Blog Archive

  I recently attended a Zoom meeting with 20+ other New York City sex and relationship therapists on the subject of how online counseling, or “TeleHealth,” has transformed their practices. Some of what I heard surprised me.  Many said they missed seeing their clients in person, and that TeleHealth therapy...

  . Part 2 of a new three-part series for men with premature ejaculation and their partners, on contemporary issues in the understanding and treatment of PE.See also:Toward a New Definition of Premature EjaculationEight Ways for Men with Premature Ejaculation to Last Longer in Bed . As a sex therapist,...

. Part 3 of a new three-part series, for men with premature ejaculation and their partners, on contemporary issues in the understanding and treatment of PE. See also:Toward a New Definition of Premature EjaculationWhat Causes Premature Ejaculation?. How can men with PE learn to last longer in bed? As we...

  Part 1 of a new three-part series for men with premature ejaculation and their partners, on contemporary issues in the understanding and treatment of PE. See also:What Causes Premature Ejaculation?Eight Ways Men with Premature Ejaculation Can Last Longer in Bed . How fast is too fast?  The answer’s always...

  Why It’s Normal to Lose Sexual Desire Sexual desire, and how to keep it going in a relationship, can be a bit of a mystery. But don’t feel bad. It’s a mystery to most sex experts as well. In this article, I’ll show you how sexual desire really works, and...

  Why Most Sex Tips Don’t Work Sex tips these days tend to be long on technique — but short on feelings.  Maybe that explains why so few couples in my sex therapy practice seem to come in with any idea what good sex is supposed to be all about. We’re...

The Urology / SexTherapy Connection — on SIRIUS XM Doctor Radio Urology specialists come in all flavors. Some specialize in the prostate, others in the bladder, others in the ureters and kidney. But in Manhattan there are several urologists who specialize in what’s called “sex and infertility.” As a sex...

Sex Talk Is Easier Than You Think I can talk about sex with anyone. Which makes sense, since I’m a sex therapist and that’s what I do in the office all day. But I have to remind myself how difficult it can be for some individuals to talk frankly about their sexual feelings....

Foreplay.  Women traditionally complain they don’t get enough of it. Often this gets interpreted as being due to a woman’s needing more physical stimulation to get fully aroused.  OK, maybe sometimes that’s the issue.   But I don’t see it as the essential thing.  The physical aspects of sex rarely...

What’s the secret to keeping love and sex alive? There’s no one best answer, and every couple is different.  But many sex therapists, myself included, talk about something called “differentiation” as a key factor.  Differentation means being able to take care of yourself, as a separate person, while you’re in intimate...

The secrets of sexual arousal are hidden in plain sight. You just have to know what you’re looking for. Physical sexual arousal – the sexually aroused body – has been endlessly studied, most famously by Masters and Johnson in the 1960’s. And less rigorously but no less intensely by every sexual...

Recently SexualityResource reviewed Sex at Dawn, a new book drawing on a vast amount of cultural and physical anthropological scholarship to suggest that our human ancestors lived in sexually promiscuous groups of hunter-gatherers.  And that the development 10,000 years ago of agriculture, an ownership society, and sexual monogamy brought an end...

Does She, or Doesn’t She? “When I was teaching the class of fifteen-year-olds and it was time for the girls to ask their questions of boys, they wanted to know this:  ‘Do you prefer girls who have a little hair or a lot of hair?’  I thought they meant hairstyles,...

A Train in Motion On the B train, one hot summer Sunday afternoon. I’m bringing my children and a few of their friends back to Manhattan, after a long day at the beach in Brooklyn. There’s a young couple standing near the exit door, sharing an ipod headset. Each with...

A New Twist on the Apple At a recent informal meeting of New York City sex therapists to discuss his new book Sex at Dawn, psychologist Chris Ryan played us a videotape showing a bonobo orgy. The tape was several minutes long.  It showed a small crew of cute little apes cavorting...

Sex and Eros The average adult heterosexual man, in the average relationship with an adult woman, doesn’t ask for so much –   and doesn’t have so much to give.   He’d like a good meal, a little appreciation for how well he replaced the lightbulb in the bathroom yesterday.  Then he...

Across the River and Into the Trees One day last summer my son came home from a birthday party covered with bruises, bleeding, and looking very proud of himself.  Happily examining his wounds in the bathtub, he explained that he’d been playing paintball, which was actual combat with kids shooting...

