Women are having fewer orgasms than men. No kidding. I can already picture the sardonic comments piling in: “This isn’t news!” What might be news, possibly, is the fact that women continue to have fewer orgasms than men throughout their lives, despite what we might assume would be an increase in experience and confidence, and an understanding (on both sides) of what they enjoy in bed.
A new study, published in the journal Sexual Medicine, found that not only do men report higher rates of orgasm during sex than women, but also that these stats remain consistent with age. Researchers surveyed 24,000 single Americans aged from 18 to 100. Men’s orgasm rates ranged from 70% to 85%, while women’s ranged from 46% to 58%. Any hope that we might achieve parity with age quickly went out the window. Women’s orgasm rates remained 22 to 30 percentage points lower than men’s across all age groups.
This does seem surprising. Like you, I was relatively unmoved by the “discovery” that men have more orgasms, my reaction more shrug emoji than righteous anger. It’s not long since the last big study of orgasm discrepancy, and sexual culture doesn’t change that fast. That the orgasm gap remains wide open is regrettable but entirely unsurprising. Like the researchers, though, I too would have expected older women (at 40, I would be classed as an “early middle adult” by the study) to have increased knowledge of what they want, greater confidence in asking for it – and, perhaps more crucially, less willingness to put up with partners who didn’t deliver. But this is not what they were asked. They were asked how often they had an orgasm “when having sexual intercourse”.
This wording changes everything. Research shows that for the vast majority of straight people, the word “sex” means penetration, even more so when associated with “intercourse”. Usually, they’re talking about penis-in-vagina, although many also consider anal sex intercourse. Whichever way you slice it, there remains a glaring problem: women are significantly less likely to orgasm this way.
This should not be news either. Writers, therapists, researchers, and educators have been talking for years about the need to broaden our definition of sex, to account for the fact that most women need clitorial stimulation to have an orgasm. As a sex and culture reporter of almost a decade, I’ve actually lost count of the articles, podcasts, panels and social media posts in which I’ve expounded on this precise topic.
When it comes to heterosexual sex, the things that happen with lips and hands and tongues and fingers and toys are far too often lumped together as “foreplay” – they’re not considered “proper sex”. Yet, for women, these are the activities most likely to result in orgasm. “We need to stop using the word ‘sex’ to mean intercourse, because it gives the false impression that intercourse is the main event for both men and women and ... it’s not,” American psychologist Laurie Mintz wrote in her 2017 book, Becoming Cliterate. Indeed.
Viewing penetrative sex as the main event is particularly farcical in the context of queer relationships, which is probably why the 13% of gay, lesbian and bisexual people who responded to the study were able to extrapolate from the term “sexual intercourse” to include their own experiences. Unsurprisingly, women who have sex with women consistently report higher rates of orgasm during sex than women who have sex with men. This was observed by sexologist Alfred Kinsey in 1953, reiterated by Masters and Johnson in the 60s, and has reliably shown up in every orgasm gap study ever since, including this most recent one conducted by Match in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute. “Lesbian [and, this writer would like to add, bisexual] women are more likely to engage in and receive oral sex, with encounters often lasting longer than those of heterosexual women,” note the study’s authors. You certainly won’t catch me dismissing the importance of enthusiastic oral sex, but might it not be partly down to the fact that queer women include oral sex in their definition of sex in the first place?
To quiz women on their rate of orgasm during “sexual intercourse” is the academic equivalent of the bloke who asks “Did you come?”, without having done anything to facilitate or expedite this outcome. And simply repeating this study every few years, as though our anatomies might have evolved in the time it took to film a new season of Euphoria, will do nothing to close the orgasm gap. The only way to do that is to start meaningfully talking about and prioritising other kinds of sex.
Franki Cookney is a freelance journalist specialising in sex, gender politics and social development, and hosts the sex podcast The Second Circle
