Studied People Having the Best Sex of Their Lives. Here’s What was Found
By Brii Cher’ri | The Boudoir Studio, Jefferson, NC
Okay, so. A team of researchers at the University of Ottawa, led by Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz, sat down with real humans who said their sex lives were deeply, embarrassingly, yes-please-more-of-that fulfilling. They also talked to seasoned sex therapists. They asked one deceptively simple question: what actually makes sex great?
They found 8 things. And I’m going to tell you all 8 of them, and then I’m going to give you one concrete way to start practicing each one — because knowing something and actually doing it are two completely different experiences, and you’ve been knowing things for long enough.
Stay with me.
So, The 8 Components of Optimal Sexuality and a little bit on how to Actually Start Living Them
1. Being Present and Focused
Not scrolling through your mental grocery list. Not rehearsing what your face looks like from his angle. Not performing. Actually inhabiting your body during the experience instead of watching it from the ceiling like a slightly bored ghost.
Here’s the thing about my clients: most of them haven’t been fully in their bodies in years. They manage their bodies. They dress them, feed them, schedule them, apologize for them. But be IN them? Be present in their own skin without editing the experience in real time? That’s a skill they forgot they had. My job is to remind them. The camera doesn’t lie and it doesn’t care about your inner critic, and at some point during their session, almost every woman stops performing and just… exists. It’s one of the most electric things I’ve ever witnessed.
How to practice it:
Before sex or before any experience you want to actually be inside of spend 60 seconds doing one thing: feel your feet on the floor. Your hands. The temperature of the air. Your breath. That’s it. Not a meditation retreat, not a ritual, just a one-minute act of locating yourself in your own body before you hand any part of it to someone else. You cannot be present in an experience you haven’t arrived at yet.
2. Connection and Being in Sync
Feeling genuinely tuned into another person, not just going through the motions together. When I’m in a session with a client, I am completely locked into her. Her energy, her hesitation, the moment she stops bracing and starts breathing. That sync is what makes the images look the way they do. It’s not lighting. It’s contact. Real, human, I-see-you contact.
Sync doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone decided to pay attention. In a culture that rewards multitasking and punishes stillness, actually slowing down enough to track another person their breath, their face, the small shifts in their energy is a radical act. It’s also, apparently, the thing that separates ordinary intimacy from the kind people remember for decades.
How to practice it:
Put the phone in another room. Not on silent in another room. Before you are with someone you want to connect with, make one deliberate act of full attention: look at their face for ten seconds without filling the space with words. Notice something specific about them you’ve never named before. Connection is attention made physical. Start there.
3. Deep Sexual and Erotic Intimacy
A closeness that goes beyond physical mechanics into something that feels meaningful. Most women walking into The Boudoir Studio have not felt erotically intimate with themselves in a very long time. They’ve been functional. They’ve been good wives, good mothers, good employees, good daughters. Erotic intimacy with yourself sounds woo-woo until you’re standing in front of a mirror in something that fits your actual body and someone is looking at you like you are, in fact, the most interesting thing in the room. Then it just feels like coming home.
The researchers found that erotic intimacy is distinct from emotional closeness or physical pleasure. It’s the quality of felt meaning the sense that this encounter matters, that you matter inside of it, that what’s happening between two bodies is also happening between two people who are actually aware of each other’s existence as more than a transaction. Women who’ve lost touch with their desire have often also lost this felt sense of meaning. They’re present physically but somewhere further away from themselves.
How to practice it:
Start with yourself before you try it with anyone else. Stand in front of your mirror and find one thing one thing that you can look at with something other than criticism. Not love yet, if love feels too far. Just neutral acknowledgment. Just: that part exists and it is mine. Erotic intimacy with a partner requires a baseline of erotic intimacy with yourself. You cannot give access to a room you’ve been locked out of.
4. Extraordinary Communication
Talking about what you want, what you don’t, what feels good. Before, during, and after. Women who’ve been disconnected from their desire have also stopped articulating it. They’ve forgotten the language. Part of what I do is give that language back, which sounds dramatic until you realize a woman literally tearing up because she finally said out loud “I want to feel sexy again” is not dramatic at all. It’s just true.
Extraordinary communication is not the same as being verbally sophisticated or emotionally articulate at all times. What the researchers mean is something simpler and more animal than that: the willingness to say the true thing. The actual thing. Not the acceptable version, not the thing that keeps the peace, not the thing that protects everyone from your desire. The thing that is real. Most women have been trained out of this so thoroughly they don’t even register that they’re editing themselves until the edit is already complete and the real thing has been swallowed again.
How to practice it:
This week, in one low-stakes conversation, say the true thing one sentence sooner than you normally would. If you want something, name it. If you don’t want something, say so. Practice the words in your body before they need to come out in high-stakes moments. Communication about desire is a muscle, and most of us have been on a years-long accidental fast.
5. Interpersonal Risk-Taking and Exploration
Willingness to try something new. Show a part of yourself you normally keep hidden. Ask for what you want. Sound familiar? Booking a boudoir session is, for most women, the scariest thing they’ve done voluntarily in years. The fact that they do it anyway is the first risk. Everything that happens after the confidence that spills out of the reveal, the way they carry themselves differently that’s the reward.