Part 2 of a series prompted by Vanessa Wood’s Bonobo Handshake. Part 3 will follow shortly, after which we’ll return to our main subject. Photo credit:  pedrosimoes7 via Creative Commons   Empathy and Its Impediments When my daughter was seven, our nanny Irene got married and moved to Florida.  This was a big loss...

Want to Test Your Knowledge of Male Sexual Psychology?   Take this quiz: QUIZ:  It’s Saturday night.  Paul, 25 years old, is on a date with a new woman whom he likes very much and finds very sexy.  Unfortunately, later that night when they undress together, he suddenly has no...

Online Sex Research Asks, “What Are People Really Looking For on the Web?”. Sex research turned a new page a few years ago with the publication of a new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, that reported the results of an online sex research study of 400 million internet searches, about...

Why Are More Women Choosing to Have Genital Cosmetic Surgery? After viewing a recent Channel 4 film “The Perfect Vagina,” by British Documentary Director and Producer Heather Leach, I understood why. It’s the explosion in the last decade of print and online close-up images of young women with, in the words of...

What 55 Million Sex Searches Tell Us About Desire A Billion Wicked Thoughts describes a novel collection of data representing 55 million sexual internet searches by some 2 million individuals.  But is it really science, or something else entirely? There’s reason to wonder.  A quick glance at the book’s bibliography shows...

Dr Kinsey Meets Masters+Johnson Since Alfred Kinsey and his associates published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953, most sex studies have consisted of questionnaire interviews asking people about their sex lives.  Just as Kinsey did. Kinsey was well aware of the limits of...

“A couple of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep...

I remember years ago going to see Frank Langella in Dracula on Broadway. The only thing I can recall about the play now is the scene just before the curtain ended Act I: As I remember, there were just two people still on stage – the Count and his female prey, standing toe...

“Penile Dysmorphic Disorder” and Obsessions with Penis Size Tori Rodriguez, a writer for MensHealth.com, recently interviewed me for a piece prompted by a recent article in the British Journal of Urology reporting that most men electing penis enlargement surgery are in fact normally endowed.  Thanks to Ms Rodriguez and to...

Shakespeare, in his Sonnets, famously imagined three strategies for escaping death: creating art, having children, and loving deeply.   It’s a tribute to sex that it can sometimes be involved in at least two out of those three. I considered this today as I took my son to board the bus for...

“Monogamy Lite” For those of you who missed “Open Marriage,” the ethical non-monogamy movement of the 70’s: Ethical non-monogamy is back.  Not that it ever actually disappeared.  But it seems to be making news again. Last year the New York Times bestselling book Sex at Dawn (extensively reviewed on these pages)  argued...

I was recently interviewed by Karen Robertson for Cosmopolitan South Africa on the subject of the new book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which has been extensively reviewed on these pages.    Ms. Robertson’s article “Is Kinky the New Normal?” appeared in Cosmopolitan South Africa in July 2011. Thanks to Ms. Robertson and to Cosmopolitan for permission to reproduce the excerpts below from our...

“When my beloved first stands before me naked, all open to my sight, there is a feeling throughout the whole of me; awe.  Why?   If sex is no more than an instinct, why don’t I simply feel horny or hungry?   Such simple hunger would be quite sufficient to insure the...

Things you Still Can’t Say in Print About Sex Last May saw the publication of a new and somewhat controversial book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, written by two experts in the new and somewhat controversial field of computational neuroscience — a scientific discipline that uses software principles to understand the human...

Sex and Sensibility Romance literature, according to the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, is the most popular form of fiction in the world.  It’s estimated that the total yearly revenues from the romance novel industry may be greater than that of the online porn industry. Women aren’t the only ones...

“Being desired is very arousing to women.”— Marta Meana, quoted in A Billion Wicked Thoughts, p. 110.   Every Little Thing She Does is Magic In a typical romance novel aimed at heterosexual women, the hero’s physical features as well as his social attributes are discussed at length. His height,...

Eros, Self-Love, and the New York Times In 2009 an article by Daniel Bergner appeared in the New York Times Magazine concerning new research into women’s sexual desire.   The article carried a statement that women’s desire is “dominated by the yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object...

A Secret Erotic Code As most careful readers of the Twilight series know, there is a literary work that gets mentioned in each of the later volumes that explains the story. For New Moon, we have Romeo and Juliet. That’s easy. For Breaking Dawn, there’s The Merchant of Venice. A courtroom drama, where a woman acts bravely to...

Mapping the Erotic Mind This year saw the publication of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a book that among other things discusses its author’s independent analysis of 55 million sex-related Google searches. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the two computational neuroscientists who wrote A Billion Wicked Thoughts, appear to have had enough data...

