[Estimated reading time: 28 minutes]

*This article uses cis-normative language, please refer to the note at the bottom of the page for details

People…I like to orgasm. I like to bring others to orgasm. I like being a purveyor of products that provide orgasms. I’m very orgasm focused. But until I started writing this, I have to admit I didn’t know exactly what an orgasm was. I didn’t know what happened when I had one. And even though I knew how to make them happen, I didn’t know what caused them. It turns out, I wasn’t alone. Orgasms are an elusive and tricky mistress that we don’t actually know a whole lot about. But today I thought we could look at what we do know, specifically what we know about the female orgasm.

 Why do women orgasm?

The latest theory (at the time of writing) about the female orgasm is that it’s an evolutionary relic from a time when human females would have induced ovulation (as opposed to our current, regularly scheduled ovulation).

Basically a whole heap of animals need a specific trigger to set off ovulation, so that their bodies aren’t wasting time and energy on ovulating when there’s no chance of becoming pregnant. The new orgasm theory suggests that the female orgasm was a way to trigger that process. This makes sense given that the clitoris used to be much closer to the vaginal opening and therefore penetrative sex was much more likely to induce orgasm.

They also found that we release the same chemicals from orgasm as other animals do during induced ovulation. Before we evolved into the upstanding citizens we are now, our bodies were designed to release an egg every time we orgasmed. This meant our body wasn’t wasting energy on pointless ovulation when we couldn’t procreate. The female orgasm, so the theory goes, is a biological relic from that era.

What exactly is an orgasm?

So what actually is an orgasm? Masters and Johnson put forward the theory of “The Human Sexual Response Cycle” in 1966 that still largely forms the basis for many modern sexual theories. Masters and Johnson theorised that there are 4 distinct stages to human sexual stimulation:

1. Excitement

2. Plateau

3. Orgasm

4. Resolution

They narrowed the orgasm phase down to a series of muscular contractions, noting that they occur at intervals of every 0.8 seconds in both sexes; with men experiencing 3 to 4, but women enjoying between 5 to 12. The contractions are localised to the lower pelvis and anus in men, but in women include the urethra and vagina.

The entire orgasm response is involuntary, which is why we often flail around and make strange sounds while it’s happening.

Furthering the research of Masters and Johnson, Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in New Jersey decided to see what was happening inside the brains of people orgasming. By conducting fMRI scans on patients achieving orgasm Komisaruk has been able to determine that from a neurological perspective there isn’t a great deal of difference between sexes at the point of climax.

Basically, regardless of your junk, when you orgasm your entire brain lights up, but particularly the nucleus accumbens. Interestingly, if you stimulate this brain region in rats, they’ll choose to keep sending electrical pulses to their brain rather than stop for food. To the point that they’ll starve to death. I mean, at least they’re literally dying happy, right?

So, an orgasm is a combination of setting your brain on fire, poking your pleasure centre to the point that you’d choose death rather than stopping, and making almost every muscle between your asshole and navel start convulsing like you’ve accidentally plugged your genitals into a power socket.

Sign me the fuck up!

What is the orgasm gap?

We’ve spoken before about the Vagina Burden, and how simply owning one sets you up for a lifetime of discrimination, expense and pain. But what we haven’t looked at is the Orgasm Gap. This refers to the measurable difference in the number of orgasms had by cis-women in hetero relationships versus their male counterparts.

No matter the sample size, or how you slice the data, there is always a statistically significant discrepancy between the number of orgasms experienced by men and women during heterosexual sex.

Interestingly women in same sex relationships experience a greater number of orgasms than their straight friends, while men in same sex relationships don’t appear to have any significant difference in the number of orgasms to their straight counterparts.

To make it even more interesting, women have way more orgasms when masturbating than they do while with a male partner. 

Now, I’m no scientist (although I look great in lab coats), but the easy conclusion to draw here is that as soon as you throw a dick into the mix, orgasms for women drop significantly. There’s a few good reasons as to why this might be the case. 

