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'orgasm gap': women even face barriers to sexual pleasure
women are faking it. but how come the narrative is always on the male perspective that women are lying.
mar 8 2020
2 minute read
women face inequality even in the bedroom. stock/getty
efforts to close the equality gap between men and women have made great strides in the past 10 years. yet despite these advancements, women still struggle with inequality in the workplace, their relationships, and even their sex lives.
yup, it’s true. women have less orgasms than men. insider reports that in 2014, a survey of 3000 men and women from the journal of sexual medicine found that men get off more than women do. in fact, men orgasmed 85 per cent of the time they had sex while women orgasmed only 63 per cent of the time.
so what gives?
according to public health researcher and journalist katherine rowland in her book “ the pleasure gap” , there are reasons why an “orgasm gap” exists between men and women. while it’s difficult to determine what led to the differences in sexual satisfaction between men and women, she suggests that stereotypes about women’s emotional needs are a factor.
inside says that stereotypes typically show that heterosexual women need an emotional connection with their heterosexual male partner in order to enjoy or want sex. hence, a woman in a healthy and happy relationship should be having a great sex life. however rowland disagrees.
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“pleasure is inextricable from our social status, compressed and constrained by financial factors, by safety factors, by objectification,” she said in an interview with npr . “we need to remove these barriers to experience sex with the full freedom, expression, range and truth that we’re endowed with.”
for her work, rowland spoke with researchers and, drawing on five years of interviews with women about their sex lives, she found that women’s sexual desire was “undercut by familiarity, the institutionalization of the relationship, and desexualized roles,” as a healthy, romantic relationship didn’t always mean good sex, she told insider,
she also told npr that when the media reports on studies looking at the percentage of women faking their orgasms, they tend to focus on the male perspective when women are lying to them, as opposed to concern around the fact that women aren’t feeling good.
“that women are feigning their pleasure in order to hasten that experience along — i think we need to treat that with real alarm,” she said. “we need to ask what’s going on in that women are engaging in spectacle as opposed to actually allowing themselves to feel sensation.”
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but that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. male partners can do their part to help their partner engage with their desires and sensations. rowland told npr that being a non-judgemental and compassionate listener is key to helping both people experience pleasure during sex.
“by creating an erotic atmosphere in which men and women’s needs command equal importance, and by encouraging interactions that depart from the wearied script of male arousal and release,” she said. “just as society tends to overly complicate female sexuality, we oversimplify men’s, and they also benefit from shifting dynamics around.”
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