London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Saturday, Oct 18, 2025

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

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

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.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
S&P Downgrades France’s Credit Rating, Citing Soaring Debt and Political Instability
Ofcom Rules BBC’s Gaza Documentary ‘Materially Misleading’ Over Narrator’s Hamas Ties
Diane Keaton’s Cause of Death Revealed as Pneumonia, Family Confirms
Former Lostprophets Frontman Ian Watkins Stabbed to Death in British Prison
"The Tsunami Is Coming, and It’s Massive": The World’s Richest Man Unveils a New AI Vision
Outsider, Heroine, Trailblazer: Diane Keaton Was Always a Little Strange — and Forever One of a Kind
Dramatic Development in the Death of 'Mango' Founder: Billionaire's Son Suspected of Murder
Two Years of Darkness: The Harrowing Testimonies of Israeli Hostages Emerging From Gaza Captivity
EU Moves to Use Frozen Russian Assets to Buy U.S. Weapons for Ukraine
Europe Emerges as the Biggest Casualty in U.S.-China Rare Earth Rivalry
HSBC Confronts Strategic Crossroads as NAB Seeks Only Retail Arm in Australia Exit
U.S. Chamber Sues Trump Over $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee
Shenzhen Expo Spotlights China’s Quantum Step in Semiconductor Self-Reliance
China Accelerates to the Forefront in Global Nuclear Fusion Race
Yachts, Private Jets, and a Picasso Painting: Exposed as 'One of the Largest Frauds in History'
Australia’s Wedgetail Spies Aid NATO Response as Russian MiGs Breach Estonian Airspace
McGowan Urges Chalmers to Cut Spending Over Tax Hike to Close $20 Billion Budget Gap
Victoria Orders Review of Transgender Prison Placement Amid Safety Concerns for Female Inmates
U.S. Treasury Mobilises New $20 Billion Debt Facility to Stabilise Argentina
French Business Leaders Decry Budget as Macron’s Pro-Enterprise Promise Undermined
Trump Claims Modi Pledged India Would End Russian Oil Imports Amid U.S. Tariff Pressure
Surging AI Startup Valuations Fuel Bubble Concerns Among Top Investors
Australian Punter Archie Wilson Tears Up During Nebraska Press Conference, Sparking Conversation on Male Vulnerability
Australia Confirms U.S. Access to Upgraded Submarine Shipyard Under AUKUS Deal
“Firepower” Promised for Ukraine as NATO Ministers Meet — But U.S. Tomahawks Remain Undecided
Brands Confront New Dilemma as Extremists Adopt Fashion Labels
The Sydney Sweeney and Jeans Storm: “The Outcome Surpassed Our Wildest Dreams”
Erika Kirk Delivers Moving Tribute at White House as Trump Awards Charlie Presidential Medal of Freedom
British Food Influencer ‘Big John’ Detained in Australia After Visa Dispute
ScamBodia: The Chinese Fraud Empire Shielded by Cambodia’s Ruling Elite
French PM Suspends Macron’s Pension Reform Until After 2027 in Bid to Stabilize Government
Orange, Bouygues and Free Make €17 Billion Bid for Drahi’s Altice France Telecom Assets
Dutch Government Seizes Chipmaker After U.S. Presses for Removal of Chinese CEO
Bessent Accuses China of Dragging Down Global Economy Amid New Trade Curbs
U.S. Revokes Visas of Foreign Nationals Who ‘Celebrated’ Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
AI and Cybersecurity at Forefront as GITEX Global 2025 Kicks Off in Dubai
DJI Loses Appeal to Remove Pentagon’s ‘Chinese Military Company’ Label
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
×