Feb 14, 2020
NPR – 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 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.”
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 … Read more.
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