The short answer
You increase a woman’s sexual desire by changing the conditions it grows in, never by forcing it. For many women, desire is responsive: it turns up after pleasure has begun, not before. So: take your foot off the brakes (stress, distraction, feeling unsafe) and press the accelerators: anticipation, novelty, feeling truly desired, fantasy, and slow, sensory pleasure. Savour sex the way you’d savour a long lunch, and in time you’ll find yourself craving it.
You know exactly how a Sancerre should taste in late afternoon light. You can tell a good oyster from a great one by the brine on your lip. You’ll book a table three months out, fly to Hobart for one tasting menu, and keep a hotel’s bath oil because it smelled like a fig tree in July.
You have trained every one of your senses to notice pleasure, to wait for it and to want more of it.
Then comes the question that brings a lot of women to us. Why does sex no longer taste like anything?
If you savour everything else, you deserve to savour this too. This guide is for the epicurean woman: the sensualist, the woman who travels for food and buys beautiful linen. It sets out what the research actually says about how female desire works, and how a woman with your appetite for life can bring that appetite back into bed. No pills, no gimmicks. Just science, the senses, and a little naughtiness. Never vulgar.
In this guide
Definition
An epicurean woman is a sensualist who treats pleasure as a discipline: she notices it, waits for it, and refuses to settle for the ordinary. In intimacy, that means she wants sex that is savoured, not rushed.
The word comes from Epicurus, the Greek philosopher wrongly remembered as a glutton. He actually argued for pleasure that is chosen well, writing in his Letter to Menoeceus that “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life”. Two thousand years later, the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin wrote in The Physiology of Taste that “the discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star”.
Both men were really talking about attention: the art of staying present for pleasure.
Here is what that means for your love life. Your brain doesn’t keep separate cellars for different delights. Neuroscientists Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach, reviewing decades of research, describe shared pleasure systems in the brain. Food, sex and other rewards all run through a common reward network, with small hedonic hotspots that amplify how much we like something and a broader system that drives how much we want it.
In other words, the palate you’ve built for wine is wired into the same machinery as your appetite for touch. Your sensuality is all still there. It has just been dining somewhere else.
Most of us were taught one version of desire, the movie version. Desire arrives first, out of nowhere, then arousal, then sex. It’s a lightning bolt in a lift.
That pattern is real, but it’s only one pattern.
Definition
Responsive desire is sexual desire that appears in response to pleasure, closeness or erotic context, rather than before it. Spontaneous desire arrives on its own, seemingly out of nowhere.
In 2000, physician Rosemary Basson proposed a new model of women’s sexual response. Particularly in long-term relationships, she observed, many women begin from sexual neutrality. They are open to intimacy, curious and willing, but not yet hungry. Desire then builds once arousal begins, and the satisfaction that follows makes women want to return. She noted that many sexually satisfied women simply don’t have frequent spontaneous sexual thoughts.
Think of it like an aperitif. You rarely sit down starving. The first sip and the first bite open the appetite.
That reframe matters enormously in Australia. In the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships, a nationally representative survey, 52% of women who’d had a partner in the past year reported a lack of interest in sex lasting at least a month, and many of them didn’t see it as a problem. Many of those women may not have had a desire problem at all, just a desire that was waiting to be invited.
Definition
The dual control model says arousal depends on two systems: an accelerator that responds to everything sexually exciting, and a brake that responds to every reason not to be aroused right now.
Developed at the Kinsey Institute by John Bancroft and Erick Janssen, and tested in women by Cynthia Graham and colleagues with a 655-woman sample, this model was made famous by Emily Nagoski in Come As You Are. She sums up arousal as “turning on the ons and turning off the offs”.
For many accomplished women, the accelerator works perfectly well. The trouble is a brake held down so hard it’s practically welded to the floor: the board meeting, the teenager, the ageing parent, the inbox, the body you’ve been told to fix, the partner who has become, in a phrase one sexologist used on our own blog, someone you look at “as your third child”.
