Come as You Are

"What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention."

— Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are (2015)

Introduction

Come as You Are
Full title	Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
Author	Emily Nagoski
Language	English
Subject	Women's sexuality; Sex education; Health & fitness
Genre	Nonfiction; Self-help
Publisher	Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Publication date	3 March 2015
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (paperback); e-book; audiobook
Pages	400
ISBN	978-1-4767-6210-4
Goodreads rating	4.3/5  (as of 16 November 2025)
Website	simonandschuster.com

📘 Come as You Are is a nonfiction guide to women’s sexuality by sex educator Emily Nagoski, first published in the United States in 2015 and issued in a substantially revised trade paperback on 2 March 2021. It popularizes the dual control model of sexual response—the balance of “accelerators and brakes” (excitation and inhibition)—and explains responsive desire and arousal non-concordance in a sex-positive, evidence-driven register. The book mixes research summaries, anecdotes, and exercises, and downloadable worksheets extend its practical tools. The revised edition is organized into four parts and nine main chapters; this outline follows the revised trade paperback. The publisher promotes the title as a New York Times bestseller, and it has been widely covered by mainstream outlets since release, including WBUR and New York Magazine’s The Cut.

Part I – The (Not-So-Basic) Basics

Chapter 1 – Anatomy: No Two Alike

🧬 Olivia likes to watch herself masturbate in a full-length mirror, and her comparatively large “baby carrot” clitoris leads her to believe her sexuality is masculine. Emily explains there is no link between clitoral size, hormone levels, and desire, which undercuts that story. From there the discussion zooms out to how medieval anatomists labeled vulvas “pudendum,” meaning shame, and how culture still loads neutral anatomy with moral meaning. Nagoski walks through biological homology: all embryos start with the same genital “prefab hardware,” which differentiates under hormones into clitoris/penis and labia/scrotum, so everyone has the same parts organized in different ways. She details the full clitoral structure—glans, hood, crura, and vestibular bulbs that wrap around the vaginal opening—and frames it as “Grand Central Station” of erotic sensation whose only job is pleasure. Because porn and airbrushed images hide this complexity and variability, many people think their genitals are wrong when they are simply different, so she stresses that if there is no pain, the genitals are healthy and beautiful. In class she has students literally find their clitoris with a mirror, and the story of a fifty-four-year-old mother who had never known where hers was shows how thoroughly knowledge has been withheld. Merritt, a perimenopausal lesbian raised in conservative Christianity, cannot yet bring herself to look at her own vulva, but looking at her partner’s and talking about it exposes the mix of fear, curiosity, and cultural baggage she carries. Returning to Olivia, Nagoski shows how the idea that “everyone’s genitals are the same parts, organized in different ways” lets Olivia drop the defensive belief that she is somehow masculine and instead feel connected to a continuum of human sexuality. The summary closes by emphasizing that the biggest sex organ is the brain that makes meaning, and that accurate anatomy can strip away shame-based metaphors so people can return to the affection and curiosity they were born with toward their bodies. Taken together, these points ask readers to treat genital diversity as benign variation rather than a diagnostic test and to begin sexual healing with direct, compassionate attention to their own anatomy, rooting sexuality in the belief that the body is normal, trustworthy, and uniquely theirs. Knowing where your clitoris is, is power.

