Learn how to love yourself first.

That's what Ms Christina Low teaches women in her workshops on tantric sexuality.

The 36-year-old Singaporean tantra yoga and sex therapist believes that inhibition over their bodies and cultural taboos can profoundly influence women's sex drives, levels of arousal and even their ability to achieve orgasms.

'Sometimes, I get women in their 40s who say that they don't even know what an orgasm is, that they don't quite know how to really be free and enjoy sex,' Ms Low says.

According to her, tantra yoga acknowledges the fact that humans are sexual beings and it shows ways to harness that energy and use it wisely.

'It's not just about mechanically 'doing' but about moving away from a purely sexual need to feeling deep love,' she notes.

Overcoming inhibitions

In her practice, Ms Low works with singles and couples, either to help them improve their sex lives or to overcome sexual inhibitions and difficulties.

She sees about 30 women a month who attend singly, seeking help with sexual difficulties that she says are rooted in emotional and relationship problems.

'If the problems are medical, I refer them to a doctor,' Ms Low says.

Her clients range from young professionals to post-menopausal women who want to stay sexually active and couples who want to regain intimacy.

Ms Low said many Asian women are shy when it comes to making their sexual needs or preferences known.

'For instance, they are too insecure to say to their partner, 'I want you to go a little bit faster or slower',' she says.

Ms Low confirms the observation that women need to feel loved and wanted to really get into the mood, while this might not be such a huge factor for men.

'Just because a woman isn't in the mood doesn't mean she can't get in the mood,' she says. 'Women may not have the same 'spontaneous sexual neediness' men do, but they can be aroused. Men just need to learn to be better lovers.'

But some of her clients don't even know what it is to 'get into the mood'.

For instance, one client in her late 20s said she did not know what aroused her. Ms Low worked with her to discover the elements in her regular life that made her feel good.

'She finally told me that doing her hair at the salon or wearing a new, elegant dress made her feel confident, so she was able to tap into this confidence and harness it to feel sexually desirable and turned on,' she says. While Ms Low's talk of achieving 'multiple orgasms' through yoga may strike many as unusual, she views sex holistically, as an emotional and spiritual experience - one that can't be treated through medication alone.

'You can't really divorce it from feeling,' she says.

In the United States, a vocal group of leading women academics is echoing this sentiment, albeit from a different platform.

Launched in 2000 and calling itself The New View Campaign, this lobby group seeks to educate the public about what it calls the 'medicalisation of sex'. It objects to the narrow definitions of female sexual dysfunction (FSD), saying that it gives people the impression that complex sexual problems can be banished with the help of a magic potion.

The manifesto of this influential group has been reported extensively in leading media and medical journals.

Dr Leonore Tiefer, an American psychologist who is one of the leaders of the campaign, has put forth a women-centred definition of sexual problems.

Endorsed by the American College of Women's Health Physicians and the Association for Women in Psychology, this definition defines sexual problems as 'discontent or dissatisfaction with any emotional, physical or relational aspect of sexual experience'.

Dr Tiefer and her colleagues have argued that while many women feel a certain dissatisfaction or disinterest in sex, it is not necessarily a disease.

Experts like Dr John Bancroft from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University - the renowned institute for sex research - have also supported this view.

Dr Bancroft has been quoted by the British Medical Journal as saying that in many situations, inhibition of sexual desire is a healthy response for women facing stress, tiredness or relationship problems.

'The danger of portraying sexual difficulties as a dysfunction is that it is likely to encourage doctors to prescribe drugs to change sexual function when the attention should be paid to other aspects of the woman's life,' he says.

'It's also likely to make women think they have a malfunction when they do not.'