The Mysterious Missing Orgasm

The WAP debacle

In 2020, Cardi B’s “W.A.P” featuring Megan Thee Stallion was topping the charts as one of the most popular songs in the country. It broke records as an all female rap collaboration, topping the billboard charts and garnering awards for the hit duo. The song and accompanying music video, linked above, is incredibly provocative, entertaining, and filled with celebrity cameos. It is truly a female-pleasure anthem filled with the lyrical claims to sexual prowess, desirability, and horniness-to-the-max that characterizes both women. Together Cardi and Megan are unstoppable as they demand sexual worship and satisfaction.

While it brought in money and accolades,“W.A.P” also brought tons of misinformed misogynists out of the woodworks, including political pundit Ben Shapiro. Shapiro and many others started a tirade of sexual shame and puritanical nonsense regarding the lyrics and overall theme of the song. He claimed that the song was an accurate representation of feminism, “a la Susan B. Anthony” and twitter erupted with comments coming for his neck. In response to the twitter tirade, Ben Shapiro cited his wife, a doctor, claiming that the need for a bucket and a mop could mean “bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection, or trichomonis.”

It was a dark-mode day on twitter as Ben Shapiro was called to question for his inability to please his wife all because he decided to challenge the concept of “wet ass pussy”. The general consensus was that either Ben Shapiro was an idiot who didn’t even know how horrible his sex life must be and/or his wife was crying out for help, sending secret signals hidden in her diagnoses.

Many came to the defense of Megan and Cardi B, feminism, and wet ass pussy. Female pleasure and sexuality became an important topic at the front of every social-media users minds. It became an opportunity for many to decry the sexuality of modern music, particularly as it encouraged young women to “act out” sexuality. Misogynistic ideals that discouraged women from talking about their desires led to a plethora of discussions about women, sex, and feminism in 2020. Ultimately it led me to a line of thought, and many others along with me, as uninformed internet trolls debated:

“Do women deserve orgasms if I’m not willing to put in any effort to make them happen?”

Pick-me parrots and other species of birds on the internet continue to echo the misogynist sentiment that whether a woman orgasms or not is unimportant if a man provides/is enjoying the sex/is married to her/etc. These voices, although not the majority, were much too frequent and too loud to be ignored; I felt as if I was witnessing the large-scale confession of a social evil — that women’s pleasure was so subverted in our society that it was shameful to talk about women’s sexual desires and to expect to be pleasured. Sex was and would always be about a man.

So why start this post with 2-year old twitter discourse? Probably because it remains relevant — in a world where so called Alpha males and incels on the internet continue to argue against the fundamental existence of the female orgasm, wet ass pussy remains an unsolved mystery. Let’s bust this case wide open.

Uncovering The Orgasm Gap

In a 2014 study researchers interviewed 1,497 single men and 1,353 single women about their sex lives. The result of their survey was that women were orgasming with a regular sexual partner 62.9% of the time while men orgasmed 85.1% of the time. They also found that sexuality created a significant difference, but only for women. Based on gender and sexual orientation participants reported these rates of achieving orgasm with a familiar partner:

• Straight men: 85.5%

• Gay men: 84.7%

• Bisexual men: 77.6%

• Lesbian women: 74.7%

• Bisexual women: 58%

• Straight women: 61.6%

The orgasm gap is the difference that exists between heterosexual men and heterosexual women’s rate of orgasm. They are the groups most directly engaging with each other in sexual intercourse yet their numbers are so different. Meaning that in a number of heterosexual encounters men are regularly orgasming and their partners are not. 85.5% versus 61.6% is not only a statistically significant figure but also a socially important one.

