emotionally accessible,

emotionally responsive,

and emotionally engaged.

So that when I come to you with some difficult feelings, you turn toward them.

You don't just keep watching watching your TV show and go, uh-huh, uh-huh,

uh-huh.

You turn toward the person and you listen with kindness and compassion.

That is the most important resource we give and receive in relationships is turning toward each other's difficult feelings.

And this is a doozy of a difficult feeling.

It is incredibly, it's like extra difficult because you want to have this conversation in a way that

avoids blaming or judging either person.

It is a third thing.

It is this tangled knot of stuff that you co-created.

I use this very ridiculous metaphor of the sleepy hedgehog.

Yes, I love it.

Where, like, when you have a difficult feeling, imagine that it's like a sleepy hedgehog that's just like sitting in the bed when you want to get in the bed and you've got to do something about it.

So what you can't yell at it.

You can't just throw it against a wall.

Somebody's going to get hurt if you do that.

So what you do is you gently turn toward it.

You find out its name.

Its name in this case might be loneliness.

It might be insecurity.

It might be distrust.

And then you ask it, what does it need in order to move out of your bed?

Oh, my God.

Free itself.

And when it tells you some things,

You take it in your palms and you go to your partner and you say, hello.

can I, when you have a moment, I want to introduce you to loneliness, which is this difficult feeling I'm having.

And when I think about it, what it needs is this.

Do you think that might be something you can help me with so that we can get this hedgehog out of our bed?

Oh my God.

These are not easy conversations.

And I think a lot of like individual prep work is valuable, getting really clear about what it is you want when you want sex, what it is you like when you like sex.

And on the other side, especially if you're the lower desire partner, P.S., when couples seek therapy for differential desire,

it's in straight couples, it's just as likely to be the man who's lower desire as the woman.

Also, think about what is it that I don't want when I don't want sex.

Question for the lower desire partner.

What is it that I don't like

when I don't like sex?

I'm going to to channel the brilliant sex therapist and researcher Peggy Kleinplots,

who would have, you know, couples come to her, they haven't had sex for years.

And one of the partners will say, It would be fine with me if we never had sex again.

I'm only here because my partner wants it.

And Peggy's question is: Tell me more about this sex you don't want.

And

sometimes it is

dismal and disappointing sex.

And here's Peggy's radical, radical idea.

It is normal not to want sex you don't like.

But also,

maybe

what you don't like is the feeling of obligation, of responsibility, of maybe you are so stressed, overwhelmed, and exhausted that you cannot find your way to the erotic place.

in your mind.

And what you need is help getting to the erotic place, finding out which other places in your brain have a doorway into your erotic mind.

I love that.

So, it doesn't mean you don't have the erotic place or you don't like eroticism.

It means you can't, it's blocked, you can't get to it.

Some people have like teensy tiny little sort of like medicine cabinets of eroticism, asexual folks, like there's just not a lot of it there.

And fair enough, people vary.

Some people have a palace of erotic mind place.

I have a friend who basically, it's it's not just that every other mind state has a doorway into the lust area in his brain.

It's that he's usually in the lust place

and he can like go other places if he wants to.

And cool, like people vary.

People just vary.

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All right, let's hear from Heather.

Here's Heather.

What do you do when you don't desire sex at all?

I'm 44 and have been married to a wonderful man for 22 years.

Sex has always been fine, but intermittent and sometimes conspicuously absent.

I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, and scarring and shame, you talked about it in your last episode, is only too real, as I have yet to get over some of the lasting poison I drank for so long.

Now I'm entering into what they say is perimenopause, which has brought with it what seems like a lack of desire for both of us.

We haven't had sex in at least a year, maybe more.

I've been thinking about what sex actually means to me.

Such a good question.

Never thought about it before.

But now things with my husband feel super awkward and stagnant.

Is this normal for women my age?

Do you have any advice?

It's normal for people of all genders and of all ages.

Let me

first

bust the myths that there's a relationship between the hormone changes of perimenopause and menopause and a shift in desire.

When changes happen, it's maybe because people might be prone to pain because of vaginal atrophy from the change in hormones, but lube fixes that.

And there's hormonal interventions that you can use if you're interested in having vaginal penetration.

So it's not the perimenopause, except insofar as that's a psychological cue.

But if

two people spend a long time not having sex with each other,

a lot of those hedgehogs can accumulate.

