Female Sexuality

This is a topic that sometimes comes up when groups of moms are together. We joke about our sex life and bemoan the fact that having little children has killed all flickers of desire in us. In fact, one of the listeners who heard that I was going to be addressing this topic on the podcast sent me this meme, and I will admit I laughed out loud when I read it: "You can thank your dad that you were born because chances are pretty good your mom was not in the mood." But all laughing and stereotypes aside, this is a really tender, sensitive topic for many women.

I think a lot about sex—-although maybe not in the way that some people do. In particular, I think a lot about why people like and don’t like to have sex, what ignites desire and what suffocates it. As a therapist, I meet with people almost daily who are trying to figure out why they don’t like to have sex, why their spouse doesn’t like to have sex, or why their spouse does like to have it. It is an elusive question sometimes as well as a painful one for many couples.   My dissertation research focused on the question of Mormon women’s sexual agency. That is, Mormon women’s capacity to be acto...

We are, from birth, sensual creatures, but a lot of us feel like that’s a design flaw - like something’s wrong, as opposed to that being what it is to be human. How much can we really embrace that core sensuality, and how much do we shame it and try to get away from it?

In this discussion with the producers of The Betrayed, The Addicted & The Expert, Dr. Finlayson-Fife talks about how religious belief can handicap sexual integration. She also talks about how one can embrace faith and sexuality and what constitutes the difference in religious orientation.

Dr. Finlayson-Fife was invited to be a speaker at the 2019 I Am Mom Summit to speak about maintaining a sense of sexual selfhood in motherhood. You can watch the recording below:  

The transcript of Dr. Finlayson-Fife and Jody Moore's Bold New Mom podcast recorded last fall.  Click on the PDF image to read: Listen to the podcast by clicking on the link below: http://www.finlayson-fife.com/podcast-archive/2019/11/26/womens-sexuality-desire-pornography-and-talking-to-our-kids-about-sex

Celeste, writing for weblog "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" reviews my online course in a post titled Resources for Improving Intimacy: "The Art of Desire". "This course was so much more eye-opening for me than I ever anticipated.  I was expecting it to go something like, “for years you thought sex was bad and now you need to know sex is good, let’s discuss.”  But it was so, SO much more than that.  It made me take a good, hard, thorough look at myself, my relationship to desire and all sorts of masks and facades I may be hiding behind that I didn’t realize were there at all. ..Maybe my fav...

Below is an article I wrote on the LDS Modesty discourse, published in EXPONENT II Magazine.  You can read it here: (Just scroll down a few pages to find the article). http://www.exponentii.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Exponent-II-Magazine_Winter-2014-Edition-4-website.pdf