The team behind this study concluded that women had “less predictable, more varied orgasm experiences than do men and that for women, but not men, the likelihood of orgasm varies with sexual orientation.” What many social and sexual scholars, including myself, concluded from this study was that patriarchy was at work yet again to create inequity in our sex lives.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, we cannot separate our sex lives from the society we live in nor the culture we grow up in. Sex, in our culture, centers men and male completion; penetrative penile/vaginal sex (which we understand to encompass all “real” sex) ends when a man can no longer be pleasured, once he has achieved orgasm. As a woman engaging with men you are not only made responsible for your partner’s enjoyment of sex, but also your own pleasure, and the societal pressure that comes along with maintaining male ego. We won’t even address faked orgasms here — it deserves a space all it’s own — but “faking it” comes from this pressure to please, to be easy to please, and to feed into male sexual fantasies as an object of desire succumbing to a dominant and undeniable sexual prowess (that oft doesn’t exist). In summation, men and women are both socialized to center the male orgasm in sexual encounters.

Obviously this broad assumptions doesn’t apply to everyone, but let’s take a look at queer folks in this study. Excluding bisexual people for the moment, only because we don’t know the genders of each of their sexual partners, there seems to be a distinctive trend in orgasm achievement in this study. Gay men, both focused on their own (male) orgasm, are orgasming at a statistically similar rate to straight men, also focused on their own orgasm. Lesbian women, having to decenter the male orgasm in their encounters but more competent in the field of female pleasure and taught to center their partner’s pleasure reported a much higher rate of orgasm than straight women, about 74.7%. While women of all sexualities still orgasm less frequently than men, there is a distinctive disadvantage when both partners place focus on the sexual desires and completion of only one of them. The process of sexual socialization that centers male orgasm leaves heterosexual women, women who have sex with men, and anyone with a vagina at a disadvantage as we struggle to prioritize our own pleasure.

social scripts & sexual actors

In psychology a social script is defined as "a series of behaviors, actions, and consequences that are expected in a particular situation or environment” — it’s a contextual behavior that we absorb from our environment, family, experiences, media, and the world around us. Do you ever notice that kids copy the television shows they watch, their parents, etc. and wonder why? Little human beings learning how to behave are picking up on the behaviors around them and absorbing all of it. Adults are no different, after a lifetime of mimicry we’ve cut and pasted our own social script together, predicting the consequences of known and unknown actions from experience, observation, and experimentation. What we don’t realize is that the scripts we have been absorbing all our lives were hardly written by the actors we see reciting them (parents, friends, teachers, & movie stars) they’re much older than that. We’ve been using the same antiquated sexual script (with a few minor tweaks) for a very long time and as a culture were beginning to suffer from the heteronormative stage production that we’ve come to rely on.

In a culture where sex between a man and a woman is the standard, when we build our sexual scripts around that model we all suffer from the inequality directing our neighbor’s bedroom scenes. Female pleasure is so marginalized that it is thought non-existent by many; where a woman’s sexual experience is much more about insecurity, other’s perception of her, secrecy, shame, and fulfilling other’s fantasies than it is about her own enjoyment. When I said that this disadvantages all of us, I mean queer people, transgender and non-binary people too; not just anyone who has a vagina but anyone occupying a feminine position or role in a sexual relationship despite genitalia. When we build our social scripts around penis worship (and a general distaste for/aversion to vaginas) we associate femininity, womanhood, the receiving role in sex with dehumanizing object status. Ultimately the effects of bad casting for women over the course of American history (and in other countries too!) is that no one is free from their original assignment and we all suffer from the rigidity of that casting.

Straight cisgender men have their own sexual issues and problems stemming from this toxic heteronormative patriarchy as well, but this isn’t their article.

Ben Shapiro feels confident and empowered to get on Beyonce’s internet and debate that wet pussy, a sign of female arousal, is a symptom of infection and ignorant incels on the internet go back and forth questioning if women are even capable of orgasm. These arguments not only promote the idea of the vagina as repulsive but also mysterious, unknowable, overly complicated, and ultimately unimportant.

