I get it. I study and talk about sex for a living. But ever since launching this podcast, I’ve been overworked learning a new skill I’m passionate about.

At the end of the day my brain is fried and my body is exhausted. This could be a strain in my marriage, but my husband and I talk about this enough for both of us to respect that this is a season, and desire fluctuates with the life it lives inside. When it passes (I’m almost there!), we’ll put in the effort to reconnect like we used to.

Why am I telling you this?

Because people often ask me, “Is the amount of sex we’re having normal?”

And it drives me crazy. Not because the question is shameful, but because it’s the wrong question entirely.

This week’s guest has built a career on asking better ones.

Birna Gustafsson is a sex educator and public health advocate who lives at an intersection many people don’t know exists: she teaches at Harvard Sex Week, has led over 50 pleasure-centered workshops, and instructs nurses and midwives in sexuality in clinical practice at the University of Iceland.

As she put it in our conversation, she teaches blow jobs, and she teaches consent for patients with Alzheimer’s.

Somehow, it’s all the same work: helping people talk about sex like it matters, because it does.

Besides Substack, you can tune in to the episode on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple.

Here are the highlights:

It’s not what you’re doing—it’s how you feel about it

A couple having sex twice a month—where both times are hourlong, deeply intentional sessions they look forward to—is thriving. Someone having sex almost every day who, when you ask about it, is quietly enduring it, is not.

You may assume the frequency tells you something, but it’s the feeling that tells you everything.

So instead of “How often do you have sex?”, try “Tell me about the last time you had sex. Did you enjoy it?” It’s a different question, and it opens a different conversation.

It’s also a great question to ask yourself.

When your mind goes blank

Have you ever been asked “so, what are you into?” and nothing came up?

It’s the same reason “what’s your favorite movie?” erases every film you’ve ever seen.

Direct interrogation shuts memory down; specific, low-stakes questions open it up.

“What was the last movie that made you laugh really hard?” works. So does “what’s something we did in bed that makes you smile when it crosses your mind?”

Building desire literacy is a skill, and it starts with better prompts. It’s actually the entire reason I created our Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck, because most of us were never handed the questions. (Readers get 10% off with code LUST)

The class men are embarrassed to take

At the sex shop where Birna taught in Iceland, the blow job class packed an auditorium, like standing room only. The class on going down on a vulva? Not so much.

A couple browsing the store summed up why: she cheerfully signed up for the first, suggested he take the second, and he recoiled.

“That’s crazy. Like, why would I do that? That’s so embarrassing. I don’t wanna be sitting in a room with a bunch of dudes, talking about going down on a woman,” he said.

Birna explained that that’s not how the class goes. You’re not sitting there talking about how poorly you do the job.

And his response was, “I don’t want to be aroused around a bunch of dudes.”

Which blew me and Birna away.

The gendered script underneath it—her pleasure is optional homework, his is core curriculum—is a great example of what keeps couples stuck.

Enthusiasm beats technique (and “real eaters” prove it)

If you’re over 30 or blissfully off TikTok: a “real eater” is the internet’s term for a man who genuinely loves going down on a woman—not as a favor, not as a warm-up, but as the main event.

Playboy interviewed Birna about the trend, and her read is what separates the real ones from the performers isn’t skill. It’s attraction to the moment.

They’re patient. They switch things up. They’re not narrating, not coaching, not checking the clock, and there is no “magic button” technique that substitutes for that presence.

Enthusiasm can’t exactly be taught, Birna says, but the pressure blocking it can be removed.

You can build up a partner’s confidence so they feel like they can and want to do this.

Sex is not a scarce resource

We’ve been handed a story where sex is a woman’s bargaining chip. A currency to be withheld, spent, traded.

Birna dismantles this: “Sexuality, love, affection, intimacy…these are abundant. They’re infinite. You cannot run out of love to give.”

You can sleep twelve hours and still sleep tomorrow. Desire works the same way.

Treating it as scarce is a disservice to everyone, and where so much resentment in long-term relationships begins.

If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe to Birna’s new substack Explicit Studies!

In case you missed it, tune in to last week’s episode or read the highlights here:

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

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Therapists are trained to help you heal, but there’s an element to what comes next that is often missed: how to have a passionate relationship again. How to feel pleasure in your body without bracing. How to want.

This week’s guest built her entire career inside that gap.

Dr. Holly Richmond is a somatic psychotherapist, sex therapist, and the author of Reclaiming Pleasure, a book I often refer to and recommend. She is also my dear clinical supervisor.

Holly is the person I bring my toughest client cases to, so getting to sit across from her and having this honest conversation was a personal highlight of this season.

Holly spent her 20s and early 30s as a journalist—celebrity profiles, health, beauty—and in a sexless marriage. Rigid, shut down, somaticizing everything (”it would be my knees one week, then my stomach, then my shoulder—and there was never anything wrong”).

She describes herself as worse than the most disconnected clients who now walk through her door, the ones who say they don’t care if they ever have sex again.

And then, through a creative writing class of all things, everything changed. For years she credited the man she met there, now her husband of 18 years.

But as she puts it in the episode: it wasn’t Danny who saved her life. Sex saved her life. Eros. Vitality. The choice of possibility over the comfortable, safe, dead life she had built.

We go deep into how she—and the hundreds of survivors she’s worked with since—rebuilt from there.

You can tune in on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Here are the highlights:

Control, pleasure, connection

Holly’s framework for reclaiming your sex life after trauma came out of her doctoral research, and it moves in a specific sequence.

Control comes first, but not the way you’d think.

Most survivors arrive already hyper-controlled: vigilant, rigid, excellent at keeping themselves safe. The work isn’t building control, nor losing it or giving it up. It’s learning to relinquish it, gradually, on your own terms.

Pleasure comes second, and it starts with discovering your sexual template: what do you actually like?

Desire (the psychological process of wanting) and arousal (the physiological one) get mapped slowly, and not just sexually—through food, movement, music, anything that brings you back to aliveness. You cannot access sexual pleasure if you aren’t experiencing pleasure anywhere else in your life.

Connection comes last, and it’s the phase where you “have to go out into the world and do this.” If you’re partnered this can look like exercises you’ll apply together, but it’s also an exercise in integrating into the community, whether that’s volunteer work or a sports hobby, for example.

If you’re interested in reading her book Reclaiming Pleasure, you can purchase it here.

The body doesn’t keep the score

Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score brought somatic trauma work into the mainstream, and recent research—the Friston paper—has challenged parts of it.

Holly agrees that the body does not store trauma. It’s not sitting in your tissues.

What the body does is express trauma. It has a story to tell.

And that distinction isn’t semantic—it’s the difference between “you are stuck with this” and “your body is trying to communicate something we can work with.”

It goes back to something Esther Perel said that Holly carries with her: words inform our experience. Victim versus survivor. Existing versus living. Stored versus expressed.

The language we use about our own healing changes what feels possible.

Safety is a process, not a place

Couples get the safety-risk balance wrong when they conflate safety with comfort.

Safety is not a state you arrive at and stay in. No one moves through the world with a permanently regulated nervous system. What we’re actually after is flexibility: that middle territory between rigidity and chaos where play, risk, and desire live.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth for long-term couples: when everything becomes familiar, familial, and frictionless, you haven’t built safety. You’ve built comfort. And comfort, left unexamined, is where desire goes quiet.

To that I’d add my own observation from my practice: couples also conflate safety with a lack of communication.

“We talk about everything” often means “we’ve agreed not to say the things that would hurt.”

Holly shared a Ram Dass line I loved:

Most couples make a contract I won’t hurt your ego if you don’t hurt mine. Healthy couples make a contract to tell the truth.

Your “forbidden” fantasies make sense

Many survivors of sexual trauma—overwhelmingly women—have forced seduction fantasies. And nearly every one of them believes they are the only one, and that something is deeply wrong with them.

Holly has heard this fear so often in her practice. Her answer is always the same: it makes complete psychological sense. These fantasies are about control: you are the author, the architect, the one deciding everything inside the safety of your own mind. Far from being evidence of damage, they’re often the psyche playing with the very thing it’s healing.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are not broken. And your fantasies are information, not indictments.

Additional practical advice

If you lose the moment during sex, like a stray thought, a noise, your to-do list, reframe it as not having lost it, but rather paused it.

Go back through sensation: your partner’s hands, your breath, how touch feels on your own skin. Ask for what brings you back (”stroke my hair,” “grab my hips tighter”). Presence is the doorway, and pleasure follows.

Say yes to something. Holly shared a practice from her own marriage: when her husband initiates, she tries never to reject him outright, but she doesn’t say yes to sex every time either.

She checks in: what can I say yes to? A long hug. A kiss. Sometimes more.

It keeps the channel of touch open without obligating anything, and it protects both partners from the corrosion of constant rejection.

Reintroduce touch without expectation. For so many long-term couples, touch only happens when sex is being initiated, which teaches the lower-desire partner to flinch at a hug in the kitchen. Affectionate touch with no agenda is, in Holly’s words, a female libido healer.

Go for day sex. Estrogen is higher in the morning through mid-afternoon. If you’re waiting until 9:30pm—after work, after kids, after everything—you’re not initiating sex, you’re pushing a boulder. Stop having leftover sex.

And for the touched-out mother: 20 minutes a week. A self-pleasure protocol that starts with nothing more than your own hands moving from your toes to the top of your head, in a way that feels good to you. That’s different from masturbation. It’s a slow reclaiming of your body as yours, so that touch with your kids, your partner, and yourself can live in different containers.

We dive into so much more, including my own past with sexual trauma and how that manifested later in my life, so I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s deep, and uplifting.

Last year, I published a recap of my event with Holly. You can read it here:

Holly's self-pleasure protocol starts with your own hands, and when you're ready to expand from there, what you reach for matters.

My own nightstand staples are from LBDO. Melt, their massage candle that melts into a warm oil (this is exactly the kind of slow, no-agenda touch Holly prescribes), and Rush, their air-pulse stimulator that took three years to design and lives in a glass base so beautiful I've never once thought about hiding it in a drawer.

If reclaiming pleasure is your work right now, they're a gorgeous place to start and you can explore more at lbdo.com — use code LUST15 for 15% off.

Shop LBDO

In case you missed it, tune in to the last episode or read the highlights here:

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

Share

Subscribe now

And then we go to bed with the person we actually love, and nothing flips on, and we lie there thinking the most quietly devastating thought there is: what is wrong with me?

This week, I sat down with Rachel Baker, the founder of LBDO, the Australian-born sexual wellness brand that has been making some of the most beautiful pleasure products I’ve seen — the kind you’d actually leave out on your nightstand instead of burying at the bottom of a drawer.

Rachel’s story starts the way a lot of ours do: a fluorescent-lit sex shop, an old man watching her browse, walls of bright pink products designed, as she puts it, “by men for the male gaze.” She walked out thinking there has to be a better way.

Years later — after losing her mother and leaving a career at L’Oréal — she launched LBDO in the middle of lockdown.

Our conversation weaved in pleasure and product education, so that you can better understand your options and what works for you.

You can also tune in on Spotify, Youtube and Apple Podcasts.

Here are the highlights:

1. Your desire is responsive — not broken

One of the most freeing ideas in sexuality research is this: desire doesn’t only work one way. For some people (and yes, this often tracks with higher testosterone), desire is spontaneous — it shows up first, and then you go looking for sex.

But for so many of us, desire is responsive. The touch comes first. The connection comes first. The warmth, the safety, the right ambience — and then the wanting arrives.

Rachel said it perfectly: she used to wonder if something was wrong with her because she wasn’t “constantly or instantly aroused like I’ve seen in porn and movies and TV.” Nothing was wrong with her. She just had a body that needed a runway.

This is exactly why I tell people to focus on building the on-ramp, and to make that on-ramp something you genuinely look forward to rather than a box to tick.

Touch is one of the most reliable ways back into your body, which is why I’m a believer in starting with a massage before anything else is even on the table. LBDO’s Melt is a candle that melts into a warm massage oil, and their Mood oil is a lightweight, multi-use blend made for exactly this kind of slow, hands-on, no-agenda touch.

For a responsive desire style, that warm-up isn’t foreplay to rush through — it’s how arousal builds.

2. Pleasure is contextual, and your libido is allowed to change.

Desire lives “in a constant state of flux throughout our lifespan,” shares Rachel.

Right now she’s pregnant, and her libido has, in her words, gone quiet.

For me, for clients, for her, the things that move desire are rarely about attraction at all. They’re about stress. Grief. Hormones. How safe you feel in your body. How seen you feel by your partner.

Dr. Emily Nagoski calls these your brakes (what turns you off) and your accelerators (what turns you on), and the work isn’t forcing yourself to want more—it’s learning how to gently take the feet off the brakes.

It’s asking each other: What contexts make it easier for us to feel close, playful, and turned on—and how can we create more of those on purpose?

For most, stress is the number one brake. So we find ways to release the stress and feel more at home in our bodies, whether that’s through dance, movement, music, breathwork, meditation or another outlet we religiously tap into to make space for comfort.

Your libido is not a fixed trait. It’s a conversation between you and your life.

3. The “I’m addicted to my vibrator” myth

This is the fear I often hear: if I use a toy, I’ll get desensitized, it’ll be harder to orgasm and I won’t be able to enjoy sex with my partner as much. Rachel hears it too. And the research is clear: desensitization is a myth. What happens is that temporary dip in sensitivity comes back within the hour.

What’s actually happening when someone feels “addicted to their vibrator” is much simpler: they’ve only ever practiced one road to orgasm. The fix isn’t fewer toys; it’s variety.

This is why I love that LBDO’s two flagship devices do genuinely different things. The Essensual Vibe delivers classic, targeted vibration; Rush, their air-pulse stimulator, creates a suction-like sensation that builds slower and, somehow, more intensely —

Rachel and her team spent three years designing it, and you can feel that obsession in your hand (it also lives in a glass base so gorgeous you’ll forget to hide it).

So, alternate. Diversify. Use your fingers some nights. Let oral take a little longer.

Sexual health is like physical health: you don’t only ever do one kind of movement, and you shouldn’t only ever take one road home.

4. Communication is lubrication

“It’s more detrimental to not talk about sex than to not have sex,” says Rachel.

The data backs her up. Couples who actually talk about sex report more desire, more arousal, more orgasms, less pain, better function across the board. And yet it’s the conversation almost no one was taught how to have.

That’s the entire reason a tool like LBDO’s Journey Deeper: Intimacy Edition exists — 100 prompt cards, built with sexologist Kassandra Mourikis, that move from light and playful into the genuinely deep.

Think of it as training wheels for the conversation: no one’s being put on the spot, you’re just answering the card in front of you. Some of the most connected couples I know didn’t begin with a Big Serious Talk.

They began with a single question neither of them knew the answer to — and let it open everything else.

5. Shame dies when pleasure becomes beautiful

A woman in her seventies wrote to LBDO after her husband died. Their product, she said, had made her feel like herself again. Their customers are teenagers buying a first vibrator without shame, mothers reconnecting with their bodies, women in their sixties and seventies discovering there was never an expiration date on any of this.

That’s what happens when we stop treating pleasure like something seedy to be smuggled home and start treating it like what it is: a form of wellness as ordinary and as worthy of beauty as your skincare or your fragrance.

If you want to explore any of the products above, you can find them at lbdo.com — use code LUST15 for 15% off.

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

Share

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That question sits at the heart of this week’s episode, and there’s almost no one better to answer it than my guest, Amanda Dames—better known as The Kink Consultant.

Amanda is a sexologist and Somatica-certified sex and relationship coach. But before all of that, she lived one of the more fascinating double lives I’ve come across: by day, she worked at the Wall Street Journal. By night, she was a professional dominatrix in a New York City dungeon.

For years, she was the person powerful men trusted with the desires they’d never spoken aloud to anyone. And what she learned in that dungeon completely reshapes how most of us think about kink, shame, and desire.

“These were powerful men—men with high-income jobs. If you looked at them, you’d think they had everything. But they were missing one thing.”

Here’s the through-line of our whole conversation: your desires aren’t proof that something is wrong with you. They’re information about a deeper emotional need.

