Best 12 quotes of Emily Nagoski on MyQuotes

About 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report an increase in their sexual interest when they're anxious or depressed. But a guy who wants sex more when he's anxious or depressed probably has less sensitive brakes. In contrast, a woman who wants sex more when she's anxious or depressed is likely to have a more sensitive accelerator.

All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings.

Dread is anxiety on steroids.

If you're trying to do something where you will inevitably fail and be rejected repeatedly before you achieve your goal, then you will need a nonstandard relationship with winning, focusing on incremental goals.

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

Not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.

Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is "inauthentic," insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.

The belief that the people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called "trust.

The moral of the story is: We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from.

This is what science can do for us, if we let it. If offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.

What turns us on (or off) is learned from culture, in much the same way children learn vocabulary and accents from culture.

White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn't made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we're planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled? It's because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that's fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn't stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside.