Category: Sex Drive

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The Pandemic Has Killed My Sex Drive,

But My Partner’s Has Skyrocketed. What Do We Do?

During quarantine, you might find that you’re hornier than usual. For others, sex is the last thing on their mind.

By Cassandra Corrado

Do you and your partners crave cheese fries at the same time? Probably not.

Sexual desire is kind of like wanting cheese fries. At any given moment you might be really excited for them, interested but not actively pursuing, or staunchly against them. It all depends on context and a number of influences at that moment. Just like it’s totally normal to want cheese fries when your partner wants pizza, it is totally normal for partners to experience different levels of sexual desire.

Since self-isolation became an essential part of our day-to-day lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of questions that I’ve gotten from people on social media dealing with differences in sexual desire is remarkable—but, ultimately, unsurprising.

As a sex educator, typically only about 2 percent of the questions I receive are about mismatched sex drive. Last week, they made up nearly 90 percent.

So, there’s no better time to dive into what exactly is happening here.

How sex drive really works

Your level of sexual desire is affected by two things: Your sexual excitement system and your sexual inhibition system.

As Emily Nagoski explains in her book Come As You Are, the things that excite you are like the gas pedals in your car: They’re the “turn-ons” that make you want to do something. Your inhibition system is like your brake pedal. And there are a lot of different things that can press on your brakes, including housework, childcare, professional stress, body image issues, a history of trauma, and, well, basically anything.

Everybody has things that sexually excite and sexually inhibit them, but when we think about sex drive, we tend to think solely about the things that arouse us.

The state of your mental health has a noticeable effect on your sex life. If you’ve noticed a drop in your or your partner’s sexual desire lately, try asking yourself if there are things in your life that are causing you more stress than usual (like, you know, a global pandemic). Stressors can inhibit your sexual desire simply by making your mind think about other things instead.

You may not be associating those stressors with sex, but your brain could be.

In the United States, we’re taught through movies and television that sexual desire is spontaneous. You meet somebody, and—bam!—you’re horny and ready for anything. You know that scene where two people are making out in an apartment building hallway, then tearing their clothes off, and then you fast forward to the duo tired and satisfied after? Though common on screen, those scenarios don’t reflect the majority of sexual experiences. Sexual desire is rarely spontaneous; more often than not, it’s fostered.

That means you might have to create a sexy context for you and your partners to feel in the mood. That sexy context could be a lot of different things: Maybe that means wearing clothing or underwear that make you feel confident, or maybe it means that all of the dishes are done.

Regardless of what your context is, the important thing to note is that you can make changes to your environment that open you up to sex. You and your partners each have your own individual excitement/inhibition systems though, and sometimes they just won’t match up.

What to do when you’re craving sex and your partner isn’t

During quarantine, you might find that you’re hornier than usual. For some people, sex serves as a grounding technique. Pleasure can be a means of distraction during otherwise uncertain or overwhelming times, and the dopamine and oxytocin boost that comes with orgasm can make you feel good—even for a little bit. Plus, you might just be bored.

For others, sex is the last thing on their mind. Both responses are normal and okay.

Differences in sexual desire can cause issues in relationships even during relatively low-stress periods. So, if you and your sexual partner are quarantined together and coping with unequal sex drives, conflict may arise.

When it does, remember that a sudden shift in sexual desire doesn’t necessarily mean that your partner is no longer attracted to you. More likely, it means that there are a lot of things pressing on their sexual brakes. The way to alleviate that stress isn’t by confronting or shaming the person; it’s by having an open conversation about what is going on for them mentally, emotionally, physically, and sexually.

Try asking questions like:

  • “I’ve noticed that we have (or haven’t) been having sex lately. How are you feeling about our sex life right now?”
  • “Since we’re avoiding sex right now, I’d like to find some other ways for us to feel intimate. What are some things that sound enjoyable to you?”
  • “I feel like COVID-19 has affected so many parts of our lives—even our sex life. Have you noticed that too? How has it been affecting you?”

Open-ended, non-judgmental questions.

One important note—the time to have this conversation is not when you’re partially undressed and in bed. Take the conversation out of the bedroom, and you’ll reduce the likelihood that someone feels rejected or pressured to respond in a particular way.

You won’t know how your partner is feeling until you talk to them, so have the conversation even if it feels difficult. You might find that your partner is afraid to initiate sex right now because they’re uncertain if sex is safe. Or, perhaps they’re feeling so overwhelmed by the current environment that sex just isn’t a priority.

It’s essential to note that if your partner says they don’t want to have sex right now, that doesn’t mean you should convince them it’s okay. “No,” “I’m not sure,” and “Not right now” all mean no, so respect that.

If partnered sex is off the table, ask yourself what feeling or outcome you’re seeking from sex. Is it physical closeness? Orgasm? Intimacy? Exercise? Catharsis?

Knowing the outcome you’re searching for can help you pinpoint other ways to achieve it. If you’re looking for physical closeness, maybe cuddling, a long hug, or giving a massage would help. If it’s orgasm, masturbation can be an alternative. Intimacy can be fostered by disconnecting from technology and planning an at-home date. A yearning for physical activity can be fulfilled by doing a live-streamed workout or other safe, physically distant exercises. And if it’s catharsis you’re looking for, try consuming media that you know brings you extreme joy, tears to your eyes, or whatever emotion you want to feel.

No matter which route you take, make sure to continue talking with your partners about your sex life. The number one thing that gets in the way of pleasurable sex isn’t lack of technique, desire, or new toys; it’s lack of communication.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Quarantine Horniness

It’s still a bad idea to sleep with someone new, even if both of you have been social distancing.  

A person walks past a mural of a mask-wearing couple kissing on March 21 in Glasgow, Scotland

By Alex Abad-Santos

In 2012, the immortal chanteuse Britney Spears sang about the erotic thrill of the apocalypse.

“I can’t take it, take it, take no more. Never felt like, felt like this before,” she sang, voicing a deep, roiling desire to dance with someone she’d just met. “C’mon get me, get me on the floor. DJ, what you, what you waitin’ for?”

Spears suggested her lust was so enthralling that not even global annihilation could get in her way.

“See the sunlight, we ain’t stopping. Keep on dancin’ ’til the world ends,” Spears continued. “If you feel it, let it happen. Keep on dancin’ ’til the world ends.”

The reality of our current apocalyptic scenario — the coronavirus pandemic — is a lot less sexy than the sweaty, bare-skin-pressing-on-bare-skin circumstances Spears envisioned. Quite the opposite. People living in 42 states (and counting) have been told to stay home, following the leads of countries like Italy and Spain that have gone on full lockdowns. Government officials have begged people to not just remain indoors but also to cut off any physical contact with others.

The aim of this restrictive measure is to reduce the spread of the virus, not letting it jump from person to person. And sacrificing physical contact for the global good means that interactions with people you don’t share a home with now exist primarily online over texts, Zoom calls, direct messages, and social media.

Through social distancing, we’re cut off from most physical contact with our friends and family. We’re also meant to keep away from people we were having sex with or want to have sex with, unless we already live with those people. And all the people who were having or were interested in having sex with us can’t pursue those aims, either

In Spears-speak, everyone you want to dance with ’til the world ends is now off-limits. But that has neither stopped people from irresponsibly hooking up (or claiming to be), nor kept some from pursuing and being pursued

While there are directives from health officials — New York City has a widely circulated memo about how its horny residents should refrain from hooking up and send nudes or video chat instead — I wanted to ask experts about why some people’s sex drives are even more stimulated than normal during a time where we can’t tap into those desires with other people. I also wanted to know: How risky is it to act on those sexual desires with someone, even if they’re also self-quarantining?

Being hornier than usual right now is perfectly normal. So is not wanting to have sex at all.

In the first week of social distancing, I noticed a few more green circles popping up on my Instagram feed than usual. Green circles are the platform’s way of indicating that you’re on someone’s “Close Friends” list, seeing a post made for a specific set of eyes decided on by the user. On my Instagram feed, these Close Friends posts usually come from gay men sharing thirst traps, a particularly randy brand of photo or video — usually shirtless, sometimes featuring underwear — that’s designed to get attention. The goal is to get the viewer to slide into your DMs, usually sending a reply involving the fire or eyeballs emoji

The question became clear: Was the lockdown on physical intimacy driving up the frequency, and thirstiness, of these private posts?

Instagram told me on March 23 that although there have been upticks in use of the platform’s “live” feature since March 16 (when the first US quarantine measures went into effect), it didn’t have specific data on whether there has been a dramatic change in frequency of “Close Friends” posts on the platform during the past month or so of worldwide quarantine measures.

Without a solid answer and nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I asked the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which studies human sexuality and relationships, for its take. Kinsey is in the middle of conducting a study on how the pandemic has affected people’s sexual relationships, and its researchers have found that the number of people engaging in sexual behavior online has increased, as well as the number of people who have completely disengaged.

“When you look at the data, you actually see movement at both ends,” social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at Kinsey and author of Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire, told me. “You have a higher percentage of people now who are saying [that] they’re masturbating and having more sex. But you also have a higher percentage of people saying they’re not engaging in any sexual behavior at all. And the people at the low end and not having any behavior — that increase is much bigger than the increase at the other end of the spectrum.”

Lehmiller says experiencing a lack of sex drive is tied to the distress of the situation. The death tolls ratchet up constantly, horrific stories come out of hospitals each day, projections talk about hundreds of thousands of deaths, and it seems inevitable that by the end of the pandemic, each one of us will know someone that’s been affected by the disease. Not being in the mood is completely understandable.

But that same apocalyptic scenario can trigger arousal too.

“There’s a whole body of research and the theory is called Terror Management Theory,” or TMT, Lehmiller said. “The idea behind it is that when we face the prospect of our own mortality, it leads us to cope, or it leads us to change our attitudes and behaviors in a way that it’s designed to cope with that existential threat.”

And for some people, TMT manifests itself in sexual interest and desire, or adopting new ways to express themselves sexually. Those expressions could be sexting, sending nudes, or initiating video chats — all of which can spin off from a single thirsty Close Friends post.

“Something we’re seeing in our data is that people are incorporating more online sexual activities that maybe they’ve never done before into their sex life as a way of getting some sexual fulfillment and also connection with other people,” Lehmiller told Vox. “So it definitely does seem to be the case that there is more sexting, for example, going on right now. And more sending of nudes and other things like that.”

Our social etiquette and norms have also changed.

Many people may now have much more privacy to send a sext or DM at any time of day. Nights and weekends — times when Lehmiller says we’re most likely to engage in sex-seeking behavior — are now almost indistinguishable from afternoons and weekdays, blurring the lines of when it’s appropriate for us to start flirting and thirst-trapping. And there are now a lot of people home during the day to receive and reciprocate these messages.

These different factors can really do a number on the way our sex drives respond.

I asked Lehmiller why my circle of gay friends and several gay men I spoke to in particular seemed to notice more thirst traps on Instagram and DMs than they did before. The research that Lehmiller is doing at Kinsey, which surveys more than 1,000 participants, found that gender or sexual orientation wasn’t a determining factor in whether someone was expressing themselves more during the pandemic, he said.

“The people that are most likely to experience that increased in sexual desire are people who already are very comfortable with their bodies and have a positive body image,” Lehmiller told me. “If you’re somebody who was embedded in a network of people that had a level of interest in sex to begin with, you’re probably seeing even higher levels of sexual interest coming out right now.”

Why it’s so risky to sleep with someone right now, even if they’re social distancing

I spoke to a number of people for this article, and found that, although Lehmiller said gender and sexual orientation wasn’t really a factor in sexual behavior, the gay men I interviewed seemed to be the most frank, candid, and innovative when it comes to their online sex lives. A 31-year-old New Yorker whom we’ll call Andrew told me about a 32-person Instagram group DM he participates in where nudes are exchanged.

“It started as a, ‘Can I send you nudes during these trying times?’” he told me, explaining how the massive DM chain began as a poll. “And a ‘yes’ vote was basically consent for receipt and I got a lot of yeses, so I thought, wouldn’t it be fun?”

The group is so popular, Andrew said, that there’s apparently a waitlist to get into the DM chain.

Hunter (whose name has been changed to protect his privacy), a 24-year-old from New York, explained that he too has been sending out more nudes and posting flirty Close Friends Instagram stories because physical intimacy is off the table.

“I started doing it naturally just because of the circumstances, but it’s reinforced by seeing so many of my peers doing the same thing,” Hunter said. “I think we’d all rather spend our time flirting and complimenting each other instead of thinking about sickness and death.”

Hunter and Andrew are actually following the New York City’s public health directive, which encourages “video dates, sexting or chat rooms” as opposed to meeting people online.

And they, like their fellow New Yorkers, have been asked to socially distance themselves for more than three weeks now. Theoretically speaking, that’s longer than the reported incubation period for the disease. But it’s important to keep in mind that just because people have dutifully followed self-quarantine measures and think they might be okay to go out to see someone once in a while, it doesn’t mean that they no longer pose a risk to each other

It’s simple: Sleeping with someone who doesn’t live in your home is still a risk, because at this point, anyone outside of your own home could stand as a health risk to you right now.

“Social distancing reduces your risk greatly, and it reduces the risk that you pose to others greatly, but it’s no guarantee that you didn’t get it when you went to the grocery store three days ago,” Anna Muldoon, a former science policy adviser at the US Department of Health and Human Services and PhD candidate researching infectious disease and social crises at Arizona State University, told me. “Every time you leave your house, there’s some level of risk. When people say they’ve been self-quarantining for two weeks, very few of them actually mean they’ve had zero risk of exposure in two weeks. And the other thing is, on your way to that [sex] date, you’ve got to get there somehow, and that’s another exposure risk.”

Muldoon said perhaps someone living in your neighborhood or even your building could be the least worst choice to sleep with for someone who absolutely can’t hold off. (Muldoon does not recommend sleeping with a neighbor, emotionally speaking.) She said that people who go to the same places that you’re going to are generally exposed to the same level of risk as you.

Humans are going to do human things, and sex is a very human thing,” Muldoon said. “I think that if you’re in a situation where it’s like you’ve talked to the person long enough that you really believe that they’re following all the precautions, and you’re in the same neighborhood having to walk the same streets, or go to the same grocery store anyway, your risk is relatively similar. I don’t love the idea, because you are increasing both of your risk, but you’re probably being exposed to the same things.”

The thing to keep in mind if you do decide to have sex during these troubling times, experts say, is that it’s not just your health you’re going to worry about. You’re making yourself responsible for someone’s health and vice versa. It’s a personal call as to whether that’s a decision you want to make. It’s absolutely fine and even a better decision that’s backed by doctors and health officials, if you don’t want to expose yourself to other people right now — or if you just want to fire up Instagram, send some consensual nudes over DMs. Or even if you just want to keep your love life to text-only for now.

“This is a moment that we’re all learning to develop deeper relationships again. It’s a kind of weird experience,” Muldoon said. “We had all adjusted to sort of a really fast trajectory into sleeping with people and really sped-up forms of dating, and this thing is forcing us to go back to old-school getting-to-know-you things.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why you’re probably having less (or more) sex right now

By Alexandra Ossola & Natasha Frost

Most people in lockdown, as 75% of Americans are at the moment, are probably experiencing big changes to their usual routine. There’s no office commute, no school bus shuttle; there are no parties to attend, no group dinners to plan. It’s unsurprising, then, that for a lot of people, those changes may also be affecting their sex life.

For some, less sex during the pandemic is a given—for those who are self-isolating while single, making their usual sex lives too risky, or those whose partners are away or sickened by the virus. Meanwhile, those with the option of having more sex might well be taking it: Condoms may become the next item to be in short supply worldwide, while some have speculated that maternity wards will see an uptick in mothers giving birth nine months after the lockdowns began.

But if you’re not feeling in the mood, well, you’re not alone. On Twitter, users lamented that “general panic and despair” had led to the sudden disappearance of their libido, as one put it. Others described feeling “unappealing” or wanting to cuddle and eat snacks instead. In a poll of just over 9,000 people from NBC News, only 24% said the coronavirus outbreak had positively affected their sex lives (28% were neutral and 47% said it had affected them negatively).

Online, sex researchers and therapists acknowledge that people could really go either way. “After all, we know from a mountain of psychological research that two people can respond to the same situation in very different ways and that the factors that increase sexual desire in some can drive it down in others,” Justin Lehmiller, a sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute, wrote in a blog post.

Wondering what’s going on? There might be a few reasons why you’re feeling different about getting busy.

Fighting off the blues

“For plenty of people, when they get stressed out, sex is the farthest thing from their mind,” says Heather McPherson, a sex therapist based in Austin, Texas. Between worrying about elderly parents, figuring out how to exercise at home, and managing a new routine, “a lot of things can point toward not doing it, because you’re so focused on surviving,” she says. Meanwhile, “stress and anxiety and potentially losing your job will potentially take a toll on all relationships.”

Still, in such unusual circumstances, it’s hard to know which behaviors are most common, McPherson says. “We don’t really have good measures to go off.”

Some people may see the opposite effect altogether: “For some people, when anxiety and stress goes up, their libido kicks up,” with sex serving as a coping mechanism. This is the phenomenon dubbed the “apocalyptic hornies” by Men’s Health, perhaps contributing to a 17.8% increase in US site traffic to PornHub on March 24, compared to an average day.

Writing in Psychology Today, sex therapist Diane Gleim suggests that it all comes down to a delicate balancing act: “A person’s sex drive needs just enough anxiety/tension/uncertainty to get activated but not too much anxiety/tension/uncertainty or else the person can get overwhelmed, flooded, and then sex drive goes underground,” she writes. “Think of it like the Goldilocks principle: not too much (anxiety), not too little (anxiety), but just (the) right (amount of anxiety).”

One of the few studies into the relationship between trauma and the libido, published in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, looked at the effect of the massive 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, China, on the reproductive health of 170 local women. Researchers found a marked decrease in women’s satisfaction with their sex life: Before the quake, 55% of women surveyed said they were satisfied, falling to 21% afterwards. They had less sex, too: Before the quake, every woman surveyed said they were having sex at least once a week, and in the week immediately after, 89% said they had not had sex at all. Even a month later, 32% said they were still not having sex.

The economy sucks

If US history is anything to go by, a downturn in economic prospects is similarly bad news for the nation’s sex life. That’s according to studies on the nation’s birth rate: During years of prosperity, such as the 1950s, the US birth rate soared. Its greatest nadirs, meanwhile, coincided with times of economic hardship: the Great Depression of 1929, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 2008 recession.

Between 2008 and 2013, for instance, nearly 2.3 million fewer babies were born in the US than would have been expected if pre-recession fertility rates had persisted, according to one study from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.

Some of this may be pragmatic, of course—who wants to have another child when they can barely afford the ones they have? Still, while birth rate isn’t a perfect measure for how much sex people are having (especially after 1960, when the pill went on sale as a contraceptive), it’s one of the better indicators widely available.

Too much togetherness

In long-term relationships, it can be hard to keep the mystery alive at the best of times. That goes double when you’re stuck together in the confined space of your own home, with few opportunities for independent activities or time apart.

Too much closeness, in fact, can actually hinder the kind of intimacy we look for in sex, sex therapist and relationship guru Esther Perel writes in her book Mating in Captivity:

It is too easily assumed that problems with sex are the result of a lack of closeness. But … perhaps the way we construct closeness reduces the sense of freedom and autonomy needed for sexual pleasure. When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter. When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.

During this interminable period of intense stress and anxiety, it’s hardly surprising if you find your libido vacillating from one extreme to the other. Sex therapist McPherson said many of her clients had found themselves settling gradually into a new routine after a few weeks in lockdown. As human beings, “generally, we’re pretty resilient,” she says. And when it comes to sex in quarantine, there’s one undeniable upside: “You certainly have enough time to do it.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What Causes Low Sex Drive In Women?

And How Can I Increase Mine?

There are real treatments available.

By Alyssa Dweck, M.D.

Not in the mood to get busy tonight? Don’t panic just yet. Libido in women is complicated. There are a whole host of factors that influence sex drive and affect why you might not want to have sex (tonight, this week, or even for the last several months).

But if it’s more of a persistent concern and it’s causing you distress, it’s worth looking into further and discussing with a trusted medical professional; the gyno is the first stop for most women. Your libido could be falling flat from something as common as stress or the birth control you’re taking, or it could be a sign of a bigger health issue. But you won’t know the underlying cause or how to solve it until you bring the issue to your doc’s attention. Okay, now let’s dive deeper.

Libido can ebb and flow for all sorts of reasons.

First, I want to remind you that there’s no such thing as a “normal” sex drive. Take the stats out there about how often other people typically have sex with a grain of salt; it varies for everyone (and, hey, people lie!). Female sex drive is nuanced, and your libido rises and falls naturally.

For example, you might have a higher sex drive around the time of ovulation (the body’s way of telling you to get frisky during your fertile time, even if you’re not actively trying to become pregnant). Or, you may not feel like being sexually active during other times of the month, like when you’re on your period (though if you’re into period sex, it can be enjoyable too).

You can also experience changes in your hormones or neurotransmitter levels from certain medications you’re taking (antidepressants, for example, could lower your drive or alter your ability to orgasm), which, in turn, can mess with your sex urge. The same can happen if you have an underlying hormonal condition like a thyroid disorder or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Another player when it comes to sex drive that you might not necessarily expect is hormonal birth control. Most BC pills (or patches and rings) contain the hormones estrogen and progesterone, which are necessary for regulating your cycle. What the pill is doing is preventing ovulation. And as a result, the typical peaks and dips of those hormone levels don’t occur, so you’re not experiencing that surge of estrogen during ovulation, which is typically what makes women want to have sex during that fertile period.

Plus, the amount of testosterone you produce also naturally decreases significantly if you’re on the Pill, which also might make your drive slip a bit. For other women, though, feeling confident and secure in their method of birth control could make them feel more like having sex. It really depends on the person and their particular hormone levels.

Or, major life changes may impact your sex drive, like if you’ve had a death in the family, recently lost a job, or are going through a bout of depression. If your mental health or emotional circumstances could have something to do with it, you may just need to be gentle with yourself and work with a mental health pro to address the issue.

It’s also totally possible that you’re just in a self-esteem rut and aren’t feeling as sexual. The bottom line is, it’s important to be honest with your gyno and/or therapist about alllll of these factors so that they can consider all possible factors that could be affecting your libido.

Or, you may actually have hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

Beyond the typical contributing factors to low libido, you might be showing signs of a well-recognized medical condition called hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD. It presents as low sex drive, but to the maximum extent. HSDD is characterized by having a pretty much completely absent sexual drive and lack of fantasizing about sex in general.
Most patients who struggle with HSDD compare it to a light switch—they used to have regular sexual desire, but for no identifiable reason, they all of a sudden have *zero* sex drive, no matter the partner or the situation. In cases of HSDD, there’s also always distress associated with low libido, meaning an emotional component of being upset or distraught over the fact that you’re not thinking about sex.

It’s a little bit tricky to diagnose HSDD. Patients fill out a brief questionnaire about their low sex drive and how it’s affecting them emotionally, and doctors screen their responses to diagnose the disorder. If, when docs assess a patient’s answers, it seems the cause of low drive could be related to something like relationship or marital problems, or a different medical or medication issue, your MD will work on addressing and treating that with you first.
But if you do get a HSDD diagnosis, don’t panic. Believe it or not, HSDD is common among young women—one in 10 premenopausal women suffer from it—and it’s not something to be ashamed of at all.

To treat low sex drive, you have a few different options.

