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What Puts a Woman in the Mood?

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02.03.2026

The Fundamentals of Sex

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The mind is the gatekeeper for physical intimacy.

The opportunity for foreplay exists in the seemingly throw-away comments that happen in everyday life.

Foreplay is also layered into the small touches and glances that occur in a day.

Diving into an article on sex, you might expect advice on love notes slipped into pockets, date nights in new locations, or, maybe, wearing a trench coat with nothing underneath—all good ideas and certainly ways to build sexiness in a relationship. But I want to address a different aspect of sexual desire, one that on first blush may not sound that sexy, but, in fact, delivers far more bang for its buck than all the trench coats you can drop to the floor.

The most important sex organ in the body, for women, is not below the waist, but rather above the shoulders. That powerful sex organ is the mind. The mind tells the rest of the body I am available for sex, or conversely, I am not available. The mind is the gatekeeper for physical intimacy. That said, if a woman feels emotionally connected to her partner, she is a thousand times (not an evidence-based statistic) more likely to want to have sex with that partner.

We tend to think of foreplay as something that happens in the bedroom, just before sex, as a kind of warmup exercise to prepare the mind and body for what’s to come, like stretching before a run. But foreplay is actually something that happens all day, from the breakfast table to the final toothbrushing. In fact, the least........

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