Chapter 2 – The Dual Control Model: Your Sexual Personality

🎛️ Laurie once has storybook sex with her husband Johnny—hungry, playful, and full of chemistry—but after pregnancy and a baby she craves only solo vibrator orgasms to fall asleep and feels dead to partnered sex. She cycles through explanations—tired, depressed, broken, not really in love—while they try toys, games, and kink that sometimes work but mostly leave her sad and confused, because she can clearly orgasm alone yet cannot make herself want Johnny. To make sense of experiences like hers, Nagoski introduces the dual control model developed by Erick Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute, which describes sexual arousal as the result of a partnership between a Sexual Excitation System (SES) accelerator and a Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) brake. The accelerator constantly and unconsciously scans for sexually relevant sights, sounds, sensations, and ideas and sends “turn on” messages from the brain to the genitals, while the “foot brake” scans for threats like STIs, unwanted pregnancy, social consequences, or Grandma walking into the room and fires “turn off” signals in response. A second “hand brake” provides a chronic low-level “no thank you”—fear of failure, worry about orgasm, or performance anxiety—that does not necessarily stop sex but makes getting going slower and more effortful, like driving with the parking brake on. Across people, these mechanisms vary: some have very sensitive accelerators, some highly sensitive brakes, and many different combinations, which together form a person’s sexual personality. On average men show higher SES and lower SIS and women the reverse, but the variation within each group is much larger than the difference between groups, and the more revealing patterns are how these systems interact with mood, stress, and other motivations. Nagoski describes “flatliners,” whose brakes slam on under stress and shut off interest completely, and “redliners,” whose sensitive accelerators make stress feel like fuel for wanting sex, showing that the same context can drive people in opposite directions. Characters like Camilla, who wants to initiate more often for her kind husband Henry, learn that they are not stuck with their current settings; by changing context, reducing threats, and adjusting beliefs, they can make it easier for the accelerator to do its job and the brakes to ease off. Desire struggles are reframed not as evidence of brokenness or bad relationships but as predictable outcomes of how each person’s excitation and inhibition systems are tuned in the environment they inhabit. Understanding those systems gives readers practical leverage: instead of trying to will themselves into wanting sex, they can experiment with turning on more of the ons and turning off more of the offs so desire can arise more easily. In essence, that’s all the dual control model is: the brakes and the accelerator.

Chapter 3 – Context: And the "One Ring" (to Rule Them All) in Your Emotional Brain

💍 To show how context can flip reactions, Nagoski tells the “sex, rats, and rock ’n’ roll” story: in a three-chamber box, researchers zap a rat’s nucleus accumbens while Iggy Pop blares. In a familiar bright lab the top of this region produces “What’s this?” approach behavior while the bottom produces “What the hell is this?” avoidance, but in a quiet spa-like chamber the same bottom-zap suddenly produces approach, showing that safety and stress radically alter how the same brain signal feels. She uses this as a bridge to the emotional “One Ring” in the mesolimbic system—ventral pallidum, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and related structures—that handles three intertwined processes she calls enjoying, expecting, and eagerness and processes all emotions, from stress and disgust to love and sex, in the same place. Because the One Ring is always running, it constantly decides whether to move us toward or away from stimuli, so the same touch, smell, or fantasy can register as sexy, neutral, or threatening depending on what else the system is juggling. Everyday vignettes bring this home: before pregnancy, a partner’s wandering hands during a cozy bedtime cuddle activate expecting, enjoyment, and eagerness that lead smoothly into sex; two months after childbirth the identical touch on a sleep-deprived, lactating, still-healing body instead activates expecting plus dread and eagerness to avoid, so the same gesture gets a weary “Honey, not tonight.” Similar shifts appear around grief, betrayal, job loss, or joyful changes like deciding to conceive or renewing vows, because the One Ring is always integrating stress, attachment, and meaning. When stress is high, almost anything will push eagerness into an avoidant “What the hell is this?” mode, while in a sex-positive context—typically low stress, high affection, and explicitly erotic—almost anything can become a curious “What’s this?” turn-on. The text emphasizes that each woman’s sex-positive context is unique and evolves over her life, so the goal is to notice patterns rather than chase a universal formula, and Nagoski offers worksheets to map three great and three not-so-great sexual experiences in terms of external circumstances and internal state. She introduces couples like Olivia and Patrick, where Olivia’s stress-sensitive accelerator and Patrick’s stress-sensitive brakes create a “shit show” chasing dynamic in which mismatched contexts and self-blame escalate everyone's stress. Coaching them to make simple agreements when they are calm and then follow the plan during crunchy times shows how deliberately designing context can protect both desire and connection. Overall, sensations are inherently ambiguous and the emotional One Ring interprets them as erotic, annoying, or threatening based on surrounding context and competing motivations. By becoming expert gardeners of context—reducing chronic stress, increasing affection and trust, and cultivating explicitly erotic frames—people can help their brains shift from avoidance to curiosity and open more consistent access to sexual pleasure. Pleasure is context dependent.