There's just like dozens of them crawling all over the bed, snoozing, napping on each other.

And you've got two tasks to manage.

First, you have the task of gradually putting your bodies closer and closer to each other until you find your place

until you find yourself in a place where sex seems like a good idea

and that's like pretty pragmatic that's like scheduling and like you can do uh sense if you google sensate focus

sensate s-e-n-s-a-t-e focus

uh or um

graded exposure therapy, you give yourself steps to follow of like getting closer and closer to each other.

That's one of the practical things to do.

The other thing, which is a separate process, is dealing with all the feelings that everybody has

about the problem.

You have to address the feelings separately from the process of solving the problem that caused all the feelings, which the sleepy hedgehog metaphor can do.

Sometimes you will find yourself getting closer and closer and you're like reminded of that time when you really wanted to initiate and

the person turned you away and like the way you felt shoved into a pit of despair, like this is never going to work.

And you need your partner to

listen kindly, generously, hold you in your arms, in their arms and let you cry and have feelings and not take it personally, but do take it seriously.

That's the two steps.

I like that.

Deal with the problem, but also manage all the feelings around the problem.

And that's managing the feelings is the hard part.

It helps if you can develop a shared vocabulary.

For example,

knowing about the brakes and the accelerator is very useful.

What activates my accelerator, what activates my brakes.

And also getting clear about the definitions of desire.

arousal, pleasure, and consent.

Because those are four different things that people mix up all the time.

And so finding out what feels good is the first step.

The reason I have people do what is it that I want when I want sex, and what is it that I like when I like sex, is that they are different things.

One is what's the thing you're moving toward, and one is what is the thing you like in the here and now, in the moment when sex is happening.

I also want to say that lots of people grew up in strong faith traditions where they are not taught that their bodies are bad and they don't have to hate themselves.

In fact, their body is a gift from God and they are granted all of the pleasure that comes with it because God gave you this pleasure.

Go for it.

What religion are we talking about?

I mean, tidy up.

Branches of every religion, name a religion.

And there are some people in that religion where the communities are like, yeah, we don't do that shame thing.

That's amazing.

So if you want to stay in a religion, find a different church or a different temple or a different mosque that doesn't teach that stuff.

We're going to hear from Melissa.

Melissa says, I am a 45-year-old young woman that previously spent 17 years with my husband.

Six years ago, my husband became my wife.

Life is moving along, and while I love my wife, I feel like a duck out of water.

I had never been with a woman.

We are slowly figuring things out, but I am exceedingly nervous about screwing something up.

Pardon the pun.

She's funny.

I was always the receiver.

I want that to be different.

I guess my question is, how do I get past my fear of being the initiator?

You might know this because this is a little bit like your story.

I do know this one.

But I want you to answer.

No, I want you to answer and then I will tell you.

Just you go.

I'm scared.

I don't want to tell Melissa anything that's not.

you know, scientifically correct.

So the science of it is actually pretty simple.

There's a wonderful book called Magnificent Sex by Peggy Kleinplotts, whom I just mentioned.

She spent years interviewing people who self-identified as having extraordinary sex lives.

And it included people of all genders, all sexual orientations, all relationship structures.

And she found out that what extraordinary sex looks like has nothing to do with the standard cultural to narrative of sex.

It's responsive desire, it's prioritizing sex, having sex mean enough in your relationship to be worth making time and space for.

And the book goes through the science of why this is true and how to make it happen in your life.

For me, this is a question about courage.

It's a question about how to be brave.

And like you have this break, it got trained into you when you were little.

child.

And so it's not going to happen immediately, all at once.

You have to unlearn the thing step by step.

You need your partner to be all the way there for you.

When I was talking about trust and are you there for me?

You know, you come into a room and you take off some clothes and this person is going to see parts of your body almost no one will see and touch parts of your body almost no one will touch.

And maybe put a part of their body inside yours, or you're going to put a part of your body somewhere inside of their body.

So if you show up with your body and their response is,

that is not a partner who is there for you.

Or if they just take it for granted, like, good, your body's here.

I've been waiting.

You owe me, right?

That's a partner who's not there.

So what you want is a partner who, when you show up, goes, yay, and wow, and thanks.

Those are the signs that your partner is fully there for you.

So if you and your wife, congratulations, are both thoroughly there for each other.

What Peggy Kleinplot says is that great sex is sex that is just safe enough.

