THE PLEASURE GAP

How doctors and scientists are cracking the code of women's desire

- Sarah Barmak

FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, Diana Firican, a 35-year-old Vancouver life coach, never heard the other women in her family mention enjoying sex or feeling desire. She accepted this as normal: in her religiously conservative family, they frowned upon most pleasures. But as she approached her 30s, Firican realized she was missing something. She wasn't having the same sexual experiences as her friends. The more she listened and read, the more she saw she had left her sexual self unexplored. She wanted to experience and enjoy her body to the fullest, so she began to look for ways to develop that neglected side of herself and bring it, as she says, "to light."

Firican is one of many North American Generation X members and older millennials who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time of ecstasy, Lil' Kim, Sex and the City and the rise of sex-positive feminism. There was a sense that sex was something women enjoyed, not simply endured or navigated. Now those same women are in or approaching menopause, which, for many, includes the loss of the sexual desire and arousal they have always taken for granted.

Diminishing sexual desire (an interest in sex) and arousal (the physical changes that happen when we are turned on) are difficult to understand and diagnose, since there is no single cause and sexuality is connected to so many other parts of our lives. Diminished desire and arousal can be attributed to the physiological changes of menopause, to stress, to a lack of sleep, to the side effects of prescription drugs, and to many other factors.