the brain-vagina connection

"We have to conclude​ from this and other studies with similar numbers that the Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.

In this liberated, postsexual revolution, postfeminist era, when women can do "whatever" they wish sexually and be "bad girls" with little stigma — when any fantasy is available at the touch of a remote control and any sex appliance available rush delivery at the click of a mouse — an astonishingly high percentage of ordinary women, from one in five to one in three, still report feeling little desire, or have trouble regularly reaching orgasm, or report being angry about something involving sexual intimacy. Now that I know more completely how connected the vagina is to female mood and consciousness, I will coin a phrase and say that between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression.

Oddly enough, our ostensibly pro-sex culture seems very comfortable with this incredibly high rate of female sexual unhappiness. There are no campaigns calling urgent attention to this epidemic of female sexual absence and sorrow. Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt's book 'The Sex Diaries' (2009) sold widely in part because it addresses directly many women's startingly low levels of desire. Arndt reported that it is quite common, in her clinical experience, for women to want sex less often than their husbands do, and that this is the unacknowledged secret behind many divorces, and even behind many male infidelities.

We will see that new studies show that when circumstances are supportive, virtually every woman can reach orgasm. What if so many women are suffering from low levels of desire, from frustration, and from sexual withdrawal, because — there is no way to say this but honestly — many men are taught about women in such a way that they don't really know what they are doing? These numbers must mean, too, that even in this post-sexual-revolution era, many women don't know how to identify, and then ask for, what they need and want.

If a man follows this culture's sexual "script" about what the vagina is, what female sexuality is, and how in general to relate to a woman — he is very likely, against all of his dearest wishes and best intentions, to miss, over time, knowing what is necessary to keep her aroused. The most destructive thing that men are being taught about women is that the vagina is just a sexual organ, and that sex for women is a sexual act in the same way it is for men. But neither gender is being taught about the delicate mind-heart-body connection that, it turns out, is female sexual response."
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina