Orgasm: Don’t fake it till you make it

If you’ve ever faked an orgasm, you’re not alone. In a survey, 68% of women said they pretended to climax, which is much higher than the 27% of men who admitted the same. The survey also broke down the numbers of when women fake it:

• 28% with a one-night stand
• 26% in a new relationship
• 31% in a long-term relationship
• 15% after marriage

For women who admitted to their partner that they were faking it, 60% would pretend again with the same partner!

That’s a lot of faking it without ever making it.>

So why do women do it? To avoid appearing “abnormal,” to avoid hurting their partner’s feelings, and to build their partner’s ego are some of the commonly mentioned reasons, according to Dr. Laurie Mintz, author of Becoming Cliterate.

Whether you didn’t orgasm or you just didn’t enjoy sexy time, you might rationalize bad sex by thinking that if it was good for him, it was good for you, too. This kind of thinking goes back to how women are raised to be perfect and desirable and to put their value in other people’s hands. It may not seem traditionally desirable to come clean that you didn’t orgasm and possibly hurt your partner’s ego. But a partner who’s truly worth it will want you to feel satisfied just as much as he does.

One thing that could greatly help close the orgasm gap is to squash the idea that women should climax from intercourse alone. Media, pop culture, and porn create this idea that intercourse is the holy grail of sex and a few thrusts can make a woman orgasm. Mintz even calls out women’s magazines that advise certain positions like woman on top. “This makes matters worse because it implies that all women can orgasm during intercourse if only they do it right.”

But there’s simply no “doing it right” because research has shown time and time again that women need other kinds of stimulation to climax. Just take a look at the numbers:

• Only 18% of women climax from just vaginal intercourse
• 36% said intercourse with clitoral stimulation helped them orgasm
• 69% said oral sex feels “very pleasurable”
• 59% give oral sex but only 44% get it in return
• It takes 3 minutes for women to orgasm by masturbating…
• And 10 to 20 minutes to climax through intercourse—almost twice as long as men (7 to 14 minutes)!

Even though these are averages and your experience may be different, these numbers are supported by the natural design of women’s bodies. As mentioned, the clit is a super pleasure zone and twice as sensitive as the penis. Intercourse alone bypasses that hot spot, going straight for the vagina.

Quick anatomy lesson: What most people call the vagina is actually the vulva, which is the anatomically correct term for the external parts of your genitals, including the clitoris. The vagina is actually inside; it’s the canal that connects the vulva and the uterus. It does a lot—it’s where the penis goes during intercourse, where menstrual blood flows, and where a baby would pass through during childbirth.

Back to intercourse: the vagina doesn't have a lot of nerve endings, so it’s not as sensitive to pleasure as the clitoris—far from it, in fact. This is a good thing because childbirth would be way more painful if that’s the case! But this explains why clit stimulation is so important. Intercourse alone can stimulate the inner part of your clit—remember, it’s a larger structure that’s partly internal—but that’s no match to the 8,000 nerve endings on the tip of your clit.