One Quiet Night   It is 22 year old Anastasia Steele’s first night alone with Seattle billionaire sex-god Christian Grey,  in his high-tech mansion in the sky. Page 85.  She is about to experience sexual climax, for the first time in her life.  Let’s hear her tell it — “Let go, baby,”...

Sex and the City – That Confusing Opening Scene There’s an image that has haunted me for years.   It’s the opening credits of Sex and The City on HBO.   Here — watch it with me. Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sara Jessica Parker, is walking in downtown Manhattan.   We see her...

Reader Beware After reading Fifty Shades of Grey, you might think you’ve learned something about  men who wish to sexually dominate their partners. In particular, you might conclude that being a sexual Dominant probably means one had a very bad childhood, as Christian Grey did.  And that like Grey one has...

An Eighteenth Century Blockbuster Pamela, published in 1740, was apparently both the Twilight and the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day.   Folks couldn’t get enough of it. Pamela inspired numerous spin-offs, take-offs, and even paintings and prints — the eighteenth century equivalent of the movie version — depicting its most famous scenes. The Pamela...

The Questions Never Change Working as a sex therapist, I have more than a passing interest in what the culture happens to be serving up about eros. Part of it is simply curiosity about what my clients are reading.  But the greater part involves a search for conceptual tools with...

Two virgins It’s well known that Fifty Shades of Grey began as a work of “Fan Fiction” published online, closely based on Twilight.    The resemblance between Twilight and Fifty Shades is indeed striking. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Fifty Shades is loaded with graphic sex, while the Twilightcharacters never saw each other naked until volume 4.   The romantic...

OK, guys — By now you’ve probably noticed your wife or girlfriend has become more interested in sex since reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Have you thought of reading it yourself — to find out what all the fuss is about? I’m going to tell you a secret:  I read the...

Eighth in a series on Fifty Shades of Grey   Can Fifty Shades save your relationship? I’m hearing the same thing from sex therapists all over the country — If you recommend Fifty Shades of Grey to clients who are stuck in unhappy sexual relationships, some of them will come back reporting better sex. We...

New York City Best Doctors, 2012 I was honored this week to be featured in New York Magazine’s June 11 issue as one of 1,160 best NYC physicians — and as one of only 31 New York City psychiatrists to make the cut. Listing as a New York Magazine Best Doctor has for many years been recognized as...

After many years of trying, an experienced rock and roll groupie finally managed to sleep with Mick Jagger. When her friends asked her how the legendary rocker had been as a sexual partner, she replied,  “He was good — but he was no Mick Jagger.”   That sweet coo I...

A strange thing, mystifying In this new movie, Tommy Lee Jones plays an Omaha accountant named Arnold who won’t have sex with his wife — Kay, a sixty-something Everywoman played by a very likeable Meryl Streep. No sex, no physical attention, minimal eye contact, separate bedrooms.  The marital estrangement combination...

All things considered, the mental health profession comes off pretty well in this year’s new sex movie Hope Springs.  Marriage therapist and author Dr Bernard Feld, played by Steve Carell, is a fairly nice specimen by Hollywood standards. He’s likeable, intelligent, confident-but-not-a-shmuck, and commits no flagrant boundary violations.  You get the idea....

Not far into her book Slow Sex, Nicole Daedone recounts the story of  the first time she ever tasted a home-grown heirloom tomato.    She was ten years old, and recalls that she’d previously known tomatoes only as things to be sliced and put on a plate.    But this was different...

Slow Sex author Nicole Daedone says she first learned the technique she now calls “Orgasmic Meditation” (OM)  from someone who’d learned if from someone else — but that she’s not sure who really started it, or when.  She says it goes back a long time. As she recounts in her recent TEDx talk,...

In previous articles in this series, we’ve been discussing a sexuality practice popularized by author Nicole Daedone – a technique she’s named “Orgasmic Meditation,” though it doesn’t necessarily involve sexual climax in the conventional sex. In her book Slow Sex, she describes how a woman can develop her capacity for sexual attention...

Here’s a question: Does anyone have any idea why Fifty Shades of Grey has sold so many millions of books? I’m asking because in all that I’ve read about this book, I haven’t seen one mention of what it’s really about.  And why it’s been such a runaway success. Is it because...

My fellow sex journalist Tracy Clark-Flory was a guest at one of  Nicole Daedone’s weekend retreats  for women at Le Meridien in San Francisco last year.   One of the events was a live demonstration of Daedone’s technique of what she calls Orgasmic Meditation (OM) with a female volunteer.  (See references 1-3 below)...