The first is the obvious one, that if we look at the situation in a vacuum, a disembodied penis (where we’re not taking into account the person it’s attached to) penetrating a disembodied vagina is highly unlikely to cause orgasm. There are simply not enough nerve endings within the vagina for penetration alone to trigger an orgasm response.

Despite this though, women are still marketed sex toys that are penis-clones that vibrate. When using these toys and having sex with a penis doesn’t yield an orgasm many women simply assume they’re anorgasmic, when in reality we’re just not designed to feel much inside our batcave. And this is probably a good thing, since if a vagina was as sensitive as a clitoris, then childbirth would become a whole lot more of an ordeal than it currently is (and it’s currently no fucking picnic).

Another reason though is slightly more complex and has to do with our attitudes towards sexuality, sex and women. From a modern biological perspective, a male orgasm is necessary for procreation but a female orgasm is incidental. However, even in situations where conception isn’t the goal, we still tend to place a priority on the male experience.

“Bullshit” you might be saying “I always try and make the women I’m with orgasm”. Okay, but how often do you have sex with the sole intention of achieving female orgasm, but not male orgasm. How many times will a male partner get his female partner off and then simply stop. Because this is exactly the sexual standard we’re holding women to.

Our social conditioning around female sexuality dictates that she is the one being pursued and is not the sexual aggressor. She should be passive and wait to be wooed. This carries across to the bedroom where, even in open-minded and enlightened bedrooms, it’s difficult for women to overcome this conditioning and take what they want.  Women are more likely to be submissives, or bottoms, in the bedroom because it allows them to give and receive pleasure without having to put themselves in a position where they’re asking for or demanding it.

It’s a rare (and awesome) woman who will hook up with a man, and do only what they know will make them climax and then leave without thought for his pleasure. And while we acknowledge that men who do this are shitty in bed, most of us have never even conceptualised a woman (especially ourselves) doing it.

There’s also still a stigma for women around being an ‘experienced’ lover, and knowing what they want. Often we feel that this makes us greedy or self-absorbed, or inattentive to a male partner’s needs. This can get to the point that some women don’t feel comfortable communicating their desires and needs until well into a relationship. And this is if they’re literate enough with their own body to actually know what gets them off in the first place.

What they didn’t teach you in sex-ed…

We’ve spoken before, about how women are expected to be able to get themselves off, but that socially we provide little to no education around how to make this happen.

Sex education doesn’t cover ‘pleasure’, just biology. And while we make jokes about boys and their wet dreams and awkward erections, it’s considered perverse to discuss female masturbation and pleasure at similar ages. This means that most girls don’t understand or have access to resources that will help them learn what feels good or even what’s happening to their body when something does feel good. Thankfully there’s now a book out there addressing this. The “Teen Girl’s Guide to Getting Off” should be mandatory reading for every person going through puberty (and their parents).

But for those of us who are already grown women, there is a vast education gap. So let’s try and fill it a little bit now...

There has been a dearth of research around female sexuality and sexual function over the years, with academia focusing exclusively on male experiences and being subject to the rampant sexism in medicine.

For most of history the study of female anatomy and pleasure has been dictated by men. There are literally 9 different parts of female genitalia named after men. Seems a bit on the nose considering I’m pretty sure there were women who knew where their fucking g-spot was before Ernst Grafenburg came along and wrote about it in the 1900s.

Nowhere has there been a greater demonstration of this bias than in the study and dissemination of information pertaining to the clitoris.

The clitoris

The clitoris is a very sensitive protrusion of erectile tissue at the top of the vulva. The entirety of the clitoris actually goes much deeper than the external protrusion though. The rest of the clitoris includes two ‘crus’ on either side which are about 10cm in length, and two shorter ‘bulbs’.

The part of the clitoris that’s visible is the ‘glans’, and if you’re thinking “oh, like the glans of the penis” then you’re spot on! Just like the penis, it fills with blood and becomes erect when sexually aroused.