You can’t savour a degustation while answering emails. The same goes for pleasure.
| Accelerators: turn on the ons | Brakes: turn off the offs |
| Something to look forward to | The inbox and the to-do list |
| Feeling wanted and noticed | Feeling rushed or watched |
| A new room, a new city | The same room, the same routine |
| Slow, unhurried touch | Hurried, goal-focused touch |
| Fantasy and erotic reading | Worrying about your body |
| Feeling safe and in control | Not feeling safe |
This is the secret the romance novel has always known.
Psychologist Marta Meana, reviewing the research on women’s desire, raised a provocative question: what if, for many women, being desired is itself one of the most potent turn-ons? Women report that being desired is arousing, and sex and orgasm aren’t always the point.
Later research put numbers to it. In a 2019 study of 662 women, researchers measured intimacy, celebrated otherness (seeing your partner as distinct and intriguing) and object-of-desire affirmation (feeling wanted). All three were related. But when they were analysed together, feeling desired was the only positive predictor of women’s sexual desire.
For many women, desire is less about wanting someone and more about being wanted, exquisitely.
Anna Grosman, Founder
Psychotherapist Esther Perel explains why that feeling fades at home. “Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery,” she writes in Mating in Captivity. And elsewhere: “Fire needs air.”
So remember the last time someone looked at you across a candlelit table as if the rest of the restaurant had gone dark. What you felt was an accelerator, pressed all the way down.
Every epicurean knows that the reservation is half the pleasure.
In a classic 1987 study, economist George Loewenstein asked people how much they would pay for a kiss from the film star of their choice. They valued it most when it would happen three days from now, more than if it happened immediately. Waiting let them savour the kiss before it happened.
Consumer researchers later found that savouring an upcoming experience increases enjoyment both during the experience and in memory afterwards. In Berridge and Kringelbach’s terms, anticipation feeds wanting, the brain’s craving system, which sets the table for liking.
Definition
Erotic anticipation is the deliberate lengthening of the time between knowing pleasure is coming and receiving it. It is foreplay that begins days, not minutes, before.
This is why spontaneous sex so often disappoints busy women, and why scheduled sex is far sexier than its reputation. A booked evening is a reservation at the best table in town, with three days to imagine the menu.
If desire is an appetite, the senses are the courses. Here’s what the research says, sense by sense.
A little, maybe, and mostly as ritual. In a study of 798 women in Tuscany’s Chianti region, those who drank one to two glasses of red wine a day scored higher on sexual desire and lubrication than non-drinkers. But the study was observational, so it can’t prove that wine caused the difference.
The caveat matters. In laboratory research, higher doses of alcohol reduced women’s physical arousal. The rule is the same one you already follow with Grand Cru: one beautiful glass, sipped slowly. The pour is part of the ceremony. The second bottle is where the evening ends.
As for oysters, chocolate and figs, there’s little evidence that any food chemically causes desire. What they do is slow you down, wake up your mouth and make you pay attention, and attention is the real aphrodisiac.
In a well-known study of mate preferences, women rated how a man smells as more important than how he looks. A 2018 study found that people with a keener sense of smell found sex more pleasant, and women with sharper olfaction reported more frequent orgasms during sex.
So the warm skin at the hollow of a neck, the cedar of a good cologne and clean linen all matter. They are information your body is reading.
Your skin has specialised nerve fibres, called C-tactile afferents, that respond most to slow, gentle stroking, at roughly 1 to 10 centimetres per second. In research, that’s also the speed people rate as most pleasant.
The most pleasurable touch moves at the speed of a slow caress: about the pace of a fingertip tracing the stem of a wine glass.
Anna
Hurried hands literally miss the receptors built for pleasure. Unhurried ones find them.
Yes. In a study of more than 52,000 adults, women who orgasmed more often were more likely to ask for what they wanted, to tease with a message during the day, to use sexy talk, and to express love during sex. A voice lowered to just above a whisper, a word chosen with care: these are the spice in the dish.