Or, as Esther Perel says, they reflect a problem and a solution: what you want and how to get it.

The work was never about fixing what you want. It’s about understanding the feeling underneath it, releasing the shame around it, and learning to ask for it.

We talk about her journey from the dungeon to The Kink Consultant, the psychology of what powerful people really crave, and—most importantly for so many of you—how to actually bring kink into a long-term relationship without it blowing up in your face.

Besides Substack, you can tune in on Youtube, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Below are 6 key insights from our episode.

1. First, what’s the difference between a kink and a fetish?

We tend to use these words interchangeably, but a kink is a nice-to-have—something that turns up the heat. A fetish is something you need to think about in order to orgasm; it compels you.

And here’s the part that surprises people: “kinky” is defined almost entirely by the status quo, which is constantly moving.

As Amanda points out, blow jobs were once considered kinky. What counts as “normal” is just a target that shifts by culture and by decade—and anything outside the current default reads as kinky.

2. No one is broken.

One of the most common fears Amanda hears is, is my kink tied to some trauma? It can be—but the research shows it usually isn’t.

Sometimes a desire imprints from something as innocent as a childhood moment that had nothing to do with sex. Sometimes there’s no clear origin at all. Her point, and mine: the hunt for “why am I like this” often matters far less than simply accepting that you are.

As long as it’s consensual and pleasurable (some derive pleasure from pain), then it’s all good.

3. What powerful men are really looking for.

The clients who filled Amanda’s calendar were often high-powered decision-makers—the people who run things all day, every day. What they came looking for wasn’t sex (in the dungeon, there is no sex and no kissing). It was the chance to surrender.

But underneath even that was something far more human: they wanted to be seen.

That need—to be witnessed without judgment—is the real engine underneath most desire.

4. To bring kink into your relationship, start outside the bedroom.

This is the question so many of you wrote in about. When one partner is kinky and the other is hesitant (or doesn’t even know yet), Amanda’s framework is to build a bridge to each other—and, crucially, she begins that work outside the bedroom.

Her unforgettable example: do you know that when you take out the garbage, you have to replace the garbage bag? You cannot fully surrender to a partner in the bedroom if you don’t trust them to show up for you outside of it. The mental load, the division of labor, whether each person feels supported—all of it shapes what’s even possible erotically.

A few of her principles:

• Both partners’ desires matter. If a couple comes to her about his kink, she won’t move forward until she knows what she wants, too. You can’t build a bridge for one person.

• The stressed partner’s desire tends to come last. Often the wife (and mother) is carrying so much that her own wants land dead last. Sometimes the real work is simply uncovering that her desire exists at all.

• Trust outside the bedroom is the foundation for surrender inside it.

5. How to actually bring it up to your partner.

If there’s one section to screenshot, it’s this. Amanda’s guidance on starting the conversation:

• Pick the right moment. Not in bed, not right before sex, not when they’re busy or distracted. Choose a calm, connected time—morning coffee, a quiet evening.

• Lead with curiosity, not a confession. Don’t dump your fantasy on them. Open the door instead: “Have you ever had a fantasy you’ve wanted to explore?” And if they share something, listen. If they don’t, you can share a part of the fantasy you’re wanting to explore, and see how they react to that fraction of it.

• Share the feeling, not just the act. This is the key. Don’t only present the what—present the why. Instead of “I want to be tied up,” try: “I want to try bondage because I think it’ll make me feel safe and held.” Feelings are relatable, even when a specific kink isn’t.

• Give them a next step. End with an invitation: “Would you be willing to explore this with me?”

If the hardest part is starting the conversation, that’s precisely why I created the Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck. It lets the card ask the question, so you don’t have to—turning these tender, vulnerable conversations into something closer to an intimate game night. You warm up on the lighter prompts and work your way toward the seriously spicy ones, at your own pace.

Shop Intimacy Card Deck

6. If you’re brand new, go from zero to one—not zero to ten.

Curious but intimidated? Amanda’s rule is to try the entry-level version of anything before you dive in.

• Impact play? Start with a hand, not a heavy implement.

• Bondage? Skip the metal handcuffs. Reach for silk ties or even Velcro cuffs—something that comes off easily.

• Want the gentlest on-ramp of all? A blindfold. It builds anticipation, quiets a busy mind, and lets you practice surrender. (It’s one of my personal favorites—and if you’re someone who can’t stop thinking during sex, it’s a gift.)

• Curious about something more advanced, like Shibari? Learn from a practitioner. Ropes are stunning, but they can get dangerous.

If this episode speaks to you and you want to go deeper, you can work with Amanda or explore her courses at amandadames.com, and find her on Instagram at @the_kinkconsultant.

In case you missed it, tune in to last week’s episode or read the highlights here:

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

Share

Subscribe now

It’s a script so pervasive that most of us absorb it before we ever get there. The dominant cultural narrative treats midlife as a problem to be solved: manage the symptoms, age gracefully, accept the dimming.

I’m here to tell you that narrative is not just incomplete. It’s wrong.

Because the women I know who are most attuned to their sensuality—the ones radiating that magnetic, self-possessed energy—are often the ones who came into it later. Not despite midlife, but because of it. Because they finally had the courage (and frankly, the fed-up-ness) to stop performing and start feeling.

No one embodies this more than this week’s guest, Juliette LaMontagne.

is the writer and creator of , a serial memoir about her midlife erotic awakening that is now being adapted for television. I came across her work exactly a year ago, on a flight to Napa of all places (she’s based in Sonoma County—kismet), and I was so moved that I interviewed her for this newsletter last year. This week, I finally got to sit down with her for the podcast.

On paper, Juliette had done everything “right.” Raised Catholic, she followed all the rules: marriage, kids, a successful career in New York City.

But behind the scenes, her marriage was unraveling under the weight of her husband’s addiction relapses—until a night in the E.R. became her breaking point. They separated for nine months, on opposite coasts. She was certain it was over.

Then the pandemic brought them back under one roof, and what happened next is one of the most extraordinary stories of erotic rebuilding I’ve ever heard: 12-step recovery, psychedelic-assisted therapy, sexological bodywork, the Wheel of Consent—and ultimately, the best sex of her life, decades into her marriage.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever wondered if it’s too late. It isn’t.

Besides Substack, you can tune in on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple.

Below are 5 key insights from our episode.

1. There’s a difference between remission and recovery—and it applies to marriages, too.

Juliette’s husband had been sober for most of their marriage, but he’d never done the deeper work of recovery. He was white-knuckling it—channeling that addictive intensity into adrenaline, work, and blame.

Meanwhile, Juliette was living in a state of constant vigilance, never knowing when the next relapse would come. Her nervous system was locked in fight or flight for years.

Through Al-Anon, she learned what she calls radical accountability: the practice of saying this didn’t happen to me—this is an opportunity for me to learn, and I have to take responsibility for my part. It wasn’t until both of them took that accountability—him in recovery, her in Al-Anon—that anything could actually change between them.

If your relationship feels stuck, this is the question worth sitting with: are you in remission, or are you in recovery?

2. Desire can’t come back online until your nervous system calms down.

This is a key part of Juliette’s story. Her eros didn’t return because of a new technique or a lingerie purchase. It returned when her body finally felt safe.

For Juliette, psychedelic-assisted therapy (alongside hormone replacement therapy) is what allowed her nervous system to finally rev down. And when it did, everything came back online—not just erotically, but sensually. Colors brighter. Sensation amplified. Alive.

She’s careful to say psychedelics aren’t the only path. But the principle is universal: you cannot access desire from survival mode. Whatever helps your body exhale—that’s where the work begins.

3. Your body keeps the score, and a skilled practitioner can help you release it.

When Juliette’s sensuality started stirring again, she sought out a sexological bodyworker—a practitioner who uses one-way touch to help clients cultivate their erotic well-being.

She describes a practice called vulva mapping: slow, intentional, exploratory touch (not aimed at arousal) that locates the places where the body holds tension, history, and—for many women—trauma. Spots that were once almost unbearably sensitive would release under patient, breathing presence, and suddenly fill with sensation and pleasure.

Her practitioner put it beautifully: going into the vulva is like opening a box of old photographs.

We also talk about orgasmic meditation—a partnered, time-bound practice that uses gentle clitoral stroking as a form of mindfulness, cultivating present-moment awareness, embodied pleasure, and emotional connection rather than chasing orgasm.

Juliette describes learning to breathe the building sensation outward through the whole body, until she was tingling to her fingertips—a completely different relationship to climaxing than the peak-and-done model we tend to experience.

And as Juliette points out, having a partner do this for you is its own practice: you’re not driving the car. For those of us socialized to monitor everyone else’s experience, learning to let go and simply receive—with no responsibility for the other person—is where the real work (and the real medicine) lives.

4. The Wheel of Consent will make you see your partner—and yourself—anew.

This is where Juliette and her husband rebuilt their erotic connection, and it started smaller than you can imagine: his hands resting on her feet, over her socks, for three minutes.

The Wheel of Consent, developed by Dr. Betty Martin, breaks touch into four quadrants—serve, accept, take, allow—and asks you to get crystal clear about who the touch is for and which direction the energy is moving.

It sounds contrived. It is anything but. Through this slow, negotiated practice, Juliette watched her husband ask for what he wanted from strength and integrity rather than neediness—and she found herself, for the first time in years, able to receive.

And then there was the moment he told her “wait.” One word. So hot. Because there is nothing sexier than presence—and for women who are used to driving every part of their lives (raising my hand here), surrendering control to a partner who can hold it is its own profound eroticism.

You don’t need whips, chains, or a play party to rebuild your sex life. You need exploration through touch, negotiation, and consent.

5. Surrender is the whole game.

The thread running through Juliette’s entire journey—the psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, the bodywork, the sex retreat—is surrender. The turning over of control to something, or someone, you trust.

I got emotional in this part of the conversation, because surrender is exactly what I’ve been struggling to access in my own life. I work with sex, I preach this daily, and yet building this business has kept me gripping the wheel so tightly that letting go—truly letting go—has felt almost impossible.

My own recent shibari experience cracked something open in me, and Juliette’s story reminded me why this work matters: it’s one thing to tell your mind to let go. It’s another to let your whole body be held.

Sometimes the bedroom alone can’t give us that container. And it’s brave to seek out the practices and practitioners that can.

If Juliette’s story resonates, do yourself a favor and read . It is phenomenal—intimate, literary, and wildly hopeful.

In this episode, Juliette mentions a previous episode with . Tune in below:

If you’re bracing for irritation, infections, or yet another post‑sex UTI, it’s almost impossible to stay present in the bedroom.

Momotaro Apotheca offers organic solutions that I use everyday to take care of my intimate health—from their soothing balm, Salve, to their UTI supplement, probiotic, and yeast infection suppository.

Curious to learn more? Build your own ritual at https://momotaroapotheca.com/discount/lust and get 20% off with code LUST.

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

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“All the men I know are nice guys. I wish I had a panel of fuckboys to consult about this issue and really get to the meat of it. Like, why did he do this to me?”

Val, her close friend and a comedian, heard that and said: that would make a great comedy show.

And she was right. Two years and 3,000 tickets later, Ask a Fuckboy always sells out and tours nationwide. It’s one of my favorite shows and a guaranteed night of laughing.

Andie and Val are now in serious relationships, and have learned a ton watching dating horror story after story unfold on stage.

Side note: I presented at Ask a Fuckboy! My husband was one when I met him (sigh). Fresh out of a divorce at the age of 43, he didn’t want anything serious with 30-year-old me. Until one day, we sealed the deal.

Six years later and married, I offer a ton of self-deprecating humor on this topic, mostly because women are told they should be chased and chosen–and I certainly did the opposite, and have zero regrets. Of course, there’s a fine line between overstaying and knowing when to walk away, and we talk about that in this episode.

This conversation is about desire in dating: what we’re drawn to, what we settle for and what we finally stop putting up with. It’s also hilarious.

Tune in on Youtube, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Here are a few ideas that stuck with me!

Anxious vs. avoidant: your attachment style is your dating instruction manual

Andie and Val represent opposite ends of the spectrum, and both approaches worked, because they played to their own wiring rather than performing someone else’s.

Andie is anxiously attached. She gets invested quickly, needs communication, and wants to know early if someone can meet her where she is. So she asks the big questions upfront, communicates her needs clearly, and moves on fast when someone can’t meet them. Her fiancé loved that about her and in less than one year, they were engaged.

Val is avoidant. She doesn’t get swept up easily, treats early dating like a low-stakes game, and lets people prove themselves over time before she extends emotional investment. Brad passed the test, and they just moved in together.

The problem arises when you pretend to be the other one: if you’re anxious and you try to play it cool, you’ll just suffer. If you’re avoidant and you force yourself to open up before you’re ready, you’ll panic and pull away.

Not all fuckboys are created equal

Andie and Val draw a useful distinction between two of the most common archetypes.

The breadcrumber keeps you just fed enough to stay. He texts sporadically, shows up when it’s convenient, offers just enough warmth to sustain your hope — and never enough to build anything real.

The love bomber does the opposite: he floods you early with intensity, future-talk, grand gestures, the whole romantic movie arc compressed into three weeks.

What makes love bombing particularly insidious is that it doesn’t feel like a red flag; it feels like finally being seen. But the crash, when it comes, is proportional to the height of the high. You’ve already built a future in your head.

The breadcrumber lowers your bar slowly. The love bomber raises your hopes catastrophically and then lets them fall.

What really changes a fuckboy’s behavior?

There’s the myth of a woman who comes along and changes him.

But according to a guy they interviewed for their own pod, your friend group sets the tone:

He stopped being a fuckboy once most of his friends were in relationships. Suddenly, fuckboy behavior looked juvenile.

You can’t say the wrong thing to the right person

So much modern dating culture is about calibrating your behavior: how long to wait before texting back, whether to seem too eager, what the “right” amount of vulnerability is on a first date.

What Val and Andie say: that math doesn’t work. If someone is right for you, your natural self is not a liability.

Choosing from fullness, not fear

There’s a difference between choosing a relationship because your life is already good and you want to share it, versus staying in one because you’re afraid of what happens if you leave. Or stepping into one for fear of being alone.

I experienced both sides of this personally. The first time, I came from a place of scarcity: expecting a partner to fill a void I found unbearable on my own. It turned out to be six years of a controlling relationship that left me unrecognizable to myself.

Two years after that ended, after taking real time to heal and actually enjoy my own company, I met my husband. The beginning wasn’t perfect, but my positioning was different. I had clear boundaries and communication, and today it’s an incredibly fulfilling relationship.

The desire you feel in a relationship, the aliveness, feels stronger when the ground under your own feet is solid.

Curious about Ask a Fuckboy? Check out their website for upcoming shows and follow along on Instagram.

One thing nobody talks about in dating advice: it's hard to show up as your confident self and be present if you're bracing for irritation, infections, or yet another post-sex UTI.

Momotaro Apotheca offers organic solutions I use every day to take care of my intimate health — from their soothing balm, Salve, to their UTI supplement, probiotic, and yeast infection suppository. Get 20% off with code LUST.

build your intimate health ritual

In case you missed it, tune in to last week’s episode or read the highlights here:

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

Share

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I started waking up at 2 or 3 AM for no reason, my energy dipped, my skin looked tired.

Nothing in my regimen had changed: I was working out consistently and eating reasonably well.

Because I often work with women in perimenopause and menopause, I started suspecting that the former was knocking at my door. It felt early, but age 35 is when it can begin.

I asked my doctor for a full hormone panel and the results were “within normal range.”

Women unfortunately hear this all the time, along with a slew of other dismissals like “It’s a natural part of aging” or “Let’s get you on Xanax or an SSRI so these symptoms bother you less.”

Medical gaslighting is real, and it’s the reason why I always tell my clients to find a practitioner who is certified by the Menopause Society, and to get more than one opinion.

These changes we feel in our disposition significantly affect our quality of life, and have everything to do with desire and libido.

They also impact our partners who are left scratching their heads, trying to understand what’s going on and how to best support us during this unstable period.