The clitoris has appeared on Venus figurines as far back as the ice age. It’s not exactly a new discovery - it has appeared throughout history from Ancient Greece (the name comes from the Ancient Greek word for key) to Renaissance Italy where surgeon Realdo Colombo declared his ‘discovery of it’ and labelled it as “the seat of women’s pleasure”. The clitoris isn’t some mysterious third spleen hidden inside the elbow that we’ve only just stumbled upon. But our ongoing awareness of it has certainly not translated into further study or education. It is still regularly left out of textbooks and anatomy diagrams for medical students despite the fact that clitoral infections, pain and disease are quite common.

As a 2005 report from the American Urological Association puts it,

“The anatomy of the clitoris has not been stable with time as would be expected. To a major extent its study has been dominated by social factors.”

The entire clitoris wasn’t properly or completely mapped until 2005, when O'Connell, Sanjeevan & Hutson used MRIs on vaginas of different ages to completely determine its component structures, neurovascular supply, relationship to adjacent structures (the urethra, vagina and vestibular glands, and connective tissue supports), histology and immunohistochemistry.

In case you missed that...2005. Yeah, if the map of the clitoris was a person, they wouldn’t be old enough to have sex yet. It wasn’t even completely sonographed until 2009!

Even when it has been publicly acknowledged for its role in pleasure and orgasm, commentary on it hasn’t always been positive. In the 16th century, Vesalius argued the clitoris did not appear in “healthy women.” While Freud’s educated opinion was that women could achieve orgasm through clitoral stimulation, but that the ‘sexually mature woman’ could do so through penetration alone. Go fuck a cigar Freud, sometimes an orgasm is just an orgasm. 

The joke is on Freud though, because much of the current research is pointing to the fact that ‘internal orgasms’ are actually also clitoral orgasms, stimulated by the interior structure of the clitoris rather than the glans alone.

Internal orgasms (vaginal, cervical. urethral, g-spot)

In the largest orgasm study to date, only 18% of women reported being able to orgasm from penetration alone during sex. The fact that the majority of women require clitoral stimulation to orgasm is something that we’ve known since Masters & Johnson were about. And yet, mysteriously, it remains absent from sex education curriculum.

There are a number of different terms that we use to refer to ‘internal’ orgasms - cervical orgasms, vaginal orgasms, urethral orgasms, g-spot orgasms, and even coregasms.

Much of the scientific discussion around these terms has come down to arguing that if people are experiencing orgasms in these distinct areas, it is most likely because they are inadvertently stimulating clitoral nerves that extend into those spaces. The cervix, for instance, contains no nerves of its own, so it would be a difficult task to try and climax from stimulating it. We already know that in people who have a g-spot, it consists of nerve endings from the clitoris, urethra and female prostate (which is why it plays such a large role in a person’s ability to squirt).

While these distinctions are important for science and furthering the study of the clitoris, it can be hard to see how they might affect the person having the orgasm.

Language around specific orgasms can be beneficial in helping us to describe our experiences and also in directing partners towards our pleasure zones. It’s crucial though for people to be remain aware of developments in this research. If we understand that those who are able to have cervical orgasms are those whose clitoral structure reaches further internally, we are more likely to have compassion and understanding for ourselves if we then fail to achieve that particular climax. Acknowledging the anatomical distinction means we avoid creating yet another sexual standard for ‘all women’ to live up to.

When it comes to our sexual anatomy, while we have much in common, we are still all unique. What makes one woman scream in pleasure can make another scream in frustration. There is no single plottable course to climax, each of us must undertake our own unique journey.

Squirting

For those who are wondering, there has been research done on what a wet vaginal orgasm actually consists of, and the answer is; it depends. There’s two kinds of wet orgasm for vagina owners; female ejaculation and squirting. Both emerge from the urinary tract.