Treatment, as you can probably guess, depends on the underlying cause. But your doctor will likely recommend one (or more) of the following courses of action.
1. Consider seeing a sex therapist.2. Revisit books and movies that might help light your flame.
This practitioner will manage the emotional and psychological components of low sex drive and will also address how your drop in libido might be affecting your relationship, or your desire to form a new relationship.

When I work with people suffering from HSDD or low libido in general, I notice that some have a fear that this may cause their partner, if they have one, to stray or leave them. This is also something you can delve into further with a sex therapist, if your low libido is bringing up intrusive thoughts like this. In my practice, I often recommend reconnecting with your partner with a regular date night. Basically, it’s a “prescription” for intimacy.

To find a mental health practitioner with expertise in sexual health in your area, check out Aasect.org.

2. Revisit books and movies that might help light your flame.
You may simply need to do some solo homework to get back in your groove. This can include a variety of different tasks (that you’re comfortable with, of course). For some patients, watching porn or reading erotica does the trick for getting sexual thoughts back on the brain. You can incorporate this during solo time so that you can start fantasizing on your own, and then you can involve your partner in the scenario.

Another thing that helps sometimes is going out on a limb with sexual activity. That could mean a fun role play scenario for some people. For others, that could mean having sex in another room of the house besides the bedroom to keep things interesting.

3. Talk to your doc about medications and supplements that can boost your drive.

If you have HSDD, medication might be necessary to treat the condition. In 2015, a drug called Flibanserin was approved by the FDA to treat HSDD in pre-menopausal women. It’s a daily pill that may have some side effects, like dizziness, nausea, and fatigue, according to the drug’s website.

More recently, another drug called Vyleesi got approved. It is uniquely administered with an auto-injector (it’s like an Epipen) that you can take on demand to get you prepped for sex. Vyleesi works on melanocortin receptors, or energy regulators, in the brain. Studies showed increased desire and decreased distress in those taking Vyleesi. One common side effect is nausea. [Ed note: Dr. Dweck has worked as an HSDD educator with the parent company of Vyleesi.]

Other options include off-label use of testosterone supplementation via prescription or over-the-counter herbal supplements to enhance sex drive.

If months go by and you’re not able to get back to your normal level of sexual desire, that could be the right time to also alert your health-care provider that you’re not feeling like yourself.

But the main red flag is not how long your drive is low (for some people it’s weeks, months, or longer)—it’s the question of whether your low libido is distressing to you. That’s when you should bring it to your gyno’s attention.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Real Orgasms And Transcendent Pleasure:

How Women Are Reigniting Desire

By Malaka Gharib

How can more women allow themselves to experience sexual pleasure?

That’s one of the central questions in The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, a book published this month by public health researcher and journalist Katherine Rowland.

Rowland explores why American women aren’t happy with their sex lives — and what they can do about it. A landmark study from 1999 found that over 40% of women surveyed experienced sexual dysfunction — the inability to feel satisfied by sex. A contributing factor, noted the researchers, was the lasting psychological effects of sexual trauma.

The Pleasure Gap
American Women & the Unfinished Sexual Revolution
by Katherine Rowland

The Pleasure Gap highlights how desire and the mind are linked for women. “Pleasure is inextricable from our social status, compressed and constrained by financial factors, by safety factors, by objectification,” she says. We need to remove these barriers, she says, to experience sex with the “full freedom, expression, range and truth that we’re endowed with.”

Rowland argues that it is possible for women to take charge and reignite their libidos. She talked to NPR about why fake orgasms are a cause for alarm, how much sex couples should have per week and “sexological bodywork.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You take issue with some of the research that tries to quantify sexual frequency and the idea that once a week may be the “optimal” amount. So how much sex should we be having?

Our national obsession with sexual frequency and the terrifying specter of dead bedrooms overrides the fundamental importance of sexual quality. There is no volume of sex that’s more or less good.

For whatever reason, researchers have embraced this idea that we should be having sex once a week — that it’s enough to sustain relationships and that it keeps depression, heart disease and obesity at bay.

But none of that research looks at how participants actually feel about that sex — other than feeling good that they can check the box for having done it.

You interviewed more than 120 women for this book. Many in heterosexual, long-term relationships told you that sex was an act of drudgery and that they often did whatever it took to get the job done. This felt sad to me.

I found myself feeling beaten down by the near ubiquity of stories of faking it in that context.

We tend to treat faking it as such a jokey matter. When the media reports on studies that try and capture the percentage of women who fake orgasm during sex, it tends to be from a male perspective saying “ouch” — focusing more on the bruising of men’s feelings that occurs when women are lying to them as opposed to concerns surrounding the fact that women aren’t feeling good.

That women are feigning their pleasure in order to hasten that experience along — I think we need to treat that with real alarm. We need to ask: What’s going on in that women are engaging in spectacle as opposed to actually allowing themselves to feel sensation?

Your book explores how some women have a low desire for sex. How does this happen?

Among the women who I spoke to, the persistent low desire was heavily associated with the idea that sex should revolve around penetration as the main course, with maybe a polite prelude of a foreplay, rather than thinking about sex as a broader universe of intimacy.

It’s the combination of a larger culture that privileges male sexuality over women’s, a culture that doesn’t teach women that pleasure belongs to them. A lack of anatomical self-knowledge. And feelings of sort of persistent danger and women being often censored and censured for expressing their desire.

You push back against the idea that the female orgasm is mysterious and elusive, which is how the media has sometimes described it. What would be a more accurate way to understand the female orgasm?

It’s more like riding a bicycle. You learn how to do it. And what we see is that as women become more versed with what their body can do, orgasm becomes more readily achievable.

The female orgasm tends to get wrapped up in these fuzzy terms like “elusive” and “hazy” and “mysterious” because women aren’t encouraged to explore what actually feels good. But if they were encouraged to self-pleasure and explore in real, sincere ways by themselves and with their partners, I think they would find that there is a world of pleasurable sensation available to them.

In your book, you say that the goal is for women to have a “profound sexual experience.” What do you mean by that?

It can mean a number of things, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be a sexual encounter in terms of our often narrow understanding of sex. The women who I spoke to describe it to me as feelings of transcendence, of approaching sex not just as a way for getting off or feeling good, but as a portal into a deeper state of self-knowledge.

They often use the word “spiritual” — the alignment of self, sensation and possibility. Pleasure so deep it felt like a homecoming, like they had been restored to themselves, to the depths of their potential.

How can women regain control over their sex lives?

The first thing to do would be to stop absorbing [unscientific] outside knowledge. There is such a rash of faulty information out there as a result of our lack of sound science and solid education. We’ve seen this proliferation of experts pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Online, you’ll find doctors who promise that by injecting more blood into the vagina, it will give it a face-lift that will bolster orgasmic potential. Or self-proclaimed “sexperts” who put on female ejaculation retreats. Those kinds of offerings often exist side by side with credentialed and validated interventions.

The second thing is to get to know your body. I think the most powerful intervention that I documented in my book was the realm of sexological bodywork.

What is that?

It’s a somatic approach to sexual healing that can — but does not necessarily — include genital touch. There’s a profound opportunity there for ethical violations, especially because it’s not a regulated practice. But for some of the women who I spoke to, they’ve said that this was the missing link in understanding their bodies.

Sexological bodywork practitioners facilitate your self-knowledge of your body, pleasure, comfort, boundaries, feelings of confidence and being able to articulate “no.” For example, “No, I don’t want you to touch me here” and “I don’t want you to look at me here.” This helps women ask why they feel this way — and get to a point where they can say “yes.”

For women in a relationship with a man, how can male partners do more to help?

Men can — and should — play a central role in helping women fully engage with their desires and sensations.

They can do this by being compassionate and nonjudgmental listeners. By creating an erotic atmosphere in which men and women’s needs command equal importance, and by encouraging interactions that depart from the wearied script of male arousal and release. Just as society tends to overly complicate female sexuality, we oversimplify men’s, and they also benefit from shifting dynamics around.

Any ideas of how to do that?

I spoke with a number of couples, and one shared a story that made a deep impression.

They’re both middle-aged and both are experiential sexuality educators, so in many respects they’re versed in subjects like male privilege and the ways female satisfaction gets short shrift. But all the same, these issues were showing up in their intimate life.

At the woman’s request, they decided to make sex just about her — so that it flowed from her interest and followed the course of her arousal. She told him, she didn’t care how he took care of himself, but she didn’t want to be a part of it.

They came to call these sessions “The Experiment.” To their mutual surprise, it lasted for a whole year. As they recounted this experience, the woman thanked her partner for his generosity, and he immediately and firmly responded, “No, it was my pleasure.” They both felt they had benefited from the woman’s sexual growth and the shared opportunity to expand their erotic vocabulary.

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What I learned talking to 120 women about their sex lives and desires

I spoke with widows, newlyweds, monogamists, secret liaison seekers, submissives and polyamorists and found there was no such thing as desire too high or low

By Katherine Rowland

Male desire is a familiar story. We scarcely bat an eyelash at its power or insistence. But women’s desires – the way they can morph, grow or even disappear – elicit fascination, doubt and panic.

In 2014, as experts weighed the moral and medical implications of the first female libido drug, I found myself unsatisfied with the myths of excess and deficit on offer, and set out to understand how women themselves perceive and experience their passions.

Over the course of five years, I talked with 120 women and dozens of sexual health professionals. My reporting took me from coast to coast, and spanned conversations from a 22-year-old convinced she was sexually damaged to a 72-year-old learning how to orgasm. I spoke with widows, newlyweds, committed monogamists, secret liaison seekers, submissives and proud polyamorists.

I also dropped in on psychotherapy sessions, consulted sexologists, went inside the battle to get “female Viagra” FDA approved and profiled practitioners blurring the lines between sex work and physical therapy. In Los Angeles, I sat with a group of determinedly nonplussed sex coaches as they took in a live flogging demonstration, while in New York I stood among a thousand women whipped into a fist-pumping frenzy by a guru who declared the time had come for them to reconnect to their sensuality.

Against the background claims that women are disordered patients who require a pharmaceutical fix, or that they are empowered consumers who should scour the market for their personal brand of bliss, I found that there was no such thing as desire too high or low. Rather, desire contains as many tones as there are people to express it.

Low desire isn’t a symptom

In five years of conversations, I heard frequent variations on a common story. Somewhere in the mix of parenting, partnering and navigating the demands of professional life, women’s desire had dimmed to the barest flicker. In place of lust, they acted out of obligation, generosity or simply to keep the peace.

“What’s wrong with me?” many asked of their medical providers, only to come away with confounding answers. “Your flatlined libido is perfectly normal,” they were told. “But it’s also a medical concern.”

Just what constitutes normal stirs intense debate, in part because female sexuality shoulders an immense weight. It’s where observers have long looked for clues about human nature and for proof of immutable differences between men and women. The chief distinction, we’re told, is that women are less desirous than men.

And yet, low desire is often cast as an affliction that women are encouraged to work at and overcome. Accordingly, some women I talked to consulted therapists to understand why intimacy was tinged with dread. Others tried all manner of chemical interventions, from antidepressants and testosterone supplements to supposedly libido-rousing pills. A number of women accumulated veritable libraries of spice-it-up manuals. No matter the path, I heard time and again how women compelled themselves to just do it, committed to reaching a not necessarily satisfying but quantifiable end.

Low desire is a healthy response to lackluster sex

However, as women further described their malaise, their dwindling desire seemed less the result of faulty biology than evidence of sound judgment. It was a consequence of clumsy partners, perfunctory routines, incomplete education, boredom and the chafe of overfamiliarity.

In short, it was the quality of the sex they were having that left them underwhelmed. As one woman put it: “If it’s not about your pleasure, it makes sense you wouldn’t want it.”

Straight women are struggling the most in their erotic lives

While all women, regardless of sexual orientation, experience dips in drive, the utter depletion of sexual interest might be more common to heterosexual women, because their desires are less clearly defined to begin with.

“I spent most of my life with no sense of what I want,” one straight woman in her late 40s told me. Another, also in her 40s, reflected that she and her husband “did sex the way [she] thought it was supposed to look”. However, she said: “I don’t know how much I was really able to understand and articulate what I wanted.”

For both women, along with dozens of others that I spoke to, dwindling desire was an affront to identity. It exposed the limits of what they had expected of themselves, namely that they should settle down with one man and be emotionally and physically content from there on out. Their experiences mirror what researchers have uncovered about the so-called orgasm gap, which holds that men are disproportionately gratified by sex.

The picture subtly shifts when you look at which women are enjoying themselves. A 2017 survey of more than 50,000 Americans found that lesbians orgasmed 86% of the time during sex, as opposed to 65% of straight women (and 95% of straight men). Investigators speculate that lesbians and queer women enjoy greater satisfaction because of anatomical familiarity, longer sexual duration and not revering penetration as the apex of erotic mingling.

I would further surmise that queer women are often more satisfied because, unlike a lot of straight women, they have fundamentally considered the nature and object of their desires.

There’s nothing funny about faking it

The subject of faking it tends to seed jokey reactions, which frame the issue of female pretending as a slight to the man’s self-esteem. When she fakes it, he is the wounded party: her absent climax becomes his loss.

According to one well-trafficked 2010 report, 80% of heterosexual women fake orgasm during vaginal intercourse about half of the time, and another 25% fake orgasm almost all of the time. (When CBS News reported on this study, the headline opened with “Ouch”; there was no editorializing on shabby male technique – all the focus was on the bruising consequences of women’s inauthentic “moaning and groaning”.)

Faking it was ubiquitous among the women I spoke with. Most viewed it as fairly benign, and I largely did too. That is, until the subject cropped up again and again, and I found myself preoccupied with an odd contradiction: as women act out ecstasy, they devalue their actual sensations.

On the one hand, this performance is an ode to the importance of female pleasure, the expectation held by men and women alike that it should be present. But on the other, it strips women of the physical and psychological experience of pleasure. Spectacle bullies sensation aside.

Women aren’t looking for a magic pill

One might think from the headlines that equal access to pharmacopeia ranks high among women’s sexual health concerns. After all, men have a stocked cabinet of virility-boosting compounds, while women have paltry options. But this was not my takeaway.

While some women opined that it would be nice to ignite desire with a pill, few saw the benefit of boosting appetite if the circumstances surrounding sex remained unchanged. While desire was frequently tinted by a sense of mystery, its retreat was rarely presented in a black box. Almost across the board, women spoke of their sexuality in contextual terms: it changed with time, with different partners and different states of self-knowledge.

In 2018 an article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior surmised “Research has not conclusively demonstrated that biology is among the primary mechanisms involved in inhibiting sexual desire in women.” Rather, the authors said, body image, relationship satisfaction and learned values intervene to shape women’s experiences of lust. Even though FDA-approved drugs like Addyi and Vyleesi are marketed to suggest that desire dips independently of life circumstances, those involved in drug development are certainly aware of these other influences. The strength of their impact on women’s minds and bodies may even be contributing to the challenge of developing effective pharmaceuticals.

In the case of Viagra and its competitors, it’s assumed men want to have sex, but physically cannot, and so a feat of hydraulics allows them to consummate the act. But for women, the problem is more, well, problematic: they might be physically capable, but emotionally disinclined. Insofar as that is the case, we need to attend the reasons behind their reluctance.

Desire comes from liberating the erotic imagination

In the course of my reporting I attended a training session known as SAR, for Sexual Attitude Reassessment. The two-day workshops designed for sexual health professionals are intended to inundate participants with sexual material in order to highlight where they hold biases or discomfort, and they showcase a lot of explicit content.

The session I attended featured media depicting a gay head-shaving fetish, a medical-latex threesome and a wincing scene involving male genitalia, a typewriter and a miniature cactus. It also included frank confessionals from people whose bodies and lifestyles don’t necessarily accord with the culture’s rigidly gendered and ableist stereotypes – such as what it’s like for a trans woman to experience pleasure, or how a little person (the preferred term for adults with dwarfism) self-stimulates when his or her fingers cannot reach the genitals.

The idea, beyond highlighting all the “inscrutable, mystical loveliness” of sex, in the words of one facilitator, is to get participants to seek out what turns them on or disgusts them, or both.

In my recollection, the word “dysfunction” never surfaced in the programming. Rather, sexuality was framed in terms of accessing delight and accepting nonconformity. The subject of low desire was not viewed as a matter of sexual disinterest, but rather a result of how, owing to the greater culture, women hold themselves back, condemn their fantasies, foreclose on what they really want and sell themselves short on the idea that sex and love must look a certain way.

Women push themselves toward physical encounters that they either do not want, or for which they have not allowed desire to adequately develop. I came away with the impression that sexual healing had little to do with tricks or techniques, and almost everything to do with the mind, with sensing an internal flicker of I want that – and feeling empowered to act accordingly.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How To Boost Your Sex Life While Looking After Your Mental Health

by Bonnie Evie Gifford

We’d all like a bit more passion between the sheets (and on the streets, if that’s what does it for you), but can you give your sex life a boost without risking your overall wellbeing?

Going through a dry spell. Having a crisis of confidence. Just feeling plain ol’ frumpy, fed-up, and unsexy. It happens to us all at some point or another (well, unless you’re some kind of fabulous, self-loving, body-confident kind of person who rarely has an off day – in which case, please tell us your secrets).

The thing is, when things feel bad, it’s easy to fall into a shame spiral, for your thoughts to automatically become more negative, and to allow self-sabotaging, defeatist thinking to rule. Worrying about a little thing like your sex life can feel trivial when there are so many other things to be concerned about – it shouldn’t be a priority… right?

Sex isn’t just fun, it’s good for you. Sex is good for your heart, the closeness that comes with sexual encounters can help lower your blood pressure, decrease stress, and even fend off illness. Studies have shown that those who have more sex report feeling healthier than those who don’t.

We share seven ways you can boost your sex life while still putting your mental health first.

1. Identify your stressors

Why is it you feel your sex life needs a boost right now? What is it that is causing you to feel dissatisfied. Identifying the cause (or causes) of your negative feelings around your sex life (be those feelings of anxiety, worry, stress, or dissatisfaction) can help you to uncover any underlying problems.

Stress can be a major factor in our overall sense of health and wellbeing. If you’re worried stress or work-related anxiety may be affecting other areas of your life, try these 10 simple ways to tackle stress right now, or discover how you can beat back to work anxiety (and stop it taking over your free time).

By taking the time to sit back and ask yourself these kinds of big questions, you can begin to reveal if there are any areas of your life that need addressing. We all experience periods of work-related stress, relationship worries, and ill mental health or wellbeing during our lives.

Acknowledging that you are struggling is the first step towards seeking help and support – be that of loved ones, or a professional. Through fixing what is really causing you disruption and discomfort, you may begin to see a positive impact on other areas of your life.

2. Acknowledge your libido

Throughout your lifetime, your sex drive will fluctuate. It’s completely natural to go through periods where you experience less sexual desire than others, for both men and women. It’s ok to not be feeling it.

If you are experiencing other relationship issues, stress, depression or exhaustion, it’s worth noting that all of these can all be contributing factors to a lower libido.

If you’re worried, it can be worth speaking with your GP, checking out NHS inform’s advice, or talking with a psychosexual therapist. Sex therapists are qualified counsellors who have extra training to help with sex-related difficulties or concerns, and can help you feel more intimate with your partner, as well as exploring new ways to help you feel more comfortable.

Working with a hypnotherapist can also help decrease any embarrassment or nerves that may be affecting your libido, encourage you to reframe your thoughts, regain confidence, and even manage menopause symptoms.

As counsellor Graeme explains, having different libidos doesn’t have to negatively impact your relationship.

“In most relationships the sexual drive or libido is different in the partners. Of course, often when we start a relationship it feels like it will last forever; you can hardly keep your hands off each other; you are both very ready to have a sexual relationship; you seem to share the same level of desire and have a great time together. Of course this honeymoon period rarely lasts forever, and as the levels of hormones drop back to more normal levels we settle down into the day to day existence of being a couple. Each of us returns to our normal libido.

“All too often this can affect the relationship; the partner with the greater sex drive can feel rejected, or that the couple has fallen out of love. All of these are a reflection of them trying to make sense of the different drives.

“Talking to your partner about your relationship and the sexual side is very important. If the couple don’t discuss how they feel then misunderstandings inevitably appear as you assign thoughts and feelings to your partner. It can be difficult to talk about, but in the long run being honest about how you feel is going to allow you to be clear about what can and cannot change.

“It’s important to recognise that there is an element of reality that you can’t change. [Their libido] is another part of them that needs to be integrated into the relationship and will require negotiation and compromise.

“Mismatched libido is a relatively common problem in relationship counselling and couples can get past it and have fantastic long-term loving relationships by being honest, talking about it, and finding creative solutions that celebrate both partners’ needs and the whole relationship they have.

3. Make small changes to your environment

Your bedroom doesn’t just affect how you sleep – it can also have a surprising impact on your sex life. Creating a more relaxing, calming environment can help you to relax, gain higher quality rest, improve your sleep, and feel less distracted. As one nutritionist explains,

“Lack of sleep massively affects our hormones and daily lives. We are less able to deal with mental or physical stress, our metabolism can slow down, sex hormones are disrupted, and we can get cranky or distracted easily.

Removing your phone from the bedroom can help avoid one of the biggest passion killers – phubbing. If you ever find yourself scrolling, clicking on notifications, or automatically opening up Insta when you could be spending some quality time with the one you love, this could be a sign that social media is affecting your relationship and you may need to get control of your scroll. Find out more about the benefits of taking a break from your phone, and how sleep get help increase your sex drive.

4. Remember: confidence is sexy

Paris Hilton is quoted as having said “No matter what a woman looks like, if she’s confident, she’s sexy.” Is that really true? Can our confidence influence how sexy we feel?

Confidence and self-belief comes from our positive thinking, relationships, and friendships. It can affect your mood, behaviour, and even how you carry yourself. When we have low self-confidence, our negative self opinions can affect other aspects of our lives, from relationships to our careers.

If we can’t believe in ourselves, why should anyone else? Yet changing our own negative self-view can feel impossible. NLP Coach Vicki explains how working with a life coach can help boost your confidence and self-belief,

“Once you start to notice your self-talk and your self-language you will soon come to realise that you are self-sabotaging. Becoming aware of your self-sabotaging thoughts and language will allow you to realise the damage you are creating, you can then replace with self-praising thoughts and language.”

Counsellor Wendy explains how you can begin stepping outside of your comfort zone and improve your confidence.

5. Rediscover foreplay and rekindle intimacy

If you’re in a long-term realtionship, improving your sex life often starts with working on your relationship. Lulls in desire and the frequency of sexual acts can become more common when you are with someone for a longer period of time.

Focusing on improving the quality of your relationship and increasing your sense of intimacy can help you to feel closer to one another, whilst resparking feelings of desire. Planning date nights together, practising open communication, setting aside quality time together, or doing activities outside of the bedroom can all help.

Bringing the focus back to foreplay, over the main act itself can help to increase both your desire and libido. Spending time together touching, kissing, or just being close with each other can all act as ways in which you can feel closer, helping you each to focus on the here and now.

6. Ditch nasty habits

We’ve all had that one (or more) bad habit that we know we should kick, but we just… haven’t gotten around to it yet. But what if your habit is having a bigger impact than you may realise?

According to one study, smoking is one of our biggest turn-offs in the bedroom, with over half (59%) of Brits agreeing. More than a quarter of us have considered ending a relationship due to our partner’s smoking habits.

Quitting bad habits like smoking or excessive drinking can increase your energy levels, improve your immune system, and increase your life expectancy. Hypnotherapy, behavioural therapy, group therapy, and telephone counselling for smoking are all options that can offer a supportive, expert environment to help you change your habits for the better.