A month ago, an article in The New York Times noted the passing of Daniel Stern, MD(below) — psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher, at his home in Switzerland. Stern’s death failed to make the Times’ front page, but the Science Times featured a memorial piece by Douglas Martin that pretty well captured the significance of...

How are they ever going to make this into a movie? This year Fifty Shades of Grey flashed 1,2 and 3 on the New York Times bestseller list all summer long — only to pretty much disappear from the national consciousness with the arrival of Fall.    While it lasted, though, FiftyShades spawned a magazine,  a Katie...

The New York Times reports today that Cinquante Nuances de Grey (that’s French for you-know-what) is now selling briskly in France — despite a hearty and unanimous condemnation by the French literary elite. According to the article “A Defiant Oui for ‘Fifty Shades” by Times columnist Elaine Sciolino, French critical opinion on the book has pointed out that...

A Strange Thing, Mystifying How many of you saw The Sessions?  Good – I see some hands. Did it lead to much discussion?  Well it didn’t in my house either. And in the popular press the same thing.  A few early reviews saying it was very moving, and well done.  Then...

Something quite ordinary The Sessions tells the story one man’s extraordinary misfortune — paralyzed by polio at age 6 — and of his equally extraordinary courage in living, loving, and finding a place in the world.  It also concerns an extraordinary kind of sex treatment — sex surrogacy — where the...

Sex therapist in the ‘hood  Several years ago, a merchant in my neighborhood learned that I was both an MD and a sex therapist.  The next time I was in his shop, he asked me if I could get him some Viagra. “How long have you had erection problems?” I asked....

A question of authority One afternoon 25 years ago, I found myself on a witness stand as a medical expert in a legal hearing concerning a patient of mine.   I was a young doctor at the time, just recently out of training. I had just been called as a witness...

I’m not usually one to linger on obituaries, but this one held my attention all the way to the end:  The New York Times’ July 24, 2013 obituary of the 1960’s prizefighter Emile Griffith, during whose distinguished boxing career rumors apparently circulated that he was gay. Now at the time of his death...

When the call came from CBS This Morning  to come discuss two new anthropological papers on the origins of monogamy, my first concern naturally was to make sure I didn’t say anything embarrassing on national TV. So I decided to make detailed notes as a precautionary measure.   But I learned that...

An open secret about good sex therapy We sex therapists aren’t so interested in orgasms.  We’re among the few humans on the planet who aren’t. Why not?  Because great orgasms don’t make for great lovemaking.  It’s great lovemaking that leads to great orgasms. Whether an orgasm happens — and whether...

A Book About Sexual Healing In a recent article in PsychologyToday, we began to discuss a new book, An Intimate Life,by Cheryl Cohen Greene — the sex surrogate whose treatment of the profoundly disabled poet Mark O’Brien was the subject of last year’s film The Sessions.  Those of you who saw The Sessions may remember...

Learning How to Talk Sex “Going Oral” Has Surprising Results In her new book An Intimate Life, sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene (the one portrayed by Helen Hunt in The Sessions) describes her work with a man who has been unable to get an erection with his wife. After much exploration, it...

Online Dating Lacks Community, Which Creates Trust As a sex therapist I spend a lot of time counseling single New Yorkers about how to find good partners. That’s gotten a lot easier since online dating has radically increased the number of people to choose from. But online dating has its disadvantages. It’s great...

Sexual Health Decision-Making is a Lot Simpler if You Understand Sexual Feelings Sexual health education for young adults would seem to be a simple matter — but unfortunately it’s not. Unfortunately, there are just too many competing political agendas. And where sexual health education is offered, it tends to be...

Fourth in a series of articles discussing A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a controversial new book by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam that uses the internet to study human sexuality in some new and unusual ways. Photo credit:  Pedrosimoes7 via Creative Commons   There’s an App for That Much like your average personal computer, the human...

“Simmering” for Couples: The World’s Easiest Sex Technique A man is about to leave the house in the morning to go to work. Kissing his wife goodbye, he buries his face in her hair to inhale her scent. His arms circle her waist to pull her closer. Her body molds...

No one objected to the book’s account of human sexual diversity. What brought a deluge of criticism was the author’s claim of an underlying order to men’s and women’s sexual tastes.  Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s new book A Billion Wicked Thoughts got a fair amount of media attention in the spring of 2011....

