Caroline Hood grew up in a religious family and religious school, learning virtually nothing about sexuality except that it was something to be ashamed of. What stayed with her was a nagging suspicion that it couldn't be right: something so universal couldn't also be shameful. That suspicion became a career, a book, and a practice she calls Desire in Real Life, dedicated to the conversations women wish they could have with a trusted friend who happens to be a sex therapist.

In Sex Begets Sex: Reclaiming Desire, Power, and Pleasure in Long-Term Love, Caroline challenges the assumption that desire must precede sex. Drawing on Emily Nagoski's research into spontaneous and responsive desire, she argues that physical and emotional intimacy form a loop, not a hierarchy, and that maintaining physical closeness is itself a buffer against the drift toward roommate, co-parent, and coworker that so many long-term couples experience.

In this conversation with Andrew, Caroline covers a lot of ground. Why the gender archetypes around desire are serving nobody, including men. Why women's desire always seems to require an explanation while men's is validated without question. Why defining sex as penetration creates unnecessary barriers and diminishes female pleasure, given that around 80% of women orgasm through non-penetrative means. Why the most pleasurable sex reported by many people is not spontaneous but planned, communicated, and intentional.

They also explore: the difference between touch that is a request for sex and touch that simply is; how to start the desire conversation outside the bedroom and before things reach crisis point; why mismatched libido is better understood by asking what need is actually being met; why the high and low libido labels are too static to be useful; and whether monogamy is a natural human state or a relatively recent social construct, drawing on Esther Perel and recent research from the Kinsey Institute.

Caroline also talks about what writing the book did to her own relationship (spoiler: only good things), and why she believes the mundane, imperfect, ten-minute version of sex is just as important to a relationship as the two-hour tasting menu.

Warm, practical, and genuinely freeing.

Sex Begets Sex is available now. Caroline writes at Substack under Desire in Real Life.

https://www.desireinreallife.com/