How did female orgasms evolve over time. What is the biological purpose of female orgasms. Why do some women struggle to achieve orgasm. How does the female orgasm compare to male orgasm. What factors contribute to female sexual pleasure.

The Evolutionary Origins of Female Orgasm

The female orgasm has long been a subject of scientific curiosity and debate. A groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology sheds new light on the evolutionary origins of this complex physiological response. By examining the lineage of female orgasms across mammalian species, researchers have uncovered fascinating insights into how this phenomenon developed over time.

In more primitive, solitary mammals like cats and rabbits, ovulation is induced by mating. During copulation, these animals experience a physiological reaction similar to the human orgasm, accompanied by the release of prolactin, a hormone crucial for reproductive processes. This suggests that in our evolutionary past, the female orgasm played a direct role in facilitating reproduction.

As mammals evolved into more social creatures, ovulation became spontaneous rather than induced by mating. This shift allowed the female orgasm to become decoupled from its original reproductive function. In humans and other placental mammals, ovulation occurs independently of sexual stimulation, yet women still experience a surge of prolactin during orgasm.

Key Findings on the Evolution of Female Orgasm

• Primitive mammals exhibit male-induced ovulation linked to orgasm-like responses
• Evolution led to spontaneous ovulation in more complex mammals
• Female orgasm persisted despite losing its direct role in ovulation
• The clitoris migrated from inside the vaginal canal to its external position

This evolutionary perspective provides a new framework for understanding why female orgasms exist in humans despite not being necessary for conception. It appears to be an ancestral holdover, repurposed by evolution for reasons that remain unclear.

The Biological Mechanisms of Female Orgasm

While the evolutionary purpose of female orgasms may be debated, the biological mechanisms underlying this experience are becoming clearer. During sexual arousal and orgasm, a complex interplay of hormones, nerves, and physical responses occurs throughout the body.

One key player in the female orgasm is the hormone prolactin. Originally linked to ovulation in more primitive mammals, prolactin release during orgasm persists in humans. This hormonal surge may contribute to the feelings of satisfaction and relaxation often reported after orgasm.

Physiological Changes During Female Orgasm

1. Increased blood flow to the genitals
2. Muscle contractions in the vagina and uterus
3. Release of hormones like oxytocin and prolactin
4. Elevated heart rate and blood pressure
5. Flushing of the skin

The clitoris plays a central role in female sexual pleasure and orgasm. Interestingly, researchers found that as ovulation became spontaneous in more complex mammals, the clitoris migrated from inside the vaginal canal to its external position. This anatomical shift may have implications for sexual stimulation and orgasm in humans.

Challenges in Achieving Female Orgasm

Despite the biological capacity for orgasm, many women report difficulties in achieving climax, particularly during penetrative intercourse. This “orgasm gap” between men and women has been the subject of much research and discussion.

Why do some women struggle to reach orgasm? There are several potential factors at play:

• Anatomical differences in clitoral positioning
• Psychological factors like stress or anxiety
• Lack of adequate clitoral stimulation during intercourse
• Hormonal imbalances
• Medical conditions or medications affecting sexual response

It’s important to note that the ability to orgasm can change over time. Many women report increased ease in achieving orgasm as they age, likely due to greater self-knowledge, comfort with their bodies, and improved communication with partners.

The Role of the Clitoris in Female Sexual Pleasure

The clitoris is a highly sensitive organ dedicated solely to sexual pleasure. Unlike the penis, which serves both reproductive and urinary functions, the clitoris has no purpose other than to provide sensation. This unique anatomical feature plays a crucial role in female orgasm and sexual satisfaction.

Recent research has revealed that the clitoris is far more extensive than previously thought. While the external portion (the glans) is easily visible, the internal structure extends deep into the pelvis and wraps around the vagina. This internal clitoral complex may explain why some women can achieve orgasm through penetration alone, as it can be indirectly stimulated during intercourse.

Facts About the Clitoris

• Contains over 8,000 nerve endings, more than twice that of the penis
• Grows throughout a woman’s lifetime
• Becomes erect when aroused, similar to the penis
• Is the only human organ dedicated solely to pleasure

Understanding the anatomy and importance of the clitoris can help both women and their partners enhance sexual pleasure and increase the likelihood of orgasm.

Comparing Male and Female Orgasms

While male and female orgasms share some similarities, there are also notable differences in their frequency, duration, and physiological characteristics. These disparities can be attributed to both biological and social factors.

Key Differences Between Male and Female Orgasms

• Frequency: Men typically orgasm more consistently during sexual encounters
• Duration: Female orgasms often last longer than male orgasms
• Multiple orgasms: Women are more likely to experience multiple orgasms in succession
• Ejaculation: Male orgasms are usually accompanied by ejaculation, while female ejaculation is less common
• Refractory period: Men typically require a recovery period before achieving another orgasm, while women may not

It’s important to note that these are general trends, and individual experiences can vary widely. The perception that men “always” orgasm while women struggle is an oversimplification. Many men experience difficulties with orgasm or erectile function, particularly as they age or due to health issues.

Factors Influencing Female Sexual Pleasure and Orgasm

Achieving sexual pleasure and orgasm is a complex interplay of physical, psychological, and relational factors. For women, several key elements can influence their ability to experience satisfying sexual encounters and reach climax.

Physical Factors

• Hormonal balance
• Overall health and fitness
• Pelvic floor muscle strength
• Sensitivity of erogenous zones

Psychological Factors

• Stress levels
• Body image and self-esteem
• Past sexual experiences or trauma
• Mental health conditions like depression or anxiety

Relational Factors

• Communication with sexual partners
• Trust and emotional intimacy
• Sexual compatibility and shared desires
• Partner’s knowledge of female anatomy and pleasure

By addressing these various factors, women can work towards more fulfilling sexual experiences and increased orgasmic potential. This may involve lifestyle changes, therapy, open communication with partners, or exploring different types of sexual stimulation.

The Importance of Sexual Education and Communication

Comprehensive sexual education plays a crucial role in promoting healthy sexual experiences and orgasmic potential for women. Many misconceptions about female sexuality persist, leading to unrealistic expectations and potential frustration for both women and their partners.

Effective sexual education should cover not only the basics of reproduction but also:

• Detailed female anatomy, including the clitoris and its role in pleasure
• The diversity of sexual responses among women
• The importance of non-penetrative sexual activities
• Techniques for enhancing arousal and achieving orgasm
• The role of communication in sexual satisfaction

Open and honest communication between sexual partners is equally important. By discussing preferences, boundaries, and desires, couples can work together to create more satisfying sexual experiences. This dialogue can help address any misconceptions or insecurities, leading to greater intimacy and mutual understanding.

Tips for Improving Sexual Communication

1. Choose a comfortable, non-sexual setting for discussions
2. Use “I” statements to express feelings and desires
3. Be specific about what feels good and what doesn’t
4. Listen actively and without judgment
5. Be open to trying new things together

By combining accurate knowledge with open communication, women and their partners can work towards more fulfilling sexual experiences and increased orgasmic potential.

Exploring Different Types of Female Orgasms

While the clitoral orgasm is often considered the most common and easily achievable for women, there are various types of orgasms that women can experience. Understanding these different sensations can help women explore their bodies and expand their sexual repertoire.

Types of Female Orgasms

• Clitoral orgasm: Achieved through direct or indirect stimulation of the clitoris
• Vaginal orgasm: Resulting from penetration and stimulation of the G-spot or other internal erogenous zones
• Blended orgasm: A combination of clitoral and vaginal stimulation
• Cervical orgasm: Deep penetration stimulating the cervix
• Anal orgasm: Stimulation of nerve endings in and around the anus
• Nipple orgasm: Achieved through breast and nipple stimulation

It’s important to note that not all women will experience all types of orgasms, and individual preferences can vary widely. Some women may find certain types of stimulation more pleasurable than others. Exploring different techniques and sensations can lead to new and enjoyable sexual experiences.

The Role of Fantasy and Mental Stimulation

While physical stimulation is often emphasized, the power of mental arousal should not be underestimated. For many women, fantasy, erotic thoughts, or even non-genital stimulation can lead to orgasm. This highlights the complex interplay between mind and body in female sexual response.

By embracing the diversity of orgasmic experiences and remaining open to exploration, women can continue to discover new sources of pleasure throughout their lives. This journey of sexual self-discovery can lead to greater self-awareness, confidence, and overall sexual satisfaction.

Why is it harder for people with vaginas to orgasm?

How come some girls don’t come at all? And guys always do. I don’t really understand. My sis said is becuz guys “are at their peak” .She says it takes a while for girls and they will start “coming” when they get a little older like 20 or 25. Please help i’m really confused!

People with vaginas may feel like they have an orgasm – aka cum or climax – less easily or less often than people with penises.

Many people with vaginas have trouble reaching orgasm through penis-in-vagina sex alone. Most of those people have an easier time with orgasm through having more variety in stimulation, like touching or rubbing of their clitoris, oral sex, vaginal sex, etc. So if you’re having trouble with orgasms, you may want to try different types of sexual stimulation to see what feels good for you. 

If you’re not sure what would feel good for you, masturbation is a great way to get to know your body. Once you know, you can communicate that to your partner to help sex feel good.

Keep in mind, everyone’s body responds differently, and every person has different preferences for how they like to be sexual with someone. That’s why communicating with your partner is very important. Our partners can’t read our minds, so it’s important to be clear about what feels good and what doesn’t, and what we do and don’t want to do.

You may find as you get older that you have an easier time having orgasms because you have more knowledge of what you like sexually, and because you’re more comfortable communicating with your partners about what you like and don’t like.

And people with penises don’t always have orgasms — it’s not uncommon for them to have trouble with orgasms, or getting or keeping an erection. Sexual pleasure has a lot to do with emotion and relaxation. It’s harder to enjoy sex or orgasm if you’re uncomfortable, self-conscious, or don’t feel quite right about what’s going on.

Learn more about orgasm and masturbation.

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Where does female orgasm come from? Scientists think they know

It’s tempting to listen to women’s magazines and believe female orgasms are a small pleasure to make up for periods and pregnancy, what they might call the raw end of Darwin’s deal. But a study published Monday shows that as mammals developed from solitary creatures to societal ones, ovulation became more automatic, and both the orgasm and the clitoris lost their reproductive roles.

Why it matters:

In some mammals, sex stimulates hormone release and is required for ovulation. Somewhere along the way, intercourse became divorced from that biochemical windfall. But when? And how? It’s not easy to study this aspect of sexual arousal in our predecessors. 

The new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, took a look at the lineage of the human female orgasm, tracing it back to a similar biological response earlier female mammals have when they have sex.

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Since Aristotle, researchers have looked for the biological and functional purposes of the female orgasm. Men need to have an orgasm to release sperm, but women do not need to orgasm to ovulate or become pregnant. Some researchers have suggested that orgasms persist because they have a psychological function in reproduction — they feel good, so they encourage women to have more sex.

The researchers behind the new study ask: Where does the female orgasm come from?

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The nitty gritty:

Mihaela Pavličev, in the department of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and Günter Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, compared more primitive mammals with more complex ones to see how female orgasm diverged from ovulation.

Solitary animals, like cats and rabbits, experience male-induced ovulation — a mature egg is only released from the ovary during copulation. The researchers said there is evidence of a physiological reaction similar to human climax, and when they ovulate, a hormone called prolactin is released.

But women also experience a surge of prolactin when they orgasm, even if they don’t ovulate at that time. The new study shows that female orgasm, and the concomitant hormone release, is likely an ancestral holdover of its reproductive function, because humans and other placental mammals, like primates, ovulate spontaneously. As induced ovulation evolved into spontaneous ovulation, the female orgasm was freed up for another purpose, albeit one without a clear role in human reproduction. Wagner and Pavličev also found that as ovulation stopped depending on orgasm, the clitoris stopped being located inside the vaginal canal.

“Female orgasm is an evolutionary vestige like the appendix,” said Wagner. “It can be used for something, but it is not clear if it has a function beyond psychological bonding between partners,” he said. Wagner compares the female orgasm to the human ability to appreciate music and other, finer aspects of life. “The value of something the human body is capable of does not have to be functional,” he said.

And while the female orgasm has evolved beyond its ancestral role, it can still speed up ovulation in humans — but only if ovulation was going to occur within the hour, said Wagner.

What’s next:

It may have lost its biological function, but the female orgasm is here to stay. That’s because the clitoris and the penis develop from the same part of the embryo. “If the clitoris went away through evolution, so may the penis,” said Wagner. No penis means no way for sperm to naturally enter a woman’s body, so unless we reproduce via medical procedures like in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, this could threaten the survival of the human race.

Men have nipples for a similar reason — they are left over from a previous stage of the embryo’s development, and don’t have a function besides heightened sexual pleasure. But they are indispensable in women, and for that reason, remain part of male anatomy.

What they’re saying:

To be sure, humans today have sex for reasons that stretch far beyond reproduction.

“The paper is a new way of looking at why females have orgasms, but I don’t think we’ll ever quite figure it out,” said Caroline Pukall, a psychology professor and authority on human sexuality at Queen’s University who was not involved with the new study.

Our basic needs have been met, and “we are able to do more than try to survive,” said Pukall, who is also a sex therapist. Instead of trying to get pregnant, she said, many humans are now trying to limit their fertility. Plenty of people who choose not to have children, or have intercourse with partners of the same sex, still have orgasms, she said, adding, “The argument is clever and compelling, but it doesn’t capture our passions and need for bonding.”

The bottom line:

Female orgasm may have evolved beyond helping us reproduce, but it is still a key part of sex — it makes women feel good and strengthens bonds between partners.

“All of life is much more complex than we give it credit for,” said Wagner.

14 Facts About Female Orgasms — Surprising Facts About Women’s Orgasms

Psst — you over there. Guess what? We’re going to talk about orgasms. Specifically, the female orgasm. Why? Well, there are probably a lot of things about the female orgasm that you probably don’t know. Some of these facts about orgasms revolve around their mental and physical benefits, like an improved immune system and reduced pain. Some are facts that debunk all-too-common myths, like condoms prevent you from climaxing. (P.S. – They don’t.) Regardless, knowing everything there is to know about the female orgasm can make the experience much more pleasurable.

So now’s the time to expand your knowledge. This is everything you ever wanted to know about an orgasm, and hopefully your next sexual experience will be your best one yet.

1. Orgasms can relieve pain.

When you have a headache, it’s pretty common to go to bed. But you shouldn’t be sleeping. “There is some evidence that orgasms can relieve all kinds of pain, including pain from arthritis, pain after surgery, and even pain during childbirth,” Lisa Stern, R.N., a nurse practitioner who works with Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles, tells Woman’s Day. This is largely due to the body’s release of oxytocin during orgasm, a chemical that facilitates bonding, relaxation, and other positive emotional states, she explains. Although the pain relief is often short-lived at about 8 to 10 minutes, Stern says that past research indicates even thinking about sex can help alleviate pain.

2. Using a condom doesn’t hamper your orgasm.

A lot of people think that because sex can often feel better without a condom that their orgasm will too. But that’s not the case. “Women are equally likely to experience orgasm with or without a condom,” Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., a research scientist at Indiana University and author of Because It Feels Good, tells Woman’s Day. “In fact, condoms may help a couple spend more time having sex, as a man doesn’t have to ‘pull out’ quickly if he’s worried about ejaculating too soon.” If he’s resistant to wearing a condom because of lack of sensation, consider manual or oral stimulation before intercourse.