What They Are Reading: Stephen Snyder MD Weekly feature on book recommendations by researchers and therapists in sex and sexual health.   Stephen Snyder is reading Daniel Bergner’s  The Other Side of Desire. “The book consists of four individual portraits, each focusing on its subject’s sexual personality. Each is done with an...

The SexualityResource interview:What to do when size obsession gets out of hand  May 11, 2011 Men’s Health Magazine writer Tori Rodriguez interviewed me in 2011 an article, “The Obsession with Size,” in reaction to a British Journal of Urology report that found most men who had penis enlargement surgery had normally sized penises.  Ms. Rodriguez...

A Billion Sexy Clicks ABC News reporter Lara Salahi interviewed me in April 2011 on the occasion of the launch of a new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a groundbreaking internet study of human sexuality. Here’s the article: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sex/kinky-sex-men-women-seek-online-book-suggests/story?id=13481745&page=1   “I believe it gives the public information about something that we sex experts...

Wolf Love in Cosmopolitan   Cosmopolitan Magazine editor Jessica Knoll interviewed me for an article entitled “The Fierce Sex Every Couple Should Try” — inspired by my article, Wolf Love in the New YorkTimes. My piece in turn was inspired by all the vampires and werewolves in Twilight, and by Alex Pappademas’ cover...

Workplace Infidelity, On and Off the Set   Hollywood never fails to provide fodder for us to re-examine the problems people have with sexual monogamy. Justine Ashley Costanza interviewed me for the International Business Times following the media’s discovery that Twilight star Kristen Stewart had an affair with her director —  ...

In November 2012 I had the privilege of co-hosting Dolce and Gabbana’s media launch for its new scent, “Desire,” for the international fashion press in St Petersburg, Russia. The first day of the two-day event consisted of a presentation of the new scent — and a discussion of the erotic...

The best of the articles on scent and desire to come out of my stint with Dolce & Gabbana was Wendy Rodewald’s article in “Daily Makeover” — Here are some quotes from the article: We spoke with Dr. Stephen Snyder, a psychiatrist specializing in relationship issues, who’s working with Dolce & Gabbana for...

Yes, Bisexuality in Men Does Exist Even now in the 21st Century, bisexuality in men continues to worry heterosexual women. Many regard it as a non-starter, and won’t date a man who reveals he’s also attracted to men. Which is a shame, because we’re now recognizing that many men who...

Miley Cyrus made headlines in October 2013 by declaring that once you reached 40, your sex life was basically over. No one knew whether Miley was being serious or not. But I ended up in the Manhattan studio of Inside Edition anyway, to discuss middle aged middle aged sex—and to what extent it still exists....

“No-Orgasm Sex” May Be the Hottest Sex of All No-orgasm sex might sound like a recipe for frustration. And frankly most people enjoy having an orgasm at the end of good sex. But a great many women I talk to say they don’t absolutely need an orgasm in order for...

Erotic Self-Focus | Why She Wants You to Watch Sex researcher Marta Meana noted, as have many other observers, that a woman’s negative feelings about her body can have a disastrous effect on her erotic turn-on. But in an insightful twist, she also noted that the converse was also typical: ...

Late-in-Life Virginity — Its Causes and Consequences Late-in-life virginity — people who remain virgins until well into their 20’s, 30’s, or beyond, is a subject that as a sex therapist I’ve been interested in for a long time. So I was pleased to be interviewed by writer John Fortenbury for...

Lessons from the “Sex Spreadsheet Incident” Emily Mitchell, writing in Men’s Health online, questioned several sex therapists over the “sex spreadsheet incident,” in which a man sent his wife a spreadsheet showing how rarely she wife agreed to sex — and she proceeded to post it to Reddit. All sex therapists queried felt...

Cosmopolitan Magazine re “Why Wanting Rough Sex is More Common Than You Think” In the run-up to the opening of Fifty Shades of Grey at movie theaters Valentine’s Day 2015, I was interviewed for Cosmopolitan on the subject of “rough sex.” Here are my answers to some of the questions I...

Dr Snyder Interviewed by BuzzFeed on the Safety of (Ahem) Certain Current Sex Practices When BuzzFeed’s Casey Gueren wanted to know about the relative safety of a certain kind of sex practice, how could I say no? What sex practice, exactly? Well, they also sought the opinion of a proctologist and an...

“Let’s Talk About Sex . . . After Fifty”August 6, 2014#NBCToday Third Hour with Al Roker, Tamron Hall, Natalie Morales, and Dr. Lauren Streicher The occasion:  NBCToday Host Hoda Kotb turned fifty, and the NBC crew decided to celebrate it in grand style — they brought in Chicago gyn and menopause expert Dr...