That’s why I invited Jackie Giannelli to the podcast. Jackie is a board-certified family nurse practitioner specializing in women’s health, longevity, and sexual medicine. She has a private practice serving women in New York and Connecticut, and is also a clinical strategist for the new Carolyn Rowan Center at Mount Sinai. She is one of the most rigorous, nuanced, and genuinely funny people I’ve talked to on this subject.

This episode is essentially a masterclass in what’s actually happening inside your body in your late 30s, 40s, and beyond — and what you can do about it. We cover everything from hormone replacement therapy to GLP-1 to peptides.

You can tune in on Youtube, Spotify and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Here are the highlights:

“Normal” and “optimal” lab results are not the same thing

When your doctor tells you you’re “within normal range,” they’re telling you that you don’t have a diagnosable condition. There is no clinical billing code for brain fog. There is no standard of care built around “I feel flat.”

And because conventional medicine is structured around diagnosis and treatment rather than optimization, millions of women are told to just live with symptoms that are actually addressable.

That’s why Jackie uses a symptom-first approach, asking where you are in your cycle, what’s changing, what’s getting worse. Hormonal lab tests are the third guardrail to her practice.

If you want to find out the essential lab markers every woman ages 35+ should know, I found Jackie’s free guide to be very helpful.

Your ovaries age twice as fast as your biological age

By age 35, women have lost 90% of their ovarian hormonal reserve and function. Ovaries are the primary production site for testosterone, estrogen and progesterone.

More specifically, ovaries produce testosterone, and much of that testosterone is then converted into estradiol, which is the most biologically active form of estrogen.

Progesterone is what helps you sleep through the night, keeps your PMS in check, and supports mood stability. So as it starts to decline, those 2 or 3 AM night wakes I started having begin to make a lot more sense.

The Women’s Health Initiative study did a lot of damage

You may have heard that hormone replacement therapy causes breast cancer. This is one of the most consequential pieces of medical misinformation of the last few decades, and it’s still shaping how women are treated today.

Here’s what actually happened:

In the 1990s, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) studied whether estrogen could protect women from heart disease. They enrolled women in their 60s and 70s—many hadn’t taken estrogen for 20+ years since menopause—and put them on it. The study ended early after finding small increased risks of stroke, blood clots, and breast cancer.

The media panicked. Headlines screamed that estrogen was dangerous. Seventy percent of prescriptions were dropped overnight. Doctors stopped learning how to prescribe it, pushing women into cash-based hormone clinics with riskier compounded treatments.

But what the study actually showed was timing matters. Estrogen is heart protective—it helps prevent plaque buildup in arteries, which is one theory for why women get heart disease later than men. But once estrogen disappears and plaque accumulates, reintroducing it can destabilize existing plaques, causing the strokes seen in the WHI.

The breast cancer findings were equally misleading. The study wasn’t properly randomized for cancer risk, and some participants had previously been on estrogen. Women who developed breast cancer while on hormone therapy actually lived longer than breast cancer patients not on hormones. Breast cancer is common regardless of hormone use.

Here’s what we now know:

Estrogen when taken early protects against heart disease, anxiety, depression, breast cancer, colon cancer, cognitive decline, insulin resistance, and osteoporosis. It increases longevity—women on hormone therapy live on average three years longer than those who don’t.

What about GLP-1s?

GLP-1s blunt reward-seeking pathways, which includes food and even libido. So if you’re taking it and you’ve noticed a drop in desire or difficulty reaching orgasm, this may be why.

Jackie takes a microdosing approach in her female patients for this reason.

It’s great to manage inflammation and metabolic changes we tend to experience after age 35, but you should also closely monitor other side effects: libido, hair loss and muscle loss.

That’s why Jackie suggests pairing GLP-1 with testosterone therapy, thoughtful nutrition, strength training, and close monitoring.

Peptides: the next frontier (and the wild west)

Peptides are small chains of amino acids that act as signaling molecules. They tell your body to do something it already knows how to do, just more efficiently.

Unlike hormones, which travel everywhere and affect the whole body, peptides tend to work locally and clear quickly, which is why many are injected directly.

Two worth knowing:

• GHK, a.k.a the “beauty peptide,” supports collagen production, hair follicle health, and skin. Jackie loves it compounded into a topical cream for scalp and face for microbiome optimization, hair regrowth and follicle health.

• And PT-141, which we cover below under FDA-approved options, works on arousal pathways in the brain.

The catch with peptides right now is regulatory: many exist in a gray market, technically classified as research-use only, which means purity and safety testing vary wildly.

Jackie’s rule of thumb: only work with a compounding pharmacy that will hand you a certificate of analysis. If they won’t, walk away.

FDA-approved medications you may not know exist for desire and pleasure

I’ve spoken to enough women who haven’t heard of these, so I’m leaving them here, and why they matter:

• Vaginal (or vulvar) estrogen: Arguably the most underused treatment in women’s health. It can prevent dryness, pain, recurrent UTIs, and even reverse the disappearance of the labia minora that happens with genitourinary syndrome of menopause. Jackie prefers a combination of estrogen and testosterone applied to the vulva, because the vulva is rich in androgen receptors. It can be used proactively, not just reactively. And it carries no breast cancer risk.

Jackie’s closing thought on this: “It’s one of the few treatments we have for anything that I can almost explicitly say is risk free. I mean, think of Tylenol. Tylenol is not risk free, right?”

• PT-141 (bremelanotide / Vyleesi): Works on melanocortin receptors throughout the body and brain, improving arousal and dopamine production. Jackie describes it as more of an arousal medication than a desire one, and notes it pairs well with SSRIs (which famously suppress orgasm) and GLP-1s.

• Addyi (flibanserin): Approved for premenopausal and postmenopausal women, it works directly in the brain, modulating serotonin and dopamine. It’s for women whose desire just won’t “turn on” despite being in situations where they want it to.

A note on designing for desire

Jackie is undergoing a home renovation and designing around her sexual wellness and connection to her husband. Lighting and mirrors in the walk-in closet, removing the TV from the bedroom, installing a whole-home sound system.

She even collaborated with a DJ who is also a therapist to build a 22-minute playlist calibrated to help women move from mental load to physical presence. (She got the idea from Barilla, who made pasta playlists timed to the exact minutes their pasta takes to cook. Genius.)

The underlying principle is that for women, arousal requires a transition. You can’t go from scheduling school pickups to feeling sexy without some kind of bridge. What does your bridge look like?

If you want to learn more about Jackie, follow her on Instagram and work with her here.

While we’re on the topic of perimenopause and menopause:

If you’re bracing for irritation, infections, or yet another post‑sex UTI, it’s almost impossible to stay present in the bedroom.

Momotaro Apotheca offers organic solutions that I use everyday to take care of my intimate health—from their soothing balm, Salve, to their UTI supplement, probiotic, and yeast infection suppository. Curious to learn more? Build your own ritual at https://momotaroapotheca.com/discount/lust and get 20% off with code LUST.

In case you missed it, tune in to last week’s episode or read the highlights here:

Lust in Translation is independently produced and self-funded.

If you shop any brands I share, using my links and discount codes is the best way to financially support this work. I promise I only feature products I actually use and believe in.

If you love what you’re reading and watching, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

Share

Subscribe now

Roughly 70% of women rarely feel aroused out of the blue, and spend years believing something is wrong with them. They think they have low libido, when in fact what’s often missing is the stimulation of their imagination. They say they don’t have fantasies, or know how to cultivate them.

If you’re not new here, you’ve heard me say this: your largest sexual organ is your brain.

I’ve found that the women who are most attuned to their sensuality and desires are the ones who read erotica (including yours truly). And the research backs this up: women who regularly consume literary erotica report higher levels of sexual arousal and satisfaction (Lehmiller, 2018).

But what is it about this medium that works so well, especially for women?

There are two layers:

1. Reading is an incredible relaxation tool. As little as 6 minutes of reading can slow heart rate and reduce stress, making it one of the most effective ways to remove the barriers (anxiety, mental load, performance pressure) that prevent women from accessing desire.

2. Women’s desire thrives in rich storytelling and plot lines. Psychological research confirms that narrative-based erotic content engages emotional and imaginative regions of the brain alongside arousal.

In fact, men have a 50% overlap between their physiological genital response and their subjective experience of desire, while women only have around a 10% overlap.

The body and the brain are frequently operating on separate channels in women—and literary erotica engages the brain, where female arousal truly lives.

If you’ve ever wondered why the romantasy genre is so popular amongst women, this is why. However, romantasy (literature that combines romance with fantasy, often in the form of fictional worlds like dragons, magic and fae) doesn’t vibe with everyone.

That’s why Carly Pifer, today’s guest, created Aurore. It’s a space for writings based on our own, real experiences. As she likes to put it: it’s as smart as it is sexy.

There’s a reason why p*rn doesn’t resonate with many women, and why literary erotica does.

What I personally love about Aurore is that there are over 300 stories and it offers a playful way for you to sample different scenarios, learn what actually lights you up (and what doesn’t), and bring those discoveries back into your own sex life.

Here are two snippets from different moments of a story called My Favorite One Night Stand:

“With my back flush against his broad chest, I let the music take over my body, rolling my hips into his as his fingers intertwined with mine. We moved together, sweat beading at my hairline, a bolt of electricity moving through me every time his hips ground into me from behind, feeling his cock grow harder with each hip roll. I turned to face him, letting my hands graze over his chest and down his sculpted arms, and then reached up to wrap a hand around the back of his neck, feeling the hairs rise in response to my touch. His hands gripped my hips, still swirling to the music, as he leaned in and kissed me.”

“His lips were on my neck, soft and then scraping as he slowly unraveled, his growls in my ear reverberating through my entire body as my moans echoed off the tiled walls. One of his hands slid between my thighs and he stroked my clit, slowly, achingly. My legs quivered and he wrapped one arm around me to hold me upright.”

In our conversation, Carly and I go deeper into how women fantasize: we talk about responsive versus spontaneous desire, body image and turning insecurity into eroticism, “real‑eaters” and why emotional safety matters so much, common fantasies, and how writing erotica can help people rewrite painful sexual or relational experiences.

Before Aurore, Carly was a writer with bylines in Vogue, Brooklyn Magazine, Slate, Refinery29, and Vice, and she now holds erotic writing workshops to guide people through the healing power of verbalizing their desires and commemorating the best sex of their lives.

If any of this resonates, I hope literary erotica can be a great source of inspiration for you to explore what turns you on.

And in that process, talk about, and even act on, your fantasies.

If you’re curious to explore more, you can browse additional teasers here, and if you decide to subscribe to Aurore, use code NATASSIA for 10% off.

Read Aurore

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It’s also the kind of thing we rarely talk about. Everyone overshares on the internet, but this still feels like the kind of TMI you keep between you and your pharmacy receipts.

That’s why I invited Lindsay Wynn, founder of vulvovaginal wellness brand Momotaro Apotheca, to talk about this foundational part of our sex lives.

If you need any convincing that this education is necessary, here are some shocking stats:

• 1 in 4 American women can’t correctly identify the vagina on a diagram

• 1 in 5 American women believe they pee and menstruate from the same hole

• 50–60% of women have at least one urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime

• 20–30% will develop recurrent UTIs

• Women get UTIs roughly 30 times more often than men

• 1 in 3 women will have bacterial vaginosis (BV) and 4 in 5 will not recognize it

• 3 in 4 women will have a yeast infection, with half experiencing it more than once.

I’ll be the first to admit: until I was 30 (and before I became a sexologist), I had never heard of the word vulva (it was all the vagina to me) and I thought I peed from the same canal I menstruated from (we pee from the urethra and menstruate from the vaginal canal).

I also had recurring UTIs and yeast infections, and hated how–when treating the latter–Monistat felt like the only solution available to me, yet it burned and itched so much!

I did not believe in organic homeopathic solutions until I tried Momotaro Apotheca’s Yeast Infection & BV Suppository. It worked within a day and it did not burn. I was flabbergasted.

It took Lindsay 8 years (!!) to develop that suppository, bring it through testing, and get it certified—and it shows in how it feels and how it works.

For the past three years, Momotaro has been core to my daily routine. I preemptively insert one suppository after sex or after a long day at the beach in a wet bikini to prevent infections, and I use it religiously when I (now, rarely) do get one.

If I have any cuts, discomfort or itching, I reach for the Salve–their certified organic balm that soothes right away. It’s also great for sunburns and small wounds anywhere else on the body. More recently, I used it to heal a swollen ingrown, which it did overnight.

After every shower I massage the Tonic Oil onto my vulva to moisturize and nourish it. This is one daily intimacy ritual that makes me really feel myself, and I’ve talked about this at length on Instagram over the years. 10/10 recommend.

And if I don’t have time to shower after a quick romp or a workout, I spray the Hydrosol Toner for a quick antimicrobial refresh.

This is genuinely how I use Momotaro on a regular basis. It’s helped me build a better relationship with my body.

My hope is that this episode and this piece expand your sense of what’s possible in your intimate care routine—that you’re allowed to have products, rituals, and knowledge that support your vulva and vagina as much as your skincare routine supports your face.

Over the years, Lindsay and I have become close, so this episode is equal parts informative and unhinged, as we overshare personal stories and break down the science with a lot of humor.

[You can watch it on Youtube, Spotify, or anywhere you tune into podcasts.]

Beyond my own experience, we also answered anonymous questions from you. Here are the highlights:

Do supplements actually work or are they expensive pee?

A lot of them are, especially in the beauty and “wellness” space. But when it comes to targeted products like probiotics or urinary‑tract support, the real question isn’t just what’s in them—it’s how much your body can actually absorb.

You only have so much bioavailability for vitamins, minerals, and active compounds, so more is not automatically better. When you’re choosing a supplement, it’s worth asking:

• What’s the bioavailability of these ingredients?

• Why this dose or this many CFUs (for probiotics) compared with other brands?

• What else is in the formula besides the “hero” ingredient?

A good probiotic is a truly active product. Momotaro’s Daily Probiotic doesn’t need to be refrigerated because the strains are freeze‑dried; they re-activate and interact with your gut microbiome once you take them.

Their Urinary Tract and Bladder Supplement is built around effective antimicrobial dosing—designed to help your body push back against the “bad” microbes introduced by things like friction from sex, bacteria entering micro‑tears, or irritants from flavored lubes that can tip you into an infection.

I see ads for probiotics that claim they’ll make your vagina taste like strawberries. What should a vagina actually taste like?

A vagina should taste like a vagina, not fruit.

A healthy vagina is naturally acidic, with a pH usually between 3.8 and 4.5—the same ballpark as tomato juice or some beers. That doesn’t sound as sexy as pineapple or strawberries, but that acidity is part of what keeps harmful bacteria in check.

It’s also why your underwear sometimes bleaches. Those pale spots on dark fabric aren’t a laundry fail; they’re a sign that your vaginal fluid is acidic enough to lighten the dye.

Taste and smell can shift through your cycle. Around your period, you might notice a more metallic, iron‑y taste or scent because of blood. That’s normal.

If you’re worried about odor before sex, skip the scented wipes and douches and just rinse your vulva with warm water in the shower or over the sink. That’s usually all you need.

If something smells strongly fishy, foul, or just very different from your normal—especially with itching, burning, or unusual discharge—that can signal an infection like BV or something else worth getting checked.

If you want a great breakdown of what different smells can mean, this guide written with one of Momotaro’s OB‑GYN partners goes into 10 common vaginal scents and what they might be telling you about your health.

read the guide

What are some best practices to maintain vulvovaginal health?

• If you want to be proactive, take a vaginal probiotic that is all-encompassing, addressing gut microbiome, vaginal microbiome, and immune health.

• Keep the vulva clean with water and gentle, fragrance‑free products; avoiding douching or harsh “feminine washes” that strip the microbiome.

• Use the Salve if you did something that was “bad”, like using flavored lube, wearing a swimsuit all day, or going from one hole to the next without protection.

• Let your vulva breathe. Wear breathable cotton underwear, loose fitting clothing, and sleep naked (or, at least without panties).

