“It turns out that the key to great sex for women is a clean kitchen,” says Ian Kerner, a sex therapist, relationship counselor and author.

Studies have documented that women need to be much more relaxed and free from anxiety than men do to reach orgasm and coming into your dirty apartment (or worse coming home to the house you share that’s dirty and devoid of food!) isn’t relaxing.

What’s more, they’ve proven that your cooking and cleaning actually turns her on. “Men doing housework can have an aphrodisiacal effect on women, who report heightened sexual interest when their husbands start washing the dishes,” according to psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework. (Quoted in AdWeek Aug. 11, 2008)

And women know it: a relatively new book called Porn for Women sports a cover photo of a man vacuuming.

How many more clues do you need?

Well, here’s another one from Kerner: “As a sex therapist and relationship counselor, one of most common complaints I hear from women is that they bear the majority of the burden for household chores…Foreplay really is cleaning up the house when it’s a mess…Once guys start carrying their weight around the house, they’re apt to find that women have more energy inside the bedroom,” says Ian Kerner New York Times best-selling author of numerous books, including the recently published Sex Detox: a Program to Detoxify and Rejuvenate Your Love Life.

All of this was started by the Council on Contemporary Families, who reported that “equitable sharing of housework is associated with higher levels of marital satisfaction — and sometimes more sex too!”