Female ejaculation involves the Skene glands, which are little pockets that drain into the urethra. Female ejaculation will be a milky white consistency, similar to penis ejaculate and contains prostatic-specific antigen (PSA).

Squirting predominantly consists of urine, but also contains PSA, whereas regular urine does not. There are also situations where women can become so aroused during stimulation (particularly fingering or direct g-spot stimulation) that their natural lubrication will pool and be expelled during orgasm, which can often be mistaken for ejaculation.  

There is a trend at the moment of partners pressuring women into squirting or ejaculating during orgasm. This has largely been influenced by its rising popularity in porn. For many men the ability to make a woman squirt or ejaculate becomes proof of their sexual prowess (because of course men manage to make a woman's orgasm about themselves).

However many people who are trying to elicit this response in their partners are doing so by placing pressure on the bladder while stimulating her with a toy or their fingers. This isn’t actually ejaculation or squirting. It’s exactly what it sounds like - basically forcing someone to pee as soon as they lose muscular control.

This technique is often used without a prior conversation about whether or not the woman wants to have this experience. It can be a distressing experience for some women who assume that they’ve wet the bed and feel ashamed or like they’ve lost control of their body. If you’re with a woman and want to make her squirt or ejaculate, talk about it with her first and don't just press down on her bladder without asking.

By contrast there are other partners who will shame those who squirt, telling them that it’s gross, wrong or just inconvenient to have to change the linen. For those in the latter camp, I can’t recommend the Liberator Throe highly enough. It’s a fuzzy blanket with a plastic interior that will soak up any and all lovemaking liquids and can then just be thrown in the washing machine.

But regardless of whether people are telling women to squirt more or less, my response is the same; they should learn to fuck off with their biases and simply allow women to orgasm the way they want to. Our orgasms are not about your ego.  

Anorgasmia - the inability to orgasm

There are many, many, many factors that can impact a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm. However it’s important to make the distinction that these factors are often due to social or cultural attitudes towards women and sex. If we don’t make this distinction we run the risk of classifying every woman who hasn’t climaxed as ‘sexually dysfunctional’ when that isn’t the case. What we need to be doing is looking at the root causes of many of these issues and addressing them there, rather than trying to “cure” the woman who can’t orgasm.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at how prevalent anorgasmia is as a ‘sexual dysfunction’.

According to a 1999 survey, around 43% of women in the U.S have some sort of problem with their sex lives.

Current research indicates that 10% of all cis-women can’t achieve orgasm at all, and the same study found that even among women who can orgasm, they won’t be able to until later in life (mid 20s to early 30s).

A study in 2005 determined that genes play a significant role in women’s ability to achieve orgasm. In fact it found that 45% of the variation is genetic. 

In the face of these statistics, many are calling the idea of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) utter bullshit. Elisabeth Lloyd of Indiana University in Bloomington, author of The Case of the Female Orgasm points out;

“What definition of ‘normal’ could possibly justify labelling a third of women as ‘abnormal’?”

With that in mind, let’s look at the factors that can actually inhibit a woman’s ability to climax.

Psychological barriers

Much of our ability to orgasm is about being able to stop overthinking. Even those of us who can confidently climax on demand have had an experience where we’re too distracted or too caught up in our own thoughts to be able to get there. For most of us it’s a once in a while experience, but for many women it can become pathological. Every time they sit down to focus on their own pleasure they end up caught in a mental narrative around whether or not it’s going to happen this time, wondering whether their partner is bored of eating them out yet, whether they smell or taste the way they want to, or whether their body is as pretty as they wish it was.

This is partially why the majority of women find it easier to orgasm through masturbation rather than sex. This is why masturbation is such a crucial element in learning how to orgasm. You can take your time, there’s no pressure, and if you don’t climax there’s no one to judge you. Orgasms should be seen as kind of like getting your driver’s licence; if you don’t have 120 hours behind your own wheel, then you can’t really be trusted with passengers just yet.