• Stay dry! Take off gym clothes and damp swimsuits as soon as possible. Excess moisture is a breeding ground for bad bacteria. If you can’t rinse off after a heavy sweat sesh, Hydrosol can help maintain a balanced pH without drying out your skin.

• Stay on top of your menstrual care. Regularly change your pad or tampons, and set a reminder on your phone if you tend to forget. You should also look at the ingredients and materials in your menstrual care products. Some have hidden fragrance synthetic materials that cause irritation and it’s worth switching up your product of choice to see if it helps.

• Get enough sleep, eat whole foods, drink enough water and reduce stress. You probably already know this, but when you’re overstressed, it can affect your sleep, digestion, and immunity, which lowers your body’s natural defenses and can make you more vulnerable to infection.

If you’re curious about trying Momotaro, I managed to snag a 20% off code for this community. You can build your own ritual at momotaroapotheca.com with the code LUST at checkout.

shop 20% off momotaro apotheca

Thank you for tuning in! If you have any questions or comments, please drop them below or hit reply.

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In this week’s episode of Lust in Translation, I sit down with Hayley Folk, a very good friend who also has a gift with words. She is perhaps the only sex and relationships writer I know who makes the kinkiest story sound, dare I say…angelic?

For example, here’s her account of the first time she got flogged at a play party by her husband:

“Afterward, in a fog of aftercare, I felt like I had opened up my chest to show him what was inside, and he met me with love; he kissed me and held me and told me I was brave. I’ve never felt so close to anyone else in my entire life. I’ve always trusted my husband, but after playing with impact together, it opened up a new level of vulnerability for us both.”

See what I mean?!

Hayley is also the founder of The Poly Pocket, where she shares her life as a polyamorous, bisexual woman married to a man, and–as her community has grown–built a dedicated online space for queer, non-monogamous women and non-binary folks.

I know a lot about Hayley’s life from our friendship, but I was surprised about how much I learned in this conversation.

And as I was editing it, I thought to myself, goodness, I could’ve gone deeper here or unpacked more of that there. Which means, I’ll eventually have to have her on again (and I’m learning how to become a better interviewer along the way).

We talk about her marrying at 23, opening her marriage, owning her bisexuality, and how falling in love with someone other than her husband at the time forced her to confront what she really wanted: polyamory.

She has since remarried, and generously shares her experience with play parties, impact play, therapy, and the daily rituals that make her marriage to Kyle feel wildly expansive, yet safe.

This episode is about how to move slowly, talk honestly, make mistakes without burning everything down, and create relationships that actually fit who you are.

Besides Substack, you can tune in on Youtube, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Below are 5 key insights from our episode.

1. What, after all, is the difference between open relationships and polyamory?

An open relationship means partners can have sex outside of their main relationship (and, sometimes, have limited romantic connections too).

Polyamory goes deeper. It gives you space to fall in love and build a life with multiple partners.

2. What are the so-called rules, agreements and boundaries everyone talks about?

Rules are hard lines that can feel rigid, whereas agreements–while respected–have more flexibility that reflect the messy reality of life. Boundaries are your limits, needs, and what you will or won’t participate in, based on your own well‑being.

So, for example:

• Rules are, “You can’t go on more than one date a week with anyone else.”

• Whereas an agreement is, “We’ll check in with each other if we want to go on more than one date a week with someone else.”

• And a boundary says, “If seeing someone more than once a week starts to affect our time together, I will ask to pause new dates while we re-evaluate, because I need regular connection.”

One of Hayley’s favorite examples of healthy non‑monogamy is a friend who keeps a literal “living, google doc” with her partner—a 20‑page list of every rule, boundary, and agreement they’ve ever had, crossed out and updated over the years.

In her own marriage, many things that began as rigid rules (like no sleepovers) eventually became more nuanced agreements as trust grew.

The point isn’t to “get it right” from day one, but to keep the dialogue alive.

3. If you’re thinking about opening your relationship…

Hayley’s advice to couples is to go slower than you think and talk more than feels comfortable.

Many people rush from “monogamous with kids and careers” straight into “let’s open everything up now,” skipping the months (or years) of conversation they actually need.

Questions she suggests asking yourselves:

• What is genuinely inspiring you about non‑monogamy—curiosity, desire, a specific fantasy, a philosophy, or the hope it will “fix” something?

• Are you truly on board, or agreeing because you’re afraid of losing your partner?

• Can you sit down together and write a list of your agreements, and boundaries that feels good for the both of you?

If you’re looking for well-rounded advice, Hayley offers guidance calls, which I highly recommend.

Book a guidance call with Hayley

4. I’m curious about play parties. What should I look for?

Hayley shares her experience frequenting them, with environments that very much resemble Eyes Wide Shut (without the satanic rituals).

If you’re curious about play parties, Hayley’s advice is to treat them a bit like dating: know what you’re looking for, and do your research.

A few things she suggests considering:

• Vibe and curation – Is it more luxurious, or a casual house party? Do you want queer‑centered spaces, or a specific kink focus?

• Screening and consent culture – Do they do applications, interviews, or consent workshops? How do they talk about safety and behavior expectations? And what about STI tests?

• Dress code and structure – Is it cocktails‑then‑play, or more free‑form? Are there rituals, performances, or clear guidelines about phones and anonymity?

She also stresses that you do not have to play just because you’re there. Going in with the expectation “we must have sex or we’re failing” creates pressure that can ruin the experience.

Some of the most powerful nights for couples are simply watching, talking, and using what they saw as fuel for later conversations—or for their own bed.

If you’re looking for a curated list of the best play parties, Hayley made a guide for you.

Get Hayley's Curated Play Party List

5. What is impact play, and where do I begin?

Impact play is a consensual erotic practice in which one person strikes another’s body (by hand or with a tool) to create intense sensation for sexual, emotional, or psychological gratification.

It is a form of BDSM and can range from light spanking to more intense practices like flogging, caning, or whipping, always grounded in explicit consent and negotiated limits.

For Hayley, impact play is the one thing that can fully shut her brain off, allowing her to drop into pure sensation. It can be sexy—hair pulling, dirty talk—but the real draw for her is the mental quiet and the intense trust it requires.

If impact play is calling you, Hayley’s guidance is clear: don’t just let someone say, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before” and start hitting you.

Her practical steps:

• Talk first, in detail – Share your boundaries, fears, and any trauma or health issues. Agree on areas of the body, intensity ranges, and what’s absolutely off‑limits.

• Learn about drop and aftercare – Both subs and doms can experience an emotional or physical “drop” afterward—feeling low, raw, or disoriented—so plan for comforting food, blankets, cuddling, or whatever makes you feel grounded.

• Build slowly – Start with light touch and gradually increase intensity, checking in verbally or with agreed‑upon signals. Don’t jump straight into “full scene” mode.

• Read or learn together – Books, essays, workshops, and classes can help you understand the psychological and physiological sides of impact play, so you’re not improvising with each other’s nervous systems.

Above all, she emphasizes that because you’re literally giving someone power over your body, you need a strong foundation of consent, knowledge, and trust before you pick up, say, a flogger.

Thank you for tuning in! If you have any questions or comments, please drop them below or hit reply.

Leave a comment

To all of the moms of Lust in Translation, I wish you a beautiful Mother’s Day this weekend!! I did not have time to curate a Mother’s day Gift Guide for partners this year as I was deep in the weeds with the podcast, but I hope it’s restful and full of love.

Follow Lust in Translation on Instagram, we recently started our new account!

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Until next week!

Natassia

Before I dive in, I want you to know that you are able to tune in directly on Substack (click on the video above), as well as anywhere you listen to podcasts.

The most popular ones are Spotify, Youtube and Apple Podcasts, so I’m linking them here.

Lauren Elise Rogers is a Certified Holistic Sexuality Educator and Embodied Intimacy & Relationship Coach who grew up in an evangelical Christian community.

We talked about purity culture, erotic literature and self-pleasure, painful marriages and joyful liberation, and raising sexually empowered teens—all in one arc.

I wanted to start here because it’s a complex and enlightening episode. Even if you didn’t grow up religious, chances are you were taught to fear your own desire. Most of us were.

Lauren’s story shows how deeply those scripts can live in us, and how possible it is to rewrite them at any age.

Below, I share 4 main frameworks and/or insights from our conversation.

1. The 7–14–21 framework: mapping your erotic timeline

One of my favorite practical pieces from this episode is the idea of tracing your sexual formation through key developmental ages: 7, 14, and 21.

Lauren describes guiding people to analyze their own “metaphorical sexual gardens,” going back through their experiences and messages at these ages.

Here’s how you can do this as a reflection practice (journal, voice note, or talk it out with a trusted friend/therapist/coach). I took the liberty of adding my own questions to this guide.

Age 7: Early messages and “good/bad” bodies

Ask yourself:

• What did I learn about bodies and nudity around this age?

• How did adults react if I was curious about my body or someone else’s?

• Were there any rules—spoken or unspoken—about modesty, touching, or privacy?

At 7, many of us absorbed foundational ideas like “my body is dirty,” “curiosity is shameful,” or “we don’t talk about that,” even if no one ever said those words out loud.

Age 14: Adolescence, desire, and social scripts

Ask yourself:

• What were peers, media, or religious communities saying about sex and “good girls/boys”?

• Was I taught that my value depended on staying pure, not being “easy,” or managing someone else’s arousal?

• Did anyone talk about pleasure, orientation, or consent in a way that honored my experience?

Lauren notes that many of her female-bodied clients realize, at this stage of reflection, “Oh, that’s where I learned that my job is to protect men from my body, and that their desire is inevitable and my responsibility.”

Age 21: Adult sex without sex education

Ask yourself:

• What was my relationship to sex, partnership, and commitment around then?

• Did I feel like I had to “perform” being a good partner, spouse, or lover without any real education?

• Was there a gap between what I was doing sexually and what I actually wanted or felt ready for?

Lauren shares that 21 is also the average age at which many people begin engaging in penetrative sex, even though experimentation and curiosity often start earlier. Yet most of us arrive there with prevention-focused, shame-based education at best.

Once you’ve done 7–14–21, look at your answers and ask:

• Which beliefs did I consciously choose, and which were embedded by family, religion, or culture?

• Which ones feel like “soil”—deep in my body, especially my pelvic floor—showing up as tension, shutdown, or guilt when I feel desire?

• Which scripts do I want to retire, rewrite, or reclaim?

This exercise isn’t about blaming your past. It’s about understanding the origin story of your erotic self so you can rewrite it in a way that actually fits who you are now.

2. Faith, pleasure, and reclaiming your body

Lauren helps clients distinguish between embedded theology (the harmful add-ons—gender roles, sexual double standards, shame-based teachings) and essential theology (their actual spiritual values and connection to the divine).

We explore how pleasure can be seen as sacred rather than sinful: from the simple fact that fetuses self-pleasure in utero, to the existence of the clitoris as an organ whose sole purpose is pleasure.

Instead of treating the body as a problem to solve, we can treat our anatomy as evidence that we were made for joy, connection, and erotic aliveness.

For people who choose to keep practicing their faith, the work often looks like:

• Letting go of rigid gender roles and scripts that equate “goodness” with sexual submission or self-erasure.

• Developing a personal ethic where sex, self-pleasure, and erotic exploration are aligned with core values like consent, mutual care, and honesty.

• Allowing pleasure to be a site of worship, gratitude, and embodiment rather than performance or obligation.

3. Toys, variety, and everyday eroticism

For those of you who’ve been taught that using a toy in bed is “cheating” or “corrupting”, a great analogy is that vibrators are like snacks or smoothies, not replacements for meals. They are different ways of nourishing the body.

• A vibrator is not in competition with a partner. It’s more like a pool toy you bring into the water together.

• You don’t become “dependent” on toys, unless they are truly the only kind of stimulation you ever allow yourself. If that bothers you, add in more variety and go acoustic (using your fingers).

• Solo pleasure practices (with or without toys) make partnered sex better by deepening your understanding of what you like and how you respond.

If you’re curious about bringing more intentional play into your erotic life, I partnered with Epiphany to bring you the Mind and Body Bundle: a clitoral arousal serum to heighten sensation (I carry it in my purse at all times!), and my intimacy card deck to spark the kinds of conversations and experiments that keep desire alive.

Think of it as a practical lab for everything we talk about on the podcast—more chances to feel turned on in your own skin, and more chances to create connection (and orgasms) instead of waiting for them to magically appear.

Explore the Mind & Body Bundle

4. Raising sexually literate, empowered teens

One of the most moving parts of the episode is when Lauren talks about parenting her 15-year-old daughter very differently from how she was raised. Instead of secrecy and silence, she centers comprehensive sexuality education and ongoing conversations as acts of deep care.

She compares it to learning how to drive: before a teen gets behind the wheel alone, they have to study, pass a written test, and log many supervised hours on the road.

Yet we often expect young people to “just figure out” sex with no information, then shame them when they struggle.

Some of the outcomes she sees at home:

• Her daughter can clearly articulate boundaries, desires, and what she is and is not interested in doing with her body in a relationship.

• She is not having sex to please a boyfriend or to validate his desire; she is able to center her own wants and limits.

• Research backs this up: young people who receive comprehensive sex education tend to take fewer risks, delay intercourse, and make more informed decisions, compared with those who receive abstinence-only messages.

For those of you raising kids or in close relationship with teens, this is an invitation to move from “protecting them from information” to equipping them with tools, language, and frameworks they can carry for life.

If you’re curious where to start, Lauren has an online course called Sex Ed Prep for Parents.

Thank you for tuning in! If you have any questions or comments, please drop them below or hit reply.

Leave a comment

Connect with Lauren on Instagram, and learn more about working with her here. ⁠

Follow Lust in Translation on Instagram, we recently started our new account!

If you enjoyed this, please share with anyone else who would too. Spreading the word helps us grow and bring you even better content.

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Until next week!

Natassia

For the last 20 years, I’ve been an avid podcast listener. It all started with NPR’s This American Life, which had a way of teleporting me far from my high school reality. In my twenties, while working in finance, I was obsessed with Guy Raz’s How I Built This — a show about entrepreneurs who really shot it out of the park.

I knew I wanted to build something of my own. I just had no idea what it would be.

How I got here always surprises people. But like most entrepreneurs, I kept betting on myself until I found something I genuinely loved—and that people were willing to pay me for. I didn’t expect to feel this fulfilled by my work, and I don’t take that lightly.

What began as Wonderlust, an ecommerce brand centered around my Intimacy Card Deck (designed to help couples talk about sex and bring more play into their relationships), took an unexpected turn when I went viral on TikTok. I shared “5 things couples who have great sex do,” based on research from the Gottman Institute, and something clicked.

That’s when I realized: most of us were never actually taught how to build a healthy, fulfilling sex life or relationship. We’re left to figure it out through trial and error.

But what if we didn’t have to?

How different would our relationships feel if we learned—early on—how to communicate clearly, navigate conflict, and explore pleasure without the quiet layer of shame so many of us carry?

That question led me to become a sexologist, certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists. Today, I work 1:1 (primarily with couples), host educational events, and create content designed to help you build a foundation that makes intimacy feel alive.

The Lust in Translation Podcast has felt like the natural next step for a while now. So many of you have asked for it over the years, and I’m excited to finally bring it to life in the way I imagined: in-studio, with thoughtful production, and conversations that go deeper than what we can do on social media.

New episodes will drop every Thursday at 5 AM EST, wherever you listen to podcasts—including here on Substack. Each episode will be paired with a newsletter like this one, breaking down the key ideas for those of you who prefer to read and reflect.

This is a show about what actually keeps desire alive, which means it’s about much more than sex.

You can expect smart, evidence-based insights woven into the kinds of candid, slightly-too-honest conversations you’d have with your closest friend. There will be stories, expert guests, and practical scripts you can actually use to build confidence and deepen connection—in and out of bed.

I’ll also be answering your anonymous questions, which is what the podcast cover art alludes to. I’ll be sharing a link for that soon.

The first episode drops tomorrow! Yes, I know, it’s not a Thursday. A small behind-the-scenes glitch pushed us back by a day. But in a way, it felt fitting and I decided to take this opportunity to write to you today.