Risk in this context isn’t about novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s about choosing to show more of yourself than feels safe. High-functioning women are exceptionally good at calculating exactly how much of themselves is safe to reveal and revealing precisely that much. The result is a life that is technically connected but actually quite lonely, and an erotic life that is technically functional but quietly starving. Risk is the doorway out.
How to practice it:
Identify one thing you want but haven’t asked for because it felt like too much. Too needy, too bold, too specific, too nakedly yours. Ask for it this week. Not in bed necessarily anywhere. The practice of wanting out loud translates. Every time you survive the risk of being seen wanting something, you expand what feels possible.
6. Authenticity
Dropping the performance. Letting yourself be who you actually are in that moment. This is the one that breaks people open the most. High-functioning women are masterful performers. They have a version of themselves for every room they walk into. When I ask them to stop performing, there’s usually a beat of panic and then something else. Something older and wilder and more real than anything the performance was covering up.
Authenticity in erotic contexts is particularly loaded because most of us have been performing our desirability for so long we’ve confused the performance for the thing itself. We know how to look sexy. We know how to make the face, strike the pose, produce the sounds. What we’ve sometimes lost track of is what we actually feel. What actually moves us. What we actually want. Authenticity asks you to trade the performance for the real experience, which is scarier and also, according to the research, where all the good stuff lives.
How to practice it:
The next time you’re in an intimate moment emotional or physical notice what you’re performing versus what you’re actually feeling. You don’t have to blow up the performance immediately. Just notice the gap. Awareness of the gap is the first step to closing it. The more you witness your own editing, the less automatic it becomes.
7. Vulnerability
Letting someone really see you without the armor. Not the curated, filtered, good-angle version. The actual you. This is terrifying. It is also the only path to anything worth having. I see women without their armor every single week. It’s a privilege I take seriously and handle carefully and I will never get used to how brave it is.
Vulnerability is not the same as oversharing or emotional exposure for its own sake. What the researchers mean is something more precise: the willingness to be seen in a state of genuine want. To let another person witness you in your actual desire, your actual body, your actual self, without the protective layer of irony or competence or humor that usually keeps you at a safe distance from being truly known. Most women haven’t been seen that way in years. Some have never been seen that way at all.
How to practice it:
Let someone do something for you this week without deflecting. When someone compliments you, don’t immediately return it or minimize it just say thank you and let it land. When someone asks what you want, tell the truth. Vulnerability is built in small moments of allowing yourself to receive. You cannot be seen if you’re constantly redirecting the gaze.
8. Transcendence
Being completely absorbed in the experience. Everything else falls away. This is the thing clients describe in their reviews that makes them cry writing it. They say things like “I forgot to be nervous” and “I didn’t think about my stomach once” and “I didn’t know I could feel like that.” That’s transcendence. That’s what this is.
Transcendence is what happens when all the other seven components are working together. It’s not something you can chase directly — you can’t try to transcend and have it work — but it’s what becomes available when you’re present, connected, intimate, communicative, willing to take risks, authentic, and vulnerable enough to be seen. It’s the state where the self-monitoring stops completely. Where the inner critic goes quiet. Where the experience you’re having is more real than the story you’ve been telling about yourself for years. Most women have touched this state before in creative flow, in laughter, in rare moments of physical abandon. They just haven’t been able to find their way back.
How to practice it:
You cannot force transcendence, but you can remove the obstacles to it. The biggest obstacle is almost always self-surveillance: the part of you that watches yourself having the experience instead of having it. This week, pick one activity you love dancing, cooking, being in water, whatever takes you close to that absorbed quality and do it for twenty minutes with no phone, no mirror, no audience. Get comfortable with the sensation of being inside an experience. That’s the muscle. The rest follows.
Notice What’s NOT on That List
Orgasm. How long it lasts. How often you do it. Technique. Body type.
Read that again. The researchers who spent their careers studying peak human sexual experience found that none of the things women torture themselves about whether their body is the right size, whether they look right, whether they’re doing it often enough or well enough or impressively enough none of it is what makes sex extraordinary.
What makes it extraordinary is presence, connection, intimacy, communication, risk-taking, authenticity, vulnerability, and transcendence. All of which require you to actually be in your body. Actually in your desire. Actually available to yourself.
So Why Am I Telling You This?
Because I run a boudoir studio in Jefferson, North Carolina where I watch women remember themselves every single week. The Boudoir Studio is not a place you go to get pretty pictures. It’s a place you go when you’ve been running on fumes for so long you’ve forgotten what fuel felt like. When you’ve been taking care of everyone else’s needs so completely that your own desire has become a stranger you don’t quite recognize anymore.
Every one of those 8 things? We practice them here. Presence, because I don’t let you disappear into your head. Connection, because I am fully locked in to you. Intimacy, because this experience is designed for you to meet yourself. Communication, because you get to say what you want and I’ll actually listen. Risk, because showing up at all is a risk and it is always worth it. Authenticity, because I will keep working with you until we find the real you underneath the performance. Vulnerability, because you will be seen and you will survive it and you will be glad. And transcendence, because at some point in almost every session, time stops and something just clicks into place.
The science backs up what I’ve been watching happen in this studio for almost a decade. The secret to an extraordinary erotic life is not a better body or better technique. It’s coming back to yourself.
Come back to yourself. I’ll have the camera ready.
Book your session at www.theboudoirstudio.com | Follow along at @theboudoirstudio
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