A Very Unscientific Analysis of Female Desire
Last summer, I was sat with a friend in a cute little coffee shop in South East London when she announced, ‘yesterday, when I was out with my group of guy friends, one of them bragged that he rubbed this girl’s clit so hard that it fell off and she loved it’.
The ludicrous nature of the statement makes it absolutely hilarious, until you think about it some more and then it makes you a bit sad. And incredibly doubtful: are you sure she loved it? I imagined Jay from The Inbetweeners, although he has some good tips, it is all about the clitti. Just maybe not so much that someone thinks it can be friction-burn rubbed and pressed and ultimately, fall off, like the casings on the dials on the front of an oven.
I think about this conversation often, sometimes I laugh, sometimes I take a little tour through my own history of disappointing sexual encounters and I think about what’s been expected of me as a woman in my sexual relationships: the assumption that I’ll be freshly groomed, the assumption that my orgasm is a bonus to the encounter rather than part of the deal, the expectation that I’ll keep it entertaining and fresh.
The Orgasm Gap
Back in 2017, Ipsos Mori asked 2,002 women about their sex lives and depressingly, only 17% women aged 30 to 80 were satisfied with their sex lives. Armed with this sad statistic, I created a Whatsapp group and asked my female friends in heterosexual relationships what their sexual encounters were like. My single friends were overwhelmingly more disappointed with their sexual encounters and even those in in committed relationships didn’t always orgasm as much as their male partners.
When asked what they did to close the so-called ‘orgasm gap’, they told me that they’ve tried to spice things up: one asked for more foreplay (and offending her then partner in the process), they all suggested they’d added in outfits and toys, suggested new positions or even testing new kinks.
When I asked if their male partners had ever tried to bring anything new in to spice it up, if they’d ever bought them a sexy set of lingerie or surprised them with a fun new toy or game to use to be intimate – the answer was no, from everyone.
Why is it down to women to ‘spice up’ the often orgasm-less sex that we’re having? But only in heterosexual relationships?
A survey in 2017 undertaken by Eugenia Cherkasskaya & Margaret Rosario for The Relational and Bodily Experiences Theory of Sexual Desire in Women, spoke to more than 50,000 Americans and discovered that lesbians orgasmed 86% of the time during sex, as opposed to 65% of straight women (and 95% of straight men).
The Origins of Low Desire
Katherine Rowland interviewed over 120 women for her book ‘The Pleasure Gap’, and for many, their intimacy was tinged with dread. Some women had tried a concoction of medication for the ‘problem’ of low desire from antidepressants and testosterone supplements to libido-rousing pills. Lots of women accumulated libraries of books and guides for relighting the spark. However, as many of the women described their dwindling desire, it seemed less an issue with their biology and more the consequence of their partners, routines, incomplete sexual education, boredom and the friction of overfamiliarity.
In short, it was the quality of the sex they were having that left them underwhelmed. As one woman put it: “If it’s not about your pleasure, it makes sense you wouldn’t want it.”
Rowland goes on to state that it is the combination of a larger culture that privileges male sexuality over women's, a culture that doesn't teach women that pleasure belongs to them. Plus, a lack of anatomical self-knowledge, along with feelings of persistent danger and women often censored, or shamed, for expressing their desires.
In school, my experience of sexual education was a handful of classes in either Biology or PHSE, which focused entirely on periods or reproduction and basic anatomy. A survey by UK cancer charity, Eve Appeal, revealed that women are more familiar with men’s bodies than their own; 60% questioned could correctly label a diagram of the male body, whilst just 35% of women correctly labelled female anatomy. Don’t even ask how men scored on labelling female anatomy…
Somewhere between what’s expected from us socially, to the mix of adulting, socialising and meeting the demands of a career, women’s desire can dim. Burnt out of inspiration, we repeat the same routines, acting out of obligation or the desire to avoid conflict. However, we are simultaneously told that we naturally have less desires than men and it is also our weakness and we are encouraged to work at that desire, to keep the spark alive, to surprise our sexual partners with lingerie and oral sex.
Is it any wonder then, that so many women are faking it? According to the fantastically named study, Evidence to Suggest That Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm, 80% of heterosexual women fake orgasm during vaginal intercourse about half of the time, and another 25% fake orgasms almost all of the time.
In my very scientific study of adding my straight female friends in a Whatsapp group, I asked them if they had ever faked an orgasm. I was disappointed to discover that I was the exception in refusing to fake it, my friends all explained that it was easier sometimes, that sometimes you just know you don’t feel it and this way it’s just over. I asked why they didn’t just tell their partners they weren’t feeling it? And whilst I anticipate the overall answer is that it would become an issue when/if it was EVERY time… Socially, we tend to treat faking it as a funny anecdote, with the media commenting on studies about faking orgasms focusing on the bruising of men’s egos as opposed to the huge gulf in the orgasm gap.
Katherine Rowland wrote:
That women are feigning their pleasure in order to hasten that experience along — I think we need to treat that with real alarm. We need to ask: What's going on in that women are engaging in spectacle as opposed to actually allowing themselves to feel sensation?
We Can Do Better
Are we just destined (or doomed) to expect often lacklustre sexual encounters because we live in a culture that doesn’t view men and women as deserving to have an equally pleasurable outcome from sex? A culture that subconsciously teaches sex education through linx adverts and porn, that often sees women as an object rather than a participant, that gives my group of friends in their 20s and 30s plenty of anecdotal stories for outcome-less articles such as this one? Because what is the solution?
I think we can do better; I think we need to stand up for better sexual experiences, we need to feel strong enough to communicate our needs and desires. Sure, ask me about any of this in person and I’ll blush and awkwardly stammer that everyone who wants an orgasm deserves one. Culturally, we’ve been taught and moulded into being modest and shying away from asking for an equal experience. However, it’s only by having these conversations out loud that we’ll stop men in their late twenties from thinking that our clitoris’ like and want friction burn.
Written by Saloni Chamberlain
Hi, I'm Saloni, loni to most! A native Londoner, I've recently relocated with my partner and our two cats to sunny Weston-super-Mare! I work as a freelance writer and I think I'm generally quite funny. My favourite word is plethora, I've never said it out loud but it's just so fancy written down.