Elisa Brune is a writer and science journalist. She is the co-author, with Jean-Pierre Luminet, of Bonnes nouvelles des étoiles (2009).

As regards sexual pleasure, men and women are far from being equal. Only one third of all women say they regularly achieve orgasm. For the majority of women, sexual pleasure is a rare, even an unknown, experience. The sexual revolution may have relaxed moral constraints, weakened taboos, liberated both behaviour and discourse regarding sexuality, but none of these advances succeeded in closing the gap between how men and women experience sexual pleasure.
There would be no reason to take an interest in female pleasure if it were obvious for most women. But this is hardly the case, and the fact that women don’t achieve orgasm as they wish, or when they wish or with whom they wish means that an in-depth study of the subject is called for.
This wide-ranging book aims to review what is now known about female sexual pleasure. It covers such topics as the role that female sexual pleasure has played in human evolution, the results of scientific studies, what women themselves have to say, and how to achieve orgasm.
Everything we ever wanted to know about the female orgasm and that we didn’t dare ask.


To learn more about the female orgasm:
• A scientific approach that will awaken curiosity and overturn received ideas. Did prehistoric women have orgasms? Why was the term “hysteria” used when the subject was actually the female orgasm?
• A practical approach that answers questions about how to access sexual pleasure.