Newsweek – Exploring the Sexual Revolution Anticipating the Fifty Shades of Grey movie launch Feb 14, Newsweek came out with a special edition:  “Exploring the Sexual Revolution.”  I was honored to be interviewed by Newsweek and Topix Media’s Jeff Ashworth for a full-page article on page 18 of the special issue: “Ana and Christian on the Couch.” Here...

For her May 2, 2015 Cosmo article, “8 Myths About Men You Need to Stop Believing,” writer Chiara Atik interviewed me about Delayed Ejaculation (DE), a male sexual dysfunction that’s flown under the radar screen forever. DE has long been rumored to be uncommon.  But in my sex therapy practice I frequently...

A man’s erection is often the most vulnerable part of his sexual response. Women are often baffled when a man loses his erection at the worst possible moment — typically just before penetration.  No one knows why, exactly. It’s one of the deep mysteries of human sexuality. Glamour Magazine’s Suzannah Weiss interviewed me this...

Men’s Fitness’ Justin DeMarco interviewed me along with several other sex experts for his fall 2015 article, “How Much Sex is Too Much Sex?” It’s a trendy topic these days, since we’re living in hyper-sexualized times. You can find new partners on your smartphone in seconds.  There seems to be a new...

Why is “DeadBedrooms” trending on Reddit? Sophie Saint Thomas interviewed me for her September 2015 article on sexless marriage and other sexless relationships for Connections.Mic — “The One Problem 20-Something Couples Have That No One Talks About.” Following on Salon Magazine’s “The Bed Death of Sexless Marriage is Real,”  and the surprising popularity of...

In the traditional Jewish world, a  man and woman not married to each other are forbidden to be alone together.  The Jewish laws covering this issue, collectively known as the laws of Yichud, are intended to counter the inherently stronger natural laws of  sexual attraction.  As strange as such laws might...

Will there ever be a “Viagra for women?”    If so, would it ever make it past the FDA?  And how many would women would really ever want to take it? In 2010, an FDA committee voted not to approve Boehringer-Ingelheim’s  flibanserin — a medication reported to somewhat improve female sexual desire....

Growing up, you come to learn that you’re not the center of the world — that the people who love you also have other concerns.  But eros is primitive, and your erotic mind is a poor student.  It remains fixated on an image of pure, absolute attention from an adoring other.   The power of...

Camille Paglia’s editorial in The New York Times, “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class, ” is a fun read, but she throws a lot of things together that I’m not sure really stick. According to Paglia,  over-education is an important source of diminished sexual desire among the ” anxious, overachieving, white upper middle...

At long last, ADHD and its marital consequences have reached The New York Times. Tara Parker-Pope’s July 20 column concerns the long-overdue recognition of the pivotal role that an individual’s having ADHD can have on a romantic partnership. The high incidence of marital distress and even divorce in such relationships. What’s remarkable...

The word “Deficit” in “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is seriously misleading. As any parent of a kid with ADHD will tell you, such children often have an astounding capacity for paying attention to something that happens to be immediately exciting, such as a video game. The problem is that they...

The following is reprinted  from Dr Snyder’s article “Are you ready for the truth?” — with permission from the original Italian publisher – WorkStyle Magazine Vol 4 (p. 32-33), July 2010. Because they’re there. The most common reason romantic love happens with coworkers is simply because they’re there. We spend a lot of time...

After posting two articles on ADHD and Marriage in response to a recent NYTimes article, I received several responses asking specifically about women with ADHD.    I decided to consult my favorite Women’s ADHD guru in New York City, Dr Laura Muggli. Laura, we hear a lot lately about ADHD and relationships, but it’s mostly...

We moderns tend to think of sexuality as the province of more-or-less monogamous couples, bound together by bonds of love, romantic possessiveness, and jealousy.   But according to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, at the “dawn” of mankind — the vast era dating from 200,000 to 10,000 years ago – things...

Sex Secrets of Our Ancestors Recently, SexualityResource reviewed Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn—a new book arguing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were sexual promiscuous in small groups. And that the development 10,000 years ago of agriculture, an ownership society, and sexual monogamy brought an end to this golden age of human sexuality....

Sex Therapy, Flibanserin, and the FDA October 29, 2014.    As many of you know, in 2010 Boehringer Ingelheim failed to win approval from the FDA committee charged with evaluating flibanserin for something called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in women. At the time, many observers argued that HSDD was a...