So that

you can

explore your sexual terrain and you know what's true.

But when it gets extraordinary is when you take a risk like initiating where you take hands with your partner and like you've explored your sexual terrain, you know what's true, you love what's true, and together you take a step into the darkness of what you don't know.

Yeah.

That is where the magnificence happens.

And that's true with everything.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

It's like, and then you, and you have to be so vulnerable when you try something brand new that you've never done before.

I mean, the first time I tried to be like the one to like make out with you, Abby, oh my God, I was so scared.

I swear to, I was like about to pee my pay i was so scared because

i just had to like and then i did it though because you know ssq

but

silent sex queen but emily i also feel like I still now we're five years in and I still feel scared.

It's not like you do it once and then I'm scared and it all activates every single time.

What comes to safe enough is going to change from context to context.

Yes.

As the

trust builds in a relationship, more stuff becomes safe enough.

But

trust between the two people is one thing.

Trust of yourself is another thing.

And the two don't necessarily grow at the same rate.

That's good.

And

it's also true, isn't the trust and are you there for me?

That extends beyond your sexual encounter, right?

Like, oh, it matters.

Are you there for me all day long?

Not are you just doing the right thing right now, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

That's why I think sex, the way I define sex is throughout a day.

It's like, yeah, that, that's like the main element.

It's like, are you actually here for me?

Like when you hand me that coffee, Glennon, I'm like, you are here for me because you know how important that is.

So I talked about that with my therapist.

You talked about Abby's coffee with your therapist?

This is I talked about like that I was going to like come and do this.

And I was talking about what your relationship looks like from the outside and my therapist wrote her master's thesis on uh lesbian relationships and how they contrast to heterosexual relationships she's lesbian uh and

that dynamic of like i am connected to you and this is a way of knowing that is undervalued because Guess whose dominant style is likely to be connected knowing?

It's women.

So lesbian relationships are sometimes characterized by more connected knowing than separate knowing.

Less, the arguments are less based on fact and reason and more based on how it felt for me when you did this was like this and how it felt for me.

And I totally understand why it would feel that way for you.

And what are we going to do?

Because both of us are right.

So like, so lesbian relationships are total immersion programs and heterosexual relationships are like Spanish 101.

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Can you play the next voice now, please?

Hi, Glennon and sister.

I grew up in a family where abstinence is what was promoted and it was kind of fear-based abstinence.

If you're not abstinent, you'll get pregnant, you'll get an STD.

And it worked for a while until I went to college.

And then I think I rebelled against the taboo

that had been created.

So, you know, sex was shameful and it was a taboo about it.

And now that I'm a mother and I have a young son, I don't want the pendulum to swing all the way in one direction of abstinent, don't ever do this, be ashamed of your body, nor do I want him to make choices on the other end of the

pendulum to swing the other way where decisions are all

not made with love for his own body.

So how do you talk to sex about sex with your children?

How do you teach them that it's natural and normal and loving and respectful,

but also protect them so they make decisions that keep their body safe?

All right.

Thanks, Glennon.

Thanks, sister.

Thanks, Abby.

I love this question so much.

I know and I love it.

Reach a week.

I don't know anything about like age-appropriate conversation with kids.

I have always taught college age and older.

Like, give me a group of senior citizens and I know how to talk, but I don't know about age-appropriate answers to specific questions.

So, I can't give that information.

May I recommend, though, any book by Corey Silverberg?

He wrote the wonderful book, What Makes a Baby, Sex is a Funny Word.

And he has a forthcoming book.

I think it's called, you know, sex.

His books are great.

Those are for younger kids, obviously.

But

what I can say, instead of like, what's age appropriate is to, that the first step to take when you want to not pass on a bunch of junk that is messed with your sex life is to deal with your shit.

I was afraid you were going to say that.

What's a hell, Emily?

But like, what's another way?

So my mom, when she had that flash of emotion, when I asked what a vagina was, had no idea what she was passing on to me.

It wasn't on purpose.

The most sex-positive parents are the ones.

So,

Peggy Orenstein writes about this in her book, Girls and Sex: that it was only

later in life that she recognized that when her mom was explicit about sexual things and talked about sexual pleasure, and as a young person, a teenager, Peggy Orenstein was like, ugh,

don't gross.

It was only later that she came to appreciate just how powerful and important that was.

