Where to start
These pages are not meant to be read in order. Open the situation closest to yours: it leads to the two or three pages that answer it.
Desire has gone, on one side or both
We have just had a child and nothing happens any more
It hurts
The erection no longer follows
I do not know what I like, or how to say it
The pages in this section
Aphrodisiacs
What the chocolate study really said, the one plant that beats placebo and what it costs, and what sends people to the emergency department.
Viagra and its equivalents
What they do and do not do, the nitrate combination that can kill, and the four countries where they are sold without a prescription.
Desire and orgasm
Desire is not a switch you flip. It varies with life stage, tiredness, stress and the state of the relationship — and knowing that stops a lot of needless worry.
Understanding female pleasure
The clitoris remains poorly understood — including by many women. Understanding it better makes sex easier, alone or with someone.
Erogenous zones
An erogenous zone is simply an area whose stimulation can produce pleasure. Location and sensitivity vary hugely between people: this is a starting point, not a manual.
Kissing, touch and massage
Foreplay is not a formality before the real thing: for many women and men it is a central part of the pleasure.
Oral and anal sex
Two common practices that are rarely discussed openly. Neither is compulsory, and neither is a stage a relationship is supposed to reach.
Desire after a birth
Not six weeks, not the first period, not the night the baby finally sleeps: there is no date. What actually happens, on both sides of the couple.
Choosing a lubricant
Lubricant is not only for dryness: it simply makes sex more comfortable, at any age and in any practice.
Low desire: understanding it, and finding the wish again
Spontaneous and responsive desire, the frequent causes — hormones, medicines, tiredness, the couple —, desire discrepancy, and what brings the wish back.
Why some cultures practise female genital cutting
Control of desire, marriageability, rite of passage, false religious prescription: the reasons communities give, what women experience, and how the practice is declining.
The Kama Sutra: what it really contains
Who wrote it, what its seven books contain — only one is about positions —, the translations that distorted it, and how to use it today.
Three things these pages share
Desire is not always spontaneous. For a good many people, and more often for women, it does not appear out of nowhere but in response to a situation that is already pleasant. Waiting for an urge that arrives unprompted means waiting for something that does not work that way — and wrongly concluding that something is wrong.
The pleasure gap is not about biology. Women reach orgasm markedly less often in heterosexual encounters, and markedly more often in other configurations. What the gap measures is practices, not bodies.
What changes things most is talking about it. That is the most regular finding in the research on sexual satisfaction, and the least spectacular. No technique makes up for a conversation that never happens.
Page checked in September 2026. The instruments cited can change: if in doubt, confirm with the official source given.
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