3. It’s not easy for women to reach orgasm.

According to a 2018 study, 10 to 40% of women report having difficulty or an inability to reach orgasm. So your inability to hit your climax is actually more common than you think. The issue is that there are so many reasons why a person may not be able to orgasm, that it’s hard to pinpoint your exact cause. Reasons range from stress and anxiety to medical issues and past trauma, according to the study. Another bit of research also found that age, arousal difficulty, and lubrication were the top reasons why women couldn’t orgasm. Regardless of the reasons, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor to rule out any other underlying roadblocks — be them physical or emotional.

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4. The G-spot may not actually exist.

“The G-spot is a controversial topic,” Dr. Jodie Horton, MD, an advisor for Love Wellness, tells Woman’s Day. In 2012, a study declared that the G-spot was, in fact, real, and that it was composed of an upper pole (or head) and a lower pole (tail). It also stated that it contained a sac with walls that resembled erectile tissue. But a 2017 dissection of 13 female cadavers found no such structure. Regardless, according to one study, more than half of women believe that the G-spot does exist.

So what are people talking about when they talk about the G-spot? Well, one study suggests that the squishy tissue you feel when you insert your fingers against the inner wall of your vagina is your urethra tissue, which is surrounded by the arms of your clitoris. So we may all just be stimulating our clitoris internally when we’re using our G-spot vibes. “It is believed that stimulation of the G-spot can indirectly stimulate the clitoris and vagina, leading to intense pleasure,” Dr. Horton says. “At the same time, other females are not able to find it.”

One thing that is certain, though? If it feels good for you, it can’t be bad. So if you feel that stimulation of the part of your body that may or may not be your G-spot is getting you off, keep on stimulating!

5.

Orgasm gets better with age.

There are plenty of things to gripe about when it comes to age, but your sex life isn’t one of them. It turns out that as you get older, the quality and frequency of orgasms can improve, Dr. Herbenick says. “[A recent survey showed that] 61 percent of women ages 18 to 24 experienced orgasm the last time they had sex, 65 percent of women in their 30s did, and about 70 percent of women in their 40s and 50s did.”

With age comes more confidence and trust in the bedroom, which can allow a woman to relax more and truly enjoy their orgasm.

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Although the survey didn’t indicate why exactly orgasms become easier with age, Dr. Herbenick says that it’s likely because older women are more sexually experienced, have more confidence in the bedroom, and aren’t afraid to speak up for what they want. There may also be more trust and intimacy involved if you’re in a long-term relationship, which can allow a woman to relax more and embrace the ride on the way to orgasm.

6. Mixing things up can help.

If you have trouble reaching orgasm during intercourse, consider switching things up, Dr. Herbenick says. “It is significantly easier for women to experience orgasm when they engage in a variety of sex acts as opposed to just one act,” she says. “For example, vaginal sex plus oral sex would be linked to a higher likelihood of orgasm than either one of them alone.” And remember, intercourse isn’t the only way to reach an orgasm — many women get off by using sex toys, either with their partners or totally solo.

7. Your self-esteem matters.

Research shows that how a woman feels about herself — including her genitalia — is linked to the quality of her orgasms. “As a women’s health clinician, I can vouch for the fact that every vagina looks different and there is no ‘perfect’ way for a vagina to look,” Stern says. “As long as your vagina is pain-free and you don’t have any abnormal discharge, sores or other medical problems, you can consider yourself healthy and normal. ”

To increase your confidence (and, therefore, your orgasm potential), Stern says it’s important to talk to yourself in a positive, healthy manner, especially when thinking about your body. One way to do that? Look in the mirror every day and say one thing you like about your body. (No repeats from the day before!) Another trick: Pull out a hand mirror and take a look at what’s going on downstairs. Getting to know every part of yourself is the first step toward feeling confident all over.

8. It may take more than 10 minutes to orgasm.

Many women take longer to climax than their male partners, and that’s perfectly normal, Stern says. In fact, most women require at least 13 minutes of sexual activity to climax. “If you find that your partner often reaches orgasm before you do, there are ways to help him slow down, like applying firm pressure around the base of the penis,” she says. If premature ejaculation is a concern, Stern recommends seeing a primary care doctor or urologist to find alternative techniques that can help.

9.

You may not need genital stimulation to orgasm.

If you’ve ever felt supremely turned on and close to the edge of orgasm without vaginal or clitoral stimulation, you’re not alone. There are literal support groups online for people who experience “spontaneous orgasm” — or orgasms that occur without genital stimulation. The reason for why this happens is unclear, but a recent study out of Rutgers University may have a clue.

Nipple stimulation, and other forms of forepaly, could help you reach orgasm.

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Using brain scans, researchers tracked which areas of the brain lit up during types of stimulation. And while the genital-sensing brain areas in women roughly corresponded to the same areas in men, something else happened when they got to the nipples. When they were stimulated, the sensation traveled to the same part of the brain as the vagina, clitoris, and cervix, lighting up the same way that it would if those areas were being stimulated. Researchers have a reason for why this may happen: Stimulating the nipples releases oxytocin, which is the same hormone that triggers uterus contractions during labor. So nipple stimulation might trigger uterine contractions, which then trigger the genital area of the brain.

10. More than 50% of women have faked an orgasm — and that’s OK.

Guess what? There are a lot of women who fake orgasms. In fact, one study found that 58.8% of women have faked an orgasm at one point in their life. And the reasons are all over the place: 57.1% wanted their partner to feel successful, 44.6% wanted sex to end, and 37.7% liked their partner and didn’t want them to feel bad. “Expressing our sexual needs has become taboo, especially for women,” Dr. Horton says. “Society has put a lot of pressure on women to have an orgasm, which can lead to performance anxiety and guilt.”

There is good news, though. That same study found that the most common reasons for no longer faking orgasms were all positives: 46. 6% felt more comfortable with sex, whether or not an orgasm occurred; 35.3% felt more confident in themselves; and 34% felt like their partner accepted them and is happy with them even if they don’t have an orgasm. “Having an open conversation about how we want to be touched and what gives us pleasure can lead to increased satisfaction in the bedroom,” Dr. Horton says. “It’s important to empower women to have orgasms on their own terms, but also understand that you can be satisfied sexually without having one, too.”

11.

Cannabis may help you orgasm, whether you apply it topically or ingest it.

Although there isn’t a ton of research on how cannabis affects your sex life (it is, after all, still a schedule I drug in the US), there is a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that it might help increase libido and the ability to orgasm. For one, cannabis is a vasodilator, which means that it opens blood vessels, increasing blood flow — which also happens when you’re aroused. In women, that is useful, because that blood flow also leads to natural lubrication. One study found that women who used cannabis before sex reported “satisfaction in the sexual domanis of drive, orgasm, lubrication, dyspareunia [pain during penetration], and overall sexual experience.”

In fact, cannabis’ability to blunt painful sensations while also enhancing pleasurable ones may give hope to those who suffer from ailments like vulvodynia and vaginismis.There is also evidence that points to cannabis can be useful in helping sexual assault survivors reclaim their sex life, as evidenced by its possible treatment for anxiety disorders. And even though the research is lacking, anecdotal evidence isn’t. Surveys show that plenty of folks are already leaning on cannabis to help enhance their time in the bedroom.

12.

There are four stages of the female orgasm.

According to Dr. Horton, orgasm is broken down into four distinct stages: excitement, plateau, the actual orgasm, and the resolution. “The excitement phase is when arousal builds. The plateau phase happens when arousal increases and levels off,” says Dr. Horton. “This leads to the third phase: orgasm, which is the intense feeling of pleasure, followed by resolution, when arousal diminishes.” But some research shows that women may not go through those phases in that exact order. For example, you may cycle through excitement and plateau a few times before reaching orgasm.

The four stages are what allow women to have multiple orgasms.

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And according to Dr. Horton, it’s possible to have more orgasms after the resolution phase, which is the one spot where women edge out over men. They need a rest after their resolution phase.

13.

The most common type of orgasm comes from clitoral stimulation, not penetration.

If you’re not someone who can orgasm from vaginal penetration only, you’re not alone. In fact, one study showed that only 6% of women said they always had an orgasm during penetrative sex. Another study showed that 36.6% of women needed clitorial stimulation in order to achieve orgasm. There are a bunch of ways that you can incorporate clitoral stimulation into penetrative sex, though. Positions like doggy or woman-on-top allow easy access to your clit, so you can stroke it while you’re having sex. And remember — you don’t have to have an orgasm during sex, either. Try some extended foreplay to get you off before sex actually kicks off. That way you can just relax and enjoy yourself.

14.

One study suggest that lesbians are orgasming more than all other women.

You’ve probably heard of the orgasm gap between men and women — but there’s also, apparently, an orgasm gap between lesbians and bisexual and heterosexual women. One study showed that 86% of lesbians reported usually having an orgasm, while only 66% of bisexual women and 65% of heterosexual women reported the same. And that, apparently, has to do with the type of sex they’re having. That same study found that women who orgasmed more frequently had sexual encounters that included deep kissing, manual genital stimulation, and/or oral sex in addition to vaginal intercourse. In other words? More focus on foreplay!

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What Does an Orgasm Feel Like? 17 Women Talk Orgasms

If you ask 17 women “What does an orgasm feel like?” you’ll get 17 slightly different answers. Just like every body is different, every orgasm is different, but they all have one thing in common: They feel good. Whether from partnered sex or masturbation, there are few things that hit the spot as much as achieving orgasm.

What Is an Orgasm?

“The brain and central nervous system are responsible for sexual responses like orgasm,” says Heather Corinna, author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College and founder of sex education site Scarleteen. “During sexual pleasure, all the nerve endings of your body (including your genitals, all linked to your nervous system) are in concert and communication with your brain, and vice-versa.”

What Does an Orgasm Feel Like?

The way orgasms feel varies from person to person. Here, we asked 17 women what an orgasm feels like and here’s what they had to say.

“Screaming for joy. Feeling everything and nothing at the same time.”

“Like tangling up a bunch of Christmas lights inside you and then blowing a fuse.”

“The stars emoji mixed with the explosion emoji.”

“I think the best thing about an orgasm is that you can’t really be thinking about anything else besides your own pleasure. It’s all-consuming and euphoric.”

“In romantic terms: Uninhibited release of control, of self-consciousness, of everything.”

“If you were to ask me to physically describe the feeling: It’s like a really wonderful and powerful sneeze in your vagina. The kind of sneeze that you can sense building up for a while, and then it happens and is just the most satisfying sneeze and you hope you have to sneeze again.”

“You know when Sailor Moon floats up into the air as a beam of light shines through her body and she transforms into a superhero? That.”

“The feeling is the same level of happiness as when you’re sprawled out on a lounge chair on a tropical beach, and unironically order a [non-alcoholic] strawberry daiquiri because you are unstoppable.”

“An orgasm feels like electric dominoes are falling down in different directions under your skin.”

“It’s a buildup of tension that arches your back and curls your toes, almost like a clenching feeling. And just when you think you can’t take it anymore, suddenly all that tension is released and pulses throughout your body. It’s the best relief.”

“Like a real moment in the day that’s just for you (and maybe your partner too, if you have one). It doesn’t work if you’re distracted, at least not for me.”

“When it’s really good it’s like an out-of-body experience, like I can feel my clitoris on a roller-coaster ride but my soul and mind are on a whole other level of connection with myself or the person I’m with and it takes over my body. Usually it leaves my whole body shaking and I can’t stand up for a few minutes.”

“It’s similar to your body falling off a cliff into a pile of tingling ecstasy. It’s a sense of sensual release that you find yourself having no control over and letting yourself go because it’s just too damn good. An earth-shattering female orgasm is one of a kind.”

“Like a hard candy and you suck on it and then all of a sudden you get to the center and it’s the burst of flavor.”

“The relief of walking up the stairs to your fifth-floor walk-up into your air-conditioned apartment. ”

“Like melting chocolate in the microwave.”

“Remember the first time you tried an avocado or ate avocado toast? That feeling of bliss and taste of deliciousness? That’s what an orgasm feels like.”

Benefits of Orgasms

Studies suggest that orgasms can actually benefit your health. Orgasms trigger the release of dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin, which, in addition to making you feel amazing, have also been shown to lower blood pressure. Women who masturbate to orgasm also report having higher self-esteem than women who don’t, leading to better overall mental health. Orgasms have even been shown to have positive effects on the gut health, improving digestion, decreasing bloating and ameliorating the negative effects of anxiety and depression.

Over half of American adults say they masturbate one to four times a week, according to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, making it an easy and popular way to reap the health benefits of regular orgasm. Another huge benefit? Better sleep.

“For people having difficulty sleeping, it helps them sleep,” said Dr. Jennifer Berman, urologist and sexual health expert. “It can help to limit stress and tension. It can help to relieve pain in the body. It can even relieve menstrual cramps.”

The best thing about getting to know your body and your sexuality is that you don’t need a partner to reap the benefits of orgasms.

Shailene Woodley said it best when she talked about the importance of young women learning about masturbation. “As a young woman you don’t learn how to pleasure yourself, you don’t learn what an orgasm should be, you don’t learn that you should have feelings of satisfaction. I’ve always had a dream of making a book called There’s No Right Way to Masturbate,” she said.

Related: 8 Reasons Why Everyone Should Masturbate

How Often Do Women Orgasm During Sex? – Kinsey Institute Research & Institute News

By Justin Lehmiller

What percent of the time do women reach orgasm during vaginal intercourse? Multiple studies have been published on this topic, but the results have varied consideriably, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

Why have the findings been so different from one study to the next? According to recent research in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, part of the reason may be due to the fact that scientists haven’t been asking the question in the same way across studies. The truth of the matter is that question wording matters when it comes to studying women’s orgasms. It matters a lot.

Most previous studies haven’t specified whether “vaginal intercourse” includes added clitoral stimulation or not. This is problematic because it means that different women may be interpreting the question in different ways. For example, some may assume intercourse includes clitoral stimulation, while others don’t. If so, this could potentially explain why there’s been so much inconsistency in research findings.

In this study, researchers surveyed more than 1,400 women about their experiences with orgasm using three different questions. Specifically, all participants answered the following:

1. “What percent of the time do you come to climax (orgasm) during vaginal intercourse (vaginal intercourse: the part of intercourse with a man that occurs while the man’s penis is in the woman’s vagina)?”(‘‘Intercourse in general’’)
2. “When having strictly vaginal intercourse (strictly vaginal intercourse: intercourse with no additional clitoral stimulation from hands or a vibrator at the same time vaginal intercourse is going on), what percent of the time do you reach orgasm?” (“Unassisted form”)
3. “When having intercourse with additional clitoral stimulation (intercourse with additional clitoral stimulation: intercourse with additional touching or rubbing of the clitoris with hands or a vibrator at the same time that intercourse is going on), what percent of the time do you reach orgasm?”(“Assisted form”)

It turned out that orgasm frequency varied substantially across these three questions.