The senses at a glance
| Sense | What the research found | Try this |
| Taste | One glass may lift the mood; more dulls arousal | One beautiful glass, sipped slowly |
| Scent | Women rate how a man smells above how he looks | Choose a scent for your skin and your sheets |
| Touch | Skin is wired for a slow caress, 1 to 10 cm a second | Ask for touch at half the speed |
| Sound | Women who ask for what they want have more orgasms | Say one wish out loud, like slower |
It’s very normal. Fantasy is the private dining room of the mind.
When Nancy Friday published My Secret Garden in 1973, a collection of women’s sexual fantasies gathered through letters and interviews, it was shocking simply because it said what nobody else would: women have rich, vivid erotic imaginations.
Half a century later, Kinsey Institute research fellow Justin Lehmiller surveyed 4,175 Americans for Tell Me What You Want. He found seven recurring themes, including novelty and adventure, passion and romance, and power play. Women were more likely than men to fantasise about passion and romance, and about consensual power exchange, often in the form of being found so irresistible that a partner is swept away.
Notice the thread running through it all: being desired, again. If you are curious about a particular one, our guide to the types of kinks walks through each, and the desire beneath it.
Research suggests it can. In one study, reading an erotic story, or simply fantasising, raised women’s arousal and desire in the moment. In a six-week trial with married women who described low desire, reading a collection of erotic fiction improved desire, arousal, satisfaction and overall sexual function about as much as a self-help book did. Like a good novel, it gives the mind somewhere to wander.
Definition
A sexual fantasy is a private, imagined erotic scene. It is a source of arousal, not a plan or a promise. You can savour it without ever ordering it.
Because the brain notices what is new. In a series of experiments, couples who shared novel and mildly thrilling activities reported higher relationship quality than couples who did something pleasant but routine.
You already know this from your own life. You’re a different woman in a different city. On the terrace in Positano or the laneway in Melbourne, in a hotel with heavy curtains and nowhere to be, you have no dishwasher to stack and no one to manage. That gap is the air Perel talks about. Novelty puts a little distance between you and the version of yourself who runs everything, and desire rushes in to fill it.
The evidence here is unusually strong. Psychologist Lori Brotto’s team ran a randomised trial with 148 women with low desire and arousal, comparing an eight-week mindfulness program with supportive sex education. Desire and arousal improved substantially in both groups. Mindfulness did more to reduce sexual distress and rumination, and the gains held at 12 months. A follow-up found that lower stress after mindfulness predicted higher desire.
This connects to a curious finding. On average, a woman’s body and her mind often disagree about arousal: what her body registers and what she reports feeling are only loosely linked. Mindfulness, it seems, helps her hear her body.
Mindful sex is simply tasting instead of swallowing.
Anna
Desire after 40 is different for every woman. Some feel it fade, some feel it sharpen, and many find it simply arrives differently. What often changes through perimenopause and menopause is that desire becomes more responsive: it turns up once pleasure has begun, rather than out of nowhere. That makes the conditions matter more than ever: time, attention, ease in your body and feeling wanted.
The research backs this up. In a study of women aged 28 to 84, sexual satisfaction was linked to relationship satisfaction and communication, not to age or menopausal status. The Australasian Menopause Society notes that dryness and discomfort are common and very treatable, so speak with your GP or menopause specialist about lubricants, moisturisers and hormonal options.
Midlife can also bring a delicious freedom. As sexologist Laura Lee put it on our blog, “You don’t have a desire problem. Your body is responding to the context of your life in a totally normal, reasonable, human way.” Change the context and the appetite often follows. We’ve also written about menopause and a sexless marriage and what a lack of intimacy does to a woman.
In that same study of 52,588 adults, 95% of heterosexual men said they usually or always orgasm when sexually intimate, compared with 65% of heterosexual women. The gap had less to do with women’s bodies than with what happened. Women were more likely to orgasm when their encounters included deep kissing, touch and oral pleasure, and when sex lasted longer.
The orgasm gap is a hospitality problem.
Anna
We’ve written more about this in how one TV series closed the orgasm gap.
Think of this as a tasting menu. Try one course this week.
Definition
Sexual self-care is the intentional practice of giving your own pleasure time, attention and safety, rather than leaving it to chance or to someone else’s schedule.