Women are statistically more likely to have survived sexual trauma, sexual harassment or sexual abuse - all of which can heavily impact the ability to psychologically relax enough to orgasm. Women are also more likely to have been subjected to negative attitudes towards sex during their childhood, negative religious or cultural attitudes towards sex, or negative messages about their body relating to sex; all of which can contribute to orgasm difficulty or sexual dysfunction (such as vaginismus).

Women are also more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety, which means they’re more likely to be prescribed medication that can drastically affect sexual function.

Physical barriers

Dr Rachel Pauls has recently done studies confirming that the majority of women will orgasm through clitoral stimulation. However Pauls also determined that the size and placement of the clitoris has a significant impact on the ability to orgasm. As women evolve however, our clitoris has been moving further and further away from our vaginal opening, and for many women it has been shrinking in size - this means that for some of us, our clitoris is too small or too inconveniently located to be able to achieve orgasm.

Some women, like yours truly, overcome this physical issue by utilising more intense sex toys. However, since sex education never addresses pleasure, most women who go sex toy shopping aren’t armed with information about their pleasure anatomy, so they’re not necessarily going to know which toy to look for and are more likely to be influenced by marketing materials or recommendations from celebrities and influencers.

Given that the majority of sex toy sales for women are still phallic shaped, dildo-esque vibrators that aren’t designed with either the clitoris or the g-spot in mind, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that most women aren’t going to climaxing from their first sex toy forays - and many may not try again. And that’s just the women who have the education, the means and the access to sex toys in the first place.

So…what now?

If you’re a woman and you’re not literate about your pleasure anatomy, it’s not your fault. Sex education has completely failed us and social attitudes towards sex for women still have a long way to go. It’s why, at Smut Buttons, we’re such passionate fans of talking about these topics, because too often they go undiscussed.

If you’re a woman who is unable to orgasm, that’s not your fault. The odds are stacked against us by genetics, by the culture of academia and medicine, by physiology, by social conditioning around sex and so much more. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards overcoming these obstacles, we absolutely fucking should. But it’s also important not to place blame or pressure on women who are unable to orgasm. For some women, orgasms are just not a possibility, and if they’re okay with that we shouldn’t try to make them feel differently.

For those who are yet to experience an orgasm but are still actively seeking them, there is the curative process of masturbation. Masturbate mindfully; focus on nothing but your physical sensations, what feels good and where and for how long. Introduce toys and fantasies and rituals as you feel the urge, but focus primarily on what your body is telling you about your pleasure (see our article on Why Masturbation Matters for more details). It won’t happen overnight though, and the more pressure you put on yourself the more difficult it will become, so think of it as a long, intimate seduction of your vagina.

If you’re a dude reading this and you want to make a difference to the lives of the women you sleep with, perhaps it’s time to evaluate the way you treat them in the bedroom. Do you make orgasm the end goal of all sex? Do you exclusively make your orgasm the end goal of sex? Are you putting pressure on her to climax, or to climax in a particular way? And most importantly, have you communicated with your partner about what she enjoys and what she wants? It’s okay if she doesn’t know and wants you to take the lead, but make sure that your first priority is giving her a safe space to talk about her needs and desires.

Together, we can fight the orgasm gap. We can have better conversations around female sexuality. We can have better attitudes towards sex. And we can educate ourselves better around pleasure anatomy. So let’s work on this, together. I believe in us. 

That is all.

You may go now.

*While we normally make a point of using body first language on this site (e.g. vagina owners), all referenced research is based on cis-women and language around the physiology speaks of ‘female ejaculation’ and ‘female orgasm’ - labelling these things ‘vaginal orgasm’ or ‘urethral ejaculation’ would be inaccurate and cause greater confusion to readers. For this article alone we have used cis-normative language. We apologise if it has caused any readers to experience distress.

We acknowledge that not all vagina owners are women/female and not all women/females have vaginas. We acknowledge that for those whose vagina came to them later in life, this information may not be relevant or accurate and may not reflect their experience.