That, like, be that parent who embarrasses your kids at the dinner table and in the car, right?

Like, yeah, because our kids do that.

They're always, we're always bringing it up and they're always doing that drama.

And when they do that, it makes me feel like we did something wrong.

Because why are they so

they're just appalled?

They're like,

because everywhere else they go, everywhere else they go is teaching them that

is the appropriate response which is why she's talking about a pendulum swing um abstinence

is not the opposite of

like

not doing sex in a loving respectful way

They are on the same side of the pendulum.

For 40 plus years, the research has been utterly unambiguous that

abstinence only, especially abstinence only until marriage education, increases rates of sexually transmitted infections, increases rates of unwanted pregnancies, and

students have sex earlier.

Earlier.

It's called sexual debut.

It's another one of those terms I really like.

Comprehensive, evidence-based, queer-inclusive sex education, on the other hand, reduces rates of STIs, reduces rates of unwanted pregnancy, and increases age of first sex.

It delays sexual debut, if that's a thing you're interested in.

So, comprehensive sex education gives you all the goals.

You, as a parent at home, have the job of being the one who, like, is

as undamaged by the cultural stuff as possible, or is sort of transparent, especially as they get to the teen years, transparent about, like, yeah, the world's teaching you some bullshit nonsense.

Don't believe it.

And you're the inoculation against it.

And you don't have to worry about about going too far to the extreme.

I have a sex educator friend with two daughters.

And when they were really little, a common thing you would hear at their dinner table is, we don't touch our vulvas at the dinner table.

Like sex education includes boundary education.

Right.

Recognizing what's appropriate, teaching people how to like read cues from other people.

Sister, talk about your.

Oh, God.

No, I'm just so glad you said that because sometimes I feel like I'm so

on the opposite that, you know, like my husband will say things like that, like, don't touch your privacy at the dinner table.

And I'll be like, oh my God, is she getting scorned?

Like, you're trying to like put her in a box.

There are reasonable limits.

There are reasonable limits.

That's so great to hear.

Okay.

So you can say

don't touch your volva.

Yeah, why isn't John Volva?

I'm trying to get him.

I'm trying to get him there.

I'm trying to get, she knows it.

She knows all that stuff.

She says Vulva all the time.

She knows.

Sister is her mother.

Your favorite word is vulva.

No, she knows all her parts.

She knows her, she knows her clitoris.

She knows everything.

But I didn't know, I did, that's a good, because they touch and, and I just never say anything, but saying we don't do that.

I mean, if you're at the mall, if, and, and it feels good to touch your vulva, right?

It does.

So, and if you're a little kid who hasn't like been taught that they're our culture has limits to where it's willing to grant you permission to touch your vulva, like the mall is not one of them.

Grocery market, grocery store is not one of them.

Your room, go for it.

Shower, go for it.

Great.

But Emily, I love the idea that we, so many of us are trying to figure out what do we say to our kids.

And it's like, we're trying to figure out how to say the right thing without first becoming the right thing, right?

Like, so.

We can, the first thing we can do is...

You don't have to wait until you are perfect.

No, no, no, no, no.

If you do that, we're dead.

Right.

But she can start detoxing herself so that the things she say will naturally be less terrifying than the things she was taught.

That's cool.

Okay, let's hear from Kat.

My stepdaughter came out last year.

She's interested in girls and her dad supports her, but her mom is very religious and seems to be discouraging her, saying she should wait until she's older to be sure.

I don't know all the details, but I do know our house is more supportive, except we don't talk about it.

And the other day, someone reminded me that my lens is entirely straight.

From my experience, I know about romance between a man and a woman, and I know about sex with a man and a woman.

If she has questions, I can do my best as a human who has been in love and lust and all sorts of messes.

But what if that's not enough?

Her father isn't worried about it, but I am.

Does she need to talk to someone who has had the experiences she'll have?

Does she need to read a book about two girls who fall in love or something I'm not even thinking of?

How can I best support her being herself?

I don't want to make y'all the poster women of lesbians, but the way you supported Chase when he came out, I wanna throw a dance party to.

And in lieu of that, I wanna make sure I'm not just saying I support her, but I'm also giving her what she needs to thrive from her lens, not mine.

Ugh.

Hat for president.

Love that.

I love.

that the stepmom recognizes that she is not enough.

I know it's sort of like we're all supposed to be like, I I am enough, I am enough.