To celebrate the launch, I also partnered with Epiphany—the clit arousal serum that flew off the shelves from my Valentine’s Day gift guide. Together, we created a Mind & Body Bundle that pairs their Epiphany Clit Arousal Serum (Cosmopolitan’s #1 Best Overall Arousal Serum) with my Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck.

It’s designed to support both sides of desire: the mental piece (feeling close, curious, and in sync) and the physical piece (your body actually responding when you want it to). And because bundles should actually bundle, you save $10 compared to buying them separately.

Clit Arousal Serum x Intimacy Card Deck

Until tomorrow,

Natassia

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Shere Hite. I hadn’t, until six months ago.

Somehow, across my studies and readings as a sexologist, Shere’s name never came up.

It wasn’t until watching Fifty Shades of Grey last October that I fell into a Dakota Johnson rabbit hole and learned she had produced and narrated a documentary called The Disappearance of Shere Hite.

A whole documentary about one of the bestselling sexologists of all time whose forgotten name is, unfortunately, no accident.

So it feels right that on International Women’s Day, I kick off a new series called Women Sexologists You Should Know with a woman who changed how we understand female pleasure—and then slid out of the public eye.

This is a story about sex research, yes.

But it’s also a story about what happens to women who insist that their experience counts as evidence.

From Missouri to Manhattan

Born Shirley Diana Gregory in 1942, in St. Joseph, Missouri, she grew up in the American Bible Belt, raised by her grandparents after her mother had her at sixteen.

She earned a bachelor’s and master’s in history at the University of Florida before moving to New York City for graduate work at Columbia University.

To pay for her education, she modeled. Sometimes for book illustrations, sometimes for magazines, and—famously—for an Olivetti typewriter ad with the tagline, “The typewriter is so smart, she doesn’t have to be.”

When she found out about the tagline after she’d already shot the ad, she was enraged.

Shere joined feminists from the National Organization for Women (NOW) to protest, and that act became a hinge in her life: the woman used as a prop in a sexist ad crosses the picket line and becomes part of the movement to dismantle it.

From there, she moved deeper into women’s liberation work and, eventually, into sex research.

In the early 1970s, there were already big names in sex research: Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, all mostly focused on bodies as observed from the outside, in labs, through the lens of penetrative sex.

But at a NOW meeting, a conversation about female orgasm exposed something glaring: we had almost no data on women’s own experiences of pleasure in their own words.

Hite’s response was simple, yet subversive.

She took her graduate research training and wrote a long, open‑ended questionnaire—over sixty questions—and started handing it out to women, asking them to describe, in detail, how they felt about sex, orgasm, masturbation, relationships, and their bodies.

At first she distributed the surveys by hand around New York City, even enlisting her boyfriend and his motorcycle to ferry questionnaires around the boroughs.

She published an earlier book, Sexual Honesty, by Women, for Women, and used it to reach more respondents, then advertised nationally and invited women to mail their responses back.

Printing these surveys was not easy.

Shere found a publishing company that allowed her to print after hours, on her own dime. She wanted women to feel like they were writing in a diary, so she added colors and design elements to make it warm and inviting.

Out of roughly 100,000 questionnaires, about 3,000 came back in enough detail to analyze.

In 1976 she published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.

The book became an immediate bestseller, and remains so, with over 50 million copies sold worldwide.

The headline that made her famous—and infamous—was that about 70% of women in her study did not have orgasms from intercourse alone, but were able to orgasm easily via masturbation or other direct clitoral stimulation.

In other words: the problem is not women’s bodies.
The problem is what we’re calling “sex.”

Women at the time felt seen, reassured, even vindicated.
Men felt mocked or threatened. Playboy dubbed it “The Hate Report.”

Reading Hite now, it’s striking how obvious this sounds.

But nothing about it was obvious in 1976, when Freud’s old binary—”vaginal” orgasm as mature, “clitoral” as childish—still haunted women’s understanding of how they “should” experience pleasure.

Here’s the part of the story that becomes uncomfortably familiar.

Hite’s work was attacked from multiple angles.
Methodologists criticized her sampling and statistics, arguing that self‑selected respondents could not stand in for “American women,” making the data suspect.

Media figures mocked her as hysterical, man‑hating, unscientific.

Television appearances became gauntlets.

In one clip in the documentary, she sits on The Oprah Winfrey Show facing an all‑male audience that openly berates her.

On another program, she’s ridiculed and interrupted as she tries to explain her findings.

At the exact moment when she had given millions of women a language for their pleasure, she was being publicly punished for her audacity.

The criticism wasn’t just, “We have questions about your methods.”
It was: Who do you think you are?

Her past as a model who posed nude was dredged up and used to discredit her.

Over time, the attacks escalated into a decade of sustained assault on her and her work.

She became the scapegoat for anxieties about porn, feminism, divorce, changing gender roles—everything that made people uneasy about the sexual revolution.

Double standards

As Hite’s critics loved to frame her as unscientific, they held up Masters and Johnson as the gold standard in contrast.

The irony? Masters and Johnson’s landmark 1966 study was based on lab observations of 694 volunteers—much smaller than her sample of 3,000, which proved to be more representative of American society at the time.

And while Masters and Johnson did conclude—crucially, against Freud—that there is no physiological difference between a “vaginal” and a “clitoral” orgasm, they also noted that internal clitoral structures extend beneath the labia, meaning penetration could stimulate the clitoris indirectly from the inside.

The broader culture absorbed this as “penetration works,” conveniently glossing over the word clitoris.

Hite, by contrast, was relentless about what that actually meant for women’s lived experience: if most of you aren’t orgasming from penetration alone, then penetration-centered sex is not serving women.

But before the backlash, there was a spectacular rise.

The Hite Report made her rich. She moved from her cockroach-infested apartment, repaying everyone who had helped fund the research, and landed on Fifth Avenue—the same building Gene Simmons called home.

She also used the funds to continue investing in her research, committed to self-funding her work on her own terms, beholden to no institution that might redirect what she could ask or say.

Public crucifixion

And it didn’t stop with the first Hite Report.

In 1981, Hite published The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, and again she did what she always did: she asked men, in their own words, to describe their emotional and sexual lives.

More than 7,000 responded to the survey, reporting not feeling safe being emotionally vulnerable, craving more emotional support from their relationships, and experiencing loneliness within their own masculinity.

We know today that these are very real consequences of socialized masculinity—the research on male emotional suppression, the mental health crisis among men who can’t ask for help—it’s one of the most important conversations in psychology right now.

But in 1981, when male TV hosts interviewed Hite about it, they didn’t say, “Wow, that’s concerning.” They said, “The men in this book don’t sound like men I know.” And with that, they discredited both her and the men who had trusted her enough to tell the truth about their inner lives.

Shere Hite couldn’t win either way.

We love the language of empowerment; we’re less comfortable with the women who actually do the empowering.

Exile

Eventually, the pressure and death threats became unbearable.

In 1989, Hite moved to Germany with her husband, Friedrich Höricke, a concert pianist nineteen years her junior.

From there, she continued to write and publish—eventually on families and even her own memoir, The Hite Report on Hite: A Sexual and Political Autobiography.

But from the American mainstream perspective, she essentially vanished.
Her name receded, even as her ideas seeped into sex education, therapy, and the way we talk in bed.

She died in London in 2020, at 77, having lived for years with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

I feel a very particular tenderness towards Shere.

Like her, I came to this work through New York City. I also studied at Columbia University, and have had a sharp taste of what happens when you say something true and inconvenient about women’s pleasure out loud.

When my piece on “The Burden of Maintenance Sex” went viral, the responses that came in weren’t just disagreement—they were personal, corrosive attacks designed to make you wonder whether it’s worth continuing. She received that a thousandfold, for decades.

So on International Women’s Day, I want to remember Shere for the pioneer she was—and for paving the way for women like me to do the work I love today.

She won’t be the last woman in this series whose name you should know, but she’s the right one to start with.

If you’re curious about learning more, I invite you to watch her documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite. It’s so well-done and what I’ve shared here is just a glimpse of her story.

And order The Hite Report or any of her other books. She poured her heart into them.

If you’re craving more support on your own intimacy journey, here are a few ways I can help:

1. I just started a new Instagram account for Lust in Translation @lustintranslationpod! I’d love to have you follow along and I’m excited to share that I’ll be extending this newsletter into a podcast next month. It’s been a dream of mine for 15 years.

2. Couples Intimacy Card Deck - Turn each other on, one question at a time. I created this deck for you and your partner to have fun talking about sex, exploring your desires and deepening your connection. Read the reviews and shop here. Get 10% off with code LUST10.

3. Transform Sex From Obligation to Anticipation - My 3-month coaching container helps women and couples build a sex life they look forward to. I have one opening starting mid-March, so if you’re interested please learn more and apply here.

If this inspired you, please share it with someone who would enjoy it too.

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We’ve barely recovered from the holiday hangover, and Valentine’s Day is already two weeks away.

In this economy no one is exactly jumping at the thought of spending more money again, so I created this gift guide for those who want to give something thoughtful within their budget.

I’ve rounded up 14 gifts I genuinely use and love—things that actually enhance intimacy, relaxation, and pleasure—organized from wallet-friendly to splurge-worthy.

1. Momotaro Apotheca Organic Botanical Bath Soak, $28

Last weekend, my husband and I turned date night into a bath ritual. We lit candles, played Miles Davis, served ourselves some Cabernet, and dissolved this soak into hot water. Thirty minutes of pure relaxation thanks to mineral-rich magnesium salts, nourishing jojoba oil, and tea tree. It melts tension, softens skin, and is handcrafted in small batches in the US. Pairs beautifully with their Tonic Oil for post-bath glow.

2. Helen Phelan Studio Online Pilates, $29.99/month

It’s no secret that feeling good in your body builds sexual confidence and stamina. On days we skip the gym, my husband and I roll out our mats for Helen Phelan’s online pilates. Classes run 15-50 minutes, suit all levels, and require nothing but a mat. It’s challenging enough to make you feel accomplished but won’t leave you too exhausted for bedroom adventures later. Use code NATASSIA4945 at checkout to get $10 off your first month.

3. Epiphany Clit Serum, $34

This is a must-have that my friends and I carry in our purses at all times. One drop massaged onto your (or your partner’s) pleasure zone creates a tingling sensation that amplifies everything, especially orgasms.

4. The Boudoir Bible: The Uninhibited Sex Guide for Today, $35

Bondage? Role-playing? Anal? It’s all here in The Boudoir Bible, illustrated by artist François Berthoud. A comprehensive, gorgeous guide that gives sexuality in the 21st century the sophisticated treatment it deserves.

5. Wonderlust Intimacy Card Deck, $36

Turn each other on, one card at a time. Couples call it date night with happy endings for a reason. There are two levels of 69 cards each (yes, that’s intentional), building from romantic to seriously spicy, featuring stunning erotic art by Brazilian artist Nathalie Edenburg. Full disclosure: I created this deck, but the 5-star reviews speak for themselves. It’s the kind of gift you’ll reach for again and again.

6. Kate McLeod Sex Stone, $48

This massage and intimacy oil shaped like an actual stone is genius—it glides on skin like silk, enhancing touch and pleasure. I’ve already reordered mine (it comes in a reusable bamboo canister, which I love). Pro tip: it doubles as full-body moisturizer, but since it’s oil-based, skip it if you’re using latex condoms or silicone toys.

7. Alex Mill Cashmere Socks, $50

You’ve probably heard that wearing socks increases orgasm chances by 30%. The truth? That study happened in a freezing lab—and being cold is incredibly distracting. So no wonder I’m a winter sex-with-socks evangelist. These Alex Mill cashmere socks are genderless (my husband and I have matching sets), impossibly soft, and the ultimate cozy-sexy accessory.

8. Maude Come Undone Kit, $60

Maude partnered with Wuthering Heights (premiering February 13!) for this limited-edition kit. Inside there’s a Burn No. 3 massage candle and Oil No. 2 for bath and body—the ultimate combo for slow-burn desire and exploration (very on-brand for Brontë). It includes an exclusive poster and behind-the-scenes booklet for my film nerds.

9. Diptyque Baies Candle, $120

I was gifted this at a Secret Santa ten years ago and became instantly obsessed. It’s a cult favorite for a reason: clean musk with woody undertones creates a masculine-leaning scent that sets the mood without being cloying. The kind of candle that makes your space feel instantly more sophisticated.

10. Cere Pleasure Duo, $172

If you’re ready to level up, this is the move. This bundle pairs Cere’s award-winning Enchantment Gel with the Spellbound Stimulator—14 modes of air-wave and vibration designed to work in tandem. What I love about the dual stimulation is how versatile it is: you can explore your partner’s body in multiple ways, or use both sensations on yourself. I’m a fan of building arousal with the vibration first, then bringing in the suction for a more intense finish. It’s thoughtfully designed and worth every penny.

11. Magic Wand Waterproof Rechargeable Massager, $179.99

The Magic Wand is legendary for a reason—it’s the gold standard of powerful, reliable pleasure. This waterproof rechargeable version means you can take it into the bath or shower (game changer), and the intensity is unmatched. Whether you’re using it solo or with a partner, this is the kind of tool that becomes a staple.

12. The Ultimate Lovers Art Kit, $189.99

This is for couples who want to get messy in the best way. The Lovers Art Kit turns intimacy into abstract art—literally. You use your bodies, movement, and a whole lot of paint (12 extra colors included) to create something completely unique. It comes with stretcher bars so you can actually display your work of art. No skills required, just a sense of play and willingness to let go. Perfect for adventurous couples or anyone looking to try something totally different.

13. The Prim Sex Pillow, $195

Wedge pillows get recommended constantly by pelvic floor physical therapists and sexologists for good reason: they alleviate back and hip pain during sex while improving angles and pleasure. The problem? They’re usually ugly foam bricks you hide in the closet. The Prim solves this. It’s made with memory foam and custom washable linen, with a patented design that actually looks like a gorgeous throw pillow that belongs on your bed. Function meets form, finally.

14. Fleur du Mal Rouge Luxe Gift Set, $268

Wearing lingerie is one of my favorite ways to tap into my sensuality. My husband knows this, which is why silk sets like this are his go-to gift. This one from Fleur du Mal includes a Flutter Thong with a high-leg cut, a Luxe Triangle Bra, and a matching silk blindfold—all in rouge silk charmeuse. The ruffle detailing is delicate without being overly sweet, and the minimal silhouette feels effortlessly sexy. It’s the kind of piece that makes you both feel seen.

This guide is meant to be short and sweet, but if you’re looking for something that’s not listed, drop a comment or hit reply. I love helping people find the perfect gift!

And if you try any of these, please report back. I’m always curious what resonates.

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P.S. In case you missed it, last week’s post has been getting a lot of love:

Every year my husband and I sit down to plan our annual goals: what we want to experience, where we want to travel, who we want to spend more time with, how much money we want to make—and what we look forward to trying in bed.

It brings us closer, this act of dreaming, separately and together.

When I share that we plan for the erotic, it often surprises people. But doesn’t it feel forced? Doesn’t it kill the mood?

Our experience has been quite the contrary.

What we plan for, we prioritize. What we prioritize, we continuously practice.

Research supports this too. Dr. Emily Nagoski has found that couples with lasting sexual connection share three characteristics:

1. They are friends who trust and admire each other. This includes showing affection, facing difficult feelings with kindness, and knowing that you are there for each other.

2. They prioritize sex. They decide that sex matters for their relationship and are willing to protect time, energy, and context for erotic connection. This can look like scheduling, saying no to competing demands, and treating sex as part of relationship maintenance rather than an optional bonus.

3. They reject generic scripts and co-create what works for them. Instead of accepting other people’s opinions about how sex “should” look, they’re willing to experiment, step outside rigid gender roles, and continually update their sexual dynamic as life and bodies change.

Foreplay begins when the last time you had sex ends. How you treat each other daily determines when—and how connected—your next sexual experience will be.

Keep this in mind as you map out your erotic life for the year.

