We grow up watching desire arrive like weather. A look across a room, a hand on a lower back, and suddenly everyone is undressing in a hallway. No conversation. No warm-up. No “give me a second, I need to get out of my head first.” Just instant, cinematic wanting.
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.
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