I once saw Joan Rivers talking about the prospect of women achieving multiple orgasms. “I’m lucky if both sides of my toaster pop,’” she quipped. Multiple orgasms may be a tall order, but we have become so used to the idea of women not orgasming at all, or faking orgasms, that it has become a stock comedy staple. How have we ended up like this? Why have we allowed this to happen, and, perhaps most importantly, is there anything that can be done to change it?
The orgasm gap is very real, and if you don’t believe Joan, it is well documented in the scientific research. In heterosexual sex, 95 per cent of men report usually or always experience an orgasm, compared to only 65 per cent of women. If orgasming was an A-Level, men are riding high on an A*, while women are scraping through with a C. What on earth is going on?
Things become even more confusing when you pan away from heterosexual sex. For a start, the orgasm gap all but disappears when we masturbate. Pretty much all of us can get ourselves there, so it’s not a biological issue.
What’s more, lesbians, or women who have sex with women, report always, or almost always, orgasming (86 per cent of the time). Gay men, or men who have sex with men, are clocking in at an impressive 89 per cent orgasm rate.
In study after study, it’s heterosexual women who are bringing up the rear, so to speak. Bisexual women are just ahead of straight women with an orgasm frequency rate of 66 per cent, which researchers believe is because sex with men is pulling their orgasm frequency down.
So, if women can almost always get there when flying solo or when they are with another woman (and men can do likewise), why does sex with a man seriously bring down a straight woman’s orgasming average?
It can’t be because men are just bad at sex, or are incapable of learning what a partner wants, because gay men are having a marvellous time of it.
This very issue was the subject of a recent research paper to come out of Rutgers University, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. A team of psychologists conducted two online questionnaires, one for heterosexual women and lesbians and another for bisexual women.
The first study asked 476 participants a series of questions around orgasming and how important it was to them. They were also asked about the kinds of sex they were having, how often they have sex, the duration, and levels of experimentation.
What they found was that orgasming was equally important to both lesbians and straight women, but lesbians not only achieved orgasm more frequently, they also had a higher expectation of orgasming than straight women.
Lesbians were also more willing to pursue having an orgasm than straight women were. Crucially, the research also found that lesbian sex involved significantly more clitoral stimulation than heterosexual sex does.
The second study revealed that orgasms were equally as important to bisexual women as they are to straight and lesbian women, but that they had far lower expectations of having one when they were with a male partner.
The physiological reason lesbians are having more orgasms than straight women do is because they focus much more on clitoral stimulation with their partners than straight men, and they do that for significantly longer too. I don’t think that will come as a huge surprise to anyone, but what isn’t so obvious is why this should be the case.
If the orgasm gap is largely down to clitoral stimulation, why aren’t heterosexual couples closing that gap by giving the mighty bean its dues? Why aren’t straight women enjoying the same levels of clitoral attentiveness that their lesbian sisters are?
Looking at the data, the researchers suggested that “sexual scripts associated with partner gender play a key role in the orgasm gap for women who have sex with men”. For me, this was something of a lightbulb moment.
The issue is not physical, it’s social. The script for most heterosexual intercourse is a bit of foreplay, then some penetration, and then when he has come, the whole thing is over. This is a message shaped and formed all around us; in films, in pornography, even in the basics of sex ed, and it’s nonsense! Where was it written that “thou shalt not come once thy partner has?”
That one has always made me rage. Why does sex have to finish just because he does? Would you leave a dinner date just because you finished your meal first? No! That would be insanely rude. You would stay until your date had finished.
When I think of all the straight sexual encounters I have had where I just didn’t get an orgasm because he got his, and then rolled over to go to sleep, it fills me with a deep, feminist rage. Not with him, but with myself.
Why didn’t I advocate for my own pleasure? Why did I allow that to happen? I think it’s because I too don’t really expect to come when I’m with a man. It’s sad but true, that’s the script, and I think it’s got a lot to do with our obsession with penetration.
Scripts around heterosexual sex are very focused on penile penetration, even though this is the sex act that is least likely to make a woman climax. Only 21 per cent of women can come through penile penetration alone, and yet we have hoodwinked ourselves into believing this is somehow the main event.
Even the word “foreplay” is part of this script because it frames all sex acts other than penetration as some kind of warm up act for the headliner of penetration. By prioritising penile penetration, alternative sex acts that actually bring women to orgasm have been pushed down the bill. Is it any wonder that straight women aren’t getting theirs?
You might think that regularly achieving orgasm with a partner is a trivial issue, but it really isn’t. Orgasming is directly linked to sexual satisfaction, so why have we straight women normalised just going without? Is heterosexual sex just for men to enjoy? Is that what we are saying?
The fact that women aren’t orgasming as much as men is a serious issue for the simple reason that heterosexual sex is still framed as being something men enjoy, and women endure. The old “lie back and think of England, ladies”. But we must not accept this as the natural state of things, because it’s not.
As this latest piece of research has shown, when we change the script and stop prioritising the act of penile penetration, women experience significantly higher levels of sexual satisfaction.
Changing heterosexual scripts is not an easy thing to do, especially for women, because it requires a lot of internal work to unpick them, not to mention the confidence required to say what you want in bed. We have all been influenced by the script that tells us women just don’t enjoy sex as much as men do, and that is bullshit. We all need to stop viewing a man’s orgasm as a foregone conclusion and a woman’s as a nice bonus.
Ladies, we all need to stop faking orgasms because you want him to think he’s doing well. If you’re not going to come, you need to be brave enough to just say that or tell him what will get you there.
Men, you need to stop thinking of penile penetration as the main course of sex; it isn’t. It might be your favourite dish, but it probably isn’t hers and if that’s all you are serving up, she’s going to be left hungry.
Lesbians are having significantly better sex than straight women, not because they are two women together, but because they are not being dictated to by sexual scripts that view clitoral stimulation as a polite courtsey. Their sex also doesn’t stop because one partner has come. It stops when they are both satisfied, and that is where we all need to get to.