Why am I reviewing a sex manual intended for a broader audience of women as a part of my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project? While the majority of my focus remains on romance in particular, this being (I feel) the genre most concerned with depicting femdom in a way dommes may enjoy, I also approach this as books that may be relevant to dommes who are trying to figure themselves out beyond finding fantasies that work for us.
Come As You Are is one of those self help phenomena that has successfully lodged itself in popular acclaim, popularizing a broad sweep of helpful information about sexuality so well that people don’t even realize it’s a source. It is also notable that if you dig into kink manuals or forum advice posts, it’s also likely to pop up in a “further reading” section or just have its advice paraphrased on the spot to the benefit of whomever is receiving it. Mostly you have probably interacted with it if you ever heard people talk about “responsive desire” versus a spontaneous kind.
Specifically the book proposes to be a sort of owners manual for women and their sexuality. I think that Nagoski’s efforts are laudable overall, and where it is held back is probably an artifact of the medium of self help as a larger genre. To its credit it is kink positive and interested in normalizing diversity of how people experience sexuality. It’s also dedicated itself to the important work of undoing the years of shame and lousy messaging people get about sex even long before they are adults. In practice, however, I think the main thing that holds it back is that its suggested outcomes, of modulating desire, are at odds with its actual message of there really being no shoulds.
It therefore ends up being like a Healthy At Any Size nutritionist here to help you develop a better relationship to food largely stuck giving you diet advice to change up your body because all their patients still want to know about gaining or losing weight. Or in this case Nagoski clearly believes compulsory sexuality is as bad for you as compulsory purity, but has to take a harm reductive approach because the majority of people still are preoccupied with having the “right” amount of sex with a monogamous partner.
That some of her anecdotes are about bisexual or lesbian women is nice, as is her stolid insistence it is ok to get off to m/m fanfic or kink. But this is a world where the asexual spectrum is not a factor of consideration, which I think isn’t her fault. We are largely the invisible orientation and Nagoski’s concepts can at least apply to the spectrum part of that experience. But, ultimately, for all she wants you to know and love your body she thinks of sexuality as first and foremost a partnered activity.
When I first decided to read this I thought maybe I would use the hands on aspect of the book to do a sort of read along. I quickly determined that probably this was going to be an issue because the majority of this is about trying to figure out why you don’t want to have sex with your partner, with a smaller amount of focus on making yourself want sex less of this desire is vexious to your circumstances (and partner). Other parts are likewise not something I need personally (I know where my clitoris is, and this book really does start you off from 0) and the rest of the book supposes it’s trouble shooting some sort of problem between you, another person and your feelings about yourself.
Therefore the premise weaves between improving communication and mutual understanding with a partner and repeating various versions of letting you know you are normal in all your infinite variations and that there’s a lot of bad information about sex we internalize. She ties most of this to the three Ms, Moral, Medical and Media. I can hardly think I am immune to misunderstandings and myth, but I think it’s an ironic testament to the strength of her thesis Nagoski’s own work still has a bunch of assumptions from those categories in the advice she is giving.
One of those sticky ideas is that she frames this through a lens of men being fundamentally different than women. I think her gender reductionism, paired with appeals to what science says, are some of the weaker parts of the book. She does a lot to criticize that sex research treats women like men lite, but not at all that our assumptions about men are as incorrect as the ones about women. She repeats various traits in women show more variation in that category than comparison to men, and in her examples treats men as if how she describes women is equally applicable, but there’s still a tendency to frame things in terms of “we know this about men, but for women…”. I think Nagoski must know this, but it’s almost like she’s been swept along with the long standing assumption that sex ed for women has to be delivered in a “secrets of womanhood, just between us girls” format.
Still, some manuals that are popular have their own problems of coming from an iffy starting place, and can still be useful. Love Languages, for example, crawled out of the land of Christian Heterofatalism. Critics correctly note a rather depressing foundation there of both reductionism (one love language!) and over use of demands on women (his love language is touch so put out, you silly girl!). With these books you can extract value, but you are going to need a sturdy shovel. And, just by the presence this book has in discussions on the topic of sexuality it’s clear a lot of people have been finding this helpful.
So if Nagoski’s Come As You Are occasionally veers into a bit of gender-essentialism, I think the book can be forgiven not quite making the leap to point out that while it proposes that women are different than how we believe men to be, men are also different than how we believe them to be. That topic, itself is a whole piece of queer theory most people aren’t ready to digest. Introductions to chemistry uses simplified models of the atom in graduated complexity, from balls joined by sticks to eventually fuzzy energy clouds only comprehensible through advanced math, but in 2012 a child still discovered a hitherto undocumented molecule through playing with a sticks and balls set, so a good simplification is more useful than a bad deep dive.
