On Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski

Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski is aimed toward cisgender women in heterosexual relationships. It is an educational book about women, female anatomy, mental health, and sex. Turns out, there are a lot of things your middle school sex ed teacher doesn't tell you. 

This book was really great and empowering. Like all things in life, every experience is deeply personal and people bring worries, thoughts, etc to sexual experiences just as often as they do to a meeting. Either way, it heavily impacts behavior and satisfaction. I learned a lot about anatomy, too, and I feel kind of disappointed nobody told me some of this stuff earlier. It would have been nice. But, I’m glad I know it now, for myself. It’s exciting to be part of a paradigm shift in feminism at large- a movement away from comparison to conventional, cisgender men as the baseline for performance in all aspects of life and toward a firm understanding and appreciation that conventional cisgender women will never operate like a man because we’re different. And it’s great that we’re different. 

The author elaborates on some of the sexual tropes of each conventional gender stereotype; women are not less sexual than men, they’re more sensitive. Performance in the bedroom is affected by the same old quality of life issues women deal with every day that drag down self esteem, self compassion, and mindfulness. It’s a reminder that, again, like many things in life, satisfaction is something people have to choose and work through every day.  The main points of the book are that partners should listen to each others words, because the body and the brain aren't always in sync; that women have a completely different understanding of sexual pleasure, even though male and female bodies are "the same parts, organized in different ways,"; we should all be deliberate about the language we use to describe the female experience.

Thanks, Jeremy and Taylor for the recommendation.