Anonymous 18-year-old straight male: “I’d like a story regarding the orgasm gap in het relationships.”
This one is just for you, straight 18-year-old male. Solely because you asked, this last Thursday I sat down with Associate Professor Marie-Joëlle Estrada, who has several years of research under her belt along with 15 years of teaching at UR in the Department of Psychology. Estrada’s research mainly focuses on romance and hookup culture.
Notably, she is also one of my predecessors: a former writer for the Sex & The CT column and founder of “Ask Estrada,” a sub-column responding to requests for advice from anonymous students on campus.
For those who aren’t aware, the orgasm gap is the rate of difference between the frequency of women’s orgasms compared to that of men’s orgasms during a sexual encounter, typically associated with heteronormative relationships. More often than not, it’s common to hear about the orgasm gap in relation to the lack of orgasms a woman is receiving during sexual encounters.
One key component to bridging this gap is understanding the nature of the orgasm itself. Professor Estrada explains an orgasm to be “an involuntary contraction of your genital muscles and your pubococcygeus muscles.” For such a reason, the sensation of an orgasm has been described as involuntary, similar to a sneeze.
So how do you know if you’ve had an orgasm?
“You know, if you have a sneeze, there are reverberations afterwards. There’s a different feeling afterwards,” Estrada said. “I would argue it’s very much like that. If you don’t know if you’ve had an orgasm, then you haven’t had an orgasm.” If you haven’t had an orgasm, it’s best to start on your own. Estrada recommends practicing masturbation and reading books on the topic, and I would recommend tutorials from ethical pornography sites (the type that are typically behind a paywall and geared towards women, such as Bellesa).
There are almost endless ways of having an orgasm, primarily because everybody is different. But for women especially, Estrada says foreplay is vital in reaching orgasm with a partner.
By foreplay, she doesn’t just mean kissing for two seconds before insertion, like we so often see in media representations of sex. Mainstream pornography skips past foreplay, and as Estrada says, portrays women in “a permanent state of almost-orgasm” beginning at the first moment of penile-vaginal insertion.
“Studies show that three quarters of men are finished with sex within a few minutes of starting, but most women take 15 minutes or more to become sufficiently aroused for an orgasm,” Estrada says.
After foreplay, it is essential to remember that there is no “right” or “wrong” orgasm to have, and that most women do not orgasm from vaginal penetration alone. Whether or not a woman can orgasm from penetration is dependent upon her specific set of genitals, which are as unique as a fingerprint.
“It’s typically what they call the ‘rule of thumb,’ […Only if] there’s less than a thumb’s-width between the clitoris and the vaginal canal, […then] you are actually getting clitoral stimulation when there’s only penetration,” Estrada explained. Which makes sense if you’ve learned anything from internet memes in the past decade: the clitoris is essential in most female orgasms. If you don’t know where it is… Google is free. There are many diagrams.
As Estrada explained it, this is because the clitoris is the only part of the female body that exists solely for pleasure. It also means that Freud sucked: he spread the narrative that orgasm from penetration was “right” and clitoral stimulation was “wrong” — one that still persists in some social circles today.
“I’d argue most people agree that an orgasm is an orgasm,” Estrada said.
Your orgasm is right as long as it is pleasurable and consensual, it doesn’t matter if it comes from a penis, finger, vibrator, oral sex, a little tickle at the back door, or even some nipple stimulation. As long as your rocks are getting off, it’s all good.
For our Yellowjacket couples that are reading and may face an orgasm gap in their relationship, or even their casual hookups, have no fear. You can bridge that gap and bring yourself, or your partners, more pleasure.
For women, who are often on the lower-orgasm side, it is important to learn what is pleasurable to you, and to be able to direct your partner towards this goal. Toxic masculinity narratives have led to the assumption that men take control during sex and know what is best, leaving the women to be deferential and passive, said Professor Estrada. But this is a disservice to male partners who are not mind readers.
“Once you kind of put it in those terms, like ‘you can’t read my mind, the only way we’re going to have a good time is if I tell you,’” Estrada said before continuing that, if you don’t know what that takes, “it’s like driving a new place without a map, right? You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you’re doing — you’re probably heading the wrong way!”
For the men, Estrada suggests being open to feedback from your partner and checking in on her often. Even if you think you know how someone’s body works, the same person’s body can change from month to month. Not only that, try to prioritize your partner’s pleasure. The lack of focus on the female orgasm likely stems from the belief that it does not serve an “evolutionary purpose.” Estrada says otherwise: “There’s an evolutionary hypothesis that suggests the female orgasm was designed to help filter out partners, like a positive reinforcement.” This means that if a male partner gave the female partner an orgasm, it would tell the female to return to said male for more.
Guys, that means if you make her cum, she’ll come back for more. You’re welcome.
All in all, the bridge to close the orgasm gap is built from communicating and understanding your own pleasure. Communication is a two-way street, and it is crucial for both participants in a sexual encounter to speak up for their own pleasure and check in with each other.
There are a lot of social factors that have made this harder for us, like unrealistic representations of sex in the media and the implicit assumption that men hold innate sexual prowess, but Estrada and I left our meeting agreeing with one key thing: Talking about these issues is the only way to solve the misconceptions surrounding the orgasm gap.