This framework has helped me and my husband turn the following into habits:

• Daily non-sexual, affectionate touch to reduce stress and increase our connection.

• Honest weekly conversations communication about what’s working and what needs improvement in our relationship and sex life.

• Quality time during dinners and date nights with a no-phone policy.

• Explore a new sexual activity every quarter (our latest is shibari!).

• Plan a new date night activity once per month.

• Maintain weekly connected sex—or every two weeks when work and travel demand it.

None of this happened by accident. It happened because we designed it.

And that’s exactly what I’ll guide you through now.

Step 1: Current state of the (erotic) union

Begin by assessing your sex life and relationship today. This is meant to be an honest, stream-of-consciousness journaling session where you write down what comes to mind.

Consider the following as you journal:

• Do you look forward to nurturing your sex life and relationship, or does it feel like a chore? Why is that so?

• What do you enjoy? What could be better? What is missing?

• What are the ongoing issues and disappointments you’ve learned to live with?

• What do you constantly complain about but don’t change?

• What truth regarding your intimate life would be the most difficult to reveal to someone you hold in high esteem?

• What have you wanted to tell your partner that you haven’t yet?

Now, add this reflection on last year:

Before you move forward, take a moment to look back. Your patterns from 2025 (or any recent period) hold valuable intel. This is about collecting data on how you actually operate when desire meets resistance.

• Where did you follow through on your erotic intentions in 2025?

• Where did you bail—cancel, avoid, or go numb instead of leaning in?

• What does that teach you about how you relate to commitment, pleasure, and change?

If you notice you always followed through when there was structure (a scheduled date night) but bailed when it required spontaneous vulnerability, that’s important.

If you leaned in during vacation but went cold at home, your nervous system is telling you something about safety and context. The goal is pattern recognition. These “bail points” will help you design goals in Step 3 that work with your wiring, not against it.

Step 2: What would guarantee failure?

When setting goals, investor Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s business partner, married 54 years to his second wife) was a big fan of the concept of inversion.

Instead of asking “How do I succeed?”, ask “What would guarantee failure?” and avoid those paths.

It’s about identifying pitfalls first, then steering clear—a defensive, risk-averse strategy that prevents “stupidity” before chasing brilliance.

In working with clients, I’ve found that people often have a hard time naming what they do want.

Research on sexual self-awareness confirms this: many struggle to articulate their desires, because they’ve rarely felt safe enough to explore them.

So in this next step, we’ll start with what you don’t want.

List what you absolutely don’t want to continue experiencing in your sex life and relationship by the end of 2026. Perhaps it’s duty sex that feels like chores, silent resentment, touch-starved months, unwinding only by watching TV together every day.

Make it as detailed and vivid as possible.

If it helps, consider what would happen if nothing changes over the next five to ten years:

• What aliveness slips away?

• What opportunities were missed?

• What did you not allow yourself to experience?

• How would your body, mood, and connection feel?

Now ask yourself:

• What identity would you have to give up to actually change?

• What self-protective thoughts are you telling yourself—”I’m just not sexual,” “We’re too busy,” “This is normal for long-term love”?

• What exactly are you protecting? And what is that protection costing you?

Research shows that naming what you're desperate to avoid is often a stronger motivator than positive fantasy alone. Step 2 clarifies the stakes by showing you exactly what you’re no longer willing to tolerate. Now, in step 3, we turn that clarity into a plan.

Step 3: Designing your 2026 erotic operating system (goals that actually happen)

By now you’ve named what hurts (current state) and what would guarantee failure (anti-vision). Now we need to orient all that energy in a direction that actually feels good.

If you could snap your fingers and be living a different erotic life at the end of this year, what does that look like?

• How often do you feel desired, relaxed, and connected?

• What does sex look and feel like on a random Tuesday?

• What kind of intimacy do you want to have with yourself, not just with a partner?

Now go back to your Step 2 inversion. Take each “I absolutely don’t want…” and flip it:

• “I don’t want duty sex” → “I want sex where we both feel genuinely turned on and present. That means: weekend mornings when we’re rested, starting with 10 minutes of kissing and sensual touch before anyone’s clothes come off, we check in verbally (’Does this feel good?’ ‘Want to keep going?’), and if one of us isn’t feeling it, we pause without guilt and reconnect another way.”

• “I don’t want to go months without touch” → “I want daily affectionate touch, without associating it with pressure to have sex.”

• “I don’t want silent resentment” → “I want a monthly ritual where we talk honestly about our sex life.”

This becomes the raw material for your goals.

Why SMART goals matter

Given that 80–90% of people don’t achieve their New Year’s resolutions, the problem is rarely a lack of desire—it’s a lack of design.

Most resolutions fail because they’re vague (”have more sex”), lack concrete timelines, aren’t measurable, or feel so ambitious they collapse under their own weight.

Without specificity, tracking, or realistic steps, good intentions evaporate by mid-February.

It’s no surprise, then, that most of us never build the systems that would actually support our erotic lives, either. We treat intimacy like it should just “happen” while we meticulously plan our careers, finances, and fitness routines.

And unmet intentions erode confidence.

Each time you set a goal and don’t follow through, you quietly question whether you’re capable of making the changes you want—or if you’re asking for too much. Over time, that doubt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s why we’re using SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

This isn’t about rigidity. It’s about giving yourself a fair shot at actually achieving what you want.

Examples of erotic goals for 2026

You’re not copying these word-for-word; you’re using them as inspiration. Notice how each one is concrete and trackable:

Connection & Touch

• “By March 31, my partner and I will have a 10-minute, screens-off cuddle or massage ritual at least 3 nights a week.”

• “I will initiate some form of affectionate touch (hug, kiss, hand on thigh) once a day for the next 30 days to rebuild physical familiarity.”

Conversations About Sex

• “Once a month in 2026, we will have a 30-minute ‘state of our sex life’ check-in using 3 prompts: what’s working, what’s not, what we’d like to try next.”

• “By the end of January, I will have purchased a tool to help us talk about sex more easily—like an intimacy card deck—and we’ll use it during one date night per month to spark honest, playful conversations we might otherwise avoid.”

• “By April, I will have brought up one vulnerable desire or boundary in conversation that I’ve never voiced before.”

Partnered Novelty & Exploration

• “By February 28, I will have researched and booked a private shibari class for us, ordered beginner-friendly rope, and scheduled a date to practice what we learn.”

• “Once per quarter in 2026, we will try one new erotic experience together—this could be a workshop (tantra, kink intro, couples massage), a new location (hotel staycation, outdoors), a fantasy we role-play, or introducing a toy or practice we’ve been curious about.”

• “By June 30, I will have introduced one element of novelty into our routine that breaks our usual script—different room, different time of day, a sensory experiment (blindfold, ice, feather), or swapping who initiates.”

Solo Erotic Relationship

• “I will schedule one solo pleasure date (self-touch, fantasy exploration, reading erotica, or mindful body time) twice a month for the next 6 months to get to know my own desire.”

• “I will experiment with one new practice (erotic breathwork, mindfulness workshop, a new toy, or reading an erotic novel) per quarter.”

Body & Nervous System

• “I will practice 5 minutes of body-based mindfulness or breathwork before bed 3 nights a week for the next 8 weeks to help my nervous system down-shift into receptivity.”

• “By September, I will have booked at least one appointment (pelvic floor PT, hormone eval, or sex therapy consult) to address any ongoing pain or medical concerns.”

Turning goals into systems (maintenance, not miracles)

Intelligence isn’t just having the right goals—it’s building the feedback loops that help you actually achieve them. Think of these as your erotic “maintenance habits” that keep the system running and let you adjust as you go.

1. Put it in your existing system

Don’t overcomplicate this. Add your erotic goals and their deadlines to whatever system you already use—Google Calendar, a physical planner, your phone reminders, a wall calendar in your bedroom.

If it’s not integrated into your life, it won’t happen.

Treat these commitments the same way you’d treat a work deadline or a doctor’s appointment.

• Block time for your monthly check-in conversation.

• Set a quarterly reminder to plan your next novelty experiment.

• Schedule your solo pleasure dates like you would a workout or coffee with a friend.

The goal is to make it easy to follow through, not to add another app or system you’ll abandon by February.

2. Weekly system check

Once a week (Sunday evening works well for many people), spend 5–10 minutes reviewing your erotic patterns. Grab your journal and ask:

• When did I feel most alive erotically this week? Most dead?

• What did I do out of identity protection (people-pleasing, faking orgasms, avoiding touch, shutting down) rather than genuine desire?

• When did I feel closest to my partner (or myself)? When did I pull away?

• Is there something my partner asked me to do that I haven’t yet, or am avoiding? (This is the mental load question—both partners need to feel like you have each other’s backs.)

This is a great way to collect data on your patterns so you can course-correct. If you notice you pull away every time your partner initiates after 10 PM, that’s intel about your energy and timing. If you felt most alive after that Saturday morning conversation over coffee, lean into more of that.

3. Daily or weekly micro-practices

If you feel called to it, you can add one or two of these prompts to your existing daily routine—morning coffee, evening wind-down, whenever you already pause to reflect:

Daily micro-reflection:

• Ask yourself: “What would make me feel 5% more connected to myself or my partner today?”

• Write one thing, then actually do it.

Evening data point:

• “When did I feel closest to my partner (or myself) today?”

• “When did I pull away?”

Mental load check-in:

• “Is there something they asked me to do that I haven’t yet, or am avoiding?”

The intelligence of getting what you want

You already do this for your business, your health, your finances. You track metrics, review what’s working, adjust what’s not. You course-correct when you’re off-track. You celebrate when you hit milestones.

Your erotic life deserves the same level of care and intelligence.

The difference between people who get what they want out of life and people who stay stuck isn’t talent, luck, or even desire—it’s the willingness to pay attention, collect feedback, and make small adjustments along the way.

Your sex life is a living system, not a fixed state. It needs tending, tracking, and honest reflection to thrive.

When you treat your intimacy with the same seriousness you bring to other parts of your life—not as an afterthought, not as something that should “just happen,” but as a practice you actively steward—you stop leaving your pleasure and connection to chance. You start building the erotic life you actually want.

If you want help making this real

If this guide lit something up in you—if part of you is tired of staying in the “wrong movie” erotically and wants support turning this into an actual, lived-in reality—I can help.

Book a one-off clarity call with me to map your erotic operating system, identify your biggest pain points, and leave with 2–3 concrete, personalized goals for 2026.

Book a Clarity Call

Or, if you’re ready for deeper transformation, apply for my 3-month coaching container, where we’ll work closely to:

• Clarify what you want from your sex life and relationship—and create a roadmap to get there.

• Build the communication skills and rituals that make intimacy feel sustainable, not stressful.

• Work through the nervous-system blocks, mismatched libidos, and relational patterns that keep you stuck.

I have two openings right now. If you’re ready for change, I’d love to help.

Apply for Coaching

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Long before becoming a sexologist, conversation was my first fieldwork. I was the one at dinner who somehow got everyone talking about sex, desire, and the quiet negotiations happening in their relationships.

I’ve been fascinated by how layered our erotic lives are for as long as I can remember.

When I read All of This, Rebecca Woolf’s memoir about marriage, motherhood, infidelity, and death, I was instantly hooked. Raw stories like hers are usually shared behind closed doors, not published for strangers.

Few people are willing to write from that much truth.

As Esther Perel reminds us, “If we were fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn’t be having such interesting talks about this.” It’s in the mess—the ambivalence, the betrayal, the desire that refuses to die—that we recognize ourselves and feel less alone.

So of course, I had to interview .

Rebecca is one of my favorite writers, first contributing to the Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul series in the 1990s and later publishing her personal blog Girl’s Gone Child, which chronicled early motherhood, marriage, and family life in Los Angeles. Besides her book All of This, she hosted a limited podcast series called No Shame (I binged it) and writes the braid–one of my favorite Substacks.

Without further ado, our interview.

Natassia: Let’s start at the beginning. You were raised in suburban San Diego in the 80s and 90s. What were the key messages you received about sex and sexuality?

Rebecca: I grew up in Encinitas, which was basically ground zero for surf and skate culture. Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Tony Hawk—those were the guys being propped up as the cultural leads, and the way you had power as a girl was by orbiting boys. So, my entire adolescence was as a groupie who was there to prop them up or give them emotional or sexual support whenever they needed.

I got a job at a local skate shop and learned how to set up a skateboard, but was not allowed to ride one.

I remember my parents got me a skateboard when I was maybe 10 or 11. I lived on this cul-de-sac full of boys and they took my skateboard, broke it in front of me and said, “You can’t ride this,” and me internalizing, “Okay, I guess my role is to sit on the curb, cheer you on, and be sexually available when you want me.”

I learned that I could rise in the ranks by being the “best pro-ho,” the cool girl who set up their skateboards, slept with them, and didn’t ask for anything.

Natassia: How did your parents talk to you about sex?

Rebecca: My mom was super sex-positive. In my early teens, she offered to get me a vibrator. She knew that I was sexually active pretty early and never made me feel bad about it, never shamed me for anything I wore or anything I did.

The big script then—and I think still, for a lot of mothers and daughters—was, “Wait until you love someone before you have sex with them.” Which is, to me, the worst possible advice, because when you’re a teenage girl you fall in love with literally everybody.

So I’ve flipped the script with my kids. I tell them, “You’re ready to have sex when you’re sexually mature enough to advocate for your desire and for yourself.”

Natassia: I love that. I remember that you also gave your daughters vibrators and gave your son the book Becoming Cliterate.

Rebecca: It’s so funny, too, because I gave it to him thinking he’d be like, “Ugh, Mom” and he was like, “Oh, thanks.” And later he really thanked me for it.

I’ve always had age-appropriate sex positive books in the back pockets of our minivan, so anyone could take a gander. And we talked about it all the time.

My whole thing with consent, which I’ve been talking to my kids about since they were little, is you never put your pleasure after another person’s comfort. Not only in sexual situations, but in general.

Because I write about sex, I have boxes of vibrators in my closet of all shapes and sizes. So I gave all of my daughters vibrators, and initially they said, “Ew, gross, Mom.”

I told them they could use it, or not. They could put it away for later. I just wanted them to have access. Now, my older daughter is the one whose friends come to her asking if I can get them vibrators.

I’m honored to be the auntie who’s there for all the girls. They know that they can call me if they really need anything that has to do with their sexual health.

When I’m driving my daughter and her friends to parties, they know they can ask and have these conversations in confidence. It’s my favorite place to talk about sex with teenagers because you’re not sitting them down and making eye contact with them.

It’s a lot easier to talk casually about sex when you’re driving and everyone’s looking in the same direction and not at each other.

Natassia: My mom was also very open about sex. We had a line of communication where I felt safe asking her questions. She also taught me about consent. So, I am very thankful for that and I think it’s fantastic that you do the same for your kids.

Rebecca: I was actually just having this conversation. There’s this pink tax of raising teenage daughters and how different it is to put my daughter on public transportation than it was for my son.

I have been thinking so much about it, because she no longer takes the bus after this guy tried to assault her and then chase her.

I did not have to deal with this with my son. So now I spend four more hours in the car to get her to school and back, because I can’t put her on public transportation.

I’ve had to have these conversations with my girls, especially living in a city like LA, where I want them to be free, roam around and have a social life. But there’s this frustration about being in a world where it’s not enough to equip them with all the knowledge: understanding consent, advocating for their desires and being strong. Because they have to deal with people who don’t know these things.

I was weighing in on a question of splitting the bill on a date. Someone else said that if you want equality, you should split the bill. And I think absolutely not. You don’t get to split the bill until we close the pay gap and until my daughters can get on the bus and ride safely.

We’re risking our lives to meet you for a drink, the least you can do is pay for it.

Natassia: You’ve shared that some of your early sexual experiences were non-consensual. How did that shape your relationship to sex in your teens and early twenties?​

Rebecca: I’ve always been an extremely sexual person. I learned to get myself off very young, so my sexuality did not come from a partner introducing me to my body; I already knew what felt good.

