When Rachel Bilson, once a star of the 00s teen drama The OC and more recently a host of a podcast about the show, said that she didn’t have an orgasm through penetrative sex with a man until she was 38, she poked alight a smouldering conversation about “the orgasm gap”.
The phrase doesn’t refer to those years of waiting, between discovering sex and meeting someone who does it right. That would be like calling a life sentence a gap year. Rather, it’s a play on the pay gap: the difference in the number of orgasms men and women report during straight sex.
