So at some point you hope to sell headsets that do the brain stimulation?

That’s the plan. Though I’m a terrible capitalist because I came out of academia where you’re not supposed to make money doing this stuff.

But you could potentially make money with these headsets.

I think so. Like if I wanted to be unscrupulous, I’d just sell them now. But I think it makes sense to wait and do more work.

When you do start selling them, who do you think your customers will be?

Low sex drive is still the number one complaint of women in sexual health clinics. That’s been the case for a long time. There are many of those people for whom this probably will not work. That is, I think some people just have discrepant desire with their partner: their partner’s [sexual desire is] really high and they’re quite normal. A lot of the women who have low-drive complaints, it’s because their partner is like “go fix yourself.” This will not help them. It will not fix Bob.

But it is a complaint for which we only had the first FDA medication last year, Flibanserin. And when it came out it was hysterical because it was touted as the first female sex drug and such a big deal and it FLOPPED.

Where do you think Flibanserin went wrong?

There were a few different things. The effect was tiny. You’re getting 0.8 more satisfying sexual episodes per month. It’s like, “I don’t even get sex one more time? And I have to take this pill every day for the rest of my life? Are you kidding me?!”

I’m not asking you to wake up and take a pill every day. And frankly I would rather sell you something that’s likely to work. So one of the things we’re doing is asking questions in our study about who benefits from this treatment. If I bring someone in and do a little assessment of EEG, can I predict who is going to show a sexual increase after a brain stimulation? I want to be able to say “this is most likely to work for this type of woman, having this type of difficulty, or this type of a guy who’s having low drive.”

I want to just be a lot more careful and truthful about what this thing is actually doing, and hope people will appreciate the honesty.

Research scientist Heather Cohen wears one of the headsets Liberos is developing. (Courtesy of Nicole Prause)

Are you more motivated to answer unanswered scientific questions than to try to liberate women to have more sex?

Yes. These are things we should know.

I love the example of insomnia problems. Generally speaking, if we ask people, “have you ever jacked off to help yourself sleep at night?” people go, “Well, yeah, I’ve got this sleep problem, and I’ve tried everything.” But I used to work in behavioral medicine, I saw all the assessments, I worked out of research-supported treatments, and none of them talked about orgasm and its function in sleep. So I was like, “Well, I should see what the science is and maybe I can write something about it. Then I looked and I was like, “Oh crap, there is no science on it.” There’s literally nothing on orgasm facilitating sleep in humans. That is a great example of low-hanging fruit. I don’t know how to tell you to use orgasm to facilitate sleep. I don’t know if you should masturbate in bed and immediately try to sleep, I don’t know if you should do it half an hour before you go to bed, I don’t know if you should actually have an orgasm; maybe you should just get aroused. I don’t know the mechanism of that response. If I could understand, then maybe I could say “You know, instead of taking the [sleeping] pill, the melatonin, or whatever half an hour before you go to bed, try to rub one out.”

You’ve talked about how the benefits of sex and orgasms are not as well understood as they should be. But what do we know about the benefits?

There are very few documented general health benefits. Most are very speculative, which is nuts. For example, ejaculation makes male rats very sleepy, but there is no proof that this occurs in humans. A paper last month suggested that inflammation is lower in older adults who continue to have sex, but this could just be that those who can continue to have sex are healthier. The idea that regular masturbation reduces prostate cancer risk remains a matter of scientific debate. Sexual arousal improves pain tolerance, but whether this could actually help a systemic pain problem, like fibromyalgia, is speculative. This is exactly why I am so excited to do work in this area.

Do we know anything about whether orgasms achieved solo have the same, more, or fewer benefits than orgasms achieved with a loving partner?

Yes, there are a couple of studies that report greater fluctuations in [physiological] indicators with partnered sex or orgasm than masturbation orgasm. However, there is a major problem with these data: there is no way to tell if it was the presence of the partner or merely having higher intensity sexual arousal with a partner present that made the difference. For example, masturbation often is used in a very functional way when people are asked, [did they do it] “to relax,” or “because my partner didn’t want sex.” If people extended masturbation as long as sex with a partner, those “differences” might disappear. We just don’t know at this point.

How might sex be better in the future?

Right now there is a lot of technology in sex, but not a lot of innovation. There are tons and tons of new sex aids coming out all the time. I look at these things and they’re pretty and they seem reasonably well developed, but I have no idea what they’re going to do for women. There’s no reason to think what they’re doing is responsive to what women actually need. They don’t do any of the science to find out if it’s what would actually be arousing. They might be fun party tricks, some people will try them, but they don’t advance us, they’re not innovative.

I’m hoping in the future we’re going to have the basic physiological knowledge and it’s going to help with sex education and that also we will get more innovation, and not just technology.

And what is the end goal of your research? Is it just for more people to have better sex?

I actually don’t care too much about how many orgasms somebody has or whether they had the hottest sex ever with their husband.

What I’m hoping is that some of this innovation is going to help us point to, say, if we understand direct manual genital simulation makes this happen in your brain, maybe can find out it works in some way to help depression. It might not have the same effect as the antidepressant medication, it might not be as strong, BUT maybe we’ve found that it’s been able to sustain people who had to come off of meds because Trumpcare goes through and they can’t pay for them anymore.

Or maybe they’re dealing with chronic pain disorders. One of the best things for chronic pain disorders is regular exercise. But that’s a very hard sell for someone who’s hurting. What if I could tell them to try regular masturbation?

Those are actually useful things to know, and I’m not convinced that having orgasms 94 percent of time with your partner is interesting.

So you think sexual pleasure could eventually be recommended to treat physical and mental disorders?

Absolutely. I mean there are so many things that change with that change in state. I don’t even know the extent of it because there’s not a lot of work in that area, but high arousal states, orgasm — there is the potential for a lot there. It’s very early stages, but we’re already getting a lot of pushback from the anti-sex, anti-porn crowd that doesn’t want people to engage sexually for pleasure. So we’re going to be fighting this the whole way.