The problem was that my early partnered sexual experiences were non-consensual. So I swung hard in the other direction. I became the girl who pursued sex, who walked up to men and told them I wanted to sleep with them. It felt like reclaiming power.

My late teens and early twenties were me sleeping with everybody, basically. I went from being the girl who fell in love with everyone to being the girl who felt nothing during sex.

My emotional and sexual selves became totally separate. I got a lot of power from casual sex, but it was performative power. It wasn’t about my pleasure; it was about being “good in bed,” about how turned on they were.

I thought I was the one in control, but in retrospect I see that a lot of that was still about external validation, not internal satisfaction.

Natassia: You married Hal at 23 when you got pregnant, and you’ve written about non-consent showing up in that relationship too. How did your dynamic with him evolve, especially once you became a mother?

Rebecca: When we met, our relationship was super sexually charged.

I was still in that mode of wooing men by taking care of them—having sex with them, cooking for them, listening to them, asking them endless questions, not needing anything back.

I married the kind of guy I’d been fucking for ten years: someone who loved being loved by me, who was very comfortable being taken care of.

Then I had a baby and everything flipped.

I suddenly had an actual child, and I did not want to mother a grown man anymore. I didn’t want to serve men or center their desire. I wanted to be in my own body, in relationships where someone asked me questions, cared about me, wanted to take care of me because I was already taking care of someone else.

That was the beginning of the end of our marriage, even though we stayed together 13 more years.

Natassia: You’ve been incredibly honest about having affairs through most of the marriage. How do you understand that now?

Rebecca: I started cheating on him within the first year. It sounds wild, but those affairs were where I actually learned what I wanted sexually. I did not feel safe in my marriage advocating for my desire because our foundation was my service to him.

With lovers, there were no stakes. I could say what I wanted and not worry about hurting their feelings or making them angry.​

I was scared of Hal from the beginning. I was drawn to men who scared me, who were dominant and powerful in that old groupie dynamic. That’s not who you want to be married to when you actually need reciprocity and care.

So I felt very justified in my affairs. I was able to escape a marriage that I did not feel safe in, learn what I wanted sexually and also recognize that monogamy never came naturally to me.

Natassia: What else did you learn from these affairs? What did they bring out in you?

Rebecca: It’s interesting because there was one that lasted the longest. It was mainly long distance because he lived in New York.

We saw each other sporadically, but it was for the most part really about longing because we would write each other these letters. There’s probably thousands of emails over the years because we would send each other emails back and forth and so much of it was writing about fantasies.

He’s a writer too and I realized that I had never had that kind of relationship or connection with someone who was also a writer. So we had this whole language and I think through that relationship I was able to articulate fantasies, desires, things with him that I’d never articulated before.

It was almost like we were prompting each other to dig deeper into this fantasy world with each other, which is the thing about affairs. It’s all fantasy, right? The majority of people you have an affair with, you’re not going to have a relationship with. They only work in the periphery of your life.

So I went searching into this part of my sexual psyche that I’d never had before. And because of that, we got really, really close sharing intimate fantasies.

My husband never would. It just wasn’t him. It wasn’t us. It opened me up to this whole other world which I knew I wanted to pursue. After he died, I did. I pursued it.

I wanted to have sex with women. I wanted to have threesomes. I wanted to have an open relationship where we were both having sex with other people and then talking about it, and then having sex with each other and talking about it.

And then there would be these times where he’d be having sex with me, and I’d be on the phone with some other girl he had sex with describing it to her.

We had this really fun, wild sex life that felt so safe with him. This is the first boyfriend who I wrote about in my book.

It was the same thing for him. He had never had a relationship like that either. He had just come out of a 20-year marriage. He’d only been with a handful of people.

I was able to be in a partnership with someone, not cheat on them, and be totally open about everything I was feeling for him and other people. So, it really was, and it still, by the way, to this day is the only relationship I’ve ever had where I felt like those two parts of myself were able to exist together.

It was super healing for me, especially post marriage. I will forever sing his praises and be so grateful to him for that.

Natassia: How does your sexuality feel now, in your mid-forties, compared to those early years?

Rebecca: I’m 44 and have always had an abnormally high sex drive. People keep saying, “Oh just wait, you’re going to reach a certain age…” [where your sex drive will decline] but I’m not there yet.

I feel way more sexually embodied the older I get. I feel fearless, super open.

In the past, I have mainly gravitated towards men 10 to 20 years older than me. I realized in the last few years that I need to start going in the other direction, because they can’t keep up. It’s not even necessarily an issue about getting hard. It’s a stamina thing.

They don’t want sex as much as I do. It makes me feel needy or desperate to ask for sex, you know what I mean?

I want to be in an equitable relationship with someone who’s at my level and I think, sexually, women in our 40s and men in their late 20s, early 30s are probably more aligned.

I have a lot of friends, a lot of women in their 40s and 50s and 60s, by the way, who are sleeping with men in their 20s and 30s. It’s hot. The power dynamics are interesting. Younger men are far more open to everything.

I realized maybe a couple years back that I’d never been with someone younger than me ever. Not even my own age. And what was it about that power dynamic that was attractive to me and what did that mean actually?

A lot of it came from feeling like I wanted someone to overpower me.

And what I’ve learned about myself in the last few years is that it’s actually fun to play with that power dynamic of being the older woman and having more experience. What does that look like? What does that feel like?

Especially because I write about this, I want to understand not only my own sexuality, but also the spectrum of sexualities.

If you want to dive deeper into Rebecca’s journey, I highly recommend reading All of This and subscribing to her substack the braid.

And if you know someone who’d enjoy this conversation, please pass it along.

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As we head into the last week of 2025, I want to thank you for reading Lust in Translation and for trusting me with your stories, questions, and curiosity. I’ll be taking a short publishing break over the next two weeks, and I’m already excited about what’s in store for us next year.

In the meantime, I wanted to share an article I wrote last week for my favorite vulvovaginal health brand, Momotaro Apotheca: “How to Stay Connected with Your Partner During the Holidays.” Even though it’s framed around the holidays, it’s a grounding little guide you can return to anytime life gets hectic and connection starts to slip to the bottom of the list.

Lastly, if you’ve had your eye on my Intimacy Card Deck, this is the final week to grab it at 25% off—a gift designed to help couples see each other in a new light, ask better questions, and spice things up with less pressure. As Shane O. shared in a recent 5-star review, “These cards rekindled the flame between my beloved and I.”

If that’s the energy you’re calling in for the new year, you can shop the deck here.

Wishing you a restful week ahead—Happy Holidays!

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In a study of the 50 most viewed videos on the largest adult film platform P***hub, only 18% of women climaxed versus 78% of men.

Of those who climaxed, 45% did so through vaginal penetration and 35% through anal penetration.

In real life, only about 4% of women reliably orgasm from vaginal penetration alone. And when it comes to backdoor play, roughly 72% of women report feeling pain the last time they did this act.

Reading that study, it’s hard to miss the gap between what we see onscreen and what we actually feel in our bodies. It’s like someone wrote a script for our desire without ever asking us what turns us on.

It’s no secret that mainstream adult films are known for creating unrealistic and often harmful expectations of how sex “should” work.

I first came across this particular study through Dr. Laurie Mintz, a renowned sexologist who often says that learning about sex through adult films is like learning how to drive by watching Fast and Furious.

As women, we tend to have strong opinions about adult films.

We notice the aggressive pounding, the flimsy (or nonexistent) plot lines, the unrealistic bodies and genitals, and the impact all of this has on our partners’ expectations and our own self-confidence.

How different it would be if these films looked and felt more like the sex we actually enjoy — slower, more attentive, more curious about women’s bodies.

It’s therefore not uncommon for straight women to enjoy lesbian adult films and quietly wonder, “Is this normal?”

Spoiler alert: it is.

Often, it’s precisely because those films center women’s pleasure, even if the portrayal doesn’t always reflect how lesbian sex actually goes down.

It doesn’t mean you’re questioning your sexuality; it just means you enjoy seeing pleasure that mirrors how you actually get off.

Something else I hear a lot from women is how they try to watch adult films with their male partners but can’t fully get into it because what happens on screen just doesn’t do it for them.

The question that follows is almost always the same:

“Are there any tasteful adult films you recommend? You know, ones I’d actually like?”

That question sent me down a rabbit hole.

I didn’t want “less bad” adult films; I wanted something that felt mutual, ethical, and genuinely hot — something made with women’s arousal in mind.

That’s how I landed on ERIKALUST, the platform created by Erika Lust, a producer who got so tired of adult films made solely for the male gaze that she started creating her own.

The performers have realistic bodies and genitals, like yours and mine. They’re ethically paid, and consent and safety are taken seriously on set.

There are actual story lines, emotional build-up, and sex that looks like something you might realistically want to have — all shot through the female gaze.

Many of us don’t just want something explicit; we want something that turns us on and makes us feel respected and seen. That’s the sweet spot ERIKALUST plays in: erotic, ethical, and human.

If you’re curious to explore what ERIKALUST has to offer, I managed to snag a 50% off code for you: NAT50.

Think of it as an invitation to see what adult films can look like when women’s pleasure is the main character.

When you think about your own experiences with adult films, where did you most recognize yourself in what I shared? How have they shaped (or misshaped) your expectations around pleasure?

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As we slow down this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to keep this edition light. Here are 5 things I’ve watched or read this week that I find worth your while. Enjoy!

1. Beyond “Low Desire”: What Women Really Need

If you caught my interview with on midlife erotic awakenings, you know I’m deep in the weeds of women’s pleasure and desire. Last week, Juliette actually turned the tables and interviewed me for her own newsletter. Here’s a snippet:

Juliette: If you could distill your entire practice into one guiding principle, what would it be?

Me: When women reclaim their sexuality as their own, and not as a performance, everything shifts.

Feeling comfortable in your own skin creates the kind of confidence of communication, a sense of self and self worth that impacts how you show up not only for yourself, but for your partner, your kids, your community, and your work.

I always joke that communication in the bedroom translates into better communication in the boardroom. It’s about women overcoming that sense of shame or guilt or dismissal that they have about their own pleasure and what they deserve.

Continue reading the interview here.

2. Kinsey, the 2004 movie

I finally watched the movie about Alfred Kinsey–the sex researcher who founded the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in the 1940s.

If sex research and education is controversial today, imagine back then. Alfred was courageous, and some would argue, downright mad.

I loved this movie, particularly for its hard-hitting reality that funding for my field is hard to come by. Today, the Kinsey Institute is yet again at risk of closing its doors due to a 2023 law passed by the state of Indiana. I have heard their archives are incredible and its on my bucket list to visit one day.

Here’s the movie’s IMDB and you can rent it on Amazon Prime.

3. The best-kept secret of peri/menopause relief

Speaking of the Kinsey Institute, it recently surveyed 1,200 women, ages 40-65, on the most effective strategies for managing perimenopause and menopause.

The usual standbys like exercise and diet showed up.

But self-pleasure, while only used by 14%, turned out to be one of the most effective relief strategies for symptoms like mood swings and sleep issues.

It scored 4.35 out of 5—higher than hormone therapy, higher than the gym.

Nearly half said masturbation improved at least one symptom, and younger perimenopausal women were far more open to it than the previous generation (which is fantastic news).

Here’s the kicker: only 7% of women heard about this from their doctor.

Once again, communication (or the lack of it) is the real silent epidemic. Imagine what would shift if doctors prescribed orgasms along with omega-3s?

Read the full article on mindbodygreen here.

4. Do kink encounters have to count as cheating?

The New York Times’ ethics column recently featured a letter from someone in a long-term, monogamous, same-sex relationship who discovered kink 18 months ago.

Their partner’s libido faded nine years back, and any efforts to “meet halfway” have only worked temporarily.

So here’s the question: If the kink in question doesn’t involve genital touch and simply isn’t a shared interest, is it a violation to explore it outside the relationship?

What counts as cheating is not universal—it’s entirely up to the people involved.

That’s why infidelity rates are all over the place. There’s no standard-issue definition (I’ve written about this before), and people aren’t always straight about where their lines are.

The only real solution is a renegotiation of your relationship’s contract. What agreements do you want to put in place? What boundaries are needed to bridge the gap?

Longevity in a relationship means you’ll revisit and revise these rules as life (and libido) changes. Sometimes sex is at the center, sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes these negotiations are unspoken—but they’re always happening.

There’s a saying in Portuguese: o combinado não sai caro. It translates as “what is agreed upon is not expensive.”

Yes, these conversations can be tough, but they’re also liberating—and critical for staying connected.

Read the NYT column here.

5. At the intersection of eroticism, art and fashion

—the fashion designer and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud—has a podcast called Fashion Neurosis that’s as much a visual feast as it is an intellectual one.

She recently interviewed Marina Abramovic, who at nearly 80, is still redefining what it means to be bold and alive.

You might know Marina for her legendary performances—like Seedbed, where, for eight hours straight, she hid beneath the Guggenheim’s stairway, pleasuring herself and broadcasting it all through a microphone to the crowd above.

Her interview with Bella is one of the most erotic and inspiring I’ve ever listened to.

Marina, with unwavering candor, shared:

“You know good food and making love are really unbelievable settling, simple things in life. It’s so difficult, people don’t make love these days anymore.

To me sex is extremely important, always been.

And you know, when I mean my age and people talking about they stop having sex in their 50s already, I could not believe how much waste.

Because feeling orgasm is such an important moment.

You feel life, you feel connected to nature, with birds, with the rocks, with the trees. Just everything becomes luminous and beautiful. So with people discovering that more, there will be much less shit as it is now.”

Marina’s words are my own.

The feeling of aliveness that comes from giving yourself good sex—whether alone or partnered—and enjoying pleasure is a beautiful source of energy and longevity I wish more women would revel in.

Watch the interview on Youtube here.

In case you missed it:

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For those who celebrate, I wish you a lovely Thanksgiving!

Thank you for reading, and until next week.

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a sexologist, it’s that people don’t give themselves enough permission to revel in pleasure. That’s why I love gifting my loved ones a reminder to slow down and be present, especially during the holidays.

As you can imagine, this guide isn’t about the typical presents—it’s a curated celebration of intimacy, sensuality, and ritual.

Whether you’re treating yourself, a lover, or a friend, each pick elevates the everyday into something delightfully decadent.

Erotica: Literary Seduction for Every Imagination

Aurore Literary Erotica Annual Subscription ($69)

Your largest sexual organ is your brain, and Aurore is where I send it exploring.

Within its digital library are over 300 erotic stories—crafted for every fantasy, mood, or curiosity. Some are soft and intimate, others raw and boundary-expanding.

Gifting Aurore is a subtle way to invite someone to explore their desires in luxe privacy.

Perk: 10% off with code NATASSIA

Psychedelic Sex, Taschen ($111)

A vibrant coffee table book that captures the delirious fusion of the sexual revolution and psychedelic art between 1967–1972. It’s the epitome of California’s hippie culture—where free love, mind-bending visuals, and cheeky magazine spreads defined an era.

Perfect for anyone who adores retro flair and wants a splash of playful history in their living room.

Jonvelle: The 100 Best Photographs ($279)

This stunning volume of French photographer Jean-François Jonvelle is a visual love letter to women in all their grace, charm, and intimate allure. Each frame is infused with his belief that beauty flourishes where confidence and comfort meet. This is the book you open to celebrate the simple magic of feeling seen and desired.

Temperature Play: Massage Candles

Temperature play transforms touch into a full-body, sensual experience. The gentle warmth of melted massage oil not only relaxes muscles, but heightens sensitivity—inviting partners to be present, playful and connected.

There are two massage candles I love at different price points:

maude burn no. 0 ($32)

Unscented and formulated with skin-softening jojoba and soybean oils. Make sure to blow out the wick once the candle has melted, before massaging it onto the skin.

Perk: 15% off with code NATASSIA

Kiki de Montparnasse Massage Oil Candle Lavender No. 5 ($75)

A reminder of summer in Provence, this luxe candle is made with natural soybean and coconut oils.

Communication is Lubrication: Intimacy Cards

Wonderlust Mindful Intimacy Card Deck (20% off for $36)

Turn each other on, one prompt at a time. This card deck has two levels of 69 cards each that makes it fun and easy to spark new conversations and rediscover each other, no matter how long you’ve been together.

