A note before we start. This is a piece about sex, written for Christians who believe God made it. The teaching in it comes from Dr. Glenn Hill, a clinical sexologist, which is why the anatomy is named accurately. None of it is written to titillate anybody.

"I think I'm just not a sexual person."

We have heard women say this about themselves, usually flatly, the way you'd say you're not a morning person. As though it were a settled fact about their wiring that everybody agreed on years ago and nobody needs to revisit.

In our experience it is almost never true. What is usually true is that she was handed an inaccurate map when she was young, her husband was handed a different and equally inaccurate one, and the two of them have been navigating with those ever since without once comparing them out loud.

According to Glenn

"Sex is designed as a party for the female, and the male is invited. Now, guys, don't worry — it's buy one, get one free. You get a free ticket. But it's actually set up to be her party."

If you grew up in church, that is the reverse of what most of us absorbed. Phyllis: "We definitely never heard the message: sex is a party for the wife and the husband's invited. That alone is pretty mind blowing."

What we heard instead was that sex is about the man, and a wife's job is to be available. According to Glenn, describing that teaching rather than endorsing it, she ends up not really being there. She's there geographically, but she's not there relationally.

A survey of 52,588 people

In 2018, researchers asked a US national sample how often they orgasm with a familiar partner (Frederick et al., 2018):

• Heterosexual men: 95%

• Gay men: 89%

• Bisexual men: 88%

• Lesbian women: 86%

• Bisexual women: 66%

• Heterosexual women: 65%

Lesbian women and heterosexual women have the same bodies. And there is a twenty-one point gap between them.

That gap can't be explained by female bodies being complicated or slow or broken. What differs is the practice, the attention, and what everybody in the room believes the event is for.

Which is good news. A problem caused by anatomy is permanent. A problem caused by information is fixable, usually faster than you'd think.

Two things about the clitoris

It's the organ at the front of the vulva whose only known function is pleasure. Every other organ you have is doing something else as well.

Almost all of it is internal. MRI work published in 2005 found the visible part is a small fraction of the whole, with roughly ninety percent inside the body — and that most anatomy textbooks still had it wrong, while describing male anatomy in full (O'Connell et al., 2005).

And until three years ago, nobody had counted the nerves in a human one. In 2022 a team did the first direct count and found roughly 10,281 nerve fibers (Uloko et al., 2023). The number everybody repeated before that, eight thousand, appears to have come from livestock studies. Not from a woman. From cattle.

Nobody hid this from you. It wasn't known, wasn't taught, and in a lot of churches wasn't mentionable. Then couples got a wedding night and were told to work it out.

If you are the wife reading this

Sixty-five percent is not a fact about your body. Women with the same body you have reported 86 percent.

Two permissions follow. You are allowed to know how you work — a lot of Christian women were taught to manage their bodies rather than understand them, and those are different skills. And you are allowed to say what's true out loud, including that hurts and I need longer than we've been taking. According to Glenn, pain during sex is a signal to investigate rather than an attitude to correct.

If you are the husband reading this

The party frame is not an accusation. It is very nearly the opposite.

Glenn says he has never met a man who was upset to find out the party is hers. His words: "As long as I get the free ticket to her party — absolutely, I'm showing up."

What it does is take something off you. If sex is fundamentally about you, every disappointing encounter is a referendum on you, and the response to a referendum is defensiveness. Once the design is hers, your job stops being performance and becomes attention and asking.

So stop trying to get it right and start making room. A lot of women have never been asked what they like. A lot of them also don't know, because nobody ever gave them the space to find out. Asking once and getting a shrug is not a failed conversation, it's the beginning of a long one.

What Paul wrote to the church in Corinth

One passage gets quoted about this more than any other. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, answering questions they had sent him about marriage:

"The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife." — 1 Corinthians 7:3–5 (NIV)

"Marital duty" is an old-fashioned way of saying sex. Now notice who he says it about first. The husband. Then he says the same thing in the other direction, and the two halves are identical.

That's easy to skim past now. It wasn't then: in Paul's world a husband's claim on his wife's body was assumed, and a wife holding the same claim on his was not a normal idea at all.

Which is why this passage is not a lever. Paul is describing two people who have each chosen to give themselves to the other, and choosing is the only way that works. If it has ever been read to you as a reason you are obligated to say yes when you don't want to, it was being used against its own plain sense.

A party nobody feels safe at

If you can't hand each other one hard sentence at the kitchen counter on a Tuesday without a three-day silence, that same inability walks into the bedroom with you, and no new information survives it. Safety isn't a mood: when someone under stress is with a partner they trust, their brain's threat response measurably quiets (Coan et al., 2006). Bodies do different things around somebody who has proven they'll stay.

One caveat: that survey is self-reported, so it shows what is happening rather than why. What it rules out is the explanation almost everybody has been using, because the bodies on both sides are the same.

Two practices for this week

1. Do a wheel about this part of your marriage. Take the Core Emotion Wheel and use it on your sex life specifically, not on your marriage in general. Which of the eight is actually in the room when this comes up — Fear, Shame, Hurt, Lonely, something else? Do it together, sitting next to each other, out loud. Most couples have never once named the emotion underneath this subject, and hearing it named by the person you're married to does more in ten minutes than a year of hinting.

2. Build the room before you ask the question. Not tell me what you like, answered on the spot. What you're after is the kind of space where either of you can say, in the moment, I don't like that, or keep doing that, or I genuinely don't know yet — and nothing bad happens afterward. No sulking, no verdict, no three days of chill. That takes time and repetition to build, and it is the actual work. The list of preferences shows up on its own once the room is safe enough to say them in.

You are not behind. You were misinformed, and that is a different problem with a different fix.

What would change this month if you both stopped assuming you already knew how the other one works?

Get the Core Emotion Wheel for free. It's a single page with our eight core emotions on it, in plain language. Most of us were only handed three or four words for what we feel. It takes about four minutes to do with your husband, your wife, or anybody you love — and it's what the first practice above runs on.

→ Get the Core Emotion Wheel — free

And if this article named something you'd rather not spend another decade guessing at, our Connected Intimacy workshop is where Glenn teaches this properly — the anatomy, the pacing, and how two people build the kind of room described above.

→ Connected Intimacy workshop

References

Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x

Frederick, D. A., St. John, H. K., Garcia, J. R., & Lloyd, E. A. (2018). Differences in orgasm frequency among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual men and women in a U.S. national sample. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(1), 273–288. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0939-z

O'Connell, H. E., Sanjeevan, K. V., & Hutson, J. M. (2005). Anatomy of the clitoris. The Journal of Urology, 174(4), 1189–1195. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.ju.0000173639.38898.cd

Uloko, M., Isabey, E. P., & Peters, B. R. (2023). How many nerve fibers innervate the human glans clitoris: A histomorphometric evaluation of the dorsal nerve of the clitoris. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 20(3), 247–252. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsxmed/qdac027