Part II – Sex In Context

Chapter 4 – Emotional Context: Sex in a Monkey Brain

🧠 Merritt’s story opens this section: a careful, traumatized woman who writes explicit gay male BDSM fiction can spend hours fantasizing, yet during sex with her partner Carol the tiniest noise, fingernail, or stray thought makes her body shut down, leaving her wondering why she cannot trust it. Nagoski explains that Merritt’s “sensitive brakes” are tied to the fight/flight/freeze stress system, which evolved to help a “monkey brain” survive lions and knife-wielding attackers, not inboxes and awkward conversations. She walks readers through the stress response cycle with the image of running from a lion, rallying the village to kill it, and then feeling the huge relief of being alive—the complete arc from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.” When the cycle is interrupted, as in freeze, the body stores adrenaline and terror until it can shake, sob, move, and finally sigh it out, like wild animals trembling after escaping a predator or a child thrashing as anesthesia wears off. Chronic, unfinished stress cycles make the brain more likely to label neutral or even erotic cues as threats, which is why stress, depression, and anxiety reliably dampen sexual interest, arousal, and orgasm for most women. For trauma survivors, sexually relevant stimuli can become tightly linked with danger, so whenever the accelerator fires the brake slams on too, and mindfulness plus completing the stress cycle become key tools for gently uncoupling them. The focus then shifts to attachment, the love system that pulls people from “I am broken” toward “I am whole,” showing how sex can either heal or intensify fears of being abandoned or unlovable. When stress, attachment, and sex activate together, people may use sex as “sex that advances the plot,” seeking contact that helps them move from “I am lost” to “I am home,” or find their plots hijacked by anxiety and conflict. Because stressed brains interpret almost everything as a potential threat while securely attached brains are primed to recognize safety, completing stress cycles and cultivating safe emotional bonds are core sexual skills rather than luxuries. This perspective invites readers to see stress management, self-compassion, and trustworthy love as ways to improve sexual wellbeing even if nothing about technique or partners changes, since context—not just sex acts—teaches the body whether it is at risk or at home. To have more and better sex, reduce your stress levels.

Chapter 5 – Cultural Context: A Sex-Positive Life in a Sex-Negative World

🌐 Johnny and Laurie’s experiment in not having sex begins this section: after months of exhausted, pressured postpartum intercourse, they switch to nightly cuddling with no expectation of penetration. One quiet evening Laurie asks why he likes having sex with her and he answers, “Because you’re beautiful,” then gently touches every “droopy,” “squishy,” or “cottage-cheesy” part of her body as she cries. In that moment she understands how deeply she has internalized cultural messages that her aging, postpartum body is a moral failure instead of the body of the woman he loves, and the release of that shame makes space for spontaneous, joyful sex that feels like love rather than obligation. Nagoski then zooms out to show how a sex-negative culture delivers three corrosive messages—your body is not good enough, sex is dirty or dangerous, and your pleasure matters less—which train women into chronic self-criticism, body hatred, and vigilance about being “too much” or “not enough.” Because self-criticism is itself a form of stress, these messages feed directly into the sexual brakes by increasing anxiety, distracting attention from pleasure, and even contributing to sexual pain disorders. She illustrates how disgust around genitals, fluids, smells, and sweat is largely learned—passed down by parents, peers, religion, and media—and how sex educators deliberately undergo Sexual Attitude Reassessment training so they can stop “yucking anybody’s yum” and respond to all consensual sex with neutral curiosity. To help readers build their own sex-positive bubble inside a sex-negative world, Nagoski offers three science-backed tools: self-compassion practices that replace harsh inner commentary with kindness, cognitive-dissonance-based actions that let people behave as if they already believe their body is worthy, and “media nutrition” that limits exposure to shaming messages while seeking out diverse, joyful representations of bodies and sex. Throughout, she returns to the mantra “You do you,” emphasizing that embracing authentic desires, boundaries, and tastes—including what turns someone off—is the antidote to cultural scripts that try to dictate what “normal” or “good” sex should be. The core claim is that culture is part of sexual context: when people stop criticizing their bodies, reject learned disgust, and surround themselves with affirming stories, they take a massive, unnecessary foot off the brakes and make it easier for pleasure, connection, and desire to emerge on their own. What if your body is cause for celebration?