Looking after yourself through addressing addictions and practising self-care can help boost your sense of wellbeing and encourage you to start reprioritising the things that matter most in your life.

7. Come together outside of the bedroom

Increasing your passion in the bedroom may be the end result, but it doesn’t have to be the sole focus. By addressing your overall intimacy, you can feel more relaxed, closer to the ones you love, and more able to open up and share.

Emotional intimacy and closeness is key to having a more fulfilling partnership. It can help you to better meet your partner’s needs, as well as communicate your own.

Holding hands, hugging, or touching more can all help release more oxytocin, allowing you to feel calmer, less stressed, and closer. Research has shown hugs can have a huge range of benefits, from protecting us against illnesses to boosting our overall health, happiness and sense of wellbeing.

Creating quality time in your busy schedules to be together can be a great first step towards putting your partnership first, and reaffirming with each other how important you are. While life’s stresses and strains may continue to get in the way, nurturing our relationships with the ones we love is vital in showing them how much we care for and appreciate them.

If you are concerned your mental health may be affecting your overall sense of health and wellbeing, it’s important to reach out and seek help. Contact your GP to find out what help is available in your local area or call Samaritans on 116 123 to speak to someone 24/7.

To find more sex and relationship help and support, visit Counselling Directory. Or discover how hypnotherapy and life coaching can help improve your confidence and self-esteem.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Not Sexually Compatible With Your Partner?

Here’s How To Work On It.


By Caroline Colvin

A couple’s compatibility doesn’t hinge on just one thing. Compatibility takes into account a couple’s habits, interests, attraction, and the effort both partners are willing to put into their relationship (among so many other factors). Sex is one important part of an even bigger compatibility “whole,” but it’s not everything, nor is it the most important part of a relationship for every couple. Nevertheless, a healthy sex life is a priority for some, and if you feel like you’re not sexually compatible with your partner, you might feel a little discouraged. But don’t panic, your relationship isn’t doomed. There are a few solutions you and your partner can consider to help make your sexual relationship work.

Dr. Carol Queen, staff sexologist at sex toy company Good Vibrations, explains that sexual incompatibility tends to become an issue because of the taboo around sex. If you and your partner don’t talk about sex openly and comfortably before you become super committed, you might not even realize how different your sexual tastes are.

“We talk about sex like there’s a ‘normal’ baseline. There isn’t!” Queen tells Elite Daily. “As long as we’re not imposing on someone else coercively or non-consensually, we all have a right to our sexuality. It’s not a problem that we’re different. It’s a problem that we don’t understand that’s one element of partner compatibility to consider.”

Queen recommends three possible solutions: taking care of your sexual satisfaction through masturbation, opening up your relationship so you can see other people with whom you’re more sexually compatible, or asking your partner to work on becoming more compatible with you. “The most effective way to do this is probably to see a sex therapist together, though there are other things you can do instead if that isn’t an option,” Queen says.

For starters, she recommends not having this conversation while in bed. “Do it over a quiet dinner, a glass of wine — but not a lot of glasses. This isn’t a good mix with inebriation, or on a walk. Don’t spring the conversation on them,” Queen says. “Ask for some of their time to discuss something important.”

Then, let your partner know that it doesn’t seem like you two are a perfect fit in terms of your desires. For example, this could be a matter of your partner having kinky tastes while you prefer something a little more traditional, or vice versa. Your dissatisfaction might stem from the fact that your partner might not be able to help you orgasm, or perhaps they have a lower sex drive than you. There could be several reasons you feel this incompatibility. Tell your partner how you feel and then ask them what they think.

You might find that they agree with you and are willing to work on your sexual compatibility together. This starts with honest communication about your sexuality, including boundaries and priorities. According to Queen, one concrete way to approach this is by sitting down with your partner and creating individual “Yes, No, Maybe” lists. In the “Yes” category, you would write down all the things you already know you like and want to make a regular part of your sex life. In the “Maybe” category, you would write the things you’d be willing to try. And finally, in the “No” category, you would write the things you don’t want to do. From there, you and your SO would avoid everything on your “No” lists, and work to find common ground on the “Yes” and “Maybe” lists.

“If you and your partner can talk openly about these kinds of things, you can pretty likely find a sweet spot of activities you both enjoy,” says Queen.

If you find that you or your partner have one non-negotiable turn-on or kink that the other refuses to try, try not to panic. Queen admits this isn’t an “easy fix,” and describes the situation as one that has “led many couples to therapy, to open their relationships, or to even break up.” Nevertheless, “if you can communicate clearly and lovingly about your differences, you have a head start,” she says. Talk it out to work it out.

Ultimately, whether it’s the sex you’re having now or something new you try out in the future, make sure you’re having sex because you want to. You should never feel like you need to have a type of sex that you don’t want to just to keep a partner, Queen says.

If you and your SO are interested in opening your relationship, Queen says you’ll “need to make sure you are caught up on your communication skills, can handle jealousy, time management, and all the things you need to be good at to successfully have an open relationship or a polyamorous one.”

A book many sexperts (Queen included) recommend is Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton. “I promise you the book is wise and worthwhile,” Queen says. You can also sit down with your partner and make “Yes, No, Maybe” lists for polyamorous relationships too.

Talking about sex can be tough. It’s why you might find yourself dating someone long-term who you’re not sexually compatible with. You and your partner might need some time to process the discussion, especially if it was difficult on you, and that’s OK.

If after you have this discussion “your partner just won’t hear you and denies what you’re saying and experiencing, that’s a red flag,” says Queen. “In a situation like this, therapy is called for. Breaking up might even be called for. If a partner denies your perspective is even real, and does not commit to work on the relationship, you may not be in a situation that can be improved.”

It might feel like a serious bummer, but try to remember that you deserve a happy, healthy sex life, and if your partner’s not willing give that to you, you shouldn’t be afraid to find someone who will.

No matter what you and your partner end up doing, it’s important that you talk through your issues. Queen says that not talking about them can prompt problematic relationship behaviors, like affairs or faking pleasure. Talking to your partner isn’t a 100% guarantee that all of your problems in the bedroom will be solved, but it’s a start, and it’s also one solid, brave, healthy step you can take to work on your relationship before calling it quits all together.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Overcoming intimacy challenges after 50

By Julie Pfitzinger

Confidence: “The quality or state of being certain.” That’s the Merriam-Webster definition, but for many people who are starting to date again after 50, confidence can falter and it can be difficult to be certain about anything.

For those who have lost a spouse or partner to death, divorce or a break-up, a feeling of being vulnerable may begin to settle in, leading to concerns about finding intimacy, as well as about when and how to fully open up to another person.

In the Dating After 50 series on Next Avenue, we’ve covered several topics including online dating and dating etiquette, which have provided tips and suggestions for the “how” on ways to start dating again.

But there’s another kind of how — how to make yourself emotionally, and physically, available to someone new. Taking a risk to share yourself and everything you have to offer at this stage of your life. Accepting and acknowledging what potential partners are offering you. Being confident about what will happen next. And knowing that even though it might not be easy, you are certain that you are genuinely ready to find fulfillment and happiness with another person.

Are You Ready to Move On?

Experts like Lisa Copeland, an author, speaker and dating coach in her fifties, say the first step to tackling that feeling of vulnerability and to start building confidence is to properly grieve the end of a marriage or relationship, whether through a break-up, divorce or death, before you even think about moving on.

For those who have divorced, Copeland says the best way to tell if you are truly ready to date is to gauge if “you’re feeling fairly neutral about your former partner.” She notes, “If you don’t feel that way yet, you are going to bring that [experience] right into the new relationship.”

The situation is different for widows or widowers. “If they had a good marriage, they are wanting to repeat the same relationship with a different person,” Copeland says. The lost spouse is also often brought into a new relationship, but that person frequently becomes “like a saint,” she says, which can be counterproductive to establishing an authentic connection with another person.

Before opening yourself up to dating, start by building a new social circle. The first step, says Copeland, is “to get out of the house.”

“Make friends. Take classes. Get involved with activities. When you are involved in doing things you love, you will light up,” she explains.

Taking that first step to put yourself out there can be uncomfortable. Copeland is a big fan of Meetups, which she says are “an amazing way to connect with others.” In her view, going into a Meetup gathering with a mindset of simply making new friends is best.

“If you meet someone, that’s just a bonus,” she says.

Different Ideas About Sex

Fast forward a bit: You’ve met someone, the two of you have found common ground and the relationship is progressing well. But what comes next could produce the biggest crisis of confidence you’ve had, well, in years: the thought of a sexual relationship.

“People often approach sex with very different ideas,” says writer and speaker Walker Thornton, who is in her 60s and the author of Inviting Desire: A Guide for Women Who Want to Enhance Their Sex Life. “The basic question most everyone starts with is: ‘Am I going to get naked with this person? And then what do I do?’”

The first roadblock is often body image, which Thornton says is typically more of an issue for women than men, although men are definitely not immune to concerns.

“Women are more concerned about sags and folds,” she says. “But men are worried about getting an erection or about satisfying a woman.”

When it comes to sex, Thornton encourages women “to share the valuable information” they have about what they like and don’t like with a partner.

“What we desired at thirty is different from what we desire at fifty,” she says, adding that she understands that for many women, the conversation about likes and dislikes is uncomfortable.

“But if you can’t even ask [a partner] about sex, how are you going to do it?” Thornton wonders.

The Myth of STDs and STIs

One particular conversation that is vitally important is around the topic of STDs and STIs, explains Thornton, and it really is non-negotiable.

“Here’s the simplest way to couch that conversation: I care about your health, so I will be tested. If you care about my health, I ask you to do the same,” she says. “Offer to send him or her a copy of your test results and ask them to send theirs in return.”

The conversation shouldn’t stop there. Thornton goes on to say that if a partner is unwilling to use a condom, for example, “they aren’t showing you that they respect your health and well-being.” If that is the case, Thornton says, “be prepared to say ‘No’ to sex, and say that this refusal makes you question their commitment to being in a relationship.”

It’s a myth that older adults don’t get STDs or STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhea; condoms can protect from genital herpes, which while not life-threatening, can be very uncomfortable and more so for women than men, says Thornton.

Make a List of What You Need

Other health issues may also come into play in sexual relationships between older adults. “Sometimes, you have to broaden your definition of sex,” says Thornton. “Focusing on pleasure, in ways inclusive of orgasm or not.”

Chronic illness can be an issue, as can cancer treatment, which often results in hormonal changes; other challenges may include fatigue or muscle/movement problems. “That can lead to a discussion about a time of day that’s better for sex, or accommodations that are needed for a bed,” explains Thornton. “Again, the best way to address all of these issues is through conversation.”

Thornton, who most frequently speaks to groups of women, often suggests making a list of just what you are looking for when it comes to a sexual relationship in midlife and beyond.

“If you have sex with someone, do you anticipate that this will be an exclusive relationship? Or if your partner decides he or she doesn’t want a sexual relationship, is that okay? Maybe it is,” says Thornton. “For you, is sex merely a goal or a natural progression of becoming intimate with another person?”

‘You Have More Freedom’

Copeland, who has been divorced twice and is now in a relationship, says there is often healing to be done before people are ready to fully open themselves up to a new person. Still, she adds, it’s vital “to know your value and know that you are worthy of someone.”

“One thing that’s often overlooked when it comes to dating after fifty is that you have more choices. You have more freedom than you did when you were younger,” she says. “You can have companions or lovers, or be in a committed relationship.”

However, Thornton — also divorced and in a relationship — understands how some might not perceive this place in life as a place of freedom.

“If we think our time is limited, we can feel more vulnerable,” she says. “But it’s really all about going into dating with an open attitude. Be willing to take the risk.”

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The biggest reason older women have less (enjoyable) sex

Just 22.5% of women over 50 surveyed were sexually active

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Women are more likely than men to be affected by age-related sex issues — challenges like hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness.

Now, a new study by the North American Menopause Society reveals a major reason for women having less sex as they age: the lack of a partner, most often because of widowhood.

