Women’s Desire Isn’t Dirty, Wrong or Selfish
A few years ago, a coach asked me a very simple question.
"What do you want?"
I'm a psychologist. I ask people questions for a living. And I sat there with absolutely nothing.
I could have told her what my clients wanted. What my family needed. What was due by Friday. What a sensible woman in my position ought to be aiming for.
But what I wanted? Blank.
I've written about this before, after a client told me that none of the life she'd built felt like hers. I keep coming back to it because it keeps being true.
If you've ever been asked that question and felt your brain quietly leave the room, this is for you.
It’s about women’s desire, and why so many of us lose touch with it.
You're not broken. You're well socialised.
Most of us were taught to be good long before we were old enough to question what "good" meant. A lot of it went in before we could even talk.
Be grateful. Be easy. Don't make a fuss. Don't need too much. Don't take the last one.
Nobody sits a small girl down and says "your wants are less important than everyone else's comfort". They don't have to. She works it out from what gets praised and what gets a look.
And this is the part that makes me furious.
None of it was an accident. A woman who doesn't know what she wants is extremely convenient. She keeps the peace. She picks up the slack at home and at work, for free. You can hand her everybody else's needs for decades and she'll call it being easy-going.
This isn't a personality (boy, I thought it was mine!). It's training.
Wanting responsibly
Women get very, very good at wanting responsibly.
We want what fits around everybody else. We want what won't upset anyone. We want something, and then in the same breath we add:
"But obviously I don't need it."
"Other people have it worse."
"I should be grateful."
Listen for it this week. In yourself, and in every woman you know.
The other tell is the shrug. "I'm easy." "I'm not bothered." "Whatever everyone else wants."
We say it about dinner, about holidays, about what happens in bed, about the whole direction of our lives.
You are bothered. You've just had a lifetime of practice at not checking.
Why your body is part of this conversation
I used to keep this work from the neck up. Careers, confidence, boundaries, leadership. All useful. All safely respectable.
Then I started training as a Love, Sex and Relationship coach, and I couldn't unsee it. The same conditioning that has a woman saying "I don't mind" in a meeting has her saying it in bed.
The receipts: In a US study of more than 52,000 adults, 95% of straight men said they usually or always orgasm during sex. For straight women it was 65%. For lesbian women, 86%.
So it isn’t biology. It’s what we’ve been taught to put up with.
(Source: Frederick and colleagues, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2018.)
The clitoris is the only organ in the human body whose sole job is pleasure. Women's bodies are built for it. And we've been taught to ignore it, override it or apologise for it.
Pleasure is your literal birthright. Not a nice-to-have. Not a treat for when everything else is done. An absolute necessity.
And it's where a lot of the serious work has been hiding.
Desire doesn't become respectable only when we rename it "purpose". Your body gets a vote.
Women's desire is information
This is the reframe I keep coming back to again and again.
Women's desire is information. It isn't an instruction. It isn't a demand. It isn't proof that you're selfish.
Knowing what you want doesn't mean you'll get it, or that everyone has to agree, or that you stop caring about the people you love. It means you can hear your own signal clearly enough to make a real choice, instead of overriding yourself on autopilot.
You can want something and decide not to act on it. That's a choice.
Never letting yourself know what you want isn't a choice. It's a habit you were handed.
Three ways to start checking
You don't need a five-year plan. Start small, and start this week.
1. Catch the shrug. Every time you hear yourself say "I'm not bothered", stop for three seconds and ask whether that's true. You don't have to say the real answer out loud yet. Just know it.
2. Ask what would feel good right now. Not what's productive, impressive or responsible. Just good. It might be a cup of tea in the garden. It might be saying no to the thing you're dreading. Small counts.
3. Finish this sentence, somewhere private.
If I were a bad girl, I would...
As I established in my book, Good Girl Deprogramming, a bad girl is not the opposite of a good girl. She's a way to use your imagination and expand your thinking.
No consequences. No sensible answer required. Nobody is marking your work. The quickest route to what you want often runs straight through the thing you were taught would make you "bad" for wanting it.
Write down whatever comes. Then notice how fast the voice arrives to tell you it's ridiculous. That voice is the conditioning. The sentence underneath it is you.
Come and do this properly with me
Reading about desire is one thing. Saying "I want" out loud, in a room, with other women listening and nobody trying to fix you, is something else. It's so bloody hard to do alone.
So I'm giving it a whole day.
Desire Is Not a Dirty Word
Saturday 21 November 2026, at Durham Woodland Workspace, a lovely warm cabin in the woods just outside Durham in the North East.
Twelve women. Lunch included. The full Bad Girl Protocol. Clothes on, no touch, and everything is an invitation.
Early bird places are £149 until Sunday 1 November, and £179 after that.
You don't need to know what you want before you come. That's rather the point.
So my question for you... If someone asked you today, "What do you want?", what's the first answer you'd talk yourself out of?
Mx
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