Some things become so obvious, that after you have seen them you are unable to unsee them anymore. One of these things is how much of what we believe about our own sexuality was handed to us by someone else. A cultural script. A hormonal narrative. A story about what men want, what women feel, what desire looks like at 40, at 60, at 70. And somewhere inside all of that “inherited” knowledge, authenticity and our uniqueness gets a little lost.
That's why I find sex research intriguing. A note before we dive in: most of the studies I'm referencing here still work within a largely binary framework of men and women. That's a real limitation of the research. Human sexuality is far more expansive than most academic studies reflect. Let’s start with one that cracks this open.
When you change the script, the numbers change
Most of us have heard about the orgasm gap: the difference in how often men and women climax during partnered sex. What gets talked about less is what happens when you look beyond heterosexuality.
Research from Queen's University found that women who have sex with women report orgasm rates of around 75%, compared to roughly 62% for women who have sex with men. Being partnered with a woman appears to come with what researchers called an orgasm advantage.
The anatomy didn't change. The script did. And that tells us something about how much of what we assume is biological is actually cultural. When sex isn't organised around penetration, when pleasure isn't centred on one person's experience over another's, the gap narrows.
A 2022 Canadian study put language to this, describing how both men and women participate in what researchers call gender labour, which is actively maintaining a shared cultural narrative that frames women's orgasms as something requiring effort and men's as simply natural. It's not just happening in the bedroom. It's happening in the stories we tell ourselves about how sex is supposed to work. This is why I don’t like talking about sexuality as female and male sexuality, because it is rooted in this cultural conception rather than their true sexuality.
Our desire doesn’t need to match, and this isn’t necessarily a problem
One of the most common things couples bring to coaching is mismatched desire. One partner wants more, one wants less, and both feel guilty or frustrated or quietly withdrawn. What research is now showing us is that this experience is close to universal, and that the solution isn't what most of us assume.
A 2021 study of 366 couples found that partners who matched in sexual desire were not more satisfied than those who didn't. Higher overall desire, rather than matching in desire, was what predicted both relationship and sexual satisfaction. The goal isn't to find someone identically wired to you, but it's to cultivate and protect desire within yourself and the relationship.
This resonates deeply with what I see in my work as an Erotic Blueprint Coach. We tend to be drawn to partners who are complementary rather than identical in how they experience pleasure and arousal. That difference can be a genuine source of richness, if there's enough curiosity and communication around it.
And a 2023 study confirmed exactly that: better quality of sexual communication within couples was directly linked to lower perceived desire discrepancy, working through increased sexual satisfaction. The conversation itself changes the experience.
Desire is more fluid and contextual than we think
We tend to talk about desire as something fixed. You either have it or you don't. But research paints a more nuanced picture. A study tracking couples daily found that on days when women and gender-diverse individuals reported higher attraction to their partner, both they and their partners reported higher sexual satisfaction and desire. Desire responds to context, to connection, to the quality of attention between two people. It fluctuates. It can be cultivated, and it is not something that necessarily can be switched on on command.
This matters because so many people (particularly women) have been told that low desire is simply who they are. A fact about their hormones. A chapter that's closing. The research suggests otherwise.
Let's set the record straight about mature women
I want to end on something I feel strongly about, because I hear the opposite narrative so often it's become almost invisible. Older women are frequently spoken about as though desire and satisfaction naturally fade, as though menopause draws a gentle curtain over that part of life. I know women who became multiorgasmic at 65. I know women in their seventies who describe their sex lives as the best they've ever had.
The research backs this up. Studies have found that older women often experience more sexual satisfaction as they age, regardless of whether they are sexually active. Many postmenopausal women report frequent arousal and orgasms even with low sexual desire. Women over 80 were among the most sexually satisfied in some studies (often without intercourse) suggesting that closeness, emotional intimacy, and knowing what you actually want play a far bigger role in fulfilment than we give them credit for.
The story that women's sexuality quietly diminishes isn't just inaccurate. It's one of the more damaging scripts we carry, because it shapes expectation, and expectation shapes experience.
Sexuality doesn't age out. It doesn't settle into a fixed shape at some point and stay there forever. It responds to curiosity, to safety, to the quality of the conversations we're willing to have with partners, and with ourselves. The research keeps confirming what many of us sense but rarely say out loud: that so much of what limits us isn't biology. It's the story we've been told about who we are, and what's possible. And stories, unlike hormones, can always be rewritten.
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