Beyond "Low Desire": What Women Really Need
Plus, 4 things I’ve been loving this week.
Welcome to Lust in Translation, a newsletter exploring what ignites your pleasure, confidence, and desire—by yours truly, sexologist Natassia Miller. If you’re new here, now’s a great time to subscribe.
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 Juliette LaMontagne 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.
5. At the intersection of eroticism, art and fashion
Bella Freud—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:
If you enjoyed this, the best compliment would be to share with others.
For those who celebrate, I wish you a lovely Thanksgiving!
Thank you for reading, and until next week.
Dear Natassia,
Reading your newsletter, I felt the pulse of what Marina Abramović named so clearly: orgasm as a moment of aliveness, a connection to nature, to luminous beauty. To those of us who live with the erotic as an aesthetic, it is not a side note—it is the vital current of our lives.
The erotic is not performance, nor accessory. It is the architecture of staying alive. It is how we breathe into our bodies, how we claim confidence, how we meet our communities with passion. For those who appreciate its aesthetic, pleasure is not indulgence—it is sustenance.
Your words remind me that reclaiming sexuality is not only about desire, but about survival, about vitality. We live to stay alive, and the erotic is the art that keeps us here. xo
This feels like an argument for pleasure as infrastructure, not indulgence. What threads through each section is the insistence that desire is information: about health, agency, communication, and aliveness. Reframing “low desire” away from deficit and toward context, permission, and embodiment quietly dismantles a lot of bad science and worse cultural messaging. I especially appreciate how pleasure is positioned as something that radiates outward—into confidence, clarity, and connection—rather than something contained to the bedroom. It reads as an invitation to take women’s erotic lives seriously, without apology.