Specifically, when asked about intercourse in general, 22% of women said they never experience orgasm. By contrast, this number dropped to 14% for “assisted” intercourse (i.e., when clitoral stimulation was specifically included), but increased to 37% when asked about “unassisted” intercourse (i.e., when clitoral stimulation was specifically excluded).

Likewise, on average, women said they reach orgasm 31-40% of the time in response to the question about intercourse in general. By contrast, women said they reached orgasm even more often with assisted intercourse (51-60% of the time), but less often with unassisted intercourse (21-30% of the time).

Altogether, what these results reveal is that when women are asked about their experiences with orgasm during vaginal intercourse in general, different women seem to be interpreting it in different ways. Some are thinking about intercourse alone (no clitoral stimulation), some are thinking about intercourse with added clitoral stimulation, and some appear to be thinking about both of these things at the same time and averaging them together

On a side note, it’s worth mentioning that, as part of this study, approximately 1,500 men were asked to estimate how often women orgasm during both the unassisted and assisted forms. They estimated that women orgasm 61-70% of the time during assisted intercourse, compared to 41-50% of the time during unassisted intercourse.

These numbers suggest that while men do seem to recognize the important role clitoral stimulation plays with respect to the female orgasm, they tend to overestimate how often women are actually reaching orgasm. Why is that? According to the study’s authors, this “may reflect men’s difficulty in accurately detecting women’s orgasms, or alternatively, men’s difficulty in detecting when women fake orgasm.”

Together, what all of these findings demonstrate is the importance of asking women and men alike clear and detailed questions about orgasms in survey research. This will not only help give us a better idea of how often women tend to reach orgasm when having sex, but it will also help to highlight the specific forms of stimulation that women find most pleasurable.

References:

Shirazi, T. , Renfro, K., Lloyd, E., & Wallen, K. (2017). Women’s Experience of Orgasm During Intercourse: Question Semantics Affect Women’s Reports and Men’s Estimates of Orgasm Occurrence. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

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Dr. Justin Lehmiller is an award winning educator and a prolific researcher and scholar. He has published articles in some of the leading journals on sex and relationships, written two textbooks, and produces the popular blog, Sex & Psychology. Dr. Lehmiller’s research topics include casual sex, sexual fantasy, sexual health, and friends with benefits. His latest book is Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Follow him on Twitter @JustinLehmiller.

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Related

Why do women have orgasms?

The reason for the female orgasm has long eluded scientists. Men need them for reproduction; women don’t. So why do female orgasms exist?

Scientists studying this issue are divided, said David Puts, a biological anthropologist at Penn State University. Some scientists think female orgasms are totally purposeless. But evidence suggests that they may have once helped (and perhaps still help) us survive and reproduce.

One theory holds that women have orgasms because men have them, said Kimberly Russell, an ecologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Some researchers argue that female orgasms exist because as fetuses, we all start out with the same basic parts, regardless of sex. Orgasms in women, like nipples on men, just happen to stick around.

Related: What’s an orgasm?

“It might be an anatomical bonus,” she told Live Science. In this scenario, the orgasm didn’t evolve specifically for females, and it might not serve a specific evolutionary function for them. 

But there’s a problem with the argument that orgasms have no function, said Patricia Brennan, an evolutionary biologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. It’s not adaptive for our bodies to devote too much energy to traits, like nipples, that aren’t beneficial. These traits tend to disappear or become less pronounced over time. That’s far from the case for female orgasms, she said. According to the Kinsey Institute, female orgasms tend to last longer than male orgasms and can occur multiple times in a row — something that’s rare in men. In other words, female orgasms use a lot of energy for a trait that supposedly has no function, she said.

Plus, there’s nothing diminished about the anatomical structures involved in the female orgasm, Brennan noted.

The clitoris, a highly sensitive part of the female genitals that has a key role in orgasms, is homologous to the penis. Like male and female nipples, they grow from the same anatomical structure. But contrary to popular belief, Brennan told Live Science, “a clitoris is not just a mini penis.”

The human clitoris has “structures that are incredibly well developed,” Brennan said. “To me, that screams selection.”

There are multiple theories about how, exactly, the female orgasm helped our ancestors pass on their genes. Although women don’t need to have an orgasm to conceive, some research suggests that wasn’t always the case. Many female mammals, including rabbits and cats, ovulate only when they mate. Based on an analysis of how traits have been passed down through the tree of life, one study published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology found that our female ancestors probably needed orgasms in order to reproduce.

But again, this theory doesn’t explain why orgasms stuck around in women, Brennan said. 

“If orgasms evolved for some adaptive reason, but they’re no longer adaptive, they should have disappeared. And clearly they haven’t gone away,” Brennan said.

Some research suggests that orgasms still create the perfect conditions for conception — even if they’re not necessary to ovulate. One study found that women who had orgasms close to when their male partner did actually “upsucked” more sperm into their bodies compared with women who had orgasms much earlier or later than their partner. Scientists have even tried to draw correlations between the number of orgasms a woman has and the number of children she has. But the evidence for these hypotheses is shaky and doesn’t draw a direct causal link between orgasms and conception, Puts told Live Science. 

Plus, these theories leave a major question unanswered, Russell said. What if the orgasm has nothing to do with reproduction? What if, instead, it evolved only for pleasure?

Sex doesn’t have to feel good for reproduction to take place, Russell said. “We know this from looking at animals! Sex can be very uncomfortable and still gets done,” she said. But culturally, the idea that sex might be for more than just babies is somewhat of a taboo topic, Russell said.

Sex that feels good for both males and females has an important social role, Russell said. It relieves stress and helps partners bond. Ancestral humans might have engaged in sex to create more cohesive groups, smoothing over conflict and cementing their social network. We see these behaviors in other primates, like bonobos, who might use sex to help dispel a fight over a tasty piece of fruit or even a clan rivalry, the BBC reports. It follows from this argument that evolutionarily, female orgasms might have acted as a kind of social glue. 

That pleasure alone is enough to make a trait adaptive goes against popular conceptions of why sex, and orgasms, exist. But for Brennan, it makes perfect sense. “To experience pleasure — that seems evolutionarily like a good idea,” she said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The Weaponization of the Female Orgasm

I am a 39-year-old woman, and I have never, to my knowledge, had an orgasm. I include the caveat because I’m often asked—by the men I’ve slept with, by my closest friends, even by my gynecologist—if I am sure. The question can feel vaguely patronizing, but it also fills me, and others like me (studies tend to put the share of nonorgasmic women at 5 to 10 percent), with a creeping sense of self-doubt.

“Do you think we actually have and just don’t know it?” my friend Lizzie—not her real name—wondered aloud the other day. “Like maybe orgasms simply aren’t that great?”

I thought for a moment. I love sex, and I’m probably on the kinky side—there’s very little that I haven’t tried. But no matter how much I am enjoying myself, there inevitably comes a time, both on my own and with a partner, when the physical pleasure, having built and built, either fades to nothing or becomes a sensation too uncomfortable to bear, and provides neither the rapture nor release I have imagined and sometimes even conjure in my dreams. “I don’t think that could be it,” I said to Lizzie. “I mean, we’re not idiots.”

The nonorgasmic thing wasn’t really a problem when I was in my teens and early 20s. For years I relished the novelty of touching and being touched by someone separate from myself, not to mention the discovery—I must have been about 11—that I could slide my pelvis beneath the bathtub faucet and elicit that delicious-and-then-unbearable sensation I described above. Even in college and beyond, when physical intimacy became more commonplace, I remember being fairly phlegmatic about the whole thing. “These boys, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said the pediatrician I still saw as an adult when I asked her about it, and she was largely right, of course, not just of the boys who had never once thought to ask if I had also come, but also of those for whom my gratification became a kind of virility contest, and one at which I may as well have been a spectator. (I can only speak to the experience of being a straight, cisgender woman, but it’s revealing to note that 86 percent of lesbian women report that they usually or always orgasm during sexual encounters, in contrast to only 65 percent of heterosexual women.)

Yet there were other men who knew exactly what they were doing, among them my future ex-husband, whom I met when I was 25 and who, from our very first night together, stunned me with his seemingly preternatural understanding of my clitoris. Paradoxically, it was the sheer intensity of our sexual attraction, the dawning hope that maybe one day he could make me climax, that not only triggered my frustration but also inspired me to act. In the early days of our relationship, I made—at a cost of $250—an appointment with a sex therapist, therein getting a glimpse of the growing and highly lucrative female-orgasm industry. A plump, elderly woman with an office full of gray tones advised me to eat more dark chocolate, stop taking birth control, and sign up for what she called “orgasm camp,” an immersive experience somewhere in the American Southwest that would have me masturbating all day long. She also sent me home with some female-centric 1980s porn, a list of recommended herbs and vitamins, and a prescription for Viagra that the pharmacist, alarmed by my gender, initially refused to fill.

For months I dutifully followed her advice, masturbating daily, popping Viagra on date nights, enduring improbable narratives about sensitive plumbers with frosted tips and acid-washed jeans, and even going off the pill. (Orgasm camp was too expensive.) But although my sex life continued to thrill—to reiterate: Pleasure and climax are not synonymous for women like Lizzie and me—I still failed to come. Eventually, exhausted and even a little bit bored by the effort, I once again resigned myself to my anorgasmic fate.

Read: The “untrue” woman

From the time that Aristotle first argued, more than 2,000 years ago, that only women “of a feminine type” ejaculate, the female orgasm has been the subject of a massive misinformation campaign. The Greek physician Galen, convinced that a woman’s reproductive organs were the exact inverse of a man’s, maintained that the female orgasm was necessary for procreation, a belief that lasted into the 18th century. (Galen also believed that women were immune to postcoital tristesse, clearly never having hung out by my bedside. “Every animal is sad after coitus,” he opined, “except the human female and the rooster.”) The ostensible correlation between pregnancy and female pleasure materializes again and again over the centuries, popping up in everything from a 13th-century British legal treatise to a guidebook for Renaissance midwives. But while you might think that this misconception would be to the medieval woman’s advantage, compelling her brutish husband to finally pay attention to her needs, it also offered a convenient defense for rape apologists, who seized upon the link between propagation and womanly lust to argue that nonconsensual sex could not possibly result in childbirth. (Or, as Republican Congressman Todd Akin so memorably put it in 2012, during his failed bid for Senate, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”)

Not until 1730 was it finally proven that the female orgasm was not, in fact, a requisite for reproduction; only then did anatomists begin to develop a relatively accurate conception of female anatomy. Even so, it took at least another century for the German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt to produce one of the earliest detailed diagrams of the clitoris, the only human organ built for pleasure alone, and one that, with more than 8,000 nerve endings, is decidedly not the inverse of the penis. You’d think, once again, that women might be the beneficiaries of such progress, but no: Coupled with the relegation of the female orgasm was the relegation of female desire, with the result that many Victorian doctors believed that women were actually incapable of climax. As the British gynecologist William Acton wrote in 1857, echoing the prevailing wisdom of his colleagues, “The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.”

Rachel Maines, a historian of technology, has argued—speciously, some scholars say; more about that in a moment—that around this same time, pelvic massage became a profitable enterprise for doctors seeking to cure their female patients of “hysteria,” the symptoms of which were said to include anxiety, sexual desire, loss of sexual desire, and a general predilection for troublemaking. The history of this nebulous “disease” (the American Psychiatric Association wouldn’t abandon the diagnosis until 1980) stretches way back, as does the practice of massaging women to better health—good old Galen tells the story of an afflicted widow who was advised to rub her “female parts” with “customary remedies,” thus eliciting the “pain and pleasure” that traditionally accompany intercourse. By the mid-1800s, Maines writes, hydriatic massage (of the sort my 11-year-old self would later discover) was developed, and some European spas had high-pressure jets specifically designed for treating “female disorders.” And yet, because it was understood by then that women were unequipped for sexual excitement, the results of such treatments were known not as orgasms but as hysterical paroxysms.

Listen to Katharine Smyth discuss this piece on The Experiment podcast.

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Maines also suggests that we have this history to thank for the creation of the vibrator, which was patented in the 1880s in England—well before the vacuum cleaner—as a labor-saving device for doctors who had been complaining of chronic hand fatigue. Other historians have disputed Maines’s claims, citing myriad discrepancies between her source material and her conclusions, and they lament that her work—which has made its way into countless books, films, scholarly articles, and even a Broadway play—has gained such widespread acceptance. Indeed, as I discovered while researching this essay, Maines has so completely shaped the discourse around sex and technology that it’s difficult to discern where the truth of physician-assisted paroxysm actually lies. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that home use of the vibrator took off quickly, with advertisements for “The Little Home Doctor” and “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates” appearing in such mainstream publications as Popular Mechanics, Woman’s Home Companion, and the Sears and Roebuck catalog. (While vibrators would eventually lose the imprimatur of social acceptability, they gained traction again on the heels of the women’s movement, not to mention the Rabbit’s cameo on Sex and the City. By 2009, some 53 percent of American women admitted to having used a vibrator at least once in their life.)

With the 1953 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which included the revelation that 62 percent of American women had masturbated, the Western world finally embarked upon a period of relative sexual enlightenment—what Jonathan Margolis, the author of O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, calls “the unsteady Western path from Victorian hangover to cautious advance.” Since then, much of the discussion around the female orgasm has centered on the evolutionary mystery of why it exists in the first place. Indeed, the male and female sexual organs would appear to be very poor complements: as a surprisingly large number of men and even women seem not to realize, the physical location of the clitoris means that only about one-fourth of women, according to some estimates, are able to achieve orgasm from penetration alone.

Which raises the question of why, evolutionarily speaking, women climax at all. Or, as Stephen Jay Gould wondered in 1987, “How can sexual pleasure be so separated from its functional significance in the Darwinian game of life?” Perhaps the most widely accepted theory of the female orgasm belongs to Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape, who hypothesized in 1967 that the relative difficulty men face in bringing a woman to climax is the very point—or, as Margolis explains it, that the kind of man who devotes the necessary care to pleasing his partner is the same kind of man who will stick around to help her raise their children. Other views abound, however, including the controversial “upsuck theory,” in which the cervix in orgasm draws sperm toward the uterus, and the American anthropologist Donald Symons’s nonadaptive argument, put forward in 1979 and later embraced by Gould, that the female orgasm—much like the male nipple—is simply a vestige of the sexes’ parallel embryonic development. A 2019 study involving rabbits and Prozac gave new credence to yet another theory, one suggesting that the female orgasm dates back to some prehistoric era in which ovulation was triggered by sexual intercourse. (In bunnies, it still is.)

The truth is that no one knows for sure why women come, and our descendants may well look back on such theories with as much derision as we do on the treatment of hysteria or the tie between climax and pregnancy. The female orgasm is a kind of Rorschach test—an abstraction upon which each new generation of doctors and scientists can project its worldview, almost always to the benefit of men and their assumptions about normally functioning female sexuality. But if you think the debate over why women have orgasms is complicated, try solving the mystery of why some women don’t have them.

Wednesday Martin: The bored sex

Some nine years after my appointment with the sex therapist, newly single after my divorce, I found myself on the floor of a Williamsburg apartment, white headlights from the expressway every so often sweeping across my bare skin. It was my fifth date with Chris—I’ve changed the names of all friends and lovers in this essay—and we’d just had sex for the fourth time in 12 hours. I was already beginning to fantasize about our future together when he abruptly confessed that he was bothered.