Part III – Sex In Action

Chapter 6 – Arousal: Lubrication Is Not Causation

⚡ Camilla calls a sex educator friend after an evening with her partner Henry, worried that something is medically wrong because she feels completely ready to have sex while her body stays dry and Henry takes her lack of wetness as proof she is only humoring him. She hears that if she is not in pain she is likely fine, that bodies often fail to show genital arousal in ways that match mental experience, and that Henry should believe her words and keep a bottle of lube handy, a pattern researchers call sexual arousal nonconcordance. In psychophysiological studies over the past thirty years, a man sits alone in a quiet lab room with a television, a strain gauge fastened around his penis, and a dial in his hand, rating his arousal as he watches different porn clips while the device records his erections. These experiments typically show about a 50 percent overlap between how turned on he feels and how much blood flows to his genitals, an imperfect but solid relationship between subjective excitement and genital response. When the same setup is used with a woman, she inserts a vaginal photoplethysmograph—essentially a tiny flashlight that measures genital blood flow—then watches similar videos and dials in her feelings, and the overlap between the readings and her experience shrinks to about 10 percent. Her genitals respond in much the same way to romantic, rough, same-sex, heterosexual, and even bonobo sex videos, while her brain distinguishes sharply between what is merely sexually relevant and what is genuinely appealing, safe, and welcome. Media coverage of Meredith Chivers’s and Ellen Laan’s work, including stories in the New York Times, has sometimes twisted these data into claims that women’s genitals reveal their “true” desires and that women who deny being turned on are lying or in denial, reinforcing myths that betray actual consent and comfort. Nonconcordance instead shows that lubrication, swelling, or erection can signal nothing more than that a situation looks sex-like to the body, so using wetness or hardness as a yes/no test confuses expecting with enjoying and can pressure people whose bodies react to unwanted or even frightening stimuli. Genital response becomes only one clue among many—alongside breathing changes, full-body tension, facial expression, and especially clear words—about whether someone is eager, unsure, or checking out. Recognizing that a body can be responsive while the person inside is uninterested or distressed allows people like Camilla to stop pathologizing themselves, teach partners to listen to language instead of fluids, and reach for lube as a simple tool to reduce friction and pain rather than as proof of desire. What turns sex into a wanted, pleasurable experience is the broader context of stress level, trust, and emotional safety, not whether genitals happen to be wet or engorged at a particular moment. Context is the crux and the key.

Chapter 7 – Desire: Spontaneous, Responsive, and Magnificent

💗 In one long-standing relationship, Olivia usually wants sex more often than her partner Patrick and initiates most encounters, but after a night when his placebo-powered lust lets her simply be the target of his desire, she realizes how good it feels to be gently pulled toward sex instead of pushed by her own urgency. For their next date night they deliberately reverse roles, arriving in their usual states—Olivia already in the mood and Patrick only mildly interested—and agree that she will follow his lead while he experiments with what helps him move from neutral to genuinely curious about sex. They spend the evening “preheating the oven” with conversation, kissing, massages, and wandering from bedroom to kitchen to feed each other, and Patrick discovers which cues—time, touch, and freedom from pressure—shift him into active wanting while Olivia finds that keeping to his slower pace makes the eventual arousal almost unbelievably intense. Another couple, Laurie and Johnny, sign up for a subscription box that sends them prepackaged sexual fantasies, joke that the first delivery looks like overpriced arts-and-crafts supplies and a vibrator they already own, and yet turn the whole thing into pizza, long talks about work and family, a bubble bath with erotic stories, and playful improvisation at a hotel. Both evenings show desire growing in response to a warm, sexy context rather than appearing out of the blue, a pattern named responsive desire. This contrasts with spontaneous desire, the familiar script in which someone is walking down the street or eating lunch, notices a sexy person or has a sexy thought, and suddenly thinks, “I would like some sex!”, a pattern that describes maybe 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women. Roughly 5 percent of men and 30 percent of women say they mostly want sex only once something pretty erotic is already happening, about half of women and one in five men shift between spontaneous and responsive styles depending on context, and only about 6 percent of women lack both spontaneous and responsive desire. The older idea that sex is a drive like hunger or thirst falls apart when you notice, as animal behaviorist Frank Beach did in 1956, that no one suffers tissue damage for lack of sex, so there is no homeostatic reservoir that must be emptied to keep the organism alive. Instead, sexual wanting operates as an incentive motivation system: people are pulled toward sex when the situation looks rewarding enough to be worth the effort, risk, and vulnerability, and they feel little or no desire when stress, resentment, shame, or boredom make the reward seem too small. A partner who feels broken for rarely wanting sex out of nowhere may simply have a tomato-plant style of sexuality that thrives on more “water”—time, affection, fantasy, rest, and emotional safety—than the surrounding culture assumes is necessary. When couples like Olivia and Patrick or Laurie and Johnny recognize their different desire styles, they can stop treating the lower-desire partner as defective, design evenings that give each person’s accelerator the cues it needs, and appreciate that desire is just as valid when it arrives during touch as when it arrives before. Rather than chasing one supposedly normal way to want sex, they can pay attention to how each person’s sexuality works, how each of them feels about it, and how kindly they respond to each other’s patterns until wanting sex feels welcomed rather than judged. That right there is the ultimate sex-positive context.