Pair them with a glass of wine and set aside an evening—wherever the questions lead, you’ll end up closer, more aware, and more adventurous.

“I got this card deck as an anniversary gift for my husband and I. We absolutely love it - great for foreplay ;)” — Maisey L.d.V.

Intimate Devices: For Every Kind of Pleasure

For those beginning to explore the world of pleasure—or who crave thoughtfully designed toys without the intimidation factor—maude offers entry-level favorites that blend simplicity, elegance, and delight.

These pieces are accessibly priced, modern, and made to invite curiosity in the most approachable way.

maude vibe ($52)

Understated, quiet, and artfully designed, the vibe offers three speeds for clitoral stimulation, but I find the gentlest setting is most effective.

Small enough for travel, bold enough to display—this is the perfect beginner’s piece or a classic for anyone who prefers simplicity with sophistication.

Perk: 15% off with code NATASSIA

maude dome ($35)

A multi-textured sleeve that’s all about control. Dome’s double-sided design features soft, stretchable silicone interiors with distinct ridged and beaded textures: one side for building, one for teasing.

Whether you’re flying solo or handing it off to a partner, dome lets you set the rhythm, the tightness, and the vibe, making every session completely personal.

Perk: 15% off with code NATASSIA

maude band ($52)

Uncomplicated pleasure, designed for two. The band is a soft, platinum-grade silicone vibrating ring that slides on with ease, offering steady, focused stimulation exactly where it’s needed most.

With its subtle look and foolproof fit, it’s one of the least intimidating ways to bring vibration into partnered play—a true invitation to shared sensation.

Perk: 15% off with code NATASSIA

LELO Sila Cruise ($149.50)

Unlike traditional vibrators, the Sila Cruise uses gentle sonic waves—no buzzing or vibration here—to coax pleasure through softness. Its sculptural silicone contours invite slow, sensual exploration, building sensation with patience rather than urgency.

As the waves intensify, the crescendo is unexpectedly powerful, making it a memorable favorite I’ve gifted time and again.

LELO Hugo 2 Remote ($160)

Designed for deep, hands-free prostate pleasure, HUGO 2 boasts dual motors, ergonomic contours, and a wireless remote that lets you control vibrations with the flick of a wrist.

Luxurious, powerful, and sculpted for all anatomies—it transforms solo or partnered play into a longer, stronger, and unforgettable experience.

LELO Soraya Wave ($196.37)

The world’s most luxurious rabbit, this bestseller combines ultra-powerful vibrations for clitoral stimulation with a flexible arm that massages your G-spot in a finger-like, wave motion.

Waterproof, sculptural, and designed for simultaneous pleasure, it offers double the sensation for truly unforgettable climaxes.

Boudoir Accessories: An Invitation to Play

For the connoisseur of sensuality, no brand captures elegance and erotic artistry like Kiki de Montparnasse. Their accessories don’t just complement intimate encounters—they transform them.

Each piece is meticulously crafted to invite curiosity, connection, and a heightened sense of pleasure.

Bondage Rope ($268)

Silky-soft, satisfyingly strong—an elegant invitation to surrender and explore.

Lace Veil ($198)

Sheer floral lace for moments of mystery, fantasy, and dramatic allure.

Man Ray Paddle ($178)

Iconic design meets playful power in this sculptural, statement paddle.

Handcuff Wristlets ($250)

Luxe restraints designed to captivate—equal parts seductive and sophisticated.

Vulvovaginal Care

For the past 3 years, I have been using these two Momotaro Apotheca products religiously. While they aren’t exactly sexy, vulvovaginal care is an integral part of intimacy.

No gift guide of mine would be complete without these:

Smooth & Restore Salve ($37)

This tiny jar is my healing talisman. I keep it in my purse and beside my bed for spontaneous moments of care. Post-sex? It’s my non-negotiable for UTI and yeast infection prevention, but I also dab it on burns, bug bites, and razor nicks.

It’s anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial, but most importantly, it’s gentle enough for every part of your body. Plus, a little bit goes incredibly far.

Perk: Get 25% off automatically at checkout

Nourishing Bath & Body Tonic Oil ($48)

I reach for this after every shower to massage on my vulva. It’s a blend of organic botanicals that moisturizes and soothes.

The oil instantly calms any dryness or irritation, leaving skin supple without any synthetic fragrance or residue. If you’re someone who values mindful, pH-balancing essentials, this is a game-changer.

Perk: Get 25% off automatically at checkout

Have questions about any of these picks, or want a personalized recommendation?

I love hearing from you—just hit reply and I’ll be happy to help you find what you’d like.

And if you found something intriguing—or know someone who’d enjoy this list as well—please forward this newsletter along.

Wishing you a very sensual holiday season!

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It was on a flight to Napa back in June when I first discovered ’s writing. I was immediately captivated by her vulnerability and bold, personal exploration.

Through a combination of psychedelic therapy, sexological bodywork, and other experiences she writes about, Juliette has undergone a profound sexual reawakening in midlife—one that’s ignited a new (and much richer) chapter in her 25+ year marriage.

We see so much of our own stories in others’ lives.

Naturally, I had to share hers with you.

But first—who is Juliette?

has spent her life redesigning what’s possible in learning environments—first in classrooms, then in startups, and now in the realm of midlife reinvention.

She’s a TED Senior Fellow, former Chief Learning Architect at Bionic, founder of the nonprofit Breaker, and spent 15 years with the New York City Department of Education.

Juliette has generously shared her journey in her substack , which I highly recommend binging.

Without further ado, our interview.

Natassia: You grew up in a very Catholic household. Reflecting on your teen and early adult years, what were the key messages that you received about sexuality?

Juliette: It was very much the traditional Catholic, “don’t give it away for free.” Sex was power. You guarded it both because you did not want to be violated–which was a real threat–and because you wanted to secure a desirable partner.

You had to project a certain image and being sexually liberal would put you at risk of violation and decrease your chances of securing a sanctioned relationship–which was the goal, because of course the goal was to get married and have children.

There was no other goal.

And nobody talked about pleasure in that equation at all. It had nothing to do with it.

In fact, there was a kind of unspoken assumption that the girls who might have enjoyed some aspect of sexual relations were…slutty.

Natassia: How did these messages shape your desires and your sense of self as you stepped into adulthood?

Juliette: I feel like I did all the right things: I played by the rules, both the explicit and implicit ones.

When I think back on it, I spent a lot of energy on that stuff. Imagine what I could have otherwise been spending that creative energy on?

But I guess in the end I was successful. I felt like I had a place in the social system. I had a boyfriend who was the quarterback of the football team.

Fast forward, I fell in love with my husband who to me was this incredible person–smart, creative and fulfilling to me sexually.

I bound myself to him in this long-term relationship that became very dysfunctional over time. So although I thought I had “won” the ultimate prize–the husband, the marriage, the children–it was slowly squeezing us.

At that time, unconscious behaviors were killing us and killing the relationship. And I think for many people, it does kill it. They break and either they do their work and recreate something different in a new relationship or they recreate it all over again, right?

That’s what so many people do when they split and divorce: they repeat the same patterns.

Eventually, we split. We separated after a real crisis in our relationship. Somehow, we were able to reinvent ourselves and rediscover the relationship.

Natassia: What made your marriage become dysfunctional?

Juliette: There was something very codependent about our relationship from the very beginning where I was overgiving, overproviding. Because to give is how I receive love and become worthy of it.

That formula was wonderful in the early days, because he loved to accept all the gifts from me. I was a bottomless well of “let me do, be and serve.” And he became reliant on it.

It felt wonderful for a good long time until it didn’t.

It was clear to me that it was gonna suck me dry, especially when the children were born. I had to draw that energy away from what I had been pouring into him, into the kids because that’s what you do when you’re a mother.

And he did not like that. He did not appreciate that shift in focus and attention.

Although he’s a wonderful father and he didn’t resent his own children, I think this happens for a lot of men. There’s just a tremendous shift in focus in the family dynamics.

I wouldn’t change that because I think that there is a period of time where a mother dedicates her life force to her children first. Just feeding them your milk, producing milk and nourishing your children is a massive tax on the body, but it is absolutely one of the most important gifts that you could give them.

After that period of intensive mothering, I felt the need to work again when they started preschool. I wanted to have something that was about me and my own identity.

I pressed forward with my career and my husband continued to feel abandoned.

Things disintegrated, until my husband–who had been sober for our entire marriage, including before I met him–relapsed.

Then he spent four years going in and out of rehab, trying to get himself back on his feet.

We were in the thick of it for quite some time with two teenage kids and it was a very challenging time.

Natassia: After you and your husband separated, you write about this beautiful moment when you had an energy orgasm in the sky, after you started psychedelic therapy. Can you share a little bit more about it?

Juliette: The first phase of my recovery was peeling back these layers of armor that I had built up over the years that preceded my husband for sure, and also included the years of being with him.

It was that shedding of the skin. Then on top of being up early for a flight and that rawness that you feel when you’re traveling someplace. I got up at 4:00 a.m. and for whatever reason, I just started to feel this swelling, this movement, this heat, and I was just overcome with a feeling of raw intensity, like there was something that was trying to come out from inside.

It was pleasurable but forceful, almost like it was trying to break me open. I call it an energy orgasm because of its intensity. You are moving, things are changing. Keep going.

It started to feel like a suspended reality and my body was changing then–not to dismiss the power of hormones shifting as well.

So it’s like I’ve got these surges of hormones happening. The world is in upheaval. I’ve started this psychedelic therapy. My whole marriage and home life is rearranging itself and there are all these open questions and it just feels equally scary and welcoming.

Natassia: And was this when you started to experience your sexual expansion?

Juliette: Sexual energy became synonymous with being alive, fully alive.

When you’ve spent so much time feeling numb or angry or resentful or kind of shut down, you just want to keep nourishing a whole part of your life when you start to feel it come back online.

So the hormonal therapy started to clear some space, then the psychedelic therapies started to drop the armor. Each of these layers opened me more to the sensation of my body. I had to understand and seek out more information, because clearly something was happening.

I was feeling myself in a very different way. I kept asking people and trying to talk about it without knowing what questions to even ask. There was a restlessness with it.

It was like this force that wanted to move through me and sex was a portal, you know?

It wasn’t like meditation or pilates class was going to make me feel more alive. No. It was clear to me that sexuality had something to do with this aliveness and I needed to chase after it.

I needed to understand it. I needed to find containers that would allow me to expand into it.

And I still feel that way today. I still like expanding into new containers so that I can keep feeling this force.

My writing is one channel for that sexual energy. It’s a way of expressing and letting it unfurl into the world, into other people’s minds. It’s just energy moving.

Natassia: You moved to California during COVID, after a year of separation from your husband, because you felt it was important to be together as a family with your children. You share that at that stage, you were just friends and co-parents. At what point did that change?

Juliette: I had no interest in having sex with him. I really couldn’t even imagine being attracted to him in that way. But again, all those things are moving in me and you’re looking around like, where do I go with this?

The answer to my question initially was to work with sexological body workers. That was one container in the early days that allowed me to express myself and play, discover, and develop a new language for touch. But ultimately as my practitioner, a woman, pointed out, it’s a one way touch.

There’s a whole world of experience that I was missing because I can’t touch her back and it’s not a shared experience, so my husband–because he really did want to reconcile–was offering himself as a willing partner in these exercises.

I was very reluctant and resistant for a long time, but then ultimately I did say, “Okay, let’s try this.”

It started very, very modestly. But I was absolutely astonished.

I think we both were astonished at how the energetic charge between us shifted as we began to experiment with some of these rather kind of formal touch exercises. Not at all the kind of pleasure that you would imagine.

Natassia: Which touch exercise was it?

Juliette: One of my sexological body workers recommended a book by Dr. Betty Martin called The Wheel of Consent.

The wheel of consent has two types of dynamics and four types of experiences: allow, take, serve and accept.

One dynamic is serve and accept. You can serve the gift of touch and in that case, if I’m serving, the other person is accepting. Then it switches: I accept when the other person is serving.

The other dynamic is allow and take. That’s when one person allows their partner to take the gift of touch.

They all feel quite different and it’s very hard to explain in words how different they are until you practice it.

For people in long-term relationships, you get so into your patterns and your kind of predictable routines with sex.

This is a wonderful way to change the scripts, because it’s turn-taking.

We started with a timer because it felt safer. His service to me was touching my feet for five minutes. So initially it was very, very tame.

Over time, you take greater and greater risks. Asking for what you want is hard for a lot of people to do. Not just to ask for what you want, but then to be seen and felt experiencing and accepting that gift of touch.

And then on the other side, to ask to take something from someone else for your pleasure and have them allow it and have them see you in your “taking” energy is a whole other experience that is quite unique.

So there’s a lot of room to play.

There’s a tremendous amount of imagination and there’s a relational dance that begins to shift when you take turns. So I think it’s great practice.

It has taught me so much. It’s allowed us to revive our sexuality and, quite frankly, it saved our marriage.

Natassia: That’s so beautiful. I love the wheel of consent. It can be very jarring in the beginning to think about what you want and ask for it. When did you start exploring sexual touch in the wheel of consent?

Juliette: It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was seeing him differently.

I want to preface this by saying that after that period of spiraling through relapses, my husband had to build himself up again and did so through the 12 steps, which are such a deep practice of humility and building of integrity.

As I was watching him do that for himself, with himself, separate from me, I could observe from a distance the way his core self was changing.

And then we started to relate to each other again physically. So these things were coming together in a symbiotic way. In other words, when I saw him in his “take” energy, it was a different perspective on him than I’d ever seen.

It wouldn’t have been possible without the foundational piece of the 12 steps that he was standing on, which I had honestly never seen in all of the years of us being together.

Natassia: That makes sense.

Juliette: He was just in a totally different place in his life, as was I. So, we’d gone off and done these separate journeys of development, and we were finding a way to relate to each other again.

I have this particular memory playing the wheel of consent: it was his turn to take, and he had this stance. It was literally just in his posture. The way he stood in space and didn’t need to perform, didn’t need to grasp. It was just the power of his energy in that stance.

I also have a memory of him using his power in a sexual dynamic. He just said, “Wait.”

That one command is incredibly charged.

It’s indicative of both where he had come from in his journey, and also the strength of these exercises to change the dance steps that we’ve been trapped in for decades.

Natassia: Oh, that’s so hot. It’s the building of anticipation, the slowing down. And that is what I feel like so many couples are missing in their process of relating to each other sexually.

Juliette: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be toys and scenes and some kind of high drama. It can be as simple as “wait.”

Natassia: In this “new” marriage, have you then maintained a level of individuality that has allowed you to coexist better?

Juliette: Yes, that’s the amazing thing. You can recover from codependency. In fact, we are better differentiated and feel more foundationally sound than we ever have been.

We talk about it all the time, like how the hell did we make it through? Thank God we did, because we are truly best friends.

We have such a lovely family and feel so nourished by the friendship and the foundation that underlines us, as well as being able to have this sexual relationship that we never had when we were younger. Even though it was, you know, the height of passion and romance and all that, it’s like, no, it’s actually better now.

Natassia: How else do you stay erotically connected in your daily life?

Juliette: It’s all energy. Sex is energy. Art, culture, relationships, politics, it’s all energy. So it’s about what energy I am paying attention to that is going to expand me.

Part of cultivating my sexual energy is attuning myself to nature, to fine art, to music, all the cliches, all the things that people have been saying forever, I feel the truth of.

And I think that’s part of the gift of midlife: all the things that are patently obvious and truisms that have existed since the beginning of time, you actually understand.

You’re like, “Oh, this is what they mean.” So I have deepened my pleasure practice by attuning to music in a way where I just let it move through me almost like an orgasm.

Certain music will just captivate me and turn me on in every part of my body.

Natassia: I love that. I too practice that almost daily.

Juliette: Yeah, I can tell.

Natassia: Thank you so much, Juliette. You are radiant.

Juliette: My pleasure.

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