“For me, sex is goal-oriented,” he explained. “I know I won’t be able to enjoy it if I can’t make you come, if we can’t share that next-level connection. If I had been your husband,” he added helpfully, “I would have had you seeing the best sex therapist out there.”

I felt suddenly enraged, as well as a little naive. I had freely shared my truth with him, as I had with all the men I’d dated; I think I’d even been proud of it, as if it were a mysterious twist that set me apart, a sexy secret, like tuberculosis, that he and I might grapple with together. “But can’t you see how unfair that is?” I said. “If I’m having fun, if it feels great to me, why can’t you just trust in that?”

He demurred. “I’m just not sexually compatible with someone who isn’t able to let go.” And then: “I think it’s probably insurmountable.”

That’s when I realized that my new role as a divorcée would force me to confront this issue all over again. Indeed, my ex-husband’s impressive self-regard may have spelled the end of our marriage, but it had also been delightful in the bedroom—here was a man, brimming with confidence, who had never once seen my predicament as a challenge to his masculinity, and who had always believed me when I told him, truthfully, just how much he turned me on. But for the men who followed, my condition was a turnoff, a defect that rendered me not only less of a woman but actually undateable.

With no one was this clearer than with Michael, a guy I nearly relocated for. One year after the collapse of our relationship—we were lying naked in his bed for old times’ sake—I asked him why he thought that things had not worked out for us. “If you had moved here,” he said, “we probably would have gotten married. And to be totally honest, if I were married to a woman who couldn’t come, I’d probably cheat on her.”

I was dumbfounded by his answer. It would have been one thing if he had said that he didn’t find me funny or attractive or intelligent, or that he’d sensed we wanted different things from life. But to drift away because I couldn’t orgasm, a fact that I’d accepted, and one that had nothing to do with my attraction to him? It seemed so horribly unjust.

“You have to understand how much I love to pleasure women,” he continued as I raved and ranted. “I think it’s the closest connection two people can share, and I think I’m really good at it—I’ve tried to turn it into an art; I’ve actually studied it.” (That I believe; the vigor he used to bring to his various sexual exertions had always reminded me of someone showing off a party trick.) “So the idea of marrying someone who will never have an orgasm,” he reasoned, “of never again being able to get a woman off, is really hard for me.” He paused. “I don’t know, maybe there’s a way in which I could see it as a challenge, like getting to a really high level in a video game. But it doesn’t feel like that.”

In David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men—one of the more incisive critiques of contemporary masculinity I’ve come across—interviewee No. 31 offers up a useful lens through which to consider our society’s current obsession with the female orgasm. Of course there are the “basic pigs,” he argues, the ones who “roll on and roll off” with absolutely no regard for their partner’s pleasure, but there’s also a second variety: the ones who believe they’re a “Great Lover,” putting a notch on their gun for every female climax they facilitate. “It’s real important to these fellows that they think of themselves as Great,” he explains. “This preoccupies a major block of their time, thinking they’re Great and they know how to please her.” I know such men—they keep coconut oil and vibrators in their bedside drawers; they could find your perineum while wearing a blindfold; they call the upper-left-hand quadrant of your clitoris the sweet spot. “But now don’t go thinking these fellows are really any better than your basic pigs are,” the interviewee cautions. “They think they’re generous in bed. No, but the catch is they’re selfish about being generous. They’re no better than the pig is, they’re just sneakier about it.”

In her 2018 book, Faking It, the sex educator Lux Alptraum denounces a culture in which, for many men, the female orgasm has become “the primary, if not entire, purpose for pursuing sex—a sentiment that suggests that anyone who isn’t able, or doesn’t want, to achieve orgasm is some kind of freak or failure.” Alptraum lays no small amount of blame for this on She Comes First, a wildly popular cunnilingus manual by the sex therapist Ian Kerner, which, when it was first published in 2004, was lauded by magazines such as Jane and Cosmopolitan for its promotion of female pleasure. (The Great Lover, Wallace’s interviewee notes, is always “running down to Barnes & Noble’s for all your latest female sexuality-type books so they can keep up on their knowledge.”) And yet for all its noble pretensions, Alptraum argues, Kerner’s book established a new paradigm in which the female orgasm, once seen as mythic, was recast as compulsory. Indeed, the trouble with She Comes First, Alptraum says, is that it positions the female climax “as a badge of honor and proof of a man’s virility, rendering women’s actual needs, desires, and authentic pleasure subordinate to the appeasement of the heterosexual male ego.”

In search of an expert male perspective on this debate, I went to see Ian Kerner himself. His tasteful office in Manhattan’s West Village was full of Danish modern furniture I would have chosen for myself. Over espresso, he rejected the idea that She Comes First had cast the looming cultural shadow Alptraum proposes, as well as the notion that a majority of men treat the female orgasm narcissistically as sport. If anything, he said, men who fixate on their partner’s anorgasmia are likely grappling with feelings of inadequacy, adding that no one in his practice had ever left a woman because she couldn’t come. “It can be an issue for a male who feels hurt or wounded—it’s not so much his ego, as much as a feeling like, Sex isn’t fun for this partner.” But Kerner also conceded that his thinking has evolved in the years since She Comes First, thanks in part to women like Alptraum and their appeal for a more inclusive view of female sexuality. These days, he said, he works with plenty of couples “who are very motivated and incentivized to have sex without orgasm. Part of my work—which is in contrast to She Comes First—can be really enjoying all the parts of sex.”

After listening to my story, Kerner hypothesized that my particular problem was an inability to quiet the restive, self-conscious parts of my brain. “To what degree are you staying in an observational place in your own experience,” he asked, “as opposed to being able to drop down into an experience of arousal?” He told me about a 2006 study by the Dutch neuroscientist Gert Holstege in which 12 women reclined with their heads in a PET scanner while their partners brought them to orgasm; much to Holstege’s surprise, the scans showed a dramatic drop in activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, parts of the brain associated with anxiety and inhibition. “So the conclusion of Dr. Holstege,” Kerner explained, was that “for a woman’s brain to get turned on sexually, another part of the brain has to turn off.” If I were Kerner’s patient, he said, he would champion a psychogenic approach, trying to sink down into an arousal state rooted in fantasy and touch. “It’s allowing your mind to get really turned on,” he said, “and maybe there’s a sort of tipping point where all that anxiety is vacated.” Yet he also admitted that this—willfully disabling one’s amygdala—is easier said than done.

Read: Why are young people having so little sex?

I do understand that there’s a sense in which I’m being disingenuous, insisting on how absolutely and completely I love sex when it is also true that I am frustrated, that I do wish—desperately at times—that it were not always for me an anticlimax. If Kerner is to be believed, moreover, there may be some validity to the critique that I’m unable to let go—I think it was Chris who said he had the sense that I was watching him during sex, trying to gauge whether he was enjoying himself rather than being transported myself. And finally I understand, too, having recently dated a man who himself struggled to come, why that can feel unsatisfying and humiliating to one’s partner; much of the thrill of sex is not pleasing the other person but being able to please the other person.

And yet it still makes me angry when I think of those exchanges with Chris and Michael, of their paternalism and hypocrisy. They are not hideous men, and my guess is that they see themselves as feminists, or at the very least enlightened, devoted above all to the satisfaction of their female partners. But their refusal to accept my own account of my experience—their insistence that, no matter what I said or did, I was not enjoying myself, or not enjoying myself enough—belies this narrative, makes it clear that their preoccupation with the female orgasm had very little to do with my pleasure and almost everything to do with their own. That’s why I still prefer the more overtly selfish men—the “basic pigs,” if you will—the ones who don’t particularly care if it was good for me, and who would never seek to mask their insecurity and egotism as a desire for human connection or concern about their partner’s happiness. At least they’re being honest about it.

Which is something I stopped being. In the weeks and months after that conversation with Michael, still traumatized by his rejection, I finally embraced the obvious solution: I started faking it. Perhaps you are dismayed by this confession; certainly it made my friends uneasy. They worried about my endgame, about the surrender of my sexual agency, about the fact that all my future relationships would now be built on a lie. “Forget those clowns,” they said of Chris and Michael and others like them. “You need to find a man who accepts you for who you really are.” Sex therapists dislike it too; they think that faking it breeds guilt and resentment, and that fixating on performance instead of pleasure makes sex even less enjoyable. (They also recognize how common it is, a fact that many men don’t seem to grasp. When Chris, who had slept with well over 100 women, swore to me that I was the first he couldn’t bring to orgasm, I laughed out loud.)

But the truth is that, for me, faking it was instantly empowering, even revelatory. Overnight, the emphasis shifted from what I lacked to what I offered (everything from a genuine zeal for blow jobs to an extensive toy collection). Sex was suddenly more fun, less fraught, and I came to luxuriate in the kinds of responses I imagine most orgasmic women had been receiving all along. Far from hiding who I really was, then, faking it threw into relief my sexuality; for the first time since my divorce, maybe for the first time ever, men began to see me as I saw myself, and as I knew myself to be, which is to say, no less carnal than the next person, and perhaps even more so. Sure, there were some ethical and practical issues at play—it pained me to think of a man I loved learning that I had deceived him; what was my endgame?—but I also couldn’t help feeling that it was finally my turn to be selfish.

But the sexual excitement sparked by this discovery sparked sexual frustration too. One weekend at my mother’s house, I realized that the guy I was seeing had forgotten to take his boxer briefs home after visiting; I spent the next morning wearing them around my bedroom, staging erotic photo shoots as sext fodder, and turning myself on so much that in desperation I finally grabbed an immersion blender from the kitchen, praying that its whirring handle might function either like the man who’d left behind his underwear or like the vibrator I had left behind in Brooklyn. It didn’t—its spinning blades were far too close for comfort—and I can remember almost crying with vexation; it’s hard to convey the impotence I felt at being unable to do anything with all this pent-up carnal energy, at being 37 years old and still having failed to master my own body. And so I resolved to continue on the journey I had started with the sex therapist all those years before, first googling orgasm camp to no avail and next setting up an appointment with Dr. M, a sensual-touch therapist whom I had read about in New York magazine. (Optional donations appreciated.)

A few weeks later, I met Dr. M—“Not a real doctor,” he admitted needlessly—at a Starbucks near his apartment. An average-looking man in his 40s, he had a pleasant energy and a wry sense of humor; we made small talk as he escorted me through the service entrance of his building and into his small, anodyne bachelor pad. (You know the type: brown-leather couch, black IKEA bookshelves, navy bedspread, oversize poster of the Brooklyn Bridge.) After a brief consultation on my sexual history—we had already spoken of it on the phone—I disrobed in the bathroom, wrapped myself in a towel, and lay down on his massage table. An oil diffuser morphed soothingly from green to purple, releasing a fine eucalyptus mist, and ambient music droned softly in the background. As he rubbed my neck and arms, I strained to read the titles on his bookshelf; I thought that I could just make out The Case for Israel.

Read: Your chemical romance

Eventually he poured warm oil onto my back and, still rubbing, slowly began to pull apart my legs. It was exciting for sure—I couldn’t tell you what exactly he was doing, but it felt melty and cadenced and new. “Good girl,” he said encouragingly whenever I squirmed. He had cautioned me earlier against being too goal-oriented, and I tried hard to empty my mind of any thought of orgasms. I don’t think I actually expected one, but it was nearly impossible not to latch on to each new sensation—Will it be now? Will it be now?—in a way that surely made the prospect far less likely. (“Try not to think of a polar bear,” Dostoyevsky said, “and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”)

“Okay,” Dr. M said at last. “We could keep going, or else we could finish up with a little Magic Wand action.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“This bad boy here,” he said, unfurling something that looked an awful lot like my mother’s blender.

A few minutes later, the towel had fallen to the floor and I was writhing naked on the table, at once enthralled and repelled by the Magic Wand’s pulsating tip and casting about desperately for something to grab hold of. “Is it okay if I touch you?” I asked, already seizing his free arm with both hands.

“Of course,” he said kindly. It was less than an hour since we had first shaken hands at Starbucks.

As I later told my friends of the experience, it was probably the best that any man’s fingers had ever felt; if I were a woman who orgasmed, I said, I would have had at least three of them. But as I could have predicted, and as Dr. M himself noted—I was beginning to feel as if he were a real doctor, so dedicated was he to my cause—something appeared to be holding me back, some inability to get over the hump. (“It seemed that you came oh-so-close,” he later wrote me in an email.)

I dressed as he described his varied clientele—the nonorgasmic, yes, but also single women craving intimate touch, adventurous women tackling their bucket list, married women seeking sexual pleasure without cheating. (Without cheating? I thought. Hmmm …)

“So you’re off to your date?” he asked as he opened the door. On our walk, I had told him about the retired merchant marine officer I was meeting for dinner.

“I am,” I said. “But I have some time to recover.”

“Okay, then,” he said, laughing. And then, holding out his arms like someone’s dad: “Big hug?”

If, like me, you can’t resist the urge at cocktail parties to recount your sexual adventures—the allure of a good story trumping any concerns you may have about puncturing your own sexual mystique—you will soon find yourself inundated by a flood of orgasm-related advice. One friend, a therapist, thought hypnosis was the next logical step, while Michael—yes, that Michael—suggested I get involved with OneTaste, a now-defunct “orgasmic meditation” company selling classes in which men wearing lubricated plastic gloves fondle a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes straight ($499 for a weekend course; $60,000 for a year-long membership). Another friend had enjoyed the late sex educator Betty Dodson’s Bodysex workshop, a 10-hour female-masturbation class in which you sit naked in a circle, play with weighted dildos, and examine the vaginas of your fellow workshoppers in a “Genital Show and Tell” ($1,200 by check or $1,000 by cash; complimentary vaginal barbell included).

Ian Kerner recommended that I check out the New Society for Wellness, an elite New York City–based sex club for Millennials ($1,690 a year for unlimited access to cannabis-friendly sex parties featuring fire performers and domination by professionals), as well as the Body Electric School’s clothes-off retreats ($495), offering a sanctuary in which to “become more aware of spiritual dimensions in your erotic explorations.” He also mentioned OMGYes, a series of instructional videos that break down taboos about women’s sexual pleasure ($59 for one season or $118 for two), and Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, which sells a curriculum for “sister goddesses” by the best-selling author of Pussy: A Reclamation that can be yours for upwards of $5,000.

Meanwhile, Dr. M suggested two additional resources: an online “Finishing School” by the sex therapist Vanessa Marin, whom BuzzFeed christened the “orgasm whisperer” ($999), and a New York–based wellness clinic called Maze Women’s Sexual Health. In a free, 10-minute phone consultation with the latter, I spoke with a lovely woman named Jen. As she described it to me, my involvement with Maze would entail a 90-minute initial visit with a therapist and a gynecologist ($530 before insurance; bloodwork included), and then an indeterminate number of follow-up visits ($380 for the second visit and $250 for each appointment after that, before insurance; additional testing not included) designed to target my particular issue, most likely with some combination of the following: an assortment of creams designed to increase clitoral sensitivity; access to no less than 20 different kinds of vibrators; a collection of ethical, female-generated pornography; testosterone-replacement therapy; a prescription for Wellbutrin; and the O-Shot, a new treatment in which blood taken from my arm would be centrifuged, its platelet-rich plasma separated out, and then injected into my vagina.