Nope, nope, nope.

If you're 100% straight, you are not what a young person who's just coming out needs.

That person deserves a community of peers and a community of elders

to help learn.

Like, what's this all about?

Otherwise, all they, all this kid has is scripts of heterosexuality.

And so, her experience with girls is going to be heteronormative.

And that's not what we want.

So,

y'all feel free to dive in here, but my idea is books

gift-wrapped one by one in a huge basket.

There are a couple of nonfiction books that are just necessary.

One of them is

Girl Sex 101 by Allison Moon.

Don't know if you've read it, but it's the one, Girl Sex 101.

And then there's a book called Queer, the Ultimate.

Ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens by Kathy Belge.

It was just revised in 2019.

Things changed really fast, so it had to be revised.

So those are two sort of like encyclopedic, here you go.

And just the fact that you're giving them is like,

I went and got these.

But there's also so many novels and so many comics.

We don't know the kids' age.

But again, anything by Corey Silverberg.

There's Heather Corinna of What Fresh Hell Is This?

For ages 9 to 14, Heather and Isabella Rotman wrote a comic called, wait, what?

That features an androgynous platypus

that tells a story about sexuality and is gender inclusive and

sexual orientation inclusive and funny and charming.

If

she's a little bit older, like 14 and older, there's a great book called Let's Talk About It by Erica Mowen and Matt Nolan.

Erica Mowen is is the cartoonist who illustrated, come as you are.

And she and her husband wrote her own book about it for all.

And again, it's entirely gender inclusive and entirely LGBTQIA plus inclusive.

If

this kid is up to a literary level where they're like reading for like big complex stories, Alison Bechtel's Fun Home.

So good.

Very specific.

And the newest one on my list of the sort of graphic novels is Times I Knew I Was Gay by Eleanor Cruz, which is,

again, for when you've got past 15 and

you're reading in a deeper way.

Emily,

one of the things I love so much about you, it's such a, well, it's such a female leadership way of being, but I mean, you have just

pointed out so many other resources for us.

Every time you're so generous with your,

I don't know, with the way that you've thrown light at so many different people and you're just a huge source of

goodness and depth.

And I just have loved every minute of this.

And I want to say to Kat,

you know, when Chase came out, we

are gay, all right?

But we weren't enough.

I mean, Abby and I had to find, look for people who come into your life now.

It will just magically happen.

It just magically happens.

I mean, our kid has,

he's gay and he's also Japanese.

So he's, you know, got a bunch of intersections going on that we don't,

we're not enough, right?

So we had to find people that he could,

we kind of were matchmakers, not in romantic relationships, but in like, kind of be, can you be our kid's mentor?

Can you be, and

Chase actually said to us once, we, I have enough moms and I'm not sure I need more.

And I'm like, yes, you do, damn it.

I know how many more you need.

Well, and if you don't have, if you don't have access to anybody, because I do also know that some people out there, they might know a gay kid and they might be trying to find a community for them.

There are very, there are so many different LGBTQ community-based chapters around the country, even in very, very conservative places like Naples, Florida, where we just came from.

They opened one up while we were there.

Take your kid there.

Not only would it be an amazing resource for your kid, but it'll be an amazing resource for you, the parents, who also need to do a little bit of educating so that you can be the landing, the safe landing place for this gay kid.

Congratulations.

Babe, I don't know what you'd say about this, but I feel like it's better to overdo it than underdo it.

Absolutely.

Right?

Like, talk about it more than what's comfortable to you, because this kid's going to be living in a world where so, so few things apply to them.

Like

the more you can bring it up.

Ask yourself the question.

If my child told me that it came out to me as straight, how often you would talk about said straight.

So did you meet a new kid?

Yeah.

Did you have a new friend?

Exactly.

And so if you find that there's a void in those same similar questions, just because your kid might have a tendency towards homosexuality or gayness or queerness, then you know that you have to sometimes overcompensate for your bias.

And so that is where I think is important that

you give them as much space to talk about it because then you'll be like me where you have to come out six times in 10 years.

By the way, I'm still gay.

By the way,

I'm still gay.

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All right, listen, Emily, you're going to love this.

We do a pod squatter of the week.

So this is an email I got, which just made me so happy.

I'm going to change the names to protect the amazing.

Okay.

Dear Glennon and sister and Abby, thank you for being brave enough to record and share your Sex Queen podcast episodes.

