I Told Woman’s Own My Story: No One Should Accept Bad Sex

Woman’s Own has run a feature about my story in its 11 August issue, under a headline I would never have been brave enough to choose myself: “I teach people how to have sex.” Blunt. Also true.

A feather, a blindfold, and a room full of strangers

In 2016 I sat blindfolded in a chair while someone I had never met ran a feather across my shoulders and down my arms. I shivered without meaning to. It was ticklish and startling and lovely all at once, and what stayed with me was that my body had answered before I had decided anything about it.

I was at a tantra workshop in a country house, one of a dozen or so people there. Over the next hour I was fed chopped pineapple and had essential oils wafted under my nose, all of it meant to wake the senses up. It sounds faintly ridiculous written down. It was also the first room I had ever been in where pleasure and connection were treated as things worth paying attention to, rather than something you get to if there is time left over.

I had not gone out of curiosity. I had gone out of desperation.

The story I had accepted

I had been with my partner for eight years. Sex had faded out somewhere after the second, and what was left was a shared house, a shared diary and a friendship. When I raised it with friends, most of them nodded along. Isn’t that just what happens? One of them listed all the good things about her partner, as though that settled it.

I could not settle it. There were no children in the mix, no family unit holding anything in place, and the thought of another thirty years beside someone who had become a flatmate made me feel bleak. Sex mattered to me and I was not willing to pretend otherwise.

What I could not see then was that I had never actually asked for what I wanted. Not in that relationship, not in any of the ones before it. My first experience at seventeen left me wondering what the fuss was about, and I stayed three years hoping it would improve. After that came one unsatisfying relationship after another, including eleven years that were almost entirely without sex. It takes two people to have bad sex. I could hardly hold it all against him when I had no idea what I was asking for.

Learning to listen to my body

That is what those workshops gave me. Not technique, not positions, but the much stranger skill of noticing what my body was already saying, and then saying it out loud to another person.

I brought it home and it did not land. My partner sidestepped the conversation, the way he sidestepped every difficult one, and eventually I had to face something I had been circling for a long time. In 2019 I told him I needed something more. He was shocked. I was forty-seven, and I could not spend the rest of my life living with a good friend.

A year later I met someone new. He already knew far more about this than I did and was glad to pass it on, and with him I understood the difference between having sex and making love. I felt every touch of it.

The newness wore off with him too, in time, as it does. What was different was that we saw it coming and had words for it. We learned to treat each other as people who keep changing, to ask plainly and without criticism, and to give without quietly keeping score.

Why this became my work

I was so altered by it that I trained, and qualified as a Certified Sexological Bodyworker. In 2021 I opened Conscious Sexuality here in North London.

Most of the women who find me are carrying the belief I used to carry: that their own needs can wait, that everyone else in the house comes first. When I tell them arousal takes time, and that forty minutes of unhurried touch before anything else is not indulgent but ordinary, they are often genuinely startled.

The men arrive with a different difficulty. Emotion and vulnerability are harder ground, and so, sometimes, is listening. What tends to move things is the moment they realise their partner’s pleasure is not a task being asked of them. It is the thing that makes their own deeper.

Not every relationship can be saved. A great many can.

No one should accept bad sex. That was the line of mine the magazine pulled out and set in large type, and I meant it. It still surprises me that I spent decades having bad sex and now spend my days teaching people how to have good sex, but it has turned out to be the most satisfying work of my life.

The feature as it appeared

Woman’s Own, 11 August 2026, pages 46 and 47. Words by Frances Leate and Matt Barbour. Click either page to read it full size.