About Female Sexuality Is Out of DateThey had laughed and made love and laughed again . . .—Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of LoveThis journey showed me, to my surprise, that even though we talk about sex all the time, the information we have about female sexuality is generally out of date. If women had easy—or at least easier—access to and could draw on the new scientific discoveries about female sexuality, which have not been widely reported, they would have a much deeper understanding of their own sexual and emotional responses—and could feel far more sexually alive and connected. Many of these new discoveries illuminate our conflicted feelings vis-à-vis our drive to be loved, and speak directly to the need for men and women to engage with what I will call “the Goddess Array,” the set of behaviors that activate the autonomic nervous system in women.Sex educator Liz Topp, author of Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual, in an eye-opening interview with me (in which she reported that senior girls in high school, even in our enlightened age, and even in excellent schools, have no idea where on the chart of the vulva the clitoris is—and neither do senior boys), referred to some of these behaviors, only half jokingly, as “the things that women need that men don’t need.”1 The latest science confirms that these “little”
