Modern Love · The New York Times

Want to have better sex this year? Here’s how.

January 7, 2026·41 min·2 clips

Dr. Nicole McNichols cites data showing the gender gap in casual sex enjoyment completely disappears when women have an orgasm.

Anna talks with Dr. Nicole McNichols, who teaches a large university course on human sexuality and has spent years polling her students alongside nationally representative data, watching classroom results and the broader research converge almost exactly. McNichols calls herself a sex nerd, and the label fits. One study she teaches links casual sex, under the right conditions, to a higher GPA — a finding that catches Anna pleasantly off guard early on. But the episode moves quickly toward something more substantial. McNichols asks what a sexual experience actually feels like for the person having it, and the answers she has collected over time fall into roughly three groups. About a third of people report feeling empty afterward, and she notes that this version — the hollow, regret-adjacent one — is nearly the only version that gets told publicly. Another third describe something closer to exhilaration, with the anticipation and uncertainty of a lead-up carrying a pleasure of their own. The third group lands somewhere between those two. Anna and McNichols then move to the question most people carry into this kind of conversation without quite naming it: whether men and women experience casual sex differently. The gap is real, McNichols says, but much narrower than the standard account would suggest. And it disappears around one variable she states plainly: when women have orgasms, they enjoy casual sex on average just as much as men do. McNichols sits with that finding deliberately, saying 'let that sink in' twice, and the conversation holds there for a beat. From there, things turn practical. Anna asks what someone who wants to begin tonight — to start, as she puts it, the joyful, fun, flirty work of having better sex — should hold onto. McNichols answers with a mantra: own your pleasure. She means something specific by it: show up prepared to name what you want and communicate it, because mutual satisfaction starts with that kind of ownership. Taking responsibility for your own desire is what makes the rest possible. Anna laughs and says she knew there would be a mantra — knew it would be right there at the front. The warmth between them is easy throughout: a researcher who loves her subject, and a host who keeps finding the data funnier than she expected. The conversation ends with Anna saying she meant it about wanting a seat in McNichols' class, and McNichols saying done.

As heard by us

A candid, data-minded Modern Love conversation about pleasure, agency, and why better sex starts with owning what you want.

Better sex, in this Modern Love conversation, is framed less as performance advice than as a question of agency: what people want, how clearly they can say it, and whether pleasure is treated as something they are allowed to own. Anna's exchange with Dr.

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A sex researcher brings actual data to the conversation your last relationship probably never had.

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