Come as You Are

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]

Writing and speaking career

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]