Some women read all of this and feel a bright, specific ache. What they want is an experience: an evening built entirely around them, with someone attentive, unhurried and genuinely curious about what they like.
That is the reason Her Confidant exists. We are Australia’s female-led companionship agency, and our approach is simple: safety before desire. Every experience begins with a confidential welcome call with our founder, Anna. Companions, our male escorts for women, are carefully vetted. And nothing is booked until you’re ready.
From Anna: When an epicurean woman calls me, she usually knows exactly what she wants. A man who can hold a conversation and hold her attention. An evening with no clock on the wall. Someone who notices the small things and has the good sense to linger there. My job is to listen closely, match her with the right Companion, and then get out of the way.
“The passion he aroused in me was next level. Six deep, guttural org#sms, in ways I didn’t know my body could respond.”
One of you, after an experience with Her Confidant
For the epicurean woman, a few experiences tend to call loudest:
We look after women across Australia. Meet our male escorts for women in Sydney and male escorts for women in Melbourne, or ask Anna about your city. What a booking can include depends on your state, and Anna confirms what is possible where you are.
If you’re curious, start with how booking works or how we keep you safe, and when you’re ready, say hello. Anna reads every message herself.
So here’s your invitation.
Tonight, pour one glass of something you love. Hold it a moment longer than usual before you drink. Notice the weight of it, the cold, the first bloom on your tongue. Notice that your body knows exactly how to want things. It always has.
Then let your mind drift to a door closing softly behind you, someone who’s been waiting to look at you like that, and a night with nowhere else to be. A mouth at your shoulder, unhurried. The low laugh that comes just before a kiss.
Desire was there all along, waiting for you to stop rushing the meal.
Savour it.
Lower the brakes and raise the accelerators. Reduce stress and distraction, and create anticipation by planning intimate time ahead. Prioritise slow, sensory pleasure, feeling desired, novelty and fantasy. For many women, desire is responsive, so it often appears after pleasure begins rather than before.
Spontaneous desire seems to arrive out of nowhere, before any touch. Responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure, closeness or erotic context. Rosemary Basson’s research showed responsive desire is common and normal, especially for women in long-term relationships.
Research consistently points to feeling desired. In a 2019 study of 662 women, object-of-desire affirmation (feeling wanted) was the only factor that positively predicted sexual desire once intimacy and other factors were accounted for. Novelty, anticipation and emotional safety also matter. It is a big part of why women love a boyfriend experience: an evening built around being wanted.
Only modestly, if at all. One observational Italian study linked one to two glasses of red wine a day with higher desire scores, but it couldn’t show cause and effect, and higher alcohol doses reduce physical arousal. Treat wine as ritual, not medicine.
There’s little evidence that oysters, chocolate or other foods chemically trigger desire. Sensual eating can still help, because it slows you down and focuses your attention on pleasure, which supports arousal.
In Justin Lehmiller’s survey of 4,175 Americans, common themes included novelty and adventure, passion and romance, and consensual power play. Women were more likely than men to fantasise about passion and romance. Fantasies are normal and don’t need to be acted on. If you would like to explore one, Anna can talk it through with you, whether that is a threesome with two Companions or something you have never said out loud.
It can. In a six-week study of married women with low desire, reading erotic fiction improved desire, arousal and satisfaction about as much as a self-help book did. Other research shows erotic stories and fantasy raise arousal in the moment.
It varies from woman to woman. What often changes after 40 and through menopause is how desire arrives: it becomes more responsive, turning up once pleasure has begun rather than out of nowhere. That makes the conditions matter more than they used to. Time, attention, feeling wanted and feeling at ease in your body do more for desire now than they ever did. Our sexologist interview on perimenopause and sex drive goes deeper.
For some women, yes. Her Confidant frames intentional intimacy as self-care: a safe, discreet, female-led experience built around your pleasure and pace, beginning with a confidential call with our founder and booked only when you’re ready. Many women begin with The Indulgence or The Sleepover, and our booking guide explains each step.
This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice. If changes in desire are causing you distress, or sex is painful, please speak with your GP, a menopause specialist or a qualified sex therapist.