This deluge did not spark joy; on the contrary, it left me confused, even despairing. Where to start? And how to pay for it? I might have simply given up as I had a decade earlier; certainly I approached each opportunity with skepticism, doubtful that any of them would actually work. But one by one, their websites—sophisticated, knowledgeable, seemingly so sympathetic to my plight—began to lure me in; I felt guilty at the prospect of inaction, as if failing to part with a huge chunk of my savings, not to mention all my leisure time, were somehow an abrogation of my responsibilities as a woman. Which was of course the point: For all my excitement and curiosity about vaginal barbells and the O-Shot, I was still sane enough to recognize that, regardless of their good intentions, these outlets were to some extent a mirror of the very men who’d sent me on this wild-goose chase in the first place, the ones who’d cloaked their own self-interest in ostensible concern about my satisfaction. Vanessa Marin had worked with innumerable women who feared their partners would dump them because they couldn’t come, a reality she clearly found heartbreaking and validating to her life’s work as an orgasm whisperer. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that in her effort to empower these women, she had also inadvertently perpetuated the very notion that had been ingrained in them by the men who threatened to leave: that they were somehow inadequate, that their pleasure wasn’t enough.

Dear Therapist: My husband and I don’t have sex anymore

Nor was I alone in the guilt and anxiety I felt at confronting this glut of self-improvement options. There’s no end of means by which women, even orgasmic women, are conditioned to doubt their own normally functioning sexuality, as well as pressured, at considerable cost, to take steps toward “fixing” it. Perhaps most pernicious is Big Pharma’s pursuit of a female equivalent to Viagra and concomitant financing of programs to spread awareness of female sexual dysfunction and hypoactive sexual desire disorder, which paved the way for products such as Addyi, the controversial “little pink pill” that gained FDA approval in 2015. Addyi’s labeling describes HSDD as being marked by “low sexual desire that causes marked distress or interpersonal difficulty,” a phrase that, as Georgetown University Medical Center’s Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman observes, speaks volumes about the drug’s true beneficiary: “So a woman upset by a belittling spouse who wants sex more often than she does,” she asks, “is eligible for a prescription drug?”

Fugh-Berman has written at length about HSDD’s history, arguing that “there is no scientifically established norm for sexual activity, feelings or desire, and there is no evidence that hypoactive sexual desire disorder is a medical condition.” Rather, she maintains, HSDD is an illustration of “a condition that was sponsored by industry to prepare the market for a specific treatment.” Which in turn would mean that untold numbers of healthy women are risking side effects such as nausea, dizziness, and low blood pressure so as to cure a subset of female sexual dysfunction that doesn’t exist in the first place. (Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of Addyi, has said that HSDD is a real condition, noting that the FDA has recognized female sexual dysfunction as “an important unmet medical need.”)

“There are dozens of medications in the pipeline that want to give women a version of desire that’s really a media-concocted version of desire,” Kerner told me. “It’s saying, ‘Hey, if you’re not experiencing desire in this forthright way, you might be a little broken, and here’s a pill.’ But it’s sort of a straw-man argument because you’re creating a problem to then fix.”

One of the most incisive observers of the female-orgasm industry is Jen Gunter, an ob-gyn who is renowned for tearing down insidious myths about female sexuality—Goop’s jade eggs and vaginal steaming, certainly, but also the O-Shot, which is “so many layers of horrific,” she writes in her book The Vagina Bible, “it’s hard to know where to begin.” When we spoke by phone, Gunter had me in stitches at her description of our fetishized portrayal of female desire.

“The whole sex industry,” she said, “it’s all about the female orgasm, in the sense that it’s not about the pleasure that gets you there. Patriarchal society wants women to be horny for men when the men are ready; it’s like, ‘Of course, oh mighty sword bearer, you should be able to just twist a nipple and stick it in, and in three seconds I’m going to arch my back and act like the most pleasurable thing in the world is happening to me.’” She said her two teenage sons have started walking out whenever there’s a sex scene in a movie or an episode of Game of Thrones because they’re so sick of her counting down the seconds from penetration to climax (“Oh my God, stop it, Mom!”). But she argues that the consequences of such messaging can seriously affect women and weigh on them, and she sees a lot of patients whose partners have broken up with them because of their sex life. “There are countless different ways that women’s sexuality can be weaponized against them,” she told me. “Pick a way, and it exists.”

In the end, I made an appointment with a tantric healer ($600 for two hours, not including travel time) recommended by my friend Imogen, another woman in her 30s with climaxing issues.

“You need to see this guy,” she texted me one afternoon. “I had the lobster-claw full-body orgasm experience. It was so insane.” And then, when I asked if the healer had actually touched her—I knew nothing about tantra, but I had visions of hands trying to manipulate the energy half an inch above my skin, which clearly wouldn’t cut it—she responded with a simple “Yup.”

The next thing I knew, I was opening my door to Justin, a tanned, muscular man about my age wearing combat boots and maroon-and-yellow ikat balloon pants. We sat in my living room discussing the lengthy intake form I’d sent him—“Do you love your genitals? Please describe”—and arguing good-naturedly about whether my having survived a near-fatal car accident a few years back meant that I had been put on this planet for a purpose. (He said yes; I said no.) He struck me as intelligent and oddly down-to-earth, given his wacky spiritual bent; I felt as safe and comfortable with him as I had with Dr. M. Then he asked me to take off my clothes, don a sarong, and make a list of intentions to tuck beneath the mattress as he prepared the bedroom for our session.

“Let’s see what you came up with,” he said when he emerged.

“You’re going to read them?” I asked. “I thought they would be private!”

“Listen, you’ll be doing a lot of private things today,” he said, “but you’ll be doing them with me.” We were sitting at my dining table now, him fully clothed and me essentially naked, the semi-transparent sarong wrapped around me like a towel. Every so often he took a break from reading my intentions to offer pearls of wisdom: Get rid of your vibrator. Make masturbation a weekly ritual. Study your vagina in the mirror (“Like Charlotte in Sex and the City!” I exclaimed to his chagrin). Most important, stop faking it. “How will you ever find something authentic if you’re inauthentic from the start?” he asked. “And if a guy does bolt for that reason, that’s an excellent way of weeding out the assholes.”

“Let’s talk about boundaries,” he finally said.

“I don’t think I really have any?”

“Okay then,” he said. “Would you be all right with unprotected penetrative sex?”

“Oh!” Chastened, I added: “No, I guess not.”

“See, that’s a boundary,” he said, and offered up a long list of other erotic possibilities. It was beginning to dawn on me that tantric healing was a little more, um, hands-on than I had realized; aroused, I said yes to it all. Then he disappeared into the bedroom. When he opened the door, he was wearing only yellow silk shorts and his many amulet necklaces. The blinds were lowered, the bed strewn with rayon rose petals; incense smoldered on the dresser, and dozens of electric candles did their simulacra of flickering.

“Enter, Goddess,” he said solemnly.

We sat cross-legged on the bed, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes; he told me to breathe deeply in through my nose and out through my mouth. Then I lay on my stomach as he pulled off the sarong and massaged my back and legs; when he later straddled me, running his forearm horizontally up and down my spine, I realized with a jolt that he also was naked. If I kept my eyes closed, I could almost ignore the question of whether I had inadvertently hired a prostitute.

“You are strong,” he whispered, every so often nibbling my earlobe. “Beautiful. Sexy. Worthy. Loving. Lovable.” He rubbed his hands with lavender oil and told me to inhale. “Imagine the farm where this lavender was grown,” he said, “and the factory where it was turned into oil. Imagine the farmer who picked it; imagine his life, his preoccupations and joys and anxieties. The world is performing for you,” he said. “Think of everything it’s doing behind the scenes to support you, and you don’t even realize it.” Then he stuck his finger in a place that I’ll keep classified.

When it was all over—let’s just say that there was lots of attention lavished on my “sacred temple,” lots of sighing over what he called “the nectar of the gods”—Justin flipped me on my side and we began to spoon (so that our heart chakras were aligned, naturally). “You are a goddess,” he told me again, “and I acknowledge and honor you.” He was shocked to learn that I hadn’t come, given my seeming enjoyment, and he wondered aloud whether I actually had, whether there was some block between my body and my brain.

We turned to face each other, still lying naked and entwined. “You have the weirdest job,” I said. He laughed, but not because he agreed with me. “It’s a calling,” he said. “I truly believe that tantra will be the next big thing, like yoga or meditation.” He told me how revelatory his first tantric experience had been; how he had sold his fancy car and quit his finance job; how he had moved to Miami so he could focus on healing women like myself. He talked for so long that the afternoon shadows began to lengthen—I hadn’t hired a prostitute, I realized, but a boyfriend.

That evening, as instructed, I drank lots of water and set light to my intentions, which quickly curled into a scroll of velvety soot. I also texted Imogen: “I really want to discuss the intimacy of it. Afterward we lay in bed naked holding each other and talking for half an hour as if we were in love.”

“He held me at the end too like a baby,” she wrote, “but I was paralyzed at the time so maybe it didn’t feel romantic to me.”

Justin texted as well, to ask how I was doing, and whether I’d had any further revelations. I think my answer disappointed him, for he soon texted again: “There may be more lessons or teachings you have created for yourself in this experience than you are letting yourself see … Don’t sell yourself short on how much you accomplished … This is a journey and you are just at the beginning.”

Is that true, that my journey is only just beginning? Some days I think I’m finished searching for my orgasm; other days, feeling more hopeful, I consider asking my mother for a masturbation workshop for my birthday. Yet other days, I wonder whether I’ve actually been having orgasms all along, whether the occasional spasms I feel are the real thing. As Lux Alptraum points out, the female orgasm is often more difficult to pinpoint than its male equivalent, and underwhelming climaxes, oxymoronic as they may sound, are far more widespread than we think. In O, Jonathan Margolis describes a study in which the sex researchers William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian observed a group of women who believed themselves to be anorgasmic, but three-fourths of whom, as it turned out, had been demonstrating physiological reactions consistent with orgasm all the while. “It is as if the modern mythology and cult of orgasm,” Margolis writes, “has placed the sensation on such a pedestal—created such an aspirational ‘superbrand’ of it—that women perfectly capable of orgasm refuse to believe they are having a legitimate one.”

Vanessa Marin, the orgasm whisperer, recently endeared herself to me by releasing a free video series called The Female Orgasm Revolution that I’ve been watching and rewatching like a cultist. (Did you know it takes women an average of 20 minutes to come? Or that 85 percent of men thought their female partners had climaxed during their most recent sexual encounter, whereas only 64 percent of women said they actually had?) Vanessa thinks it’s bullshit that 10 percent of women are destined for anorgasmia, by the way, and so too the idea that orgasms require simply “letting go.” Orgasm is a skill like skiing, she says, and like skiing, it calls for time and practice. Last night in bed I attempted her celebrated four-step masturbation method, a combination of stroke, speed, pressure, and body techniques—it left me longing for the Magic Wand, but she would say that’s just my impatience talking. At least she’d be pleased to know that my days of faking it are over, if only because, driven by the same storytelling compulsion that motivates me at cocktail parties, I’m almost certainly blowing my cover.

But maybe it’s for the best. Granted, I surprised myself with the ire that bubbled up over the course of writing this essay; I hadn’t realized how much lingering resentment I had toward those men—and later, toward the female-orgasm industrial complex in which I saw the self-interest of such men reflected—who made me feel deficient and ashamed for a situation out of my control, and one that I had long ago made peace with. As grateful as I am to Dr. M and Justin for their support, moreover, for offering a safe space in which to further explore the frontier of my own body, I find myself wondering, when I think too hard about it, whether their professed “calling” is actually just more male selfishness in disguise. (“Do you work with men?” I asked Justin before he left. “No, only women,” he said. “I’m not trained in the lingam.” Shocking, I couldn’t help thinking.) Yet I refuse to believe that there aren’t at least a few men out there with the necessary confidence and generosity to want me regardless of whether or not I ever come, and Justin made a good point: How will I ever find something authentic if I am inauthentic from the start?

And I will leave you there, dear reader—with the frustration of yet another anticlimax.

90,000 The Secret of the Female Orgasm: What Do Scientists Know About It?

• Linda Geddes
• BBC Future

July 10, 2015

Photo author, Getty

Female sexual characteristics, from the G-spot to multiple orgasms, once puzzled scientists. But now, as the correspondent discovered

BBC Future , Radical Experiments Help Find Some Answers.

There is a lock on my washing machine. To turn it off, you need to hold the program start button for some time, pressing it with a certain effort.If you press too lightly, nothing happens; if it is too strong, then the machine will burst into angry squeak. But as soon as you once understood exactly how to press, then there are no further problems: the light comes on, everything starts to move, and as a result, the washing process reaches its peak, accompanied by the increasing hum of the motor. As a result, we get a tangled pile of wet but fresh clothes at the exit. However, if you do not know how to handle the button, then nothing will come of it.

Now consider the female orgasm.Jerome Salinger once wrote: “A woman’s body is a violin, and you have to be a great musician to make it sound.” If you press the right buttons and caress skillfully, then a woman can be plunged into such ecstasy that for a few seconds the whole world will cease to exist for her. But getting it wrong can result in pain, frustration, or dull indifference. For a man, everything is completely different: if he can achieve an erection, then a few minutes of active stimulation usually leads to ejaculation.

Why is an orgasm such an intense pleasure? How do women manage to have multiple orgasms? Does the notorious G-spot really exist? Medicine has been struggling with these riddles for a long time. “We can go to the moon, but we don’t know enough about our own body,” says Emmanuel Giannini of the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, who has devoted his career to finding answers to these questions. In recent years, he and other sex gurus like him have done a whole series of studies on these topics and finally began to get some intelligible results.

Brain on fire

Perhaps one of the most important skills for researchers in this field is the ability to convince women to drop prejudices and masturbate (or even have sex) under the watchful eye of scientists, including inside an MRI scanner, not romance-friendly device. One of the pioneers of this scientific direction was Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University in the US state of New Jersey. He tried to figure out if the difference in sexuality between men and women could be explained by differences in the structure of their brains.

Author of the photo, Getty

Caption to the photo,

Immediately after orgasm, the female brain, in contrast to the male, continues to remain “on”

the same nervous activity. “The similarities between orgasm in men and women are much greater than the differences,” says Komisaruk.

This can explain why the orgasm is so overwhelming: if the whole forest is on fire, it is difficult to keep track of the individual fires that started the fire.”In orgasm, everything is activated at the same time, and this eliminates the subtle difference between the various processes that take place,” he adds. It seems that this is why we are unable to think about anything else.

In this crucible of emotions, however, one can distinguish especially hot centers. One of these is the nucleus accumbens, a region responsible for pleasure and reward through the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. In the course of the experiments, the rats, which had the opportunity to stimulate this section through the electrodes connected to it, preferred this activity to food – to such an extent that they could overdo it and die of hunger.This zone, in addition to sex, is activated by cocaine, amphetamines, caffeine, nicotine and chocolate. So it’s no surprise that orgasm is also habit-forming.