In fact, just 22.5% of postmenopausal women surveyed were sexually active. And of the 65% who did have significant others, just over 34% were sexually active in the past 30 days.

The study looked at roughly 4,500 women in the United Kingdom who were enrolled in a trial for ovarian cancer screening. As the trial continued, the women reported having less sex and that it was less enjoyable over time.

Only 3% of participants described positive sexual experiences, whereas only 6% sought medical help for sexual problems, despite the availability of effective therapies, ScienceDaily.com reports.

Most studies look at the physical reasons for a decline in satisfactory sex during and after menopause (usually captured from a checklist of complaints). This one instead examined free-text data to try to understand why women feel the way they do about sex.

“Sexual health challenges are common in women as they age, and partner factors play a prominent role in women’s sexual activity and satisfaction, including the lack of a partner, sexual dysfunction of a partner, poor physical health of a partner, and relationship issues,” NAMS medical director Dr. Stephanie Faubion wrote.

And there are a variety of psychosocial factors that come into play, too: body-image concerns; self-confidence; and perceived desirability, stress, mood changes, and relationship issues. The study also cited how their partner’s physical condition, as well as their own health, played a major role.

The bottom line: Having an intimate partner with whom you share good physical health are key to sexual activity and satisfaction.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Is there such a thing as ‘normal’ libido for women?

Drug companies say they can “fix” low sex drive in women.

By Caroline Zielinski

Ever wished you could reciprocate your partner’s hopeful gaze in the evening instead of losing your desire under layers of anxiety and to-do lists? Or to enthusiastically agree with your friends when they talk about how great it is to have sex six times a week?

Perhaps you just need to find that “switch” that will turn your desire on – big pharma has been trying for years to medicalise women’s sex drive, and to “solve” low libido.

One US company has just released a self-administered injection that promises to stimulate desire 45 minutes after use.

In late June, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) approved Vyleesi (known scientifically as bremelanotide), the second drug of its kind targeting hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), a medical condition characterised by ongoing low sexual desire.

Vyleesi will soon be available on the market, and women will now have two drugs to choose from, the other being flibanserin (sold under the name Addyi), which comes in pill form.

Many experts are sceptical of medication being marketed as treatment for HSDD and the constructs underpinning research into the condition.

Yet many experts are highly sceptical of medication being marketed as treatment for HSDD, and also of the scientific constructs underpinning the research into the condition.

What is female hypo-active sexual desire disorder?

Hypo-active sexual desire disorder (or HSDD) was listed in the DSM-4, and relates to persistently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity, which causes marked distress and relationship problems.

“The problem is, it is very hard to describe what this medical condition actually is, because its construction is too entangled with the marketing of the drugs to treat it,” says Bond University academic Dr Ray Moynihan, a former investigate journalist, now researcher.

His 2003 paper, and book, The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction,  evaluates the methods used by pharmaceutical companies in the US to pathologise sexuality in women, focussing on the marketing campaign of Sprout Pharmaceuticals’ drug flibanserin, an antidepressant eventually approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a treatment for women experiencing sexual difficulties.

“This campaign, called Even the Score, was happening in real time as I was working as an investigative journalist and author.

“I got to see and document the way in which the very science underpinning this construct called FSD – or a disorder of low desire – was being constructed with money from the companies which would directly benefit from those constructs.”

The campaign was heavily criticised, mainly for co-opting  language of rights, choice and sex equality to pressure the FDA to approve a controversial female “Viagra” drug.

During his research, Dr Moynihan says he found “blatant connections between the researchers who were constructing the science, and the companies who would benefit from this science”.

“The basic structures of the science surrounding this condition were being funded by industry,” he says.

What does the science say?

The biological causes of the condition have been widely researched. A quick search comes up with more than 13,000 results for HSDD, and a whooping 700,000 for what the condition used to be called (female sexual dysfunction).

Some of these studies show that women with the condition experience changes in brain activity that are independent of lifestyle factors, and other research has found that oestrogen-only therapies can increase sexual desire in postmenopausal women.

Others look into the effectiveness of a testosterone patch increasing sexual activity and desire in surgically menopausal women. Most say there is little substantive research in the field, and even less conclusive evidence.

“Oh, there are … studies galore, but mostly they are done by the industry or industry supporters – that’s one problem,” says Leonore Tiefer, US author, researcher and educator who has written widely about the medicalisation of men’s and women’s sexuality.

“There is no such thing as ‘normal’ sexual function in women,” says Jayne Lucke, Professor at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University.

“Sexual function and desire changes across the lifespan, and is influenced by factors such as different partners, life experiences, having children, going through menopause.”

Using the word ‘normal’ is very powerful, because it puts pressure on women about our idea of what is a ‘normal’ woman’.
Professor Jayne Lucke

Professor Lucke has studied women’s health and public health policy for years, and believes our need to understand female sexuality and its triggers has created a rush to medicalise a condition which may not even exist.

“Using the word ‘normal’ is very powerful, because it puts pressure on women about our idea of what is a ‘normal’ woman’,” she says.

The studies submitted by AMAG (Vyleesi) and flibanserin (Sprout Pharmaceuticals) for approval from FSD have been criticised for their connection to industry, as well as the small differences between the drugs effects and those of the placebo.

For example, Vyleesi was found to increase desire marginally (scoring 1.2 on a range out of 6) in only a quarter of women, compared to 17 per cent of those taking a placebo. A review of flibanserin studies, including five published and three unpublished randomised clinical trials involving 5,914 women concluded the overall quality of the evidence for both efficacy and safety outcomes was very low.

Side effects were also an issue with both medications.

Flibanserin never sold well, partly due to problems with its manufacturer and partly due to its use terms: that women would have to take it daily and avoid alcohol to experience a marginal increase in their sexual experiences.

“I’m just unsure of the mechanism of action with these drugs – they seem to be using the model of male sexual desire as a baseline,” Professor Lucke says.

“In the heterosexual male model of sexuality, the man has the erection, then there is penetration, hopefully an orgasm for both: that’s the model this is targeting”.

That said, it doesn’t mean that women don’t suffer from authentic sexual difficulties – the preferred term by many physicians, including the head of Sexual Medicine and Therapy Clinic at Monash Health and a sex counsellor at The Royal Women’s Hospital, Dr Anita Elias.

“I don’t use terms like ‘dysfunction’, or worry about the DSM’s classification system,” she says.

“Clinically, I wouldn’t waste too much time reading the DSM: we’re dealing with a person, not a classification.”

She says she prefers to talk about “sexual difficulties” rather than sexual “dysfunction” because often a sexual problem or difficulty is not a dysfunction, but just a symptom of what is going on in a woman’s life (involving her physical and emotional health, relationship or circumstances, or in her beliefs or expectations around sex).

She prefers ‘sexual difficulties’ rather than ‘dysfunction’ because often … (it) is a symptom of what is going on in a woman’s life.

“It’s the reason you don’t feel like having sex that needs to be addressed rather than just taking medication,” she says.

Dr Elias believes silence and shame that surrounds the topic of female sexuality is impacting how these conditions are being dealt with at a medical and societal level.

“Sexual pain and issues just don’t get talked about: if you had back pain, you’d be telling everyone –but anything to do with sex and women is still taboo”.

Dr Amy Moten, a GP based in South Australia who specialises in sexual health, says sexual difficulties are not covered well enough during medical training.

“While training will include a component of women’s sexual health, this tends to refer to gynaecological conditions (such as STIs) rather than sexual function and wellbeing.”

She says many GPs won’t think to ask a woman about sexual issues unless it’s part of a cervical screen or conversation about contraception, and that many women are reluctant to have such an intimate conversation unless they trust their GP.

“We need to think more about how to have these conversations in the future, as we’re living at a time of general increased anxiety, a lot of which can relate to sexual health.”

As for medication? It may be available in the US, but the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has confirmed no drug under that name has been approved for registration in Australia – yet.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A Big Reason Why Some People Don’t Enjoy Sex As Much

By Kelly Gonsalves

Some of the biggest things that can get in the way of good sex: performance anxiety, relationship stress, life stress, lack of variety, lack of time, physical conditions that cause pain, sexual dysfunction where certain parts don’t work the way they should, mental health, antidepressants, orgasm focus, clitoris negligence, selfishness, selflessness, lack of communication, lack of lubrication, internalized shame about having sex…and those are just the ones that initially come to mind.

But here’s one that we don’t often hear or talk a lot about: childhood trauma. And that doesn’t include only childhood sexual abuse (although that’s a large and pervasive type of childhood trauma). It also includes being neglected by your parents, seeing aggressive or emotionally abusive behavior between your parents, getting bullied or mistreated by peers, dealing with identity-related discrimination, and more. These early negative experiences can psychologically shape us and the way we behave, think, and move throughout the world. And new research suggests those traumas can actually affect the way we experience our sexuality in a very specific way.

Researchers surveyed 410 people currently in sex therapy about their sex lives, childhoods, levels of psychological distress in the past week, and how mindful they are as people.

The results showed people who’d experienced more instances of trauma throughout their childhood tended to have less satisfying sexual lives than those without childhood trauma.

Why a bad childhood can lead to a less satisfying sex life as an adult.

It has to do with those other two variables: psychological distress and mindfulness. Predictably, the findings showed people with more childhood trauma tended to experience more daily psychological distress (that is, moments of fear, worry, anxiety, or other negative emotions felt throughout the day) than those without childhood trauma. That psychological distress was linked to lower mindfulness (i.e., the tendency to be attentive and aware of what’s happening in the present moment as it unfolds), and that lack of mindfulness was what was making sex less enjoyable. 

“Psychological distress (i.e., depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive impairments) may encourage the use of avoidance strategies to escape from suffering or unpleasant psychological states, which may in turn diminish attentiveness and awareness of what is taking place in the present moment,” the researchers explain in the paper. “The numbing of experience or low dispositional mindfulness may diminish survivors’ availability and receptiveness to pleasant stimuli, including sexual stimuli, therefore leading to a sex life perceived as empty, bad, unpleasant, negative, unsatisfying, or worthless.”

In other words, people who’ve experienced bad stuff as kids tend to deal with more stress, anxiety, and negative emotions, and because of that, they’ve developed a specific coping strategy that involves distancing themselves from being fully aware of their emotional and perhaps even physical senses. That lack of mindfulness, however, ends up making good things—like sex—also less enjoyable.

How mindfulness affects sexual pleasure.

Plenty of past research has demonstrated how important mindfulness is to enjoying sex. One study earlier this year found people who are more in tune with their senses tend to have more sexual satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, a higher sense of sexual well-being, and even more sexual confidence.

This isn’t just about woo-woo feel-your-feelings stuff—mindfulness is particularly key to physical pleasure. Here’s how the researchers explain it:

A lower dispositional mindfulness may be particularly detrimental to sexual functioning. Namely, individuals who are distracted, less present, less aware, or unmindful might report lower sexual satisfaction because (1) they may show less awareness of sexual stimuli or less capacity to identify and experience pleasant states as they unfold, therefore potentially experiencing less sexual satisfaction; and (2) their lack of self-regulation of attention might preclude psychological distance from anxious thoughts and decrease their contact with moment-to-moment experiences, hence tempering arousal reactions toward sexual stimuli. … A greater disposition to mindfulness has also been related to one’s ability to fully experience the sexual act.

If you’re someone who had a rough childhood for whatever reason, it’s possible that those experiences have shaped your ability to be fully present with your senses, which in turn can make sex just feel less good.

According to the study, the trauma-distress-mindfulness-pleasure connection accounted for nearly 20% of the variance in sexual satisfaction among people—in other words, these variables together were responsible for 20% of the difference between how good sex felt across all the people in the study, from the people with the lowest sexual satisfaction to those with the highest. That means this is something to seriously pay attention to if sex tends to not feel so great for you!

The researchers suggest people with childhood trauma consider spending time working to deal with their negative emotions via mindfulness—that is, learning to sit with those emotions instead of trying to avoid them. That practice, if mastered, can begin to seep into all parts of your life and change the way you tune into any and all experiences, good and bad.

