The Wonder Down Under by Nina Brochmann & Ellen Stokken Dahl

No, The Wonder Down Under is not a travel guide about Australia. It’s full title is The Wonder Down Under: A User’s Guide to the Vagina. And it was utterly fascinating and illuminating from start to finish.

Nina Brochmann & Ellen Stokken Dahl are medical students (probably fully fledged doctors by now) from Oslo who worked in the area of sexual health. They quickly realised that there were myths and misconceptions about pretty much every area of female genitalia and health. Their subsequent research revealed that they also had some of their own misconceptions to bust.

As a 50 year old woman, long interested and curious about her body, I have read widely on this topic over the years. Yet I learnt so much from this book, my head is still spinning!

My only disappointment is that Brochmann & Dahl stopped before peri-menopause. Trying to find accurate, up-to-date, easy to read information about this stage of female life is very challenging. Perhaps they will revise the next edition with a chapter or two on this long ignored, hidden side of female health?

one in three women has a responsive form of sexual desire. At the opposite end of the scale, there are the 15% who have the ‘classic’ spontaneous form of sexual desire, in which you feel desire for sex out of the blue. All the other women are somewhere in between the two. Now and then, they fancy having sex without quite understanding why, whereas other times, sex sounds like a bit of drag until they feel their body responding and their head slowly joins the party. Only a small group of around 5% lacks any desire for sex, whether spontaneous or responsive.