Stress and Sex

Providing scientifically-accurate and sex-positive information to enhance sexual pleasure.

Laurie Mintz Ph.D.

Masturbation 102: How Women Pleasure Themselves

While no two women have identical self-pleasure methods, there are commonalities across women. One is that it is rare for women to pleasure themselves with penetration alone.

Masturbation 101: Letting Go of Guilt

Many women feel guilty about masturbating. Let's debunk the guilt with accurate information on the sexual, physical, and mental health benefits.

Orgasm Gap: Picking Up Where the Sex Revolution Left Off

Even after the sexual revolution, an orgasm gap remains. Addressing the cultural forces driving this gap has implications beyond pleasure.

Closing the Orgasm Gap: Tips for Personal and Culture Change

It's International Women's Day, a day to push for gender parity. If you're a woman who has sex with men, here are a five tips to help you get gender parity in sexual pleasure.

Dear Young Adult Women: What You Can Learn from Grace & Aziz

Here's some advice to help empower you sexually in what the commonality of the Grace & Aziz Ansari scenario tells us is an often confusing and toxic sexual environment.

A Letter to Young Adult Men: What You Can Learn from Ansari

Young Men: Here are seven tips to follow so that no “Grace” ever describes her evening with you as “the worst in her life."

Sexual Communication: The Bedrock to Make Your Bed Rock

The vast majority of women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm, yet feel awkward telling partners this. Here you'll find a science-based pep-talk and tips for sexual communication.

Mindful Sex Is Mind Blowing Sex

Have you ever had your mind wander during sex? Most people have! Here's how to use mindfulness to bring yourself back to the moment and focus on sensations.

Close The Disconnect Between Women’s Self & Partner Pleasure

To close the gendered orgasm gap in partnered sex we need to close another disconnect: the way women pleasure themselves alone and the way the receive pleasure with a partner.

Doing Sex Differently

Academics discuss a “standard cultural script” where male orgasm is the climax of the show. Let's replace this with four new plays that make orgasms an equal opportunity event.

Abstinence-Only Sex Ed: Harmful? Unethical?

A major professional society calls abstinence-only sex ed harmful and unethical. The UN backs comprehensive sex ed, and the WHO defines sexual health as including pleasure.

Achieving Equality in the Boardroom and the Bedroom

Today is National Women's Equality Day. To commemorate it, let's continue the cultural and individual process of closing the orgasm gap.

How Nameless Invisibility Harms

The totalitarian regime that captured the handmaids relegated them to "Of Men." Let's not do the same thing with our genital anatomy.

Five Tips To Help Women Celebrate National Orgasm Day

July 31 is National Orgasm Day. Here are five tips on female orgasm to help you celebrate, on this holiday and all year long.

A Call for Orgasm Equality

The most crucial action needed to orgasm with a partner.

A Letter to Sexually Active Young Women

Men have more orgasms than women. Lesbians have more than het women. Let's look at the reasons and what we need to do to close these orgasm gaps. Let's get "cliterate!"

Implementing Amy Schumer’s Orgasm Advice

Amy Shumer is using comedy to be an orgasm advocate. Now it’s up to you to take her advice and advocate for your own orgasm. Your clitoris and your communication are the key.

Healing Body-Shame & Trauma: Sharing My Story To Heal Yours

As a psychologist, I’ve known for a long time that letting go of shame and pain requires speaking the unspeakable. Now I know that sometimes speaking is not enough. Sometimes we have to move, to breathe, and to deeply focus without thinking or talking at all.

The Orgasm Gap: Simple Truth & Sexual Solutions

To close the gendered orgasm gap, we have to hold clitoral stimulation and penetration as equal. It’s time for Orgasm Justice for All! .

A Letter to Young Sexually Active Heterosexual Men

Young heterosexual men are under a lot of false pressure due to porn images. Let's clear up some of these distortions so young men can have a more fulfilling sex life.

A Letter to Young Sexually Active Heterosexual Women

This generation seems more misinformed than any other, because they get information from pornography. The most distorted information is about women’s pleasure. Let's clear this up.

The Privilege of Sexual Freedom

This Fourth of July, as you watch the fireworks and celebrate our country’s freedom, please remember that sexual freedom is a human right that not everyone has. Please appreciate your freedom and at the same time, consider helping those who don’t have this freedom.

The Joy of Mindful, Asynchronous Sex

During asynchronous sex, the receiver can connect her body and mind in space and time—or in other words, she can cultivate the mindful focus that has been shown to increase orgasmic capacity

A Linguistic Sexual Revolution: Naming the Clitoris

Let’s use language to shape our values around women’s orgasmic response. Let’s start naming the clitoris openly and proudly. Let’s use a nickname so frequently that it makes its way into online dictionaries. After all, calling the clitoris Tori, Doris, or Pepita is no stranger than calling the penis Tom, Dick, or Peter.

Seventy Percent: A Statistic to Enhance Your Sex Life

If more women and men knew this statistic, less women would be faking orgasm.

Using the Placebo Effect to Enhance Sexual Desire

Why take a drug, replete with side effects, when a placebo works as well? Instead, ask your doctor for an inert pill and believe it will increase your desire—because the research shows it will.

Hooking Up: Complexities and Double Standards

College students are hooking-up. Still, just what they are doing, and how they are reacting emotionally and sexually, is far from straightforward. What is clear, however, is that missing from the discourse is research on same-sex hookups and that in heterosexual hookups, the sexual double standards is alive and well.

A Touchy Subject: The Health Benefits of Masturbation

Masturbation is free and has more clear-cut health benefits than a multivitamin.

A Drug for Desire

This week, The New York Times Magazine ran an article about the testing of a drug to increase female sexual desire....I just wish the author had mentioned a simpler strategy or two. I wish he had mentioned methods that don’t alter brain chemicals.

Don’t Wait for Desire: Reverse the Equation

There is one piece of advice, steeped in scientific evidence, which has the potential to improve countless sex lives. This advice is most relevant for women in long-term committed relationships. That advice is....

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