The Sexual Script of Heterosexuality Is Broken

I’m also running a new survey on waiting in relationships and I’d love your input. You can fill it in here. Thank you!

There is a statistic that appears in conversations about sex with such regularity that it has almost become background noise: heterosexual women orgasm much less often than heterosexual men.

The orgasm gap has been documented repeatedly: men orgasm more frequently during heterosexual encounters than women do. The statistics look like this, to be more precise:

• Heterosexual men: orgasm about 95% of the time

• Lesbian women: orgasm about 86% of the time

• Gay men: orgasm about 89% of the time

• Heterosexual women: orgasm about 65% of the time

Yet every time this fact resurfaces, a familiar explanation follows close behind. Women are more ‘complicated’, their sexuality is ‘mysterious’, women are just ‘naturally’ harder to satisfy or simply ‘don’t want’ sex as much. For men sex is a ‘need’ so women mostly do it to please their partners and therefore do not want or expect any pleasure for themselves.

What I find really annoying is how quickly many people jump to explanations rooted in women’s biology when the evidence points somewhere else entirely. Even when it’s acknowledged that women’s sex drive matters, the conversation gets pushed into the medicalisation of desire.

But not because the absence of women’s pleasure is a problem. It only becomes a problem when it leads to an absence of desire, or, put blunty, when women start refusing sex with their partners. Only then it’s deemed a ‘problem’ to be solved with meds, because it’s a problem for the men who are no longer having access to the women’s bodies.

Because there is this other statistic (that I also presented in the bullet points above) that receives far less attention in mainstream discourse. Women in lesbian relationships orgasm far more frequently than women in heterosexual relationships.

This creates an obvious problem for the people who like to claim that women’s bodies are simply incapable of experiencing pleasure reliably. If women would routinely struggle to orgasm regardless of partner, perhaps we could blame anatomy. If women were reporting low levels of sexual satisfaction across every type of relationship, maybe we could conclude that female sexuality is inherently elusive.

But that is not what the data shows. Women appear to be perfectly capable of reaching orgasm when they are having sex with other women. In lesbian relationships, orgasms are had 86% of the time, compared to just 65% of the time in heterosexual relationships.

I am not arguing that heterosexuality itself is broken, though I see the point of everyone who would. The hetero-scepticism we’re living in is well-deserved by men. But I digress; people are free to love whom they love and to be attracted to whoever they want.

What I am arguing is that the cultural script attached to heterosexuality is failing women so consistently that the results have become measurable. This cultural script of heterosexuality could be defined as: the total of the assumptions about what sex is supposed to look like, what counts as sex, whose pleasure matters, what are the ‘motions’ or steps of a typical sexual encounter and what partners owe one another,

The orgasm gap is not the problem, it’s the symptom.

The Myth That Refuses to Die

One of the strangest things about heterosexual culture is how stubbornly it clings to ideas about female sexuality that have been contradicted by decades of evidence.

Take the belief that women are supposed to orgasm from intercourse alone.

This idea remains astonishingly influential despite the fact that most women do not achieve an orgasm through penetration alone. Researchers have known for centuries that the clitoris plays a central role in female sexual pleasure. Anatomists started describing the clitoris since the 19th century. This is not some new or controversial science. It is not fringe research, it’s basic anatomy.

In a way, we could argue that the casual dismissal of the clitoris’s role in pleasure started with Sigmund Freud. As I keep pointing out in some of my other articles, psychology as a field was not always women’s friend. It was designed to keep women under more patriarchal control and we can still see echoes of that today. But I digress.

Mr. Freud, bless his heart, defined women as ‘little creatures without a penis’ and moved on to develop his ridiculous penis envy theory. The irony is not lost on us that patriarchal culture as a whole behaves as if men are very envious of women’s capacity of bearing and giving life, and therefore a lot of effort is invested into minimizing and denying this act sometimes done by women. (Casting women as ‘vessels’ for men’s offspring, naming obsessions that mark children as their fathers’ properties, etc.)

Anyway, back to good old Freud. He believed that women were very saddened by their lack of a penis and that it was important that they stopped rebelling and accepted their inferior position in society. Moving from a ‘clitoral’ to ‘vaginal’ orgasm was the necessary maturation of women, according to Freud, who thought clitoral orgasms were ‘immature’.

But we know that for the wide majority of women, clitoral orgasms are the only kind of orgasms possible. Even the relatively small minority of women who experience ‘vaginal’ orgasms do not feel those in the absence of clitoral stimulation; it’s actually also a clitoral orgasm but achieved from a different, internal angle, since we now know that this pleasure organ stretches deep beneath the visible external structure.

And yet mainstream culture continues to define and frame heterosexual sex as though this information arrived yesterday and is still under review. Because women’s pleasure is simply not important or a myth, according to the patriarchal culture.

We continue to treat clitoral stimulation as an optional extra, a bonus feature, a kind of charitable add-on that particularly considerate men might provide if time permits. Penetration remains the unquestioned centerpiece, the main event, the thing around which everything else revolves.

Imagine applying the same logic to male sexuality:

• Imagine a culture that insisted