Simmering: A two minute technique for nourishing the erotic bond between partners. Useful for modern couples for whom the idea of leisure time is a quaint memory, but who’d like to stay in touch.   A Modern Dilemma Recently I had lunch with my colleague Eric Amaranth, and the conversation turned to...

As we get ready to close the books on 2010, I would like to express my gratitude to  family,  friends, and colleagues for your support and encouragement over the past year.   And to all my patients for your trust and confidence.   May we all merit much happiness in...

What Does a Woman Want? Freud, famously, claimed not to know.   In a letter to his student Marie Bonaparte, he wrote,  ‘The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does...

I just returned from the annual spring meeting of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research (SSTAR).  The Society gathers leading sex clinicians and researchers from all over the country and the world, and features the most recent developments in sexual science and practice. As a member of SSTAR’s Consumer Book Award committee, I had the privilege...

Just because you stop the medication, that doesn’t mean the problem will resolve. It’s been known for a long time that finasteride, commonly taken by men as Propecia to prevent hair loss, can occasionally cause loss of erections and loss of sexual desire. Last time in “Manhattan Sex Therapist’s Diary” we discussed...

Who Knew? It’s a scene that replays in my office several times a year. A couple comes to see me because the man has developed trouble with his erections.  Often accompanied by loss of sexual desire. I always make sure to review such a man’s medical status in the first...

As Simple As It Gets “Wolfgang likes to look at images of female derrieres.  He prefers certain poses:  bent over, legs splayed, leaning on her knuckles.  He like these images so much that he is willing to pay for the privilege of looking at them.   Sometimes he pays several times...

Thanks to Sherrie Bourg Carter, Psy.D. — author of the new book, High Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout (2011, Prometheus Books).  — for permission to reprint this interview from her blog, High Octane Women, on PsychologyToday.   The interview is part of a longer article,  Sex and the High Octane Woman.   Dr. Carter: Most...

The Trouble with Unisex Theories in Sex Research The big sex discoveries 50 years ago by Masters and Johnson concerned how the physiologies of male and female sexual response were so similar.  In the past decade, the big sex discovery has been that male and female sexual neuropsychology are so different....

Thanks to sexpert Megan Andelloux from Rhode Island’s Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health for permission to reprint the following interview (slightly modified) from her site www.thecsph.orgWhat do you do in the field of sexuality? I’m a New York City psychiatrist and psychotherapist specializing in sexuality and relationship issues. I also write...

As we get ready to leave 2011 behind, I would like as always to express my gratitude to family, friends and colleagues for your support and encouragement over the past year; and to my patients for your trust and confidence.   May we all merit much happiness in 2012. Here’s...

The cultivation of sexual mindfulness One rainy Friday afternoon in mid-summer, I traveled uptown to speak with Nicole Daedone, a former professor of semantics who now devotes herself full-time to teaching what must be one of the world’s most curious mindfulness techniques. At Daedone’s OneTaste Urban Retreat Center in San...

In the end, your patients’ opinions are the only ones that really matter. But when you’re a sex therapist, your patients tend for obvious reasons not to thank you in public.  So one relies on the judgment of colleagues. In New York City, the central clearinghouse for colleagues’ opinions has for...

The following article continues a discussion of new findings in sex research concerning bisexuality, prompted by the recent New York Magazine article, “Bisexuality Comes Out of the Closet,” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis.  See also—On Male Bisexuality: The Elle InterviewWhy is Male Sexuality Like the Higgs Boson?Bisexuality:  Out of the Closet at Last?  ...

What It’s Like for People With Social Anxiety on a Third Date Referrals for sex therapy often include some mention that the individual has some kind of “performance anxiety.”   The problem isn’t always anxiety.  In fact, any negative emotion can cause sexual trouble.  It can just as easily be guilt or...

What is a sex surrogate?   And how is a sex surrogate different from a sex therapist?   These questions go all the way back to the origin of both professions in the 1960’s.  The simple answer is that sex surrogates get naked with their clients, and sex therapists don’t....

There Are 7 Major Errors in the Recent New York Times Op-Ed on Pink Viagra. Let’s Clear Them Up. As a sex therapist who also happens to be a medical doctor, I’m used to disagreeing with a lot of what I read about sexual pharmacology. But the recent New York Times opinion piece “Nothing Is Wrong...

Women’s Sexual Desire Is Different We’ve learned a lot about women’s sexual desire in the last few decades. Back when sexologists were mostly male, sexual desire—or “libido” —used to be thought of as like some kind of hydraulic pressure in the body. Like the pressure most young men feel when...

