Why sex is still an anticlimax for women

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Research from the States is likely to inspire hollow laughter from straight women around the globe. The study, published in the journal Sexual Medicine, found that men of all age groups reported higher orgasm rates during intercourse — from 70 to 85 per cent — compared with 46 to 58 per cent among women. Yet, curiously, women having sex with women recorded higher rates of climax. The upshot: if women are the fair sex, it is clear which constitutes the unfair one.
The analysis relied on data from eight annual Singles in America surveys, funded and conducted by match.com in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute, the sexuality and relationships research programme at Indiana University. Accordingly it included more than 24,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 100.
The scientists were particularly interested in whether satisfaction differed according to age; their optimistic assumption being that orgasm inequality might diminish as straight women develop the confidence to issue demands, and their partners develop a greater ability to fulfil them. And, lo, the aforementioned hollow laughter now borders on the hysterical. For, again, while this was true of their sapphic sisters, senior heterosexuals revealed no ecstatic increase in female pleasure. Straight women start our sex lives down on our orgasmic luck and we end them equally frustrated.
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As Dr Amanda Gesselman, the study’s lead author, remarked: “We really, as a society, sort of prioritise men’s pleasure and undervalue women’s sexual pleasure. And I think that contributes to consistent disparities.” Sort of? She thinks? I realise that scientists prefer to talk in terms of what is proved but surely we might allow ourselves a little less equivocation here? Society has an orgasm gap and all of us should mind it.
As ever with matters sexual, one must issue an immediate caveat that there are myriad ways to experience enjoyment, climax merely one of them. However, in terms of quantifiable gratification, these figures indicate an exasperating state of disparity. The British stalwart Ann Summers has put the estimate at 1,734 missed orgasms during a lifetime.
Meanwhile, the notion that female sexuality is more vague, amorphous and non-orgasm-orientated than the “focused” male variety will strike many as sexist rot. For a start it feels unjust to use our ability to experience multiple orgasms as an argument to preclude our enjoying a single one (at least, during partnered sex). Meanwhile women can experience “blue vulva”, just as men complain of “blue balls”, occurring when blood flow to the genitals increases without being relieved, causing pain. Yet, is “blue vulva” a phrase bandied about to blackmail chaps into satisfying female needs? It is not.
Far from constituting any sort of revelation, this injustice has the status of a perennial one. A report published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour in 2016 put the statistics at 65 per cent of heterosexual women achieving orgasm during sex, compared with 95 per cent of chaps, with 86 per cent of lesbians achieving the big O. In this context the Kinsey figures feel less breaking news than a lamentable condition of heterosexual life; the fundamental inequality that straight women are stuck with.
When I was growing up in the Eighties, the joke was that most men didn’t know where the clitoris was located. This rather relied upon their being enlightened enough to know what the word meant — by no means a given. In her 2021 book Are You Coming? A Vagina Owner’s Guide to Orgasm, the Dutch journalist Laura Hiddinga argues: “Female pleasure is all about the clitoris. Most women, 80 per cent, cannot achieve orgasm through penetration alone … We wouldn’t have an orgasm gap if the clitoris wasn’t ignored.”
Even during the early Noughties, when I was briefly a sex columnist for this paper, I was forbidden to use the word “clitoris” because — according to my section editor — “no one wants to read that over breakfast”. Marmalade dropper or not, some would clearly have benefited from the public information element. That said, according to many women the issue is less a dearth of knowledge than a lack of expectation.
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As a thirtysomething friend says with a laugh: “My husband thinks being woke means understanding the clitoris, meaning now he can ignore it from an informed perspective.” “Better than the cursory flick,” chimes another, “the tokenistic fumble, then on with the real deal.” I am reminded of my first year at Oxford in 1990 when a story did the rounds that a friend’s boyfriend had ejaculated, sighed, then rolled over. Scandal ensued not because of this but because his inamorata herself then sighed, rolled over, and “finished the job”; an act condemned as “punchy”, “rude” and “castrating”.
The line that tends to be wheeled out at that point is that, where male anatomy is as obvious and straightforward as an erect member, its female counterpart is somehow “obscure”, invisibly elusive, requiring knowledge and arcane work. It doesn’t feel too cynical to interpret this as a euphemism for “something too many straight men decide not to engage with”.
After all, surely it is male arousal that is the more fragile: young men in a panic about premature ejaculation, with more than half of those aged 40 and above experiencing erectile issues. Although roughly the size of a pea, the clitoris is estimated to have about 8,000 sensory nerves, double that of the penis. Put a woman in the right sort of breeze and she can be aroused. Freud fantasised about penis envy but isn’t such erotic jealousy more likely the other way around? Hence all those patriarchal myths about insatiable women. These stereotypes simply suggest how longstanding the orgasm gap has been. For “insatiable” simply read: “less likely to be satisfied by penetration alone”.
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The final insult is that legions of men appear not to even realise the gap exists, occupying utopian erotic idylls in which male rapture is assumed to imply female exultation, their petites morts ours. Utopian, or perhaps wilful ignorance. As to the situation improving with age, evidence suggests it may get worse. “I had more orgasms as a teenager, pre-sex, during my ‘heavy-petting’ years,” a sixty-something confides. “It’s one of the ironies that led me to quit my 30-year-old marriage.”
The young women I discuss this with aren’t convinced matters are evolving; or only in so far as Gen Z are not prepared to put up with this dynamic, meaning celibacy may be preferred. “A big issue is the idea of when sex ends,” one university student observes. “Me and my female friends talk about this all the time. The sad thing is that sex is performance for a lot of girls, not least given how much it has become distorted by porn. Orgasms are something we do on our own.”
Equal rights surely deserve as much of a place in the bedroom as in the boardroom. Instead, as Laura Hiddinga puts it: “Orgasmic equality is feminism’s final frontier.”