What We Miss When We Talk About Women's Sexual Pleasure
Sarah has never experienced pleasure during intimacy.
She can be present. She can go through every motion of connection with her husband. But sexual pleasure, the kind that is supposed to rise up on its own from a body that feels safe, has never quite arrived for her. In the quiet of her own mind, she has wondered more than once if something is simply wrong with her.
From the outside, her marriage to Hamza does not look like a marriage carrying this kind of ache. They are in their mid-forties. Two children. A stable home. A practicing Muslim family who weathered a hard beginning and came through it together. Most evenings, Hamza settles onto the couch with his phone while Sarah moves through the kitchen and the living room, tending to the small routines of a house with children still young enough to need her. They are not unhappy. They are simply tired, and okay, and neither of them has the words for what sits beneath that okayness.
Sarah's story is not unusual. It is, in fact, remarkably common. And the way we have been taught to respond to it, as a field and as a culture, has left women like her searching in the wrong direction entirely.
Pleasure Was Never Meant to Be This Narrow
When we talk about women's sexual pleasure, we tend to talk about it as though it lives in one place. As though it is a single measurable event rather than an experience with many dimensions. We ask whether a woman is reaching orgasm, how often, how easily, and we let the answer to that question stand in for everything else pleasure might hold.
But sexual pleasure was never meant to be this narrow, confined to sensations in our sexual body parts. It is physical, yes, but it is also emotional, felt in the safety of being fully seen by another person. It is sensorial, held in the warmth of touch and the closeness of another body. It is relational, built on trust between two people. And for many of us, it is spiritual too, part of what makes intimacy feel sacred rather than simply physical. When we reduce sexual pleasure to orgasm alone, we lose almost everything that pleasure actually is.
And if you are reading this and orgasm is not something you feel the need to work toward, or want right now, that is okay too. Pleasure can be emotional. It can be physical in ways that have nothing to do with an endpoint. It can be sexual without following the shape we keep hearing it is supposed to take. It does not need to amount to the outcome we are so often told to chase if that outcome is not something meaningful to you right now.
An Islamic Lens on Pleasure
Within an Islamic framework, a woman's sexual pleasure is not an afterthought. It is something our tradition takes seriously, from the emphasis placed on foreplay to the language scholars have used around a husband's responsibility to attend to his wife's pleasure and not only his own. This is a tradition that understood, long before modern sex therapy existed, that pleasure is not incidental to intimacy but central to it, and that rushing toward an endpoint dishonors what intimacy is meant to hold. Indeed, one of the purposes of sexual desire (i.e. shahwah) within our soul is sexual pleasure, as but a small reflection of the pleasures of the Afterlife.
So if our tradition holds sexual pleasure with this much intention, why does it still feel so distant or difficult for so many of us? This is not a question to answer quickly, or to feel ashamed of asking. It is an invitation to get curious, compassionately, about what may be sitting underneath our own relationship with sexual pleasure in marriage. What follows in this post is an exploration of exactly that, the layers beneath the surface that so rarely get spoken about.
The Orgasm Gap and the Education We Keep Reaching For
Much of the conversation around women's sexual pleasure has narrowed itself to the orgasm gap, the well documented reality that women reach orgasm far less consistently than men do in heterosexual encounters. In response to this gap, the field has largely offered one solution. Learn about the clitoris. Learn about its over ten thousand nerve endings. Understand your anatomy, experiment, communicate what feels good, and pleasure will follow.
But then what? Okay, so now I know the clitoris has over ten thousand nerve endings. Then what is my sexual pleasure automatically supposed to do with that. What does this knowledge actually help me do, in a body that has spent years learning to disconnect from sensation rather than notice it. Information about anatomy cannot, on its own, teach a body how to feel again.
There is nothing wrong with this knowledge itself. Women deserve to understand their bodies, and for a long time this understanding was withheld from us entirely. But we have to be honest about what this approach assumes. It assumes that the primary barrier between a woman and her sexual pleasure is a lack of information. It assumes that if we simply taught women more about their anatomy and more about technique, pleasure would open up on its own.