The other, honestly more important thing she’s doing here, however, is actually using our relative openness to What Science Says to chip away at our self destructive defence mechanisms. There’s a bit of a hidden aspect here, but it’s less trojan horse than trojan my little pony. It will be very hard to read this without an extra layer of re-enforcement on your self acceptance.
Beyond that, and an introduction to general anatomy, her main theory is the idea that sexuality has variable levels of excitability and inhibition. She believes that the vast majority of women are experiencing problems not because things don’t turn them on, but because most women are easily turned *off*. The whys of this are a bit more vague, but she also believes these are more of a factor of things we internalize than say, hormones.
Thus for Nagoski, generally the root cause of inhibition is attributed to mental baggage or to current life circumstances that make it actually reasonable to not want to have sex. Therefore the majority of her efforts are towards helping the reader think what that might be. Nevertheless you can see a contradiction that she writes in her examples of essentially trying to get women to acknowledge they don’t have to do this and can be ok with not being horny when they think they are supposed to… by telling them how to want sex with another person when it is convenient.
If I had another pet peeve it would probably be that while Nagoski is plenty kink positive, she generally defaults to examples of female submission. It’s true there’s a lot of submissive people out there of any gender, so this is hardly all that remarkable. Indeed, for all her women in her illustrative anecdotes, BDSM makes up a part of what the women do as an unremarkable part of their sexuality. Nevertheless, it’s always some variation of the sub role that’s described in the most positive terms. Two of the women find significant results in having their partner deny or otherwise restrict them, while the third, in a sapphic relationship, has it mentioned off hand that the only part of her desire that seem to be working going into therapy is when she imagines herself the bottom in a male/male multipartner scenario where she is being dominated. Everty so often around her storytelling, we then get some light reminders about how healthy the bottom/sub side of kink is. And while a lot of people need to hear that, there also is a certain point when I am absolutely and entirely sick of being reassured it’s ok to have submissive fantasies. Even more so when they are paired with glurgey comments that of course since you have so much pressure on you in the real world it makes sense you want to pretend you have none in the bedroom. Hurkblergh.
And then there was one moment where things went frankly bizarre. Fueled by a desire to accept the whole spectrum of possible sexual experience while pushing back on the idea of a pure physiological arbiter being the ultimate signal of true longing, Nagoski goes from the more sensible reassurance that wetness or similar are not contradictory signs of enthusiasm if the rest of you thinks otherwise, and into defining orgasms as something entirely abstract and personal. An orgasm, according to Nagoski, is whatever the person having it says it is.
After coming in through a tagline about “The Surprising New Science” and the first three quarters of the book woven with quotes from various studies, this was an odd place to find myself dropped. While I agree to Nagoski’s larger point that orgasms have a wide range of sensory difference for those who have them, here we are departing from what any science says on the subject with the velocity of a glitching kerbal space program launch. Sure, for some people orgasms are transcendent full body thrashing and for other kind of like the pop of a fresh jar of pickles opening, but the physiological part is still not entirely subjective. If you are so inclined and armed with an electrical current you can give a freshly deceased cadaver an orgasm.
And the sudden turn to hand wavery here is so abrupt that I had to take a break here and wonder what the hell I was just reading. Was Nagoski just using a bit of hyperbole here to stop women from discrediting their orgasms as not good enough and further psyching themselves out? Was she, despite setting the expectation that anyone should be able to have an orgasm, hedging by leaving the door open for women to decide anything they can mange is still enough? Did I misread something here?
But, be that as it may, for me I think the book’s strengths, outside of the reassurances and the basic anatomy, are the approach of troubleshooting sex as something that requires making space for it and removing distractions. This kind of is a skill that you have to figure out in long term relationships and approaching this with your expectations at a realistic level based on your actual circumstances can be very helpful. And if your problem with sex with your partner is you a psyching yourself out or worse, refusing to acknowledge good reasons why you don’t actually want to do this, this book may be really helpful.
Ultimately, for me, this book wasn’t something I needed. It’s good to have vocabulary to talk about the steps to setting up to have some flavour of successful intercourse with another person. Ditto to describe variations in desire patterns. I am also glad someone’s catching the traumatized religious conservative survivors and getting them to look at their own genitals. Lives are going to be saved by doing that, since your reproductive system is also one of those body parts that has a high chance of trying to kill you. But this really is a 101 primer and ultimately a 10+ veteran sex blogger probably isn’t going to be surprised to learn the clitoris is important or that you don’t need to feel shame about your fantasies.
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Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!
