It all comes down to your relationships – with yourself, too…

What I’d most like to say to women is, your sexual desire and arousal are rooted in your relationship, not your genitals. The best way to optimise sexual desire, arousal and orgasmic capacity is to be honest about what you want sexually and communicate that to your partner or partners – and to be honest about your relationship.

We need to move away from the idea that all women have no interest in being sexual. In the right circumstances, women love being sexual. In my research on cyber-infidelity, the most surprising thing that emerged was how predatory women are, and not only online. The state of the relationship is the core reason women present with sexual difficulties. They’re functional on their own or when they’re online, chatting to a stranger. It’s only within the intimacy of a relationship that there is a lack of communication around what they really desire sexually and emotionally. Then they appear to have a sexual dysfunction, when they don’t really.

Women also need to look at their relationship with themselves. Many, many women have experienced violence and abuse, which definitely affects their ability to be functional and requires therapeutic intervention. And if a woman is not comfortable with her body, that’s going to interfere with her sexuality too. DR MARLENE WASSERMAN, AKA DR EVE, clinical sexologist, sex therapist and author of Cyber Infidelity: The New Seduction