“Higher levels of dispositional mindfulness may help to reroute one’s focus away from negative, critical, or anxiety-provoking cognitions and onto sensations that are happening during sexual activities with their partner, as they unfold from moment to moment, therefore promoting satisfying sexual experiences among partners,” the researchers write. “Partners presenting higher levels of dispositional mindfulness could be more aware of their internal (e.g., arousing sensations, thoughts, emotions) and external cues (e.g., erotic cues such as seeing the partner’s naked body).”

Here are a few of the best meditations for improving your sex life, plus a guide to staying present during sex itself.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Healthy Sex On A Regular Basis Means A Healthy Brain

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Healthy sex is something we should all aspire to achieve, regularly. It might make you laugh, but, it will seriously boost your brain health. Maybe you thought that your most important sex organ was the one between your legs. Realistically speaking, it’s your brain. Think about it, your brain controls every small or big thing you do. Therefore, it’s just as crucial to your sex life as the other parts.

Studies show that your brain releases chemicals, which control your libido, arousal, and sexual performance. And ultimately, it controls your body’s movements and responses too.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that a healthy brain means a happier sex life. However, most people don’t seem to value the relationship between sex and the brain. There is a very strong reciprocal process between the two. And having sex often helps keep your brain young, sharp, and happy.

Healthy Sex For Your Brain

I mean it’s a win-win. It is not like sex is a mission for you to do. Healthy sex is something that everybody should enjoy on a regular basis. Add not just because it’s fun, but because it’s really beneficial to your overall health too.

Build A Stronger Brain

There’s research that says regular sexual activity increases neurogenesis. This is the growth of new neurons in the brain which improves cognitive function in multiple areas. In addition, experts have found that sexual experience also promotes cell growth in the brain’s hippocampus, which is essential to memory.

Instant High

There is a great amount of pleasure that you experience when having sex. This is largely due to dopamine, which is a chemical messenger in the brain and is in charge of many functions. The hormone is involved in reward, motivation, memory, attention, and regulating body movements.

Therefore, when dopamine releases into the body, it creates feelings of pleasure and reward. That’s why you feel naturally driven to repeat the same activity.

A Natural Anti-Depressant

When having healthy sex, your brain produces natural chemicals and hormones that allow you to feel satisfied and relaxed. These include oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. All three of these happy hormones are released during an orgasm. Serotonin is the main hormone responsible for mood.

Other research has discovered that women who had sex without a condom had fewer depressive symptoms than women who used a condom. This research took a guess and presumed that unique compounds in semen, including estrogen and prostaglandin, have antidepressant properties. These are then absorbed into a woman’s body after sex.

Therefore, if you’re in a committed relationship, this could do wonders to your quality of life!

Less Forgetfulness

Struggling to remember normal things in your daily grind can be frustrating. It happens to the best of us though! It could be because of something else though. How’s your sex life going? Is it healthy?

Apparently, a healthy sex life improves your memory significantly.

Like I said, sex increases cell growth in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a brain region vital to long-term memory. Other experiments have found that engaging in regular sexual activities grows more neurons in the hippocampus. These studies were conducted on rodents, however, there is no evidence proving that the effects are the same in humans.

But I guess you can let a healthy sex life speak for itself…

No More Stress

Sex is the ideal way to release tension. It’s been proven to be a natural relaxant.

Science suggests sex can improve your mood and decrease anxiety by reducing stress signals in the brain and lowering blood pressure. These connections in the brain and the body all work in tandem. Sexual interaction and physical affection improve mood and reduce stress. Likewise, improving your mood and reducing stress increases the likelihood of future sex and physical affection in a relationship.

It’s a continuous cycle and if you get it right you will be happy and healthy forever.

Better Sleep

Who struggles to fall asleep at night? It happens to the best of us. Luckily a healthy sex life can help that! And at the same time, more sleep helps boost your sex drive. So it’s another win/win. The sleepy effect is due to the hormones mentioned earlier. Moreover, having an orgasm releases another hormone, prolactin, which makes you relaxed and sleepy.

The time between the sheets is also more likely to induce sleep in men than women because the prefrontal cortex of a man’s brain slows down after ejaculation. Studies say that when combined with the hormone surges, this can result in the well-known ‘rolling over and falling asleep’ behavior.

Hey, Smarty Pants!

Yup, sex makes you smarter.

Apparently, people who have frequent, regular sexual activity score higher in many different mental tests. Studies say they’re more fluent in speaking, their visual perception improves, and they can judge the space between objects better. Then in other studies, frequent sexual activity has been linked to better sustained cognitive abilities in older adults.

All the processes in your body are closely connected. And sex is a massive part of it! Everything that affects your brain affects your sex life, both positive and negative. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, PMS, substance abuse, and personality disorders all impact sex.

That’s why you should never pit your mental health at the bottom of your list of priorities. It must be number one. Mental health issues can make having healthy sexual relationships very difficult. Your emotions and sex life are both directly connected to your brain. Managing stress, finding life balance, and healthy lifestyle habits will improve your sex life. We can’t deny that a healthy brain and your sex life are closely connected. They both help each other. However, having a healthy sex life will lead you to a stronger brain.

And a strong brain means a strong and happy sex life!

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Not That Kind of Girl

In her influential 1959 Atlantic article, “Sex and the College Girl,” Nora Johnson predicted that young, educated women pursuing expansive new opportunities would likely end up disappointed. She spent the rest of her life finding out what could happen instead.

High-school students graduate in 1960. Nora Johnson’s articles, novels, and memoirs followed women as they matured from infatuated teenagers to aging lovers.

By Annika Neklason

Every few years, new concerns bloom about the changing ways young people are approaching relationships, from the stigmatized early years of online dating in the 1990s and 2000s to the panic over campus hookup culture in the early 2010s to the dawning concern that rather than having too much sex, Millennials aren’t having enough. Many young people are now experiencing a sex recession, my colleague Kate Julian wrote for the cover of this magazine in December.

But long before Tinder or Match.com were founded, and even before most universities went coed, the seeds of these ideas were planted in another Atlantic article: Nora Johnson’s influential “Sex and the College Girl.” Written in 1959, the article captured a snapshot of college romance on the lip of the sexual revolution and the second-wave feminist movement: Young women were pulling back from romantic commitment and domestic life to explore their options; young men were left bewildered and resentful as their relationships shifted in turn.

Johnson framed the moment not as one of ecstatic liberation, but rather as an uncertain and sometimes overwhelming introduction of possibility for female students. She observed educated women navigating a convoluted path of desire, respect, security, and shame in pursuit of the dream of a full life: “a husband, a career, community work, children, and the rest.” Only an exceptional few could achieve that life without sacrificing personal or professional goals along the way, she predicted. For many of the rest of them, this pursuit would end in “an ulcer, a divorce, a psychiatrist, or deep disappointment”; and for some of them, those who were put off by the apparent futility of trying to balance all the expansive possibilities, “the most confining kind of domestic life.” Without the “moral generalizations” of her grandmother’s era, Johnson’s college girl was left to forge ahead toward those difficult choices with more subjective, and personal, judgment—carrying “her belief in herself,” or what she calls the “modern version” of herself, forward into the unknown.
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Johnson wrote “Sex and the College Girl” when she was 26, just five years after graduating from Smith. Though young, she was already beginning to establish herself as an author. She’d grown up as the daughter of a Hollywood filmmaker, surrounded by “an encampment of storytellers,” as she later recalled, and had published her first and ultimately most successful novel, The World of Henry Orient, a year earlier. Like “Sex and the College Girl,” the book drew on her own experiences as a student, fictionalizing the crush she and a friend had nursed for an actor-musician while they were in high school.

As Johnson grew older, the subjects of her writing generally did too, maturing as the decades wore on from students navigating the college dating scene to married couples to divorcées to aging lovers. But though the characters changed, the sense of uncertain possibility she described in “Sex and the College Girl” remained—sometimes joyful, sometimes dutiful, sometimes onerous, but never entirely gone. Johnson’s love stories, told in an era of expanding female choices, were weighted with the consciousness of them.

In “Sex and the College Girl,” the choices were myriad, novel, and full of potentially far-reaching consequences. Female students faced decisions about who to date, what to offer physically and emotionally, and how much to hold in reserve for how long. Beyond that immediate horizon stretched a broader array of opportunities and potential pitfalls: children, careers, and all of the self-betterment and intellectual rigor their educations were preparing them for. Commitment and marriage, in a sense, presented an out—a sense of certainty, a solid support system. “Joe has a future,” Johnson wrote. “He knows exactly what he is going to do after graduation … The decision about [the college girl’s] life keeps her awake at night, but when she is with Joe things make more sense.”

Two years later, in “The Captivity of Marriage,” Johnson described the constrained choices of the women who stuck with their Joes. Now juggling the responsibilities of raising children, keeping a house, and engaging in “community or P.T.A. work of some kind,” married women “feel … like a pie with not enough pieces to go around,” Johnson wrote. But the new responsibilities and family and community ties did not put the “undefined dreams” of their younger years to rest; instead, the wife and mother “vaguely feels that she is frittering away her days and that a half-defined but important part of her ability is lying about unused.” That feeling of dissatisfaction, Johnson observed, was coupled with the lingering “quality of excitement that comes from strangeness and the idealization of still-unknown experience” that made the concept of sex with an unfamiliar partner attractive. But those choices, which would take women away from their husbands and children, were now taboo. In their place were new choices, more limited but still unfamiliar and consequential. “Choosing a house and everything that goes into it, and a school, and a competent doctor are decisions that the young mother makes without adequate knowledge,” Johnson wrote, “and she can ill afford mistakes.”

She described the fallout from one error in judgment a year later in “A Marriage on the Rocks,” an article published in the July 1962 issue of The Atlantic. “The moment when it first becomes apparent that one’s marriage was a mistake,” she opened the piece, “is the beginning of probably the longest, darkest period in the human lifetime.” She chronicled the slow fracturing of a union that, to the college girl, had carried a promise of lifelong certainty in an otherwise unknown future. Unhappiness settled in and grew unbearable as the relationship devolved into “the endless opening of wounds … capitulating one’s beliefs … [and] adjusting oneself to the dismal and baneful workable compromise.” But choosing to break free of  that unhappiness meant exchanging it for a new, unknown one, defined by a sudden and “terrible feeling of having no one around on whom to blame everything.”

Johnson expressed the frustration of seeing a marriage fail while knowing that, with the newly available options for women to marry for love and to define more aspects of their life and work, “all of us … have the potential to become the greatest lovers on earth.” She wondered: “All this freedom and opportunity are breathtaking. Do we deserve them, and can we possibly live up to their obligations?”

Divorce loomed large in Johnson’s life. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was 6 years old, and they moved to separate coasts, leaving Johnson to shuttle back and forth between her mother’s New York home and her father’s star-studded Hollywood life for much of her childhood and adolescence. “My heart begins to tear, a long ragged rent which I have spent my life trying to mend,” she reflected in her 1982 memoir You Can Go Home Again, looking back on the dissolution of her family. She recalled how her mother’s attempts to become “an elegant divorced lady in a lovely house in the most exciting city in the world” transitioned into a second marriage to a possessive man who resented Nora when she returned home for a time as an adult after her own first marriage failed.

By the time she turned 32 in 1965, Johnson had already been married, divorced, and married a second time herself. In The Atlantic’s June 1961 issue, in which “The Captivity of Marriage” was published, she was introduced to readers as “happily married and the mother of two daughters.” When “A Marriage on the Rocks” was printed in the July 1962 issue,those details were omitted from her introduction. By the time she published You Can Go Home Again at the age of 59, her second marriage had also ended in divorce. In that sense, she fulfilled the melancholy predictions of “Sex and the College Girl” twice over.