After orgasm, however, a slightly different process occurs in the brains of women and men, partly explaining the difference in postcoital behavior of the two sexes. Komisaruk and psychologist Kachina Allen found preliminary evidence that immediately after orgasm, certain areas of the male brain stop responding to further sensory stimulation of the genitals, while the female brain remains “on”: this seems to be why some women are able to experience multiple orgasms. but men do not.

Anatomy of Pleasure

Even this analysis of brain scans has caused some controversy – let alone trying to define the anatomy of orgasm. The penis has only one channel for delivering sensation to the brain, while the female genitals have three or four. At the heart of female sexuality is the clitoris. Who was the first to guess the importance of this organ is unknown: but it was found even in one of the oldest figurines, the so-called “Paleolithic Venuses”, depicting faceless women with large breasts, round bellies and pronounced labia.

However, experts began to write about the fact that the clitoris is a separate anatomical unit, common for all women and responsible for pleasure, only in the 16th century. In his book De re anatomica, published in 1559, the Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo described the clitoris as “a hotbed of feminine delight.” Nevertheless, in the following centuries, the topic of female pleasure faded into the background, and the clitoris was practically forgotten (at least, anatomists and doctors). They remembered him again in the 20th century, but still did not pay much attention.Sigmund Freud, although he admitted that a woman is capable of having an orgasm, but believed that clitoral sensitivity in adulthood fades into the background compared to vaginal. He considered the inability to experience vaginal orgasms a sign of psychosexual immaturity.

Photo author, Getty

Photo caption,

Somewhat different processes take place in the brains of women and men, partly explaining the difference in postcoital behavior of the two sexes

However, if this were true, it would have turned out that in the world there are too many women who are unable to fulfill their sexual potential.Between 30 and 40% of women say they have never had an orgasm just from vaginal penetration – although many more do it by stimulating the clitoris.

Suggestions that vaginal orgasm have any advantages annoy many supporters of feminism. It sounds like the women who don’t experience it are just not trying hard enough. Should vaginal orgasm be considered a kind of rite of passage for all women without exception, or only for a select few? Is it possible to have an orgasm without having a clitoris at all?

Barry Komisaruk found the first answers to these questions by accident when he was studying the mating behavior of rats.One fine day, having thrust a rod into a rat’s vagina, he caused an unexpected reaction in the rodent. “As soon as I touched the cervix, the rat froze and stopped moving,” he recalls. Among other things, with this stimulation, the rats became insensitive to pain. Soon he passed from experiments on rats to women, and it turned out that they are characterized by the same feature: vaginal stimulation blocks pain signals. But how and why does this happen?

To understand this, Komisaruk conducted a study with sexologist Beverly Whipple, studying women with spinal cord injuries of varying severity.Scientists have found that even in cases where the trauma blocked the nerve pathways known to medicine from the genitals through the spinal cord to the brain, women still felt touching the vagina and cervix. Some even experienced an orgasm from it – despite the rupture of the pudendal nerve that connects the clitoris to the brain. “Women with spinal cord injuries who could not feel the clitoris nevertheless experienced orgasms with vaginal stimulation,” confirms Komisaruk. “This is perhaps the most compelling evidence that vaginal orgasms exist.”

Photo author, Science Photo Library

Photo caption,

The vagina and clitoris have many “direct exits” to the woman’s brain

The explanation is that signals from the vagina to the brain are transmitted through the vagus nerves that do not enter the spinal brain. “Women describe clitoral orgasms as more localized and external, while vaginal orgasms are deeper and more involving the whole body. Perhaps this is because the nerves that carry information from the clitoris are different from those that transmit signals from the vagina,” Komisaruk adds. …As for the surprising fact that vaginal orgasm can make the body insensitive to pain, the point here is probably that the nerves connected to the spinal cord are able to block the release of the neurotransmitter responsible for the perception of pain. When signals reach the brain, they can also spur the release of neurotransmitters such as endorphins, which can reduce pain.

So, if sensations from different parts of the female genitals are transmitted by different nerves (and both cause orgasm) – can we say that some parts of the vagina are more sensitive than others? And what should couples focus on when trying to achieve this most elusive vaginal orgasm?

The treasure on the map is marked with the letter G

For a long time, the main target was considered the notorious G-point, which received this name in the early 1980s after the German gynecologist Ernst Grefenberg.In 1950, he described the erogenous zone located on the anterior wall of the vagina opposite the urethra (located on the other side of this wall). Subsequent studies revealed that this zone contains a node of blood vessels and nerve endings, as well as a female prostate rudiment. Scientists have suggested that in a minority of women – especially those with strong pelvic floor muscles – stimulation of this area can cause a powerful orgasm and the release of a small amount of fluid from the urethra, which is different in composition from urine.

Soon, information about this magic point on the front wall of the vagina began to spread more and more widely. Many couples have tried to find her, often without success. Some feminists, meanwhile, argued that the G-spot hype was allegedly an attempt by men to reaffirm the important role of vaginal penetration – after the general public’s attention shifted to the clitoris during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

Photo author, Getty

Photo caption,

The search for the notorious G-point led to the understanding that anatomically everything is much more complicated

Evidence of the presence or absence of the G-point is rather fragmentary and often does not deserve the significance that is attributed to them.One study that “rejected” it was based on MRI scans of just one woman. The issue is compounded by controversies about how to properly name the various internal parts of the female genital, and where some of them begin and others end.

However, there seems to be some physical difference between women who can and cannot experience vaginal orgasms. In 2008, Giannini published the results of a study that involved nine women who experienced vaginal orgasms and 11 did not.Ultrasound showed that the former have thicker tissue located between the vagina and the urethra.

At first, Giannini concluded that this could very well be evidence of the existence of the G-spot. But further research made him change his mind. “The word” point “implies a kind of button that you can press to get an orgasm or pleasure, – he explains. – It means a certain organ, which either is or is not. But no one has been able to clearly describe such an organ or such a point.”

But if it’s not a button, what is it? More and more scientists support a simple hypothesis: this is the clitoris.Most people think the clitoris is a pea near the surface of the skin, but recent MRI scans show that it is actually not small at all. The pictures show a large, voluminous, bifurcating organ about nine centimeters in length. It is located along the anterior wall of the vagina, parallel to the urethra.

At its base is the head: the outer part that most people consider to be the clitoris itself, it is also the most sensitive element. But the bifurcated processes of the organ go around the vagina and go into the labia.

This organ can also be described as a split penis. Both the clitoris and the penis are created from the same embryonic tissue: the tubercle tubercle, which appears in the early stages of fetal development and subsequently develops into either the clitoris and vulva in girls, or the penis and scrotum in boys. But there is an important difference: when puberty ends, the penis stops growing under the influence of hormones such as testosterone, and the clitoris continues. “It’s not just a small penis,” says Giannini.The vagina also responds to hormones, including the female sex hormone estrogen, which helps explain the fact that sexuality in women can change with age.

Photo author, Getty

Photo caption,

Female sexuality has remained a taboo topic for centuries

It is difficult to prove or disprove the presence of the G-spot precisely because of such a complex device of female genitalia: it is quite problematic to stimulate the front wall of the vagina separately, because the inner parts of the clitoris and the urethra are likely to be stimulated as well.

This is exactly what was demonstrated in the course of further research by Giannini, conducted together with the gynecologist Odile Busson at the ultrasound center in the French city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Scientists persuaded three women to either stimulate the anterior vaginal wall with a lubricated swab, or to stimulate the outer parts of the clitoris with their fingers. The researchers used ultrasound to observe what happens under the skin. During vaginal penetration, the inner parts of the clitoris and tissues around the urethra began to move and swell, and during masturbation with fingers, the effect was carried out only on its outer part.

There are more difficult cases: in some women, vaginal penetration can simultaneously stimulate both the outer and inner regions of the clitoris.

In 2009, a 42-year-old woman came to the clinic of Rachel Pauls, a gynecologist in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was born without a bladder and has undergone multiple surgeries to address this problem. But, according to Pauls, there is a silver lining: she experienced amazing orgasms. The patient told her doctor that she experienced, on average, two orgasms per intercourse, one by stimulating the clitoris, the other by vaginal penetration.Pauls was greatly impressed by her story, and especially because the patient’s urethra (and with it the entire bundle of nerves and other elements, considered the G-spot) was not in its usual place. In addition, the woman’s clitoris was located right at the very edge of the vaginal opening. “Perhaps this is also why she had an orgasm so often,” notes Pauls.

Does size matter?

Pauls wondered if the size and location of the clitoris affected the ability to achieve orgasm in healthy women.The researcher and her colleagues found 10 women who claimed that they had never or almost never had an orgasm during intercourse, and 20 women who had it almost every time. Scientists examined in detail the structure of their clitoris using MRI scanners and found that the smaller the head of the clitoris and the further it is from the vagina, the more difficult it is for the owner to achieve orgasm.

Author of the photo, Thinkstock

Caption,

You should not consider a woman’s body a machine that can produce the same result over and over again

If we take all these studies together, we can conclude that women can experience different orgasms ways: from clitoral, vaginal stimulation, or from a combination of both.Further research by Komisaruk showed that signals from different parts of the female genitalia (and also from the nipples) arrive in approximately the same region of the brain, albeit in slightly different parts of it. “The different types of orgasms and different sensations have a solid neuroanatomical basis,” says Komisaruk. “And this may explain why the more intense, complex and pleasurable orgasms described by women occur when the clitoris, vagina and cervix are simultaneously stimulated.”

For the same women who cannot achieve orgasm during penetrative sex (or in general with any sex), Pauls advises experimenting.“Female patients come to me and say:“ I don’t have a vaginal orgasm – I guess there’s something wrong with me. ”But they’re really okay. We are all a little different.

Giannini also has something add: “Enjoy not only sex, but also self-knowledge, understanding what you are today, because tomorrow you can change.” And do not underestimate the natural diversity. ” give the same result, “the scientist advises.

The Complete Guide to Female Orgasm

Orgasm is an elusive thing and totally depends on the brain, but we made it a sign of great sex and sincerely believe in what we can recognize by its external signs. Let’s figure out where we went wrong.

What men need to know

1. External signs are not an indicator of orgasm

Moans, convulsions, arching the back, releasing “claws” are not signs of orgasm. The media and porn have created a toxic stereotype that a real orgasm should be like a rite of exorcism.

Neuroscientist Dr. Nicole Prause dedicated study ^{to this, in which she decided to check exactly which external signs make it possible to accurately understand what an orgasm was.}

The result caused a violent reaction from the public, because none. According to her, many women during orgasm did not reveal their condition with absolutely no external signs.

2. Women moan to stop sex

According to statistics, women in general often imitate orgasm: 67% of women do it sometimes, and 25% imitate it at every ^{sexual contact.But only 20% of men believe 90,137 that their partners could imitate pleasure.}

Most men consider ^{groans to be proof of orgasm. This interested the researchers, and they found that in reality everything is exactly the opposite: a third of women regularly simulate an orgasm, namely, amplifying the sounds made , half of the imitators do it periodically.}

3. The demand for orgasm will not help to achieve it

In general, the very expectation of visible evidence of orgasm is logically explained by sociologists.Charlene L. Muehlenhard, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, has shown in her ^{studies that men regard female orgasm as a measure of the quality of their work.}

And many do not finish their actions until they receive verbal evidence of this. That is, in the literal sense, they will continue to move within a woman until they receive a response that is acceptable to themselves.

At the same time, we are just learning to talk about sex, and we are not able to adequately perceive the information that the partner has not received an orgasm.This leads to the fact that we pay attention to visual signs more than to the real feelings and sensations of a partner.

Men this approach also let down: now they have to dispel the myth that ejaculation always means orgasm, although it is not.

For example, this is how women look before, during and immediately after orgasm. With such expressions, women might have been sitting across from you on the bus and you wouldn’t have suspected anything. The photo was taken within the framework of his project About Project by Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti.

A woman before, during and immediately after orgasm / masmorrastudio.com

4. Nevertheless, there are still external signs of orgasm

Orgasm is a powerful nerve signal that travels through the spine to the brain. So, obviously, he has some physical signs, but it is usually difficult to notice and isolate them.

Obstetrician-gynecologist Lisa Masterson told what happens to a woman during orgasm.

First of all, it is a rapid heartbeat.Then the muscles begin to contract (but not as they show in the movies, but rather like cramps – they can be barely visible) of the ankles, toes and, most importantly, the muscles of the vagina. Contractions inside the vagina can be felt with your fingers.

Then an orgasm occurs directly, during which the pupils dilate and the clitoris pulsates. You can try to feel it with your lips. Finally, as Dr. Masterson adds, if you try really hard, the woman will sweat (not because she jumped on the bed, but because of the rapid heart rate and muscle contractions).

A woman before, during and immediately after orgasm / masmorrastudio.com

5. It is the brain that brings you to orgasm, not the technique of execution

More precisely, the technique plays a huge role, but only if the person is comfortable in bed with you.

Only a quarter of ^{women regularly experience orgasm during intercourse: regardless of how long it lasts, from the size of the penis, from how a woman feels about a man or their relationship.}

These statistics come from not only one study, but from a comprehensive analysis of 33 studies over the past 80 years by Elisabeth A.Lloyd) in her book The Case of the Female Orgasm.

So there are probably two scenarios.

Either the girl in your bed knows exactly what to do with her to have an orgasm, and tells you about it. Then you need to listen to it, and not remember your previous experience or pictures from porn. If a girl knows that for orgasm she needs, for example, at least an hour of oral sex, and tells you about it directly, this is great news for you. It means that she is very comfortable with you, she went through the jungle of her doubts, fears and mistrust and voiced, perhaps for the first time in her life, what she wants in bed.

Either she has not yet experienced an orgasm and cannot tell what she likes. In this case, previous experience can help you, but it is important to remember: she does not know how to reach an orgasm, but to understand whether it is pleasant for her right now or not, of course, can, therefore, there is no need to put pressure on her. After all, you study her together with her, she is already embarrassed, do not act as if you are in a hurry somewhere, and the process of satisfying your partner tires you.

Remember that orgasm does occur in the brain.And if he has already been at least once, then you clearly understand his approach, distance, possibility or impossibility.

Sometimes he can “disappear” in the process: in a few seconds “before” his leg was brought together – everything, most likely, the change of position will delay the orgasm or completely “scare away”. Or the girl will understand that she cannot “catch” him in any way – this is also normal and does not speak of your failure as a lover. This suggests that the girl’s brain is now not ready for orgasm, even if she herself is quite ready.

6. However, a variety of practices can help

It has long been known that heterosexual women have the least orgasms. The reason is that they have less oral sex.

Australian researchers surveyed ^{5,000 heterosexual men and women about their last sexual encounters and found that 96% of cases were vaginal penetration. Only 24% of women talked about cunnilingus. In 1% of cases, it was anal sex for a woman. Mutual massage of the genitals, on the other hand, received all equally: 76% of people reported it.}

Orgasms from any of these influences were obtained from 95 to 98% of men. For women, the statistics were very different. Orgasms from vaginal penetration alone were reported by 50% of women. When this was added to genital fondling with hands, the percentage of women who had orgasms increased to 71%. Vulva massage, vaginal penetration and cunnilingus led to orgasm in 86% of women.