Part IV – Ecstasy For Everybody

Chapter 8 – Orgasm: Pleasure Is the Measure

🎆 Merritt, a perimenopausal lesbian writer with sensitive sexual brakes, asks how to “make orgasm happen” after years of rarely climaxing with her partner Carol, and is told she cannot force it but can allow it by dropping orgasm as the goal. She reads a sex-therapy workbook, then she and Carol start a weekly ritual of massages, kisses, and oral sex where they simply play, notice sensations, and refuse to measure success by whether she comes—and, once the pressure is gone, orgasms begin to arrive on their own. A young friend starting her first sexual relationship wonders how she will even know if she has an orgasm, and discovers that it is not one specific feeling but an unmistakable sense of completion, a sudden release of tension that can show up in many shapes. Research in the lab confirms that this release is fundamentally a brain event rather than a neat pattern of pelvic contractions: some women’s muscles pulse without any sense of climax, others climax without classic contractions, and genital measurements never fully capture the experience. The text piles up women’s stories and statistics showing that only about a third of women reliably orgasm from penetration alone and that most rely on clitoral stimulation, vibrators, or other kinds of touch, making it clear there is no hierarchy of “real” versus “lesser” orgasms and that every vagina is fine whether it comes this way or that. Orgasm turns out not to be an evolutionary requirement but an optional, wildly diverse side effect—a bonus—that can happen during partnered sex, masturbation, exercise, sleep, or not at all, without saying anything bad about a woman’s body. Difficulty with orgasm usually traces back to brakes such as stress, self-criticism, spectatoring, or pain, and the practical fixes range from socks and vibrators to changing the goal from “achieve an orgasm quickly” to “savor as much pleasure as possible for as long as possible.” To describe truly ecstatic climax, the narrative turns to the flock metaphor: the brain is like a flock of birds following simple rules, and peak orgasm happens when all the “birds”—stress systems, attachment, curiosity, body image, attention—are flying toward the same magnetic pole of pleasure instead of tugging in different directions. Olivia’s experiment in meditating through sex, relaxing her muscles and returning her attention to sensation whenever her mind tries to race ahead, shows how aligning the whole flock can transform many quick climaxes into one long, oceanic orgasm that feels bigger, slower, and far more vulnerable. In this view, orgasm flourishes when a woman feels safe enough to let go of control, treats her brakes as sleepy hedgehogs whose needs must be met, and lets desire build gradually in a context of mindfulness, self-acceptance, and play rather than perfectionism and deadlines. When the goal shifts from “having the right kind of orgasm” to honoring any path that brings enjoyment, the inner monitor relaxes, tension can rise without panic, and the same hardware that once seemed unreliable becomes capable of deep, extended ecstasy. You were born entitled to all the pleasure your body can feel.

