It is widely accepted that there is a huge gap between the sexes in the percentage of times each achieves orgasm. Heterosexual males score a whopping 95 percent of the time, whereas heterosexual females only achieve 65 percent – a massive thirty percent disparity.
All other orientations do better, with gay men and women but a few points apart at near 90%. What gets the lesbian women up there is said to be that they spend longer on sex sessions, understand each other’s bodies better, include more manual and oral stimulation, indulge their fantasies more, and so on.
However, it is also true that women on their own get themselves off almost as much and as quickly as men going solo. According to the Kinsey Institute, that’s in under four minutes.
And there are hot quickie sessions when – driven by a mutual desire for spontaneous sex – women can come like trains with the same urgency and intensity as their men.
Taking a step back, then, lesbian women, women going solo, and even in the heat of quickie sex, women are all getting to climax in a fairly similar time to men. So, for them, the orgasm gap is largely non-existent.
Why Is The Orgasmic Gap Widest In Straight Couples?
So, why is the gap there – and at its widest – in the orgasmic disparity between partners in heterosexual relationships? This suggests two things: first, that straight women are too concerned with the man’s pleasure and, second, that men are overly self-centered.
As Nona Willis Aronowitz recently wrote in the New York Times, “Half a century [after women’s lib] Gen Z rightly sees how women are still, after all these years, taught to prioritize men’s desires over their own.”
If we want to be orgasm gap busters in hetero sex, then women need to take more control of their own pleasure. And men need to recognize that women need plenty of clitoral stimulation – manually and orally – in order to achieve their orgasm. Indeed, a truly great male lover will ensure that his female partner comes first – before even being penetrated.
Just physiologically, men have their thousands of nerve endings clustered in the head (glans) of their penises and the string (frenulum) behind it. These both get plenty of stimulation deep inside a vagina. For women, their nerve endings (despite having twice as many as men!) are bundled in the clitoris situated above the vaginal opening.
Need For More Clitoral Stimulation
All the published studies on comparative orgasm rates between the sexes rarely, if ever, take into account what kind of stimulation is being experienced by the women participants. If straight men in the studies are simply going directly for penetrative sex, then the all-important female main organ of sexual pleasure, the clitoris, is getting very little attention.
Orgasmic gap busting requires women to renounce the deep-seated myth that the rule – and their role – is to conform to their male partners’ sexual needs and desires. While women’s right to sexual satisfaction is, at least, going in the right direction, though too many, as Aronowitz put it, have “wished my sex was more meaningful, but … clung to the cultural validation offered to married heterosexual couples … the whole heterosexual dance in which women demand commitment in exchange for sex and men acquiesce.”
She believes women first need to explore the broad range of their own erotic desires and exercise full sexual freedom, “to move past the cultural defaults and instead actively reach for authentic happiness.” It is because gay women have given themselves much more license to indulge their desires, she suggests, that accounts for their significantly higher rating in the orgasm satisfaction stakes.
How ‘Straights’ Can Close The Gap
For women, who don’t want to break free of hetero-normative partnerships, they and their partner(s) need to move beyond the female subornative stereotype. We have already discussed the need for more clitorally centered sex that should happen in foreplay. Men – and women – should also move beyond the fragile male ego jealousy view of the vibrator and incorporate these highly effective devices into sex sessions together. Incidentally, there is no credible research that suggests poor outcomes from sustained vibrator use; on the contrary, studies are fairly consistent in finding their usage improves sexual response.
And, when moving to intercourse, they should adopt positions that maximize clitoral stimulation – such as woman-on-top (‘cowgirl’) ones where she can grind her clitoris against his pubic bone. Or there’s the CAT (clitoral alignment technique) where he rides higher on top of her, resulting in similar clitoral stimulation. See “Lovers’ Guide: Sex Positions”: https://www.loversguide.com/product/lovers-guide-sex-positions/
It is fairly unarguable that the orgasm gap is virtually wholly rooted in the gender gap. It is almost non-existent outside of heterosexual partnerships – where it is appallingly wide. We all need to move beyond the male-centric propaganda which sexually disadvantages people with vulvas. Let’s all come together as often and as reliably.