What The Orgasm Gap Tells Us About Heterosexual Intercourse

Our cultural scripts for heterosexual intercourse are acquired from the intricate process of socialization that molds us into the beings we are. Because this process is guided by notions of a gendered social hierarchy, we both experience and engage in sexuality in relation to social factors such as anatomical (mis)understandings, gender roles, and embedded power dynamics. Subsequently, these cultural scripts convey an understanding of sex as needing to revolve around penetration and comprising of acts at the service of male pleasure. Such scripts engender encounters that do justice for neither the woman party to it nor for her sexual pleasure. The orgasm gap is a term that describes the resulting sexual pleasure disparity in achievement of orgasm existing between heterosexual men and women. Without surprise, this disparity is as deeply-routed as are the social factors which led to its existence.

Scientific research indicates that women orgasm at much lower rates in heterosexual activity than men do. While this demonstrates a clear unequal pleasure distribution, it is best put into perspective by comparing it to orgasm occurrence among women by sexual orientation. A 2014 study examining this variation found the mean orgasm occurrence to be 63% among single women and 85% among single men. This same study resulted in findings about lesbian women orgasming on average 75% of the time compared to 62% for heterosexual women. This effectively shows that women do not only orgasm significantly less than their male counterparts, but also that they do so in comparison to women who have sex with other women.

This same story could be told by painting a slightly different picture. When masturbating, studies show that 95% of women orgasm. This decreases by a tier in first time hookups with other women where they orgasm 64% of the time, followed by a second tier in first time hookups with men where they orgasm just 7% of the time. No matter the angle from which we approach it, the data points to the inseparable synergy between our cultural scripts for heterosexual intercourse and the de-prioritization of female pleasure.

To know that the average time it takes women to orgasm from masturbation is the same as it takes men is also to know that the core of this issue does not rest on a mythical female sexual inability to orgasm. Instead, it exists at the intersection of our understanding of female sexuality and skewed sexual practices. The shift needed to move in another direction requires from us that we adopt a different outlook as to how we ought to engage in heterosexual intercourse. Since three quarters of women do not experience orgasm by penetration only, closing the orgasm gap requires a directed attention to the very organ which plays a leading role in female sexual pleasure ― the clitoris. Widening our understanding of the clitoris to incorporate its stimulation in heterosexual intercourse coupled with communication around what feels pleasurable moves us closer to remedying to a global illiteracy surrounding female sexuality.

Still, closer ― in this case ― denotes more about the initiation of a cultural shift than it does the full remedial of the pleasure disparity. The social norms informing a woman’s place in society have permeated into our notions of intimacy to dictate that, there too, women should come secondary to men. So, women’s pleasure becomes less incentivizing to actualize, less important to see through, less prevalent in heterosexual intercourse.

It is this lingering notion that represents our greatest hurdle in closing the orgasm gap. Yet, we may rejoice in knowing that we are all socialized into digging these gaps, and that all consciousness around socialization provides its holder with the ability to seek to unlearn it.