Born to Flirt In 2010 I was approached by an Italian publication, WorkStyle Magazine,  who were interested in an article on why people fall in love with their office-mates — and how to avoid it. The article that resulted, Are You Ready For the Truth? Infidelity at the Office, and How to Avoid...

What’s Up With Millennial Kids and Freaky Erotica? For his June 13, 2015 article, Why Do Millennials Love Cartoon Porn So Much?  Cosmopolitan writer Frank Kobola interviewed me about why Millennials seem to gravitate to cartoons of far-out characters doing impossible things. I pointed out that sexual excitement ordinarily requires some element of transgression and novelty,...

The latest news about premature ejaculation has come in from Europe:  PRNewswire’s   “Men slow to talk about fast sex”.    It cites data from a new survey on PE, which confirmed something that we sex therapists have always known:   Premature ejaculation is a serious matter that adversely affects millions of men’s...

What Makes A Sex Therapist Different? Finding a good sex therapist isn’t easy. If you’re suffering from a sexual problem, it’s crucially important that you see someone who understands the difference between a sex therapist and a “regular therapist.” Often a “regular therapist” will advertise themselves as a sex therapist, when...

Sexless Marriage . . .and “Nearly-Sexless” Marriage  . There’s sexless marriage. And then there’s “nearly sexless marriage” — where a couple might only have sex a few times a year. Or as one patient of mine, an insurance executive, described it — “on a quarterly basis.” If sex on a quarterly...

Difficulty Ejaculating: Myths vs Reality. When I first started out as a sex therapist thirty years ago, I was taught that difficulty ejaculating was rare, that it was very hard to treat, and that it usually suggested deep-rooted psychological problems.   We now know these are all total myths. The...

Trouble Ejaculating and The Orgasmic Double Standard    Men who have trouble ejaculating are a misunderstood bunch. Women’s and men’s orgasm difficulties are really very similar. As I explained in my article, "Advice for Men Who Have Difficulty Ejaculating," an orgasm is really just a reflex. Male or female, people...

At the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey craze in 2012, Jeff Ashworth of Topix Media interviewed me for a single-edition magazine Fifty Shades of American Women published by Topix in Sept 2012. The two-page feature interview, “Putting Ana and Christian on the Couch,” covered many subjects familiar to readers of the Sexuality...

Huffington Post Love + Sex Podcast on “Open Relationships” For their May 21, 2015 Huffington Post Podcast, In Open Relationships, Are Women the Real Winners?,  HuffPo staffers Carina Kolodny and Noah Michelson interviewed several sex experts on the subject of “ethical non-monogamy.” In a line-up that included NYU psychology professor Zhana Vrangalova, Ph.D. and Dossie Easton, noted author of The...

10 Sex Questions from Cosmo As a sex therapist, someone who answers sex questions for a living, it’s always a pleasure to get asked questions by Cosmo. Here are some recent ones, along with the answers:   Question #1: What is “coital alignment technique”? A: Coital alignment” is a set...

On July 16, 2012 I was again on Sirius XM Doctor Radio from NYU Medical Center with my sex therapy colleague Virginia Sadock MD, Director of the Human Sexuality Training Program in the Department of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. We discussed the perennial issue of infidelity in the...

My first time on TV, where I got media-coached by Oprah. You can read all about it HERE  

Getting the Facts Right Flibanserin—the long-awaited “pink pill” for women with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD)—was finally approved by the FDA last August, after years of debate. But so far the only women who’ve actually been able to try it have been subjects in clinical research trials. No woman has yet...

In 2012 the world went temporarily crazy for Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold 100 million copies. It seemed every woman in America was reading E. L. James’ 3-volume erotic romance. We discussed the book at length on these pages, in articles such as “When Should a Sex Therapist Recommend Fifty Shades of Grey to...

After news of the Kristen Stewart mini-scandal broke this week, I was contacted by IBTimes writer Justine Ashley Costanza about infidelity amongst the famous and not-so-famous.   With her permission, I’m reprinting the conversation we had in preparation for her IBTimes article that appeared July 25th. Dr Snyder, you’ve said you’re sympathetic to...

Tim — First of all, congratulations on your upcoming move to New York City.  It’s a great town, and I’m sure you’ll love it here. As an athlete and a religious man, you will be a role model to many young people here.   So I’m writing to you today...

Now that Representative Anthony Weiner is reported to be seeking professional help, one question seems to be on many people’s minds: Help for what? That’s not clear.  Sending suggestive photos of oneself to young women is clearly personally and professionally hazardous.  But does it reflect a disorder requiring treatment? Common sense...