There was so much that I could relate to, ended up discussing many of the topics with my husband, which was super helpful.

So thanks.

But my reason for writing is that I wanted to share a story with you.

In your Q ⁇ A episode, there was much discussion about vibrators, and there was also a question about how to talk about, provide info to your kids about sex.

So here's my story.

Recently, I noticed that my vibrator was missing.

This was a little alarming, as you can imagine.

After a thorough search, I found it in my 15-year-old daughter's bedroom.

Not knowing how to handle the situation, I took it back and we didn't discuss it.

Not awesome parenting, I know.

When it went missing a second time, I talked to my husband about this phenomenon and he said, just buy her one.

Which was great advice.

So I did buy my 15-year-old child a vibrator.

Yes, I did.

But instead of giving it to her directly like a grown-up, I just put it in the hiding place where I had found mine.

Soon thereafter, I walked into my kitchen to find my 15 and 18 year old daughters looking at me with the vibrator smack in the center of the kitchen counter.

This prompted a glorious discussion of vibrators, why we have them, sex in general, women as sex objects, porn, etc, etc.

The next day I bought one for my 18-year-old daughter too.

I hope this gives them freedom and removes some stigma about sex for them.

Sister, I can't wait to share with them your 75% clitoral orgasm statistic when the time is right, of course.

Thanks for all you do, Melissa.

Well, Melissa, they all have vibrators.

I think the time is right now.

You just want to have an orgasm because now.

Emily, is that amazing?

That's amazing.

That is amazing.

That's amazing.

And you know what?

I am all in favor of the subtle, the quiet invitation of not being like, here is my gift to you.

You can have a vibrator of your own, but just, you just leave it there where you you know she goes looking so she can find it.

And that is like a silent open door.

And that you got away with not talking about the silence.

All right.

What do you think about the silence?

Do you want to save it for the next time?

Cause you know I'm going to harass you to come back here again.

Or do you want,

what do you think?

I want her to say the things about the silence.

I'm not going to go deep into the theory.

I'm just going to go right into the psychoeducational intervention.

you're going to draw a big plus sign on a piece of paper so that it's divided into four quadrants okay in the first quadrant you're going to write what are the good things about silence

and the second quadrant you're going to write what are the not so good things about silence

in the third quadrant you're going to write what are the good things about noise

and in the fourth quadrant what are the not so good things about noise You're going to fill all of that out.

You're going to look like, what do I notice when I look at the good things and the not-so-good things about these two different things?

Are there strategies I can use to maximize the good things and minimize the not-so-good things?

On the flip side, I want you to write why it matters

that you would try noise.

And then I want you to write on a scale of 0 to 10, how important is it to you to make noise?

And on a scale of 0 to 10,

how confident do you feel that if you decided to try noise, you could, if you decided?

That's the activity.

And again, as the sister of professional musicians, as the daughter of professional musician, my mom is a singer too.

What I know is that the voice evolved to express emotion.

That is its primary job.

And I know a lot of us get raised to believe that women should be silent because our emotions are not welcome, because we're human givers, pretty happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others.

God forbid we have experiences of our own.

So, it is part of your good things about making noise is that it's smashing the patriarchy with your voice.

Plus, she got me again.

She got me again.

Make your partner happy, too.

Isn't that if you can't get there?

There are intermediate things you can make tiny, tiny noises.

You can just literally say the word moan.

Oh my god, I'm just imagining that.

Moan.

That's such a writer thing, too.

She's going to literally say the word.

Or she moaned.

What Abby said, what you did deserves a moan.

Yeah, what you did deserves a moon.

Because Abby needs words of affirmation.

Okay, babe, we're going to work on this.

And I also like the assignment because I like any sex assignment that really only involves writing down words.

Also, you're perfect just the way you are.

Thank you.

I love you.

Emily, you are a hero for our times, a national treasure, what the world needs, the one we've been waiting for.

We loved every minute of this.

Please just go do all of your important work with freeing women to have more confident and joyful sex lives.

And also come back and see us and also be our sister and also move next door to me.

Yes.

Okay.

All of those things.

Okay.

We love you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you all for being at We Can Do Hard Things.

If you get, you know, scared, tired, exhausted, whatever this week, don't forget, we can do Hard Things.

Thank you, Emily.

Thank you.

This was so fun.

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