Yahoo Lifestyle 
The secret ingredient helping satisfy women in the bedroom
One expert is helping women figure out how they can orgasm every time they have sex.
Move over pay gap, there’s another gender inequality that’ll have you up all night with new statistics revealing that more than half of women “find sex unsatisfying”.
“Men orgasm pretty much 100% of the time whereas there is a massive orgasm gap for women,” Dr Raelia Lew, the co-founder of Lovers, an intimate care brand, told Yahoo Lifestyle.
She says while women are often portrayed as “pleasure pleasers” or “pleasure providers”, it’s no surprise that many aren’t enjoying themselves under the sheets.
In a survey of 1,000 women, Lovers discovered that one in four experience pain with sex, one in three report a low libido and one in 20 suffer vaginismus, a condition which causes the muscles around the vagina to involuntarily contract often during penetration.
But as a gynaecologist and fertility expert with almost 20 years’ under her belt, Dr Lew believes she’s found the answer to satisfying sex, by applying medical principles - and cannabis - to female lubrication.
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The ‘chill without the high’
Extracted from cannabis at 1 per cent strength and concentrated in a pure oil, cannabidiol or CBD is listed as an active ingredient in one of Lovers’s lubes.
“It’s a cannabinoid derivative but it's purified and not THC [the main psychoactive compound of cannabis] so it doesn't get you high,” Dr Lew said. “We call it the chill without the high.”
Instead it’s helping women in “sexual relaxation” by reducing the threshold to orgasm and breaking the cycle of anxiety and sexual pain that some women suffer due to vaginal conditions.
“The benefits are to try to help someone have a better orgasm, or an easier to reach orgasm,” the gynaecologist explained. “But it can also be particularly useful for women who have a high level of anxiety around sex because of conditions like vaginismus or sexual pain related to endometriosis.”
So how does it work?
“The vagina is actually an amazing delivery system for molecules to get into the body’s circulation and have an effect because it's designed with a lot of blood vessels and lined by mucous membrane which is a thin layer of skin that’s easily traversed by molecules,” Dr Lew said.
“So when you apply medications vaginally, they are rapidly absorbed and get into your system quite quickly.”
She added that the best time to apply the CBD-based lube is about 20 to 30 minutes before any action, in order to give you time to get into the zone.
“Effects probably start a little bit earlier than that, probably even up to 15 minutes, but I think it’s really important whenever you’re trying to improve a sexual experience to realise that women need foreplay, whether it’s for self pleasure or with a partner,” she said.
From dispelling myths to ‘upgrading sexual experiences’
When it comes to the stigma around using lube, Dr Lew is quick to dispel any myths that the need for extra lubrication is a sign that there’s something ‘wrong’ with a woman, and she’s got some great analogies in her lab coat pocket.
“It's like, you could walk everywhere barefoot, or you could wear shoes,” she said. “These are things that make things better. Lube is not to fix a deficit in yourself. It’s to enhance what you’ve got to achieve a better outcome for yourself and upgrade your sexual experience.”
“We need to just rethink the way that we think about sex because women deserve to have an orgasm every time they have sex.”
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