The most popular pornography centers violence against women, highly choreographed and retouched scenes of women orgasming on command and this is where most of our young people see sex for the first time. Simultaneously, sex work is a mark of shame and most recently through the rise of OnlyFans adult actors (women in particular) began to make money off of adult content creation. Social stigma and online mocking has picked up in the midst of this wave of financial empowerment as our misogynistic society fights to keep sex workers exploited — sexual objects for their enjoyment rather than thriving entrepreneurs.

Sexual health courses in public school very rarely talk about female pleasure, if they speak about anyone’s, and many women go into their sexual and romantic lives thinking of sex as immoral, if not inherently painful — at the very least an unpleasant chore.

Obviously not every place is like this, not everyone thinks like this, but enough do that it’s a problem for the rest of us and although our sexual culture has come a long way, we still have a long ways to go.

closing the gap

There are things that we can do in our relationships with ourselves, and our partners to increase our rate of consistent orgasm and change our culture reflect the real value of pleasure. Everyone is different and I don’t have a step by step guide on how to defeat the patriarchy in your pants — finding ways to navigate this is up to each and everyone of us, but I do think that addressing a few issues would help:

• THE CLITORIS

The vast majority of us need more than penetration to orgasm; only between 3-10% of sexually active vagina owners can orgasm consistently without some other type of stimulation. The clitoris is incredibly important AND in some ways complicated because we as a culture, and our scientific experts, haven’t spent much time researching it. We do know a few things though:

Like an iceburg, the vast majority of the clitoris lies below the surface, wrapping around the vagina. A lot of the pleasure felt during vaginal penetration is actually from indirect stimulation of the “legs” of the clitoris. It’s delicate, and what’s going to work for one person isn’t going to work for everyone. The best advice when it comes to clitoral stimulation is to follow what feels good, communicate, and be a little selfish.

Ultimately an orgasm isn't guaranteed and we shouldn’t put pressure on ourselves to orgasm every single time, but if you do want to cum it’s essential that you work with your body and at it’s pace. Nothing is wrong with taking a long time to learn how to orgasm consistently, needing long periods of stimulation, or even exploring combo moves in the bedroom. The best advice when it comes to orgasming and clitoral stimulation is not to give up or quit because it’s not easy, you are capable of this and you’re worth all the work it takes.

A little Hoe-Tip: Toys are your partner’s best friend in the bedroom! Try incorporating them into your sexual play.

• MORE SEX EDUCATION

Sex education in the United States is unstandardized, often inaccurate, and universally lacking. Although the health information that some programs offer in public schools about adolescent bodies, STD’s, pregnancy, and more is important, the framing of that essential information is based on fear mongering tactics that fail to teach people how to engage sex. I’m not calling for live demonstrations — what we need is a sex education curriculum that starts as young as possible and never truly ends.

Kids as young as 2-3 years old should learn about consent, bodily autonomy, and the correct names for their genitals. At every age we should be talking about and modeling how to respect one another: across difference, through conflict, and in the midst of attraction. For maturing adolescents the information to make healthy decisions about their bodies and sex is the basis for sexual education but shouldn’t sit at the absolute center. It creates a culture around sex that does nothing to dispel its mysticism in young people’s minds and sends them elsewhere looking for answers, like their uninformed peers and the internet (a disaster waiting to happen).

We need to demystify sex. Pleasure, for any and everyone, isn’t something talked about in sex education and if we start the conversation young and keep it constant, allowing ourselves to get comfortable talking about pleasure, we can make strides and leaps towards closing the orgasm gap. When our sexual education centers what makes us feel good and how to keep ourselves mentally, medically, and emotionally safe while we feel good, our eventual sex lives - years in the making- can be incredibly healthy and fulfilling.

• A LITTLE LESS PORNOGRAPHY

I am in no way anti-pornography, but the state of the industry right now does nothing to increase female pleasure in real life, it actually makes it harder for women to achieve sexual pleasure. When all of the examples of sex that we have are so highly directed, edited, acted, and scripted there’s very little room for realism in our sexual fantasies.