Chapter 9 – Love What's True: The Ultimate Sex-Positive Context

🧭 After years of trying tricks, toys, and “fantasy boxes” to fix her low desire, Laurie’s turning point comes when she chooses pleasure for herself and spends a weekend at a mindfulness retreat—doing yoga, eating and breathing with awareness, sleeping nine hours a night, and rediscovering that she wants to be a source of joy for the people she loves by first being a source of joy for herself. That shift is the gateway into meta-emotions, the feelings she has about her own sexual feelings, which are governed by a “little monitor” in her brain who constantly compares her real experience with an internal standard and reacts with satisfaction, frustration, or despair depending on the gap. An elderly patient in Oliver Sacks’s clinic, Gertie C., illustrates how powerful that monitor can be: she has anxious, erotic hallucinations until he tells her that a friendly nightly visitor actually sounds like a good idea, at which point the same hallucinations become affectionate, scheduled rendezvous that give her love and comfort in late life. In stark contrast stands Ms. B, a woman in her mid-40s who rarely initiates sex, never climaxes during intercourse, and has learned to describe herself as “sexually dead” because she absorbed the script that real sex should be thunderbolts of spontaneous desire and orgasms from penetration, even though her responsive desire and clitoral orgasms are statistically normal. Their stories show how wishing to be different can shove the monitor into the pit of despair, turning perfectly healthy patterns into sources of shame and slamming on the sexual brakes, while a simple reframing—like the student whose only spontaneous desire had appeared in chaotic relationships and who lights up when invited to embrace responsive desire in a good one—opens curiosity instead of contempt. To explain why this happens, the text introduces the “map and terrain” metaphor: families, media, and moral messages draw a map in which men’s simple, spontaneous sex scripts are treated as the default, and women try either to force their real bodies and relationships to follow those routes or to conclude that the terrain is broken when it does not. Changing sexual wellbeing, then, means changing meta-emotions: trusting the terrain by noticing that current desire, arousal, and orgasm patterns are normal; letting go of the map even when that means grieving old ideals; and practicing nonjudging “emotion coaching” toward oneself and one’s partner. Laurie’s renewed gentleness with herself, couples who interrupt arguments to ask whether they are both choosing compassion and patience, and partners who treat each other’s tears like stunned birds or sleepy hedgehogs to be held rather than problems to fix, all show how new goals, kinder effort, and more realistic expectations can shrink the gap the monitor obsesses over. In this sex-positive context, negative meta-feelings such as “I shouldn’t be like this” or “my body is wrong” stop piling stress on the brakes, and the same responsive desire style, nonconcordant arousal, or non-intercourse orgasms that once felt like failures become welcomed parts of a unique erotic self. When people move their inner standard from “be normal” to “belong in my own skin,” their sexuality stops being a test and becomes a terrain they can explore with curiosity, flexibility, and shared responsibility for creating good contexts. Feeling okay about how you feel—even when it’s not what you expected—is the key to extraordinary sex.

—Note: The above summary follows the Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition, revised and updated (2 March 2021; ISBN 9781982165314). Chapter titles and part structure per catalog/preview records. First U.S. edition: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks (2015), xi+400 pp.; ISBNs 9781476762104 (pbk.) and 9781476762098 (hc).

Background & reception

🖋️ Author & writing. Emily Nagoski is a sex educator with an MS in counseling and a PhD in health behavior (Indiana University), with clinical and research training at the Kinsey Institute; she previously served as director of wellness education at Smith College. The book synthesizes contemporary sex science for general readers, centering context effects, the dual control model, and distinctions among arousal, desire, pleasure, and consent. The dual control framework traces to work by John Bancroft and Erick Janssen and remains an active research area. Reviewers note the book’s friendly, accessible tone and clear visuals, emphasizing its “you-are-normal” message. Practical tools are reinforced by official worksheets hosted on the author’s site.

📈 Commercial reception. The first U.S. edition was published by Simon & Schuster Paperbacks in 2015 (400 pp.; ISBN 978-1-4767-6210-4), with library records confirming the bibliographic details; a revised and updated trade paperback followed on 2 March 2021 (400 pp.). The publisher promotes the title as a New York Times bestseller. International editions appeared with Scribe in 2015 for Australia and the UK markets.

👍 Praise. In The Guardian, Van Badham praised the book’s merger of pop science and sexual self-help “in prose that’s not insufferably twee,” adding that it offers “hard facts on the science of arousal and desire” in a friendly way (27 April 2015). WBUR (Boston’s NPR newsroom) highlighted the book’s myth-busting approach and predicted it would be a pivotal read for many (13 March 2015). Salon’s interview with Nagoski called it a rare sex-advice book that “actually has it” — lasting value beyond quick fixes (6 March 2015).

👎 Criticism. Even positive reviewers noted stylistic tics; The Guardian mentioned “a few too many gardening metaphors.” Some reviewers observed that the book primarily addresses cisgender women, reflecting limits of available research on trans populations at the time; they argue that readers seeking broader LGBTQ+ coverage may find scope constraints. Scholars also caution that evidence underpinning the dual control model—a framework the book popularizes—continues to evolve, with calls for further measurement refinement and population-diverse research.

🌍 Impact & adoption. The book extended into an eight-part audio series, the Come As You Are podcast, announced for 16 November 2022 and released with early episodes in mid-November 2022 by Pushkin Industries/Madison Wells. It appears on higher-education syllabi and resource lists, including Wesleyan University’s Summer 2024 graduate seminar materials, the University of Florida’s Spring 2025 “Sexuality in Mental Health” course, and Western Washington University’s 2024 campus consent guide.

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