In addition, there are studies ^{, which confirm that only 8% of women are able to regularly experience orgasms only from vaginal penetration.And it’s not about the skill of their partners, but about physiology: their clitoris is located closer to the vagina than the rest.}

Study author, Ph.D. Professor Kim Wallen adds that despite this figure, Hollywood continues to portray this 8% as 100%, which hinders both women and men.

So if your partner only gets an orgasm from penetration, it’s her anatomy, not your penis.

Anything that helps a girl to stimulate her clitoris, whether it be fondling, cunnilingus or something else, is more likely to lead her to orgasm.

A woman before, during and immediately after orgasm / masmorrastudio.com

What women need to know

Your pleasure matters

According to statistics ^{, 90% of women fake an orgasm when they realized that they could not achieve it. The reasons for imitation were called such: to stop sex because of boredom, fatigue, discomfort, pain, time constraints, in order to please the partner.}

Lack of orgasm is least of all associated with the technique and skills of the partner, the presence of sex toys, and so on.A Finnish study ^{found that psychological comfort was the main factor in achieving orgasm: it increased sexual desire, arousal, self-esteem and increased openness.}

So stop thinking that your orgasm can wait until better times. Hundreds of studies have been devoted to examining the causes of female imitation and lack of orgasm and to show that this is a ubiquitous problem that demonstrates deep-seated problems in society, in relationships between people.Until 20 years ago, the female orgasm did not bother anyone – and it’s time to change that.

What affects the number of orgasms

Psychologists and social scientists have found ^{that there are four variables that, to some extent, affect the likelihood of orgasm.}

1. The older the age and higher education, the greater the likelihood of orgasm, as women become more confident in themselves to demand attention in bed and talk about sex.
2. Women with liberal views have more orgasms than those who adopt conservative (religious and social) views, in which a woman’s feelings are always in second place.
3. The more comfortable and happy a woman feels in a relationship, the more she reveals herself sexually.
4. Women who have experienced sexual abuse or other sex-related trauma experience fewer orgasms.

The third point is the most important – the level of comfort, pleasure and happiness in the relationship. In “ideal” relationships 70% of women reported orgasms, in sexual contacts with casual partners the number dropped to 49%.

Reasons that may prevent you from reaching orgasm

1.Movie stereotypes

Some women fake an orgasm because they don’t know how long it will take them to really reach it, or what exactly needs to be done to get it.

PhD, author of The Elusive Orgasm, Vivienne Cass believes the media portrayal of orgasm is to blame: “Men and women see these vividly orgasmic women in movies and think it’s the norm. Meanwhile, there is also porn. Because of him, most are used to seeing women cum in a few seconds. “

As a result, not only men are waiting for the “rite of exorcism”, but women are also expecting some unusually vivid sensations, which is why they can ignore their real orgasm or consider it not strong enough.

But each orgasm is unique in sensations, duration and intensity, it is important to learn to feel your body, and not to adjust expectations, focusing on the woman bending on the screen.

2. Critical attitude to your body

Psychologists believe ^{that critical internal judgments of a woman about her own body interrupt the smooth increase in sexual arousal, and this is a very important factor in achieving orgasm.}

A woman’s inner voice lists the main concerns: “my breasts are too small”, “they are not like other women’s breasts”, “my breasts are deformed”, “vagina is too dry / wet / narrow / wide”, “my vagina is not beautiful”, “I don’t feel clean enough downstairs so I don’t have oral sex.”

Psychologists note that many women have learned a negative attitude towards their bodies from their parents, in the process of teaching hygiene and other issues. If the genitals did not have names, they could not be touched, but could only be washed, then the genital area is associated exclusively with excretory functions.

Women’s shame eventually extends to everything below the waist. It is difficult to get pleasure from touching parts of the body that you used to think are dirty, and it interferes with having an orgasm.

3. Lack of adequate sexual socialization

Many women have acquired distorted views on sex at an early age. The negative attitude of parents towards nudity, masturbation, sexual practices with first partners has a strong influence on how men and women perceive sex and sexuality.

As a result, people begin to view some sexual activities as acceptable and “clean” and others as “dirty” and “bad”. In addition, some religions view sex as an expression of the base, sinful nature of humans.

It is difficult to imagine that a person brought up in such a system suddenly falls in love with sex at the age of 25 and quickly opens up sexually. Psychologists nevertheless agree that, as a result, an adult woman will be inclined to perceive sex as a forbidden and shameful act, and for her desire and pleasure she will feel guilty and expect negative consequences.

4. Fear of awakening repressed memories of trauma

Every third woman in the world has experienced some form of violence and harassment, and this cannot be ignored. Such an experience leaves an imprint, especially in a country where it is a shame to ask for help and cannot wait for the support of society.

At the same time, most of the women affected received traumatic experience before the age of 18, and often a relative was the culprit. This undermines the entire system of woman’s trust in the world in the future.

In such cases, intimacy becomes a difficult event, because the woman experiences problems with trust, comfort and confidence. Sex can ultimately provoke feelings of guilt, emotional pain, and any similarity between her partner and the injured person increases the likelihood of painful memories returning.

5. Fear of losing control

Feeling that you are in control is one of the basic human needs. When you grow up in a country where men think they can tell you anything, shout after you on the street, touch you, stalk you, and the word “no” is perceived only as flirting, control becomes a defense mechanism that was difficult to build and will be difficult lose.

Psychologists say that women who are forced to rely on maintaining control as a defense mechanism tend to resist their own urge to express themselves freely during sex.

What to do to help yourself reach orgasm

1. Look at your genitals

If you’ve never done this, take a mirror and look at your genitals. At least find out where the labia minora are and what the clitoris looks like.

2.Get to know your body

Take 30-60 minutes to explore your own body. You can start by taking a bath or shower. You can use oil, lubricant, or lotion. Focus on how the touch feels, where it feels best. Move to the genitals, try to understand which areas are pleasant to you, and where it is perceived as a simple touch of any other part of the skin.

Then rest and replay the sensations of touching in your head: perhaps a specific place and intensity of touch will occur to you.Try it. And do not rush to go directly to masturbation, it is important to get used to your own body and pleasure in general.

Psychologists believe ^{that this should help normalize this behavior so that it stops being read as stress.}

3. Masturbate

Making masturbation comfortable is also important, so it’s time to examine how your genitals respond to touch. If you figure out exactly how and where you need to be touched to make it feel good, it will help in getting an orgasm.It will also increase blood flow to the genitals, which will also be beneficial in achieving orgasm.

Give yourself as much time as you need, and feel free to approach the process thoroughly: your position, the use of lubricant, arousal (erotic romance, porn or fantasy), music – anything that can help you relax.

And don’t worry about the timing: it can take 5, 10, 20, 30, 45 minutes to reach orgasm. Do not get hung up on this, only your pleasure is important.

4. Learn to talk with your partner

After you find out what you like, get used to the idea that your pleasure is important and achievable, convey it to your partner.

If this is a one-night stand partner, he will need direct guidance – and do not accept his rejection or selfishness. It is better to agree on everything in advance: your pleasure should also be in the plans of your partner, he should be ready to listen and hear you.

5. Do not imitate

Unfortunately, some women imitate orgasm not simply because they are tired or have missed an orgasm, but to avoid trouble in the form of physical violence ^{.But if you can tell the truth, speak up.}

Researchers believe that women who have already experienced an orgasm fake it less often. You should have the right to stop sex without pretending or making excuses, but simply because you don’t want to continue and you have not been able to achieve orgasm.

If your partner’s pleasure is important to you, then you can help him get pleasure in any other way, and you do not need to endure for this.

There is no need to be silent, especially if the relationship suits you.Until your partner knows that you are not getting an orgasm, he cannot change it.

Read also

Practical lessons on how to get an orgasm for a woman

It is necessary to look for the reasons for the absence of orgasm, imitation of pleasure. Most often they lie in psychology or such banality as fatigue. But there are simple exercises and practical tips on how to get an orgasm for a woman. Then you will not have to wait for December 22 – the day of the World Orgasm, writes Raut.ru.

Flexibility is the key to success

Today everyone already knows that both partners should work on orgasm, if only because efforts on the one hand do not give pleasure to either Him or Her.Developing flexibility is one of the ways a woman can get an orgasm. Flexibility implies the development of the pelvic muscles, the lumbar region. For maximum pleasure, active movements of the hips, pelvis and the whole body are required. The most effective way to develop flexibility is to enroll in oriental dance, strip plastic, Pilates, and body ballet.

Choosing a pose

Surely many young ladies have noticed that they achieve pleasure in a particular position faster than in others.Making a choice is the second piece of advice on how to get an orgasm for a woman. The position of the legs (divorced or clenched) also affects the start of the gratification process. The body gets used to a certain position in which it gets an orgasm and does not cheat on it. The first position in which women orgasm quickly is the cowgirl position. It allows you to control the intensity, rhythm of movements. This pose is active, so it requires good physical preparation. You don’t have to follow the statistics at all, so we keep looking for our sexual position.

Correct breathing

In sex, as in yoga, a lot depends on correct breathing. Orgasm is the muscle contraction of the vagina. Adequate oxygen is needed to contract muscles. The more intense the muscle contractions, the brighter the pleasure. The third piece of advice on how to get an orgasm for a woman: when the pleasure intensifies, you do not need to hold your breath. Otherwise, the excitement will not rise to the desired height.

Correct rhythm

To get an orgasm, it is important to set the correct rhythm: movements can be fast, slow.Intense, sharp, gradually accelerating. As a rule, ladies know perfectly well at what pace it is best to have an orgasm. This issue must be discussed with your boyfriend so that he does not get lost in conjecture. It is advisable to do this before the process, so as not to constantly correct the partner.

Looking for hot spots

Orgasm can be vaginal or clitoral depending on the stimulated point. Deeper and more extensive is the vaginal orgasm. But, as statistics show, only 30% of women experience vaginal orgasms more often than clitoral ones.Half of them say that this requires pre-stimulating the clitoris. You need to find an opportunity to explain to your partner exactly where this starting point is. The approach of the peak of pleasure is influenced by the caress of the breast, as a result of which the hormone oxytocin is produced.

We swing muscles

A trained body gets tired less, moves more rhythmically. In addition to the press, back, pelvic area, hips, you need to train the iliopsoas and vaginal muscles.The first train by pulling the pelvis forward and slightly up. The vaginal muscles are also easy to train – you just need to squeeze and unclench them. It is even invisible to others. The number of repetitions should be increased gradually.

Fantasizing

Without fantasies, it is quite difficult to get pleasant sensations during intercourse. In sex, not only technology plays an important role, but also psychology. For example, you can imagine more seductive poses, scenes. Fantasies can be a wonderful scenario for the future that needs to be discussed with your beloved.You can remember the experienced moments, moments of happiness. Do not hesitate to read erotic literature, because everything needs to learn and improve your skills and abilities.

We train on ourselves

The fastest woman reaches orgasm, engaging in self-gratification. Sexologists consider masturbation to be an excellent way to study your body and desires. They prescribe it to those who have difficulty getting an orgasm. Masturbation allows you to understand what is the best position to take, how to move.It may take 3-5 minutes for a woman to peak on her own, while joint art will take 20-40 minutes, or even more.

90,000 What a woman feels during orgasm

1. Alexandra compares orgasm to a pleasant warmth that spreads all over the body to the fingertips. The pleasure is so concentrated that it even hurts a little. At the same time, I want to approach the finale as quickly as possible and prolong the experience for a long time.This feeling completely absorbs and makes you forget about everything.

2. Olga says that her orgasm can be compared to a volcanic eruption, when the whole body pulsates, and the head begins to make involuntary movements. After such an intense experience, you just want to lie still and enjoy the prostration.

3. Nina says that for her an orgasm is a feeling of warm inner light, accompanied by inner contractions. After graduation, you want to quench your thirst and lie in an embrace with your loved one.

4. The energy of sex fills the entire body, concentrating especially strongly in the solar plexus – this is how Oksana talks about her experience. When everything is over, the girl prefers to relax and do nothing.

5. During orgasm, Dasha’s breathing becomes disordered, and her body seems to fall into a daze. So much energy accumulates inside that there is a desire to quickly throw it out. After the completion of the orgasm, I do not want to continue having sex, so the heroine asks her husband to stop and lie down next to her.

6. Alina claims that her orgasm fills the whole body with warmth – perception concentrates on this, leaving no more thoughts or sensations.

7. Ulyana uses an interesting allegory that the body at this moment can be compared to an overflowing vessel from which water is about to pour out.

8. Anna notes that along with increased breathing, the body feels waves of heat. The senses are so heightened that you want to stop muscle contraction.

9.Elizabeth enthusiastically describes her sensations of orgasm – as if everything in the body mixes and then explodes. It is impossible to ponder what is happening, all that remains is to enjoy.

10. Natalia has a funny description – the girl compares an orgasm with dancing on a skateboard, but only with complete confidence in the absence of the possibility of falling.

Every woman has her own feelings, but the fact that absolutely everyone needs an orgasm is beyond dispute. Here is just a part of the list of what the female orgasm is responsible for:

1. Youth, beauty, health of skin, hair and nails.At the moment of discharge, a woman receives a hormonal cocktail that helps her stay young and attractive for much longer.
2. PMS Relief. Those who have not encountered irritability and overeating in “these” days, so instead of an extra bun, it is better to go and have sex with your beloved. The effect will be much greater.
3. Dissatisfaction or satisfaction of the partner. Men really need to see that you like the process, if this is not so, over time they may have a feeling of guilt that they do not bring you to relaxation, or even a desire to find one that is able to enjoy.
4. General nervous and psychological state, susceptibility to stress and depression. Everything is clear here, if a woman does not receive discharge, then the body decides to throw it out in something else, often negative. Or buns again :).
5. Increased risk of various female diseases. The blood rushes to the genitals, and then … nothing else. Over time, stagnant processes may develop in the small pelvis of a woman.

Scared you enough :)?

Dear girls, develop your sexuality and sensitivity, the ability to experience orgasm, to stay young, beautiful and happy forever.Come to our trainings “Development of a female orgasm” (here you will receive a 7-day system of awakening vaginal orgasm) and “Orgasm reflex. Orgasm awakening technique” (and here you are doing a physical exercise based on body-oriented therapy to open sensuality and release blocks in the pelvic organs). Men, help your ladies, come to the training “Sexual Mastery of Men”, here we will teach you methods of bringing a woman to 7 types of orgasm + help to free her head from unnecessary thoughts and tell you how to determine what she is imitating.

We are waiting for you at trainings and bright orgasms!

90,000 Female Orgasm: To Have Or Not To Have?

In men, orgasm is “automatically” attached to ejaculation – it has allocated the fertilizing principle and get a fee, reinforcement in the form of orgasm. A man also needs an orgasm because it takes some time for sperm to ripen, about 2-3 days, and when the time approaches, attraction is high, sexual intercourse occurs with great physiological support and fertilization is possible.

If a man lives more often and this does not correspond to his physiological capabilities, such a rhythm of relations can cause functional forms of infertility – the sperm will be immature and the number of spermatozoa required for fertilization of an egg will be low. A woman does not have such a fixed pattern by nature. Almost the majority of female animals have no orgasm. Moreover, the female orgasm even interferes with conception, since the muscle contractions occurring at the time of orgasm impede the free passage of the sperm.Therefore, female orgasm is quite late acquisition.

