A short YouTube segment (host: Wendie Trubow, MD) explaining why sex drive often declines with age, focusing on a proposed difference in timing between desire (mind) and arousal (body) for men versus women. The speaker suggests practical strategies—e.g., 15–20 minutes of sensual massage with sex off the table—to help women access bodily arousal first, which can then lead to desire.
Chapters
What are the things that decline our sex drive over as we age? One of the key things that I think is super important to mention is men and women, the way we are wired is that men have desire first and then arousal, and women have arousal first and then desire. What the difference is, is desire is of the mind, arousal is of the body. So desire is like, okay, in a hetero relationship, man sees a woman, you know, as a thought around their physique. So that's in the mind, that's des. And then all of a sudden they get turned on, they get a hard on, that sort of thing that's in the body, that's arousal. For most women, it tends to shift and it tends to be arousal is before desire. So what this means for most women, and this happens a lot as, as the relationship goes on and so a lot more with age is that we think as women that, okay, well, I'm not in the mood. Like, I'm so stressed out. Work has been hard. I got 16,000 things to do. There's no way there's space for that desire in the mind. When they decide to start having sex, oftentimes when they're not even in the mood 15 to 20 minutes in, all of a sudden, hey, because now they've dropped into their body, now they're feeling the sensations of the body, now they're feeling aroused. So that means in order to get the desire, this is why it can be really helpful to start it like 20 minutes of sensual massage with like taking sex off the table and just like practice getting into one's body. Because once you're feeling the sensations of the body, that can lead to the arousal and then the desire can come secondly.