For women like Sarah, it does not work this way. She knows her body. She could recite the anatomy, name the techniques, ask for what the books say to ask for. And still, sexual pleasure feels distant, or effortful, or entirely absent. This is where the field falls short, because the field is rarely holistic. It rarely takes a somatic, trauma informed perspective. It treats the body as a mechanism to be studied rather than something a woman has to live inside of every day of her life.
Confidence and Femininity Are Not the Same as Embodiment
Beyond anatomy education, there is another kind of resource that gets offered to women who are struggling with sexual pleasure. Build your confidence. Get in touch with your femininity. Learn to feel sexy and desirable in your own skin.
These resources come from a good place, and for some women, they genuinely help. But they carry the same quiet assumption as the anatomy education does. They assume that what stands between a woman and her sexual pleasure is a feeling she has not yet found, rather than a body she has not yet learned how to inhabit.
Think about what confidence or a sense of femininity is actually being asked to do here. If a woman has spent years disconnected from her body, if her emotions were dismissed or punished growing up, if she carries trauma she has never had the chance to process, if her soul carries imprints from experiences no one ever helped her make sense of, then what is confidence supposed to reach. What is getting in touch with her femininity supposed to undo. These approaches are often not rooted in a framework of embodiment - nor are they trauma-informed. They do not ask what is actually getting in the way of a woman feeling safe and present in her own body during an ordinary day. They offer a feeling to reach for without ever addressing why that feeling has been so hard to access in the first place.
A woman does not only need to feel more confident or more feminine in order to feel sexual pleasure. She first and foremost needs to feel safe inside her own body, and to feel alive and fully present in her body. Confidence often follows from this, and it cannot substitute for it. And until we build our approaches to women's sexual pleasure on top of embodiment first, rather than confidence or femininity first, we will keep offering women solutions that were never built to reach the actual root.
The Body We Keep Leaving Out
There is a deeper reason the field keeps reaching for education and confidence work instead of something more holistic, and it has to do with how we talk about the body at all.
When the body enters conversations about sexual pleasure, it almost always enters through a sexual lens. We talk about arousal. We talk about anatomy. We talk about the nervous system only insofar as it explains what happens during intimacy itself. The body becomes something we discuss exclusively in the bedroom, as though it disappears in every other room of a woman's life.
What gets left out are important questions:
How does a woman relate to her body while she is simply living, hours and days that have nothing to do with intimacy at all?
Does she notice when she is hungry, or has she trained herself to push through it for the sake of a long to do list?
Does she let herself cry when something hurts, or has she learned to hold her face still and keep moving?
Does she know what calm actually feels like in her chest and her shoulders, or has tension become so constant that she no longer registers it as tension at all?
Notice how these are not questions about sexual intimacy. Instead, they are questions about whether a woman's body has been a place she gets to feel safe in, or a place she has learned to push through, manage, and override in order to keep functioning.
This is the piece that goes missing when pleasure is treated as a topic that only shows up during sexual intimacy. A woman's relationship with her body during an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, folding laundry or answering emails or calming a crying toddler, is the actual foundation that intimacy gets built on top of. If a woman has spent years disconnected from her own hunger, her own exhaustion, her own sadness, that disconnection does not disappear the moment she enters the bedroom. It walks in with her. No amount of education about pleasure during sexual intimacy can reach a problem that was never only about sex to begin with.
This is why a somatic, trauma informed lens has to sit at the center of any real conversation about women's sexual pleasure, not as an addition to the existing conversation, but as the missing foundation underneath it.
What Gets in the Way of Feeling Sexual Pleasure
The reason many women struggle with sexual pleasure in marriage has very little to do with what they know and everything to do with whether they can actually feel their own bodies while it matters most.