Why is nature so unfair to women? The answer exists. This is a deep evolutionary expediency. The fact is that in nature the female chooses the male. Everyone went to school and from biology lessons remember that the male is always beneficial, outwardly different from the female. The feathers are more beautiful and fluffy, the color is brighter, the fur is thicker, etc. Everything was invented so that his future girlfriend would notice him and choose from among other applicants for the “hand and heart”.

In the world of people, a woman also chooses, and first of all she should choose not the best sexual partner, but the best father for her children, the best protector, breadwinner, etc. A woman needs comfortable conditions to ensure the survival of the offspring, and only the best representative of the opposite sex can ensure the safety of this offspring. Therefore, nature inserts a special limiter for women on sexuality.

Only attraction, only feelings, only one sexual attraction cannot be considered the decisive factor of choice.A woman should critically assess the future partner, see his weaknesses, the possibility of genetic abnormalities. Scientists have proved that the unpleasant smell of a partner has a predictive moment – “bad” genes smell bad and nature has awarded a woman with such a selection tool. A woman should not lose her vigilance at the moment of choice, therefore nature cools her sexuality. A woman’s sexuality is half that of a man’s.

Before the emergence of romantic love, which is presented as the highest goodness of the human race, the relationship between men and women was distinguished by excessive simplicity and coarseness of morals.In the Middle Ages, romantic love emerged as a reaction to the syphilis epidemic, when relationships required selectivity. Romantic love also brought a sensual element to the relationship between men and women.

So why does a woman need an orgasm? There are two hypotheses in the scientific world. We spoke about the first hypothesis above when we touched upon the mechanism of orgasm in a woman. Muscular contractions of the reproductive apparatus at the moment of experiencing the highest pleasure, impede the passage of sperm, thereby allowing only the most active and high-quality sperm to reach the egg.Sperm material is being sampled.

The second hypothesis suggests the emergence of an evolutionary phenomenon of orgasm in a woman, which grows out of a feeling of love, as a physiological message to a partner that he was able to awaken a woman in a partner and she belongs to him in body and soul, as a mechanism for fixing a partner, a powerful factor in the formation of a man’s attachment to a woman.

A man who begins to feel responsible for awakening a woman’s sexuality must have good reason to end this relationship.

Thus, the presence of a father in children is ensured, the prosperity of a woman is a kind of evolutionary acquisition aimed at ensuring that children are brought up in a full-fledged family, among people who love each other, which contributes to better socialization and adaptation of the offspring. I believe that everyone will draw the right conclusions for themselves.

Natalia Rocheva.

Was there an orgasm? 5 Signs of True Satisfaction

Let’s turn to history first.The word “orgasm” has existed in the language for a long time. Its origins go back to Ancient Greece. Literally translated, the word “orgasm” means “swelling with moisture, burning with passion.” From the point of view of physiology, this sounds less poetic: the culmination of sexual intercourse, the highest peak of pleasure.

* * *

Specialists distinguish between several types of orgasm. Although, of course, it should be understood that this division is very conditional. And yet.

The simplest is the genital orgasm. It is also the most common.It is clear that based on the anatomy (genitals – genitals), this type of orgasm manifests itself locally and arises from the contraction with a certain frequency of the muscles in the pelvic region.

The genital orgasm is short in time, but it is felt quite sharply. If you understand the anatomical nuances in more detail, then you should distinguish 3 types of genital orgasm: clitoral, vaginal and uterine, which, of course, can occur as separate phenomena, and follow each other or even occur almost simultaneously.

A rather rare occurrence is a breast orgasm. And it almost never arises spontaneously. It is achieved after specific exercises that can be learned. As a rule, the thoracic orgasm occurs against the background of the genital one.

And the most desired one is the orgasm of the whole body. Actually, this should be considered the highest satisfaction, true orgasm, the very highest peak on which all women strive to be at least once (and ideally regularly).

This orgasm is long, steady and incredibly powerful.His train still echoes the next day with a pleasant languor throughout the body. And sometimes even three days after the echoes of such an orgasm are felt.

* * *

Women describe orgasm differently. Pleasant warmth spreading over the body. Sharp pleasure – sweet, at times, to the point of unbearableness. An irresistible desire to throw out the emotion outward – into the breath, into the rumbling, into the groaning of the body. One thing is similar in all these descriptions – it is too difficult to find words to express your feelings. But this is the mystery of a true orgasm, which, unfortunately or fortunately, cannot be expressed in words.

But those specific actions with the help of which women often try to simulate an orgasm refer to manifestations of sexual pleasure (or, even worse, are a disguise for the absence thereof): moans, cries, imaginary convulsions, shortness of breath. The same kind of manifestations are passionate requests: “Yes, yes! Don’t stop! Oh, how good!”, Which in the English version sounds like: “Yes, yes! Once more! Oh, good!”

This is how the actress’s orgasm is effectively played in pornographic and erotic films.And, having seen enough, apparently, at such scenes on the screen, many women mistakenly take them for a manifestation of a true orgasm – so they imitate in real life the pseudo-passion they saw, cleverly played out sexual frenzy. But, alas, too exaggerated, beautifully constructed, intelligibly presented “orgasmic” behavior, which is much better, testifies in favor of simulation.

* * *

True orgasm is determined by only 5 objective signs. And they are already, according to experts, it is impossible to simulate.

1. RHYTHMIC PULSATION

We are talking about contractions of many muscle groups: the vagina, uterus, pelvic floor, anus, abdominal muscles. Moreover, these are, as a rule, spontaneous muscle contractions, but rhythmic, literally with second intervals like pulsation.

Contractions of the abdominal muscles are clearly visible, and the man feels the contractions of the muscles of the vagina with his own penis, which makes him more excited. Such an intensity of contractions cannot be done consciously, it happens on the verge of instinct – just as we pull our hand away from contact with something hot or upon an electric shock.

2. PASSIVE BODY MOVEMENTS

While experiencing an orgasm, a woman involuntarily makes vigorous enough bodily movements to make her erogenous zones closer contact with the male stimulus. The purpose of such actions is not to allow pauses, not to slow down, to achieve impetuosity and an increase in passion until the desired climax arrives.

In these minutes, a woman is no longer interested in caresses, or kisses, or a word of love. She will not allow the man to be distracted by all these tenderness.On the eve of the explosion, all feminine nature is concentrated only on physiology.

3. FLUSH AND ERECTION

A true orgasm is always accompanied by a rush of blood to the skin. The forehead, cheeks, and chest area turn red. The woman feels hot. Perspiration appears on the body. In minutes of orgasm, a woman has an erection of the nipples, clitoris, and labia. Even a very experienced mistress is unlikely to be able to imitate such a state.

4. VAGINAL DISCHARGE

Excitation of a woman during orgasm reaches such a degree that vaginal discharge is excessive, beyond the physiological need.There are so many moisturizing lubricants and vaginal secretions that the abundance of fluid begins to “sound” during intercourse, and immediately after the end of intercourse, it may even be outside.

5. INVOLUNTARY GRIMASA

All talk about a blissful smile, an unearthly angelic enlightened expression on the face during orgasm is nonsense! Or the prerogative of beautiful cinema. Bliss comes later, but at the moment of orgasm it is impossible. Because bliss is given to the face consciously, purposefully.

Whereas during orgasm, a woman is not able to control her facial expressions. The face of a woman experiencing an orgasm (the same, by the way, applies to men) is distorted by an unsympathetic grimace.

This is a kind of instinctive additional effort of the muscles of the face, helping to plunge deeper into orgasm and surrender entirely to the highest physiological (in fact, animal) pleasure. Well, of course, and not without attracting the entire psychoemotional nature of feeling, inherent exclusively to the human body.

* * *

After a true orgasm, many women are in a state of mild prostration, as if they are losing the sense of time and reality. At the same time, the relaxation of the body occurs gradually. As if the wave is leaving, moving away. Or the fire goes out, dying out very slowly, but no, no, yes, flaring up with separate tongues of flame.

Psychiatrists jokingly say that true orgasm is a form of impaired consciousness. But in every joke, as you know, there is some truth. If you have watched V.Menshov’s “The Envy of the Gods”, then, of course, remember, the sex scene in the truck, in the finale of which the heroine of Vera Alentova, shocked for the first time by the test, asks in bewilderment: “What … was that … was? ..” And that was an orgasm.

90,000 everything about female orgasm through the eyes of a sexologist

 It is important to talk about female orgasm. Talking about it with a specialist is a hundredfold important.

  

On the eve of the author’s seminar on the anatomy of the female orgasm, Ekaterina Bogomolova, a leading sexologist and body psychotherapist with 10 years of experience in psychotherapeutic and training practice, answers the editorial questions.

What we talked about in this article:

What is the difference between male and female orgasms?

I’ll probably start with the similarities between male and female orgasms. The right hemisphere is responsible for orgasmic pleasure in both sexes, presumably in the part of the brain called the amygdala. This structure is known to be responsible for many important functions, including the emotional sphere. According to research by scientists, the center of orgasm is primarily affected by external stimuli, signals coming through the organs of sight, hearing and touch.

When impulses enter the brain, dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for the anticipation of pleasure, begins to be produced.

If we talk about the orgasm itself, then it is a powerful nervous discharge, accompanied by muscle contractions and an increase in the level of serotonin and oxytocin, which is responsible for the emergence of feelings of closeness and affection.

The right hemisphere is responsible for emotions, therefore, if a person restrains his feelings and manifestations in life, this forms internal tension and, of course, directly affects libido.And also, when the nervous system is suppressed from severe stress, a woman cannot relax in sex, and a man has difficulty ejaculating. In this we are alike.

Read also: COMPLETE PLEASURE: 7 FACTS ABOUT WOMEN’S ORGASM

But the difference between a female and a male orgasm lies in the sensation itself. The male orgasm is better studied, it is always peak and short-lived, associated with ejaculation and, as a rule, means the end of sexual intercourse. A woman’s orgasm is multiple, wavy, wandering, on which the sexual intercourse may not end or even not happen at all.Also, our orgasms have different mechanics: for men, it is about muscle contraction, and for women, it is about contraction of the vagina.

Men have only one variant of orgasm (the effect may be different, but the orgasm is one), while women share it: vaginal, clitoral, uterine and other variants. A woman most often has a mixed orgasm, because even with vaginal stimulation, the effect on the clitoris is very important.

The spectrum of erogenous zones in men is very localized, while in women, erogenous zones are located throughout the body.Plus, these zones may not be fully disclosed, since the woman does not know herself very well. This is the reason that the first sexual intercourse in women, as a rule, does not end with orgasm and this ability develops gradually (it is believed that the peak of sensations occurs by the age of 35), and a healthy man has it every time at the moment of stimulation. Also, do not forget that a woman is more emotional and depends more on psychological factors and emotional background, place, entourage, state.

Is that why they joke that the most erogenous zone is the brain?

You can of course say so! As I said, in women, a lot depends on the visual and auditory component. It has been proven that the level of arousal increases when she sees or imagines something pleasant for herself (based on her experience earlier), the production of dopomin begins.

What else does a female orgasm depend on?

In short, from many things: both from personal variables and from the actual state.The first factor is how the woman physically feels. Are there any difficulties in health, in what state is her hormonal system, because it certainly directly affects orgasm.

The space and environment where sexual intercourse takes place also greatly influences. This is our safety. But there may be nuances, for example, if a woman gets an orgasm exclusively in extreme conditions, then this is considered an issue worth paying attention to and, perhaps, contacting a specialist.I’m not talking about moments when you want to diversify your personal life a little, namely about situations when an orgasm happens only in an unsafe environment.

Getting an orgasm directly depends on the accumulated experience: children, adolescents, experience gained during the first sexual intercourse. When we talk about the first sexual experience, it is important to understand that the main emphasis should be on psychological readiness and on the atmosphere around the woman and the partner.

Orgasm is also influenced by whether a woman is pregnant or has had a recent birth.It often happens that a woman during this period does not pay much attention to herself and her pleasure, and the difficulty with the orgasmic sensation is fixed.

What changes in a woman’s sex life after childbirth?

Of course, it is worth mentioning the hormonal background. Often, women during pregnancy can really want sex, but after childbirth, there can be a strong decline.

We cannot write off the physiological consequences of childbirth – a woman needs some time to recover.Plus, when feeding, increased prolactin is produced, which gives a decrease in sexual desire and affects vaginal dryness, you need to know this and use additional funds.

And one of the most important factors is that a woman’s sense of self is changing, and it’s not only about sex, but also about life. She is in strong dependence with the baby, all her emotions and experiences are directed there. She loses a holistic sense of herself, and sex is very dependent on how we feel.Therefore, I recommend for couples who, for physiological reasons, can already have sex after childbirth, ask someone to take a stroller and stay at home alone, or put a nanny with a child and leave for a couple of hours to a hotel. So that the baby is not directly accessible for the woman. Then she gets the opportunity to relax.

Read also: AMBULANCE: HOW TO ACHIEVE VAGINAL ORGASM?

What if there is pleasure from the process, but no orgasm?

We need to figure it out.First, it is necessary to understand what we mean by the concept of “no orgasm”: it has never been in life / it was there before, but now it doesn’t / sometimes it is, and sometimes it doesn’t.

In the first two cases, we are dealing with such a violation as anorgasmia – the absence of orgasmic pleasure. There are several degrees: extreme, when there was no orgasm at all with any stimulation. This is considered a serious problem, it is worth working with a specialist with it. A milder degree, when there used to be pleasure, but now it has disappeared.It is also worth disassembling what blocks, installations, fears, injuries are behind this phenomenon. There is almost always a reason.

What is definitely not considered anorgasmia – when a woman gets an orgasm during cunnilingus, but at the same time worries that she does not have a vaginal orgasm. This is not a disease, but a slight confusion, because there is no wrong orgasm and a clitoral orgasm is considered as real as a vaginal one.

Why is fake orgasm so common?

I’ll start with historical facts – in the 19th century, orgasm was considered applicable exclusively to men.Only somewhere in the twentieth century this concept began to be applied to women as well. The trend changed (thank God!), And the pleasure of the woman became as important as that of the man. There are more and more men for whom it is very important for a woman to be satisfied, and they also enjoy this immensely. This is very encouraging.

On the other hand, there is a new problematic – a woman is now obliged to get an orgasm. If this does not happen every time, then something is wrong with her. And many women start to imitate pleasure.

It often happens that when she has uncomfortable sensations in the process of sexual intercourse itself, she is embarrassed to tell the man about this – she is afraid of offending him. It can also cause a fake orgasm.

Or just a woman knows that she never gets it, that it is a great difficulty for her, but she wants to be attractive to a man and give him some kind of nourishment, she imitates him.

Also, the reason for imitation may be the fact that it is very difficult for a woman to talk about sex in general.For example, she grew up in a family where it was not accepted, sex was something shameful, or absent, for example. A woman develops an appropriate attitude towards sex, and how can we talk about true pleasure if, at the very thought of sexual intercourse, she feels discomfort or even disgust?

Read also: THREE KINDS OF ORGASM YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

Is it important to discuss with a man your orgasm and the reasons that contribute to it?

Certainly.