GREENFIELD — When the New York Times best-selling author and Smith College professor began teaching, she gave her students a freebie question: What did you learn this year?
It was a sex education course and Emily Nagoski expected a scientific answer or two, but what she got shocked her and ultimately shaped her career moving forward.
Students said, “I learned I’m normal.”
The critically acclaimed sex educator and inaugural director of wellness education at Smith College went onto write “Come As You Are: The Surprising Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life.”
The Easthampton resident has been giving sex talks around the world, speaking about her book and about consent and the culture around it. Wednesday afternoon she gave her talk to Greenfield Community College.
Nagoski picked apart societal preconceptions on consent and pleasure during her lecture — speaking about differences between what your body might find as sexually relevant and what you personally find as sexually pleasurable — while providing recommendations, like standing naked in front of your mirror every day and forcing yourself daily to write down what you in fact like about your body.
“All bodies are beautiful bodies,” Nagoski explained. “Beauty is the thing you already are.”
Nagoski outlined what factors might be involved in determining whether they want sex: mental and physical well-being, partner characteristics, relationship characteristics like trust, setting, and other life circumstances.
She pointed to tickling as a good instance to look at as to whether someone would find something pleasurable, pointing to the mood someone is in when being tickled to whether they might find it pleasurable.
She concluded with her mantra: Pleasure is the measure. Nagoski then quoted fellow scholars, saying, “It whether or not you like the sex you have or don’t have” and “What kind of sex is worth wanting?”
Following the talk, Nagoski chatted briefly on the dynamics in the Pioneer Valley and people’s perspectives on sex and consent, like differences between cities and towns in the region.
“The way I experience, it is there’s mostly micro-cultures, pockets of friends and connected people, where they feel comfortable with a particular vocabulary they share,” Nagoski said. “They’re having conversations about consent and pleasure in ways that feel right and that grow within the micro-culture. There’s a little bit of cross fertilization into the adjacent micro-cultures.”
“But, she added, even in a place like the Pioneer Valley, it doesn’t feel like there is a whole comprehensive culture to consent or anything like that.”
Nagoski, who is currently wrapping up her latest book “Burnout” on life’s pressures and expectations, pointed to the historic development of culture in the valley.
“It started in the 1600s when we stole some land from some people. This is a nation, but specifically a state founded by Puritans. They left because they thought the British were too sexy,” Nagoski said. “From that seed, there has been adaptation and growth, but especially when there’s a pocket of a town isolated from other places, it will tend to grow its own little micro-climate. The seed origin is often a form of Puritanism, where women are not just property but inherently sinful.”
She’s hopeful that some in the generation growing up today, particularly in parts of the valley, will grow up with a more accurate vocabulary and understanding around sex and consent, though it might take a another generation for things to continue to change.
“I feel really optimistic about these micro cultures, these bubbles, where consent culture is growing and being cultivated,” Nagoski said. “But we’re not at a scale where I can say there’s a region-wide culture of sexuality.”