Emily Nagoski

Emily Nagoski (born 1977)^[2] is an American sex educator and researcher, and author of books including Come as You Are.^[3] She is the former director of wellness education at Smith College, where she taught a course on women's sexuality.^[4][5]

Emily Nagoski earned a PhD in health behavior from the Indiana University School of Public Health and a master's degree in counseling from Indiana University. She has worked as a researcher at The Kinsey Institute.^[6]

For eight years, she was the director of wellness education at Smith College. In 2016, after the success of her first book, she became a full-time writer and public speaker. In addition, she operates a podcast, a newsletter, and a social media presence which sometimes features a puppet named Nagoggles.^[7]

Come as You Are was published in 2015. The book discusses the difference between "spontaneous" and "responsive" sexual desire,^[8][4] with Nagoski estimating that only around 15% of women experience the former.^[3] She also discusses "arousal non-concordance",^[9] estimating, based on experiments of responsiveness to sexual stimuli, that there is a roughly 50% overlap between what stimuli men consider "sex-related" and "sexually appealing", compared with only 10% for women.^[10] The book popularized the metaphor of a car accelerator and brakes, representing reasoning to engage and avoid sex, respectively.^[7] It argued that when women lack sexual desire, the reason is not always a lack of "acceleration" but instead too much brakes. The Guardian praised the "lightness of Nagoski's tone combined with the book's happy, of-course-you're-normal message."^[6]

In 2019, Nagoski and her twin sister Amelia co-wrote the book Burnout, on the causes and management of stress, including structural factors that particularly affect women.^[11][12] They contrast the relatively short-term dynamics of stress in evolutionary times with modern-day stressors that often go unresolved, and discuss forms of affection and physical activity that help complete what they call the "stress cycle".^[13]

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections was published in 2024. It was inspired by dry spells in her own marriage, and it was the first time she publicly discussed her own sex life. The New York Times called it "the product of an academic who loves data."^[7] In the book, Nagoski stresses that the priority of sex should be pleasure, not frequency, orgasm count, or novelty.^[7][14]

She appeared in The Principles of Pleasure, a Netflix docuseries about sex.^[15]

Nagoski is married to Rich Stevens, a cartoonist, whom she met on the dating site OkCupid in 2011. They have two rescue dogs.^[7] She was diagnosed with autism in 2021.^[7]