But she had also built a successful career as a writer of novels, memoirs, articles, and, once, in collaboration her father, a movie based on The World of Henry Orient. Decades later, in an essay for The New York Times, she wrote about something she hadn’t predicted: finding love again. Johnson “was a long-divorced 71”; George was 83 and “recently widowed.” He became her third husband. “What astonished us,” she wrote, “was that the electricity we generated was as strong and compelling as love had been 50 years before, that it scrambled the brain every bit as much. Yet more surprising was that we had a rousing and delightful sex life.”

They still faced daunting choices and disappointments. At first they lived together in Florida, but they grew bored and moved to New York, only to grow bored there too, and be cold, and miss Florida. They dealt with natural disasters and health problems. They had difficult conversations. And then, seven years after they met, George died.

All Johnson’s stories resist the neat closure of the happily ever after. The security that Joe seems to present in “Sex and the College Girl” proves illusory; love degrades, fractures apart, or abruptly ends. “Marriage, entered upon maturely, is the only life for most women,” Johnson wrote in 1961. “But it is a way of life, not a magic bag of goodies at the end of the road.” Even old age, retirement, and George, who she said “brought joy and magic to my life,” don’t put the uncertain possibility of other paths to rest or stave off the sting of disappointment.

But her stories also resist the closure of a final failure. The college girl grows up, gets married, gets divorced, gets married again. She makes the wrong choices and then gets to make new ones. “This, then, is what the result is for a girl who has been brought up in a world where the only real value is self-betterment,” Johnson concluded in 1959. “She has had to create her own right and wrong, by trial and error and endless discussion.”

This is the story that Johnson wrote again and again, for several decades, until she died in 2017: There’s no happily ever after, or any ever after at all, but there’s happiness. Heartbreak. Regret. Magic. Surprise. Her extraordinary work was also a life lived, and recorded in pieces, over decades of love stories.

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17 reasons you might not be enjoying sex

By Arielle Tschinkel

  • When you’re not enjoying sex, you might be wondering why, but the truth is that our sex drives are impacted by so many things.
  • Both your physical and mental health can be the cause of a low libido.
  • Stress, certain medications, and a feeling of shame could all be reasons you may not be enjoying sex.

Your sex drive is determined by so many factors and it can constantly change depending on what’s going on in your life, as well as your physical and mental health. Whether you’re dealing with short-term or long-term sexual dissatisfaction, it’s normal to wonder why you’re not enjoying sex.

According to experts, here are some reasons you may not be enjoying sex.

Editor’s note: This post contains some information that may be triggering to those who have experienced sexual assault or trauma.

You’re engaging in sexual activities before you’re adequately aroused.

Taking extra time for foreplay can help.

Preparing your mind and body for sex can be crucial to actually enjoying it and taking time to get aroused may help prepare your body for sex.

“Foreplay gets the ‘blood flowing’ to the genitals and helps with lubrication and the ability to climax during sexual activity,” Michael Ingber, MD, Board-certified in Urology and Female Pelvic Medicine & Reconstructive Surgery at the Center for Specialized Women’s Health, division of Garden State Urology/Atlantic Medical Group told INSIDER.

“Many people get caught up in the idea that sex is equivalent to intercourse,” added Melissa Coats, psychotherapist and owner at Coats Counseling, LLC. “Foreplay is sex and by taking the pressure off of the thought that there must be one outcome in a sexual experience, you can free yourself up to enjoy foreplay and focus on your own pleasure rather than the worry.”

You’re not mentally or emotionally ready to have sex.

Your body and mind should both feel ready.

As important as it is for your body to be ready for sex, your mind also needs to be ready, too. “Context is everything,” said Coats. “For example, If you come home from a long day of work feeling anxious, upset, and overwhelmed and your partner tries to make sexual contact, you will most likely not be able to access your [feelings of] desire and pleasure easily.”

She said context includes a variety of things including your environment, level of stressors, or even the state of your relationship with a sexual partner.

You’re dealing with anxiety about your body or appearance.

Focusing on negative thoughts about your body and self could make sex less pleasurable.

Sex can be an extremely vulnerable situation, so if you’re not feeling comfortable in your own skin, you may find it more difficult to enjoy sex.

“Anxiety is the enemy of desire and pleasure,” Coats told INSIDER. “In order to experience sexual pleasure, we need to be present in the moment and with our bodies. If you are experiencing negative self-talk about your body, your mind is not on how much you are enjoying your body and what it is experiencing.”

You’re uncomfortable about past sexual experiences.

If you don’t feel safe, it can be tough for your body to relax.

Whether you’re dealing with a past sexual trauma or worrying that your experience level is different from your partner’s, these feelings can understandably creep up before, during, or after sex, making it tough for you to find enjoyment in a sexual experience.

Coats said that communicating with your partner can help you to feel more comfortable during sex.

You’re not comfortable around your partner.

Sex could make you feel vulnerable.

Since sex oftentimes involves so many layers of intimacy, if you’re not fully comfortable with your partner, you’ll likely have a difficult time fully enjoying your experience.

“By expressing these aspects of your sexuality with someone, you are trusting them with that vulnerability,” said Coats. ” If you are not comfortable with your partner, feeling vulnerable will not seem appealing and may even feel physically or emotionally unsafe.”

You feel shame or stigma about your sexual needs or wants.

Having a conversation with your partner about what you want and what you’d like to try might help.

Sexuality exists on such a wide spectrum and everyone has different wants, needs, and desires. Opening up about what you like and don’t like can feel intimidating, even if you’re with a long-term partner. And, feeling like you cannot express your wants or needs can be making sex less pleasurable for you.

“Shame and stigma are attacks on identity,” Coats told INSIDER. “Whether the shame is related to a sexual identity, fantasy, kink, (or something similar,) feeling attacked either by your own thoughts or someone else’s thoughts or actions, you may automatically feel unsafe and want to retreat.”

You’ve been given false or sex-negative messages about sex or sexuality.

Not everything you were taught in sex education is necessarily accurate.

Similarly, it can be easy to believe things you’ve heard about sex, from how much you should be having to stereotypes about the kinds of sex people have, and these can seep through to your own sexual experiences, likely without you even realizing it.

“There is an abundance of misguided, harmful, and plainly false messages about sex that people take at face value as fact. If something doesn’t feel right, allow yourself to question that message, whether it is from yourself or someone else,” said Coats. In these cases, she suggested exploring sex-positive resources to help you to feel more comfortable with sex.

You’re on a medication that impacts your libido or physical sensations during sex.

Antidepressants commonly cause a decrease in sexual desire.

You might not link your medications to your sex drive, but plenty of over-the-counter and prescription medications can impact your sex drive, including birth control, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, blood pressure medications, and even allergy meds and antihistamines.

“Several medications can affect not only libido, but also the sexual experience in men and women,” said Dr. Ingber. “Antidepressants are notorious for this, causing a decrease in sexual desire and often interfering with the ability to orgasm.”

If you think a new or existing medication is causing a dip in your libido or ability to orgasm, check with your doctor.

You’re dealing with a medical condition that makes sex painful.

Endometriosis can cause intense cramps and make sex painful.

Even though it’s incredibly common, experiencing pain during sex can be the quickest way to put the brakes on your enjoyment in the moment. There are several medical conditions that can contribute to pain, dryness, or irritation during or after sex, as Jessa Zimmerman, a certified sex therapist and author of “Sex Without Stress,” previously explained to INSIDER.

“There are some medical causes of sexual pain, including skin conditions, autoimmune disorders, pain conditions due to overgrowth of nerves, endometriosis, and vaginismus, an involuntary clenching of the vagina that develops in anticipation of pain and is painful in itself,” said Zimmerman.

Other medical conditions that might cause painful sex include prostatitis, dyspareunia, and even skin allergies.

If you suspect a medical condition is causing you to feel pain during sex, check with your doctor, who can help you to find treatment options and ways to help ease your pain or discomfort.

You may be trying positions that make you feel uncomfortable or pained.

If certain positions cause you pain, your body could be trying to tell you something.

Pain or discomfort during sex isn’t always due to a chronic medical issue — some positions may not be enjoyable to you.

“If you have sought medical attention with no clear answers, try using different positions, lubricant, or talking to a pelvic floor physical therapist to help figure out what your body is trying to tell you,” said Coats

Dr. Ingber agreed, adding that everyone is different and what’s comfortable and enjoyable for one person isn’t necessarily pleasant for another.

You’re not prioritizing sleep, eating well, or exercising regularly.

If you’re feeling constantly hungry or moody, your body might be trying to tell you that you need more sleep.

As Coats told INSIDER, “Physical, mental, emotional, and sexual health are all connected. When one is being neglected, it is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brakes on. It will go, but it will slow you down a lot and it’s not great for your engine. Engaging with your sexuality when you feel physically un-aligned can be stressful and difficult.”

Taking care of your entire body by getting enough sleep, eating a balanced diet, and getting regular exercise will help give you the energy your body needs to not just have sex, but thoroughly enjoy it, too.

You’re not sure what feels good for you and your body.

Figuring out what you like and don’t like can make sex more enjoyable.

Sexual desire and preferences are different for every person. And, according to Coats, popular misconceptions about sex being a “task to be mastered instead of an activity to enjoy” could make it tough for someone to figure out what they like.

Taking time to explore your own body by way of masturbation or trying new things that you’re comfortable with, whether with new toys, positions, or other sexual stimuli, can help you learn what feels enjoyable for you.

You’re skimping on water intake.

Being dehydrated can also cause you to feel dizzy or pass out.

Believe it or not, being dehydrated can lower your libido and even make sex painful. If you’re not drinking enough water, you might experience headaches, fatigue, and irritability, which can definitely hinder your ability to get in the mood.

But the same way that your cells need water to remain adequately hydrated, dehydration can cause dry, irritated skin, potentially leading to pain and irritation down below.

Similarly, Healthline notes that there’s a link between dehydration and erectile dysfunction, and your body needs sufficient oxygen to help maintain an erection. When you’re not getting enough water, you might not get adequate blood flow throughout your body, which includes your sex organs.

You’ve recently given birth.

Postpartum is a different experience for everyone.

For those who have recently given birth, Dr. Yvonne Bohn, OB/GYN at Los Angeles Obstetricians & Gynecologists told INSIDER that postpartum tearing and healing can cause intercourse to be painful.

She said doctors typically recommend abstaining from sex for six weeks or longer post-delivery, but it depends on the patient’s body and their healing process. She also added that breastfeeding can decrease one’s estrogen levels, causing one’s vagina to be less lubricated and less elastic, thus making sex more painful.

You’re afraid of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.

You’re afraid of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections.

Even if you’re taking precautions for safe sex, it’s natural to worry about pregnancy or STIs. “Any fear that exists while engaging in a sexual encounter is going to impact how you feel about your experience,” Coats told INSIDER. “If you are afraid of getting pregnant, remember, sex does not [have to] equal intercourse. There are plenty of ways to express and experience pleasure and eroticism other than intercourse.”

You’re stressed about other things.

If you’re stressed about work, you may find it hard to focus on enjoying sex.

Few things can kill the desire for sex quite like stress. From an emotional standpoint, Coats said mental energy plays an important role in enjoying sex.

“If that mental energy is being used to assess what is going on anywhere but within your own body, it is competing with your pleasure for your brain space. Creating a context where you can put other things aside and allow yourself to focus on you, also known as self-care, is crucial in sexual satisfaction.”

Your mental stress could even cause sex to be more painful. “All of these issues will impact your natural ability to relax, get aroused, lubricate and prepare the [body] for sex,” Dr. Bohn told INSIDER.

You’re just not interested in sex, either at the moment or in the long-run.

If you find yourself never really feeling sexual attraction or desire, you may identify as asexual.

The truth is that not everyone is interested in having sex and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

“If sex is not that interesting to you, you are not abnormal. If you would like to become more interested in sex and your sexuality, there are plenty of ways to spark curiosity,” Coats told INSIDER. “But it must come from your own desire and not someone else’s expectation in order to be pleasurable.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!