Sex is clumsy. If the only images we have to compare ourselves to and imitate are these idealized scenes then what does that mean for our self esteem? Pornography is pleasing to the eye because it’s a visual medium; it’s made to entertain and is not necessarily concerned with creating accurate images of sex for people to imitate and learn from. That’s not to mention all of the parts of sex that pornography excludes and de-emphasizes: the conversations before-hand, the awkward fumbling, the process of learning each others bodies, leg cramps, and accidentally biting each other too hard. If people trying to learn about sex, curious about how it’s “supposed” to look and feel, can’t see these things they don’t imagine sex this way. When it ends up being inevitably awkward and unpracticed the chasm between our real and imagined knowledge is bridged only by bruised ego.

I don’t think porn needs to be cut out completely but I do believe that we need to stop relying on it, or at least the type of porn that has characterized the last few decades. As sex workers strike out on their own with platforms like OnlyFans, and begin to build and grow their own platforms, we’re seeing a diversification of pornography and a personalization of pornographic actors. This presents an opportunity for us to make some feminist skin flicks: pornography that not only reflects realistic sexual encounters but also emphasizes humanizing women, consent, real pleasure, and sexual safety. We should be investing our time, energy, and MONEY (pay sex workers) into pornography that reflects the type of sex we want to and should be having and divests from pleasure for the eyes only.

• MASTURBATION

There is still a lot of shame around masturbation and it’s something we need to unpack. First and foremost, there is nothing wrong with touching and pleasuring yourself; it’s a perfectly healthy practice and the safest form of sex. In addition to being good for preventing STD’s and unwanted pregnancies masturbation has the ability to help us learn our bodies.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore your own body then you can’t be an expert in your own pleasure, and how would you teach someone how to make you feel good if you don’t even know? For young folks growing into their sexuality (and people of all ages) masturbation can be a fun, safe alternative to partnered sex with the benefit of helping them prepare to assert themselves and instruct others when they’re ready. In addition to being educational, masturbation, when practiced properly, has the ability to be incredibly empowering.

Young people seeking sexual satisfaction shouldn’t place all their cards with partners and other people. When we give that power to others, valuing the type or quantity of sex rather than the quality, we rob ourselves and each other of the care we each deserve. Masturbation, particularly for young women, presents a healthy comparison for sometimes-painful, mediocre, and apprehensive sexual encounters. Information is empowering and masturbation makes folks want to have good sex rather than any sex. In knowing the potential of their own pleasure alone, young women gain the tools to explore, learn their own bodies, teach others, and advocate for themselves, never settling for less than the sweetness of solitude.

• COMMUNICATION

The absolute best thing that vagina owners can do to increase their rates of regular orgasm is communicate with their partners. When it comes to concepts like “faking it” non-communication or the fear of communication is the biggest thing getting in the way. The vast majority of people I speak to who sleep with women want to make their partners orgasm, and many believe that their partners are regularly orgasming when they aren’t.

What’s important is that vagina-owning folks are sitting down and having these conversations with their partners before, during, and after sex. It doesn’t have to be scary to talk about what you want and need, and it must be an ongoing conversation. It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean or rude: you can cuddle and talk about what you liked, what went well, when you felt close, etc. You should be talking during sex, being encouraging, being clear when something doesn't feel good, and exuberant when it does.

Learning to assert yourself is the most important thing you can do to make sure you get yours; if you don’t demand an orgasm you aren’t going to have one, and if you don’t demand to be satisfied you won’t be. Setting that tone from the beginning of any one night stand, situationship, or romantic entanglement will get you on track to regular orgasms and ward off anyone who isn't worth your time — who doesn't care.

Though it may seem futile, like a fool’s errand, or like you’re never going to cum, we have so many tools and strategies — even outside of these — that we have at our disposal to bring ourselves to completion. Don’t duck out at intermission, demand a finale.