she said research has shown “quite convincingly” that sexuality between women and men has historically been about men’s pleasure. “it usually ends with men’s orgasms and often a woman’s orgasm isn’t even part of the story.” in the victorian era, women were thought not to have any kind of sexuality whatsoever, chadwick added. gynecologist william acton famously wrote in his 1857 manual, the function and disorders of the reproductive organs, that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.”
the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s brought increased focus on women’s pleasure, making women’s orgasms a symbol of gender equality, chadwick said.
today, there’s increasing pressure on women, and men, to fulfill certain sexual norms — lots of sex, ending in orgasm — in a culture of almost compulsory sexuality.
yet studies have found that many women fake climaxes to please their male partners, van anders and chadwick write, “highlighting that women sometimes prioritize their male partner’s ego” over communicating their own sexual desires.
for their study, the pair developed an experiment, the imagined orgasm exercise. in an online survey, men (mean age 26) recruited from craigslist, reddit, facebook, the university of michigan and other sources were randomly assigned to read one of four vignettes where they imagined themselves with a woman with whom they had had sex at least three times previously. the women were orgasmic, or not. and the woman had either often, or rarely experienced orgasms with other men.