Why Don’t We Talk About This?

Sara Bernard

I first heard the word "orgasm" when I was about nine years old. I remember it well: I was at a café with my mother and older sister, eyeing all the elaborate desserts behind glass, and one dark, sticky-looking wedge of chocolate was labeled in big, swirly letters, "Orgasm Cake." I had no idea what that meant. When I asked, they both got very red and uncomfortable, my mother especially. There was a great, fat pause. Then, eventually: "It – it just means… really good chocolate cake."

Although of course I knew she was lying, that's the only information I had for a while – that "orgasm" meant a special kind of chocolate. And while I distinctly remember that moment of ignorance (maybe because its emotional resonance – that other people knew things I didn't – stung, and because it stung, lingered), I don't remember when I found out what the word really meant. Perhaps because orgasm was always a kind of afterthought, a shadowy byproduct of all the other incredibly fraught aspects of the sex conversation, which barely happened at home and was only associated with disease, pregnancy, and rape at school. Besides a couple of friends encouraging me to purchase a vibrator at some point, no one, not even the people who seemed most outspoken and comfortable about sex, ever spoke with any shred of specificity about how a female orgasm worked. They certainly never talked about the myriad ways in which it could work – particularly with a partner – even though it seemed like everyone was having plenty of sex.

Sure, there are a hundred resources out there I could have explored and questions I could have asked my sex-positive friends. But in general, just moving through the young adult world, navigating heterosexual sex and relationships and culture and media – and expectations and miscommunications and frustrations – there was always a thick cloak of silence around all of it. I harbored (like many women, it turns out) a self-deprecating expectation that everyone else was having orgasms, easily and swiftly and often, during sex. But no one ever told me that the vast majority of women actually do not orgasm from vaginal intercourse.

In fact, there's a ton of research out there that supports this idea. At least 70 to 80 percent of women don't have otherwise unassisted orgasms through penetrative sex; some studies suggest that number is more like 93 percent. The 1953 Kinsey Report on female sexuality, the 1976 Hite Report by feminist Shere Hite, a clinical psychiatry manual from the 1990s, studies from 2001 and 2008 and 2011: they all iterate and reiterate that penile-vaginal intercourse by itself rarely results in female orgasm. That's largely based on physiology, and not psychology or frigidity or any of the deep-seated, socially constructed reasons that many women (and men) have skewed expectations and tend to keep this uncomfortable reality to themselves.

Among other research findings: Women are far less likely than men to orgasm during casual sexual encounters, women are far more likely to have consistent orgasms when they're alone, and overall, it takes longer for women to get there, in part because the female anatomy is diverse and complex and women are all very, very different from one another. Well, duh, some say – this is hardly news. But if so many of us live in this world, why don't we talk about it? And why does the dominant culture so rarely support it?

Elisabeth Lloyd, a science historian at Indiana University, Bloomington, is among the handful of researchers whose work suggests that the proportion of women who can consistently orgasm from vaginal intercourse is as little as 7 or 8 percent, and that's often because their clitorises happen to be unusually close to their vaginal opening. "But in Hollywood," she told Reuters, "That 8 percent is portrayed as 100 percent." The result: a whole lot of everyday people who wonder if something's wrong with them, decades after pioneering research, after the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 70s, after the word "orgasm" has become a household term.

And sure, sex talk seems to be everywhere; it seems like, as a nation and world, we've gotten a whole lot more sex-positive, sexually open, and openly supportive of different sexual experiences and preferences. But in many ways, silence holds. Misinformation persists. Many sexologists, sex educators, sex columnists and women's magazine editors still report that the single most common and consistent question they get from female clients and readers is some version of, "Is there something wrong with me? I can't orgasm during sex."

While the idea that orgasms don't just happen, especially with straight-up penetrative sex, may seem like an old idea to some, the frustrating social reason for its genesis persists, like an old wound. Shere Hite wrote in 1976 that penetrative sex is "a sexist definition of sex, oriented around male orgasm and the needs of reproduction" and that "this definition is cultural, not biological." That was almost four decades ago. And yet, in so many insidious ways, we're still caught up in it.

Among the barriers to busting all the mythology is how difficult it remains to get the funding and the social acceptance to even pursue further knowledge. Orgasm researcher and Rutgers University professor Barry Komisaruk was only able to secure funding at one point if he took out the word "vaginal" from his study's title. There are textbooks beyond textbooks of sexual dysfunction and disorder, but so little vocabulary to discuss the positive, yet complex and still nebulous, aspects of the female sexual experience.

What may be a typical experience for a woman, then, at least with a partner with whom there isn't much history, comfort, or appetite for exploration: The man touches her, she becomes aroused, vaginal intercourse happens, he orgasms, the end. If she doesn't articulate what's missing, and he doesn't look for or ask for what's missing, then that's how it can be, especially early on in a relationship. Many women, even if they do know what could change the situation, find it incredibly difficult to articulate what's needed; what if he judges her? What if her communicating what she needs bruises his ego somehow, makes him feel like he hasn't been doing a good job so far?

In a 2010 study, 67 percent of heterosexual women said they occasionally faked orgasm. The Kinsey Institute's National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior reports that 85 percent of men believed their partners had an orgasm during their most recent sexual encounter, while 64 percent of women reported having had one – a difference too large, researchers argue, to be attributed to the number of men whose recent sexual partners were men.

Here's a thought: what if we stopped pretending it's okay not to talk about this? And what if, when we did talk about it, we stopped calling it a deficit, a disorder, a problem? Unless you're attending esoteric sex conferences or deeply and deliberately exploring this stuff, there's simply no great vocabulary out there for the interesting and exciting ways to achieve female orgasm – not the methods, not the anatomy, not much of anything. There's still no real way this is getting taught or disseminated, except through trial and error and embarrassment. But what if we started coming up with words for this stuff? Descriptive words? Empowering words?

All women are very, very different when it comes to what actually works – what brings one woman to orgasm would cause another one pain. Many women have difficulty reaching orgasm, and there is no one-size-fits-all – not even close. And that thought alone would have been really helpful for me to have stumbled across a long time ago.

Experimentation is vital; it's part of it. We do want to have healthy sexual relationships with one another and with ourselves, and we're not broken if we're not coming at the sight of a penis like a Hollywood actress. Maybe, one day, sex ed at school could, heaven forbid, include a discussion of orgasm. Maybe resources to learn about it and try different techniques and different vocabularies could be both readily available and openly embraced. And maybe, one day, it could be okay – or, dare I say, pleasurable – to get this conversation going.

Sara Bernard is a journalist and podcast host. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, and other publications.

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