This is the goodreads summary: "Sexual Intimacy for Women helps female couples examine the emotional, physical, and psychological aspects of their relationships, with the goal of creating more intimacy. Exercises and client-based anecdotes from Dr. Corwin’s years of experience with same-sex couples help women overcome common issues around orgasm, body image, identity, aging, and parenthood. Dr. Corwin dispels myths, examines the intricacies of female desire, and gives advice to help couples achieve long-lasting, healthy, and fulfilling relationships."

This book deals specifically with same-sex couples and is written by a lesbian sex therapist, and I’d say it sits somewhere on the boundary of relationship manual and sex manual. My girlfriend and I finished reading this book together a while ago, and I wanted to share in case it would be useful for any of you gynes. We read it primarily because our sex life kept bringing up a lot of emotions, related to libido disparity and trauma on both sides.

After the introduction, the book is divided into three sections. ‘Just the facts: Women, sex, and desire’ covers common myths about female sexuality and proposes that most female desire is responsive rather than wholly spontaneous. 'Common stumbling blocks to intimacy’ covers specific problems within a relationship that might be impacting one’s sex life, for example desire discrepancy, poor body image, infidelity, trauma, aging, and parenthood. Finally, ’Secrets to long-lasting intimacy’ covers keys to quality communication, 24-hour foreplay, and taking your time with orgasm.

SIFW is not a perfect book by any means, but it’s the best we were able to find. Overall, it was detailed, varied, and had a lot of empathy for both women in a relationship, even when speaking of contentious matters like infidelity. I think the author does a really good job switching from the perspective of one partner to the perspective of the other - sometimes I would feel a bit wounded or judged in one paragraph, and then feel seen in the very next one - only to find out that my girlfriend had felt seen in the first paragraph and judged in the second one!

Has it helped us in our relationship? Yes, I definitely think so. It validated each of our feelings while also giving new insights into the feelings of the others. It made us feel more hopeful and optimistic - after reading some of the more unfortunate anecdotes we were able to look at each other and laugh and say at least things between us aren’t that bad! We made many highlights and notes that we’ve already revisited at times. The most startling takeaway for me may have been the conceptualizing of sexuality as a muscle rather than a battery - something which has already turned out to be true, though unexpected. If nothing else, it has certainly given us a lot of guided practice talking about sex and other difficult topics.

Has anyone else read Sexual Intimacy For Women? Or a similar book? Was it useful? What did you learn?