This often begins earlier than we realize, in imprints our souls have carried for years. Moments when we were dismissed instead of comforted. Times our emotions were treated as inconvenient rather than valid. Experiences that taught us, long before we had language for it, that our bodies were not entirely safe places to remain in. These imprints settle into the qalb (heart), and they shape how at ease we are with our own stillness for the rest of our lives.
Think about what it takes to notice sexual pleasure in the first place. A woman has to be able to register a sensation as it happens, to stay with it instead of leaving the moment in her mind, to let her body soften instead of holding itself together. For a woman carrying imprints like these, this kind of stillness does not feel peaceful. It feels exposed. Staying in motion, staying one step ahead of her own feelings, has often been the safer choice, even if she has never named it that way. She has spent years practicing the opposite of noticing. She has practiced tuning her own body out.
This is what we mean when we talk about survival mode. It is not a dramatic state reserved for crisis. It is the quiet, constant hum of a woman managing a household, a job, a family, running on empty and calling it normal. Her nervous system cannot tell the difference between the pressure of an overflowing inbox and an actual threat. Either way, it braces. Either way, it prepares her to keep functioning rather than to feel. And a body that has spent all day bracing does not simply relax the moment intimacy begins. It carries the same bracing into the bedroom, because it does not know how to do anything else.
Sexual pleasure asks for the opposite of bracing. It asks a woman to notice sensation instead of pushing through it, to stay present in her body instead of leaving it, to let herself be affected instead of holding everything steady. A woman who has spent years disconnecting from her body in order to survive cannot simply switch that off because her husband is beside her. The disconnection she practices all day does not pause for intimacy. It shows up there too, not because anything is wrong with her, but because her soul has been carrying imprints that never had the chance to be tended to.
Broadening What We Mean by Pleasure
If we take a woman's whole relationship with her body seriously, we also have to broaden what we mean by pleasure itself. Sexual pleasure is not only the physical sensation building toward an endpoint. It is emotional, felt in the safety of being witnessed by another person. It is sensorial, held in warmth and closeness and presence. It is relational, built in trust. And it is sexual too, but this is only one thread among many, not the whole fabric.
When we release sexual pleasure from the singular goal of orgasm, something in us softens. We stop measuring intimacy by how it ended and start noticing all the places it was already happening. The exhale when a partner holds without needing anything back. The safety of being fully seen. The quiet, unhurried moments that never needed to build toward anything at all.
Sarah's healing was never going to come from more information about her body. It was going to come from learning to notice her own hunger, her own exhaustion, her own sadness, long before she ever reached the bedroom. This is the work many of us are being called toward. Not more pressure to perform pleasure, but the slower work of learning to feel our own bodies again in the middle of an ordinary day, so that when intimacy asks us to be present, we already know how.
Questions to Sit With
Sexual pleasure is not something to figure out in a single reading. It is something to notice, slowly, over time, in your own body and your own life. A few questions to carry with you, not to answer all at once, but to return to as they feel relevant.
When was the last time you noticed you were hungry before you were starving, or tired before you were exhausted?
Do you let yourself feel sadness or anger as they arise, or do you tend to hold your face still and keep moving?
Where does tension tend to live in your body, and how long has it been there without you noticing it?
What would it feel like to be fully present in your body for a single ordinary moment today, without needing to accomplish anything in it?
If sexual pleasure has felt distant or effortful for you, has it ever occurred to you that this might live in your everyday relationship with your body, rather than in what happens during intimacy alone?
And if orgasm has never been something you feel drawn toward, what does pleasure actually feel like for you, in whatever form it takes?
This is only the beginning of a much larger conversation, one we are continuing to unfold through Witnessing the Soul. Season 1, Intimacy in Marriage, is coming soon, built around this same understanding that struggles with sexual intimacy are rarely only physical, and that real healing asks us to return to the body as a whole, not only in the bedroom.
If this piece resonated with you, subscribe to our newsletter below for exclusive early access to Season 1, along with reflections, resources, and stories like Sarah and Hamza's as they continue to unfold.
For those interested in learning more about Soulful Sexual Intimacy in Marriage, you can purchase my book here.
