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Books · 02 / 04 · Two-time New York Times bestselling author

Books thatchangedthe conversation.

Two New York Times bestsellers, written for the women whose doctors weren't trained to help them — and the partners, clinicians, and friends who needed a vocabulary that did not yet exist. Together, they helped name the modern field of female sexual medicine and made arousal physiology a household-vocabulary topic for the first time.

For Women Only — book cover
2001 · Henry Holt & Co.

For Women Only

A revolutionary guide to reclaiming your sex life from the body that owns it

For Women Only was the first mainstream book by a board-certified urologist to treat female sexual dysfunction as a medical condition rather than a psychological one. When the Bermans began writing it in the late 1990s, the published clinical literature on women's sexual health was vanishingly thin — most of what existed had been adapted, often clumsily, from research originally done on men.

The book set out to fix that. It walked patients through the vascular, hormonal, neurological, and pharmacological causes of low desire and arousal disorder, and gave them a vocabulary their doctors did not yet have. It became a New York Times bestseller, was selected as a Good Morning America Book Pick, and was eventually translated into eighteen languages.

Two decades later, it remains the most-cited reference clinicians hand to patients who have spent years being told that what they are feeling is not real.

NYT BestsellerGMA Book Pick18 Languages11 Weeks NYT List
2005 · Hyperion

Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman

Three keys to mind-blowing sex — what every woman wants her partner to know

If For Women Only built the diagnostic frame, Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman was the clinical playbook. Written four years later, after thousands of patient consultations and a decade of clinical research at the UCLA Female Sexual Medicine Center, it laid out — in plain, physician-direct language — what arousal actually is, how it actually works, and why it actually fails.

The book reached the Oprah Book Club, was featured on the Today Show, and made female arousal physiology a household-vocabulary topic for the first time. It was structured around three connected systems — the body, the relationship, and the self — and refused to treat any one of them as the real culprit while the other two went unmentioned.

Written for the women whose doctors weren't trained to help them, and for the partners who had been left to guess.

Oprah Book ClubToday Show FeatureNational Bestseller
Secrets of the Sexually Satisfied Woman — book cover
Press

What they wrote.

Required reading. The first serious medical book to take women's sexual health as seriously as it takes the cardiology of middle-aged men.
— The New York Times Book Review
An unflinching, plainly written look at what medicine has gotten wrong about women — and what to do about it.
— Oprah Magazine
The most useful book about female sexuality published in a generation. It assumes its reader is intelligent.
— Glamour
Specific, unembarrassed, grounded in twenty years of seeing patients who had been failed by the standard of care.
— Today Show
Two physicians, one diagnostic eye, and a refusal to let the conversation stay polite.
— Good Morning America
Reads less like a self-help book and more like the consultation you wish you could have had.
— Vogue
From the page · For Women Only

An excerpt.

The first thing I tell a new patient is that her body is not betraying her. It is reporting. Pain during sex is a measurement. Loss of desire is a measurement. The flat, distant feeling that something has gone quiet is a measurement. None of those readings are character defects, and none of them are imaginary, and none of them are something a woman is supposed to live with because she has crossed some arbitrary age threshold or because the man in front of her in a white coat does not happen to know what to do.

For most of the last century, when a woman walked into a doctor's office with a sexual complaint, she walked out with a referral to a therapist. The assumption was that the problem lived in her marriage, or in her childhood, or in her head. Sometimes it did. Often, it didn't. Sometimes the problem was a medication she had been on for ten years. Sometimes it was a hormone level no one had bothered to draw. Sometimes it was the long, slow vascular consequence of a disease nobody had thought to screen for in a forty-five-year-old woman because the textbooks had been written about men.

This book is the workup that conversation should have started with.

— For Women Only, Henry Holt & Co., 2001
Twenty years later

Why they still matter.

Dr. Jennifer Berman

The Women's Health Initiative results have been re-evaluated. Bioidentical hormone therapy has moved from fringe to standard of care for the patients it's indicated for. The vocabulary these books gave women — vascular insufficiency, androgen decline, arousal-disorder differential — is now the vocabulary any reasonable clinic uses. That part has changed.

What hasn't changed is the fifteen-minute appointment, the referral to a therapist, the panel that wasn't drawn, the SSRI no one warned would do this. Women still walk into clinics with sexual complaints and walk out with the same answers their mothers got. The infrastructure of care still lags the science by twenty years.

These two books are still in print because the gap between what medicine knows and what most women are offered is still wide enough to need a bridge. They are the bridge most patients reach for first.

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