Irene Fehr, MA, CPCC

To understand women's sexuality and sexual health, you have to understand the role of pleasure in women's lives. Pleasure is an essential nutrient for women: it relaxes the nervous system, balances hormones, creates arousal, and connect the woman to her body and sexuality. Pleasure is the antidote to low libido in women.

Women's sexual desire is responsive to pleasure, which means that pleasure has to precede arousal, which precedes desire. Understanding this pleasure-desire cycle allows couples to find what works to create a sustainable — and hot — sexual connection.

As women, we are constantly bombarded with expectations and standards on our beauty, our body and its aging, and sex appeal—and we judge ourselves and our sexiness based on them. There is another way! When you know how to feel sexy and turned on from the inside—when you tap into what your body desires and what feels good to you—your sexuality becomes a source of sustainable confidence, power and radiance (not to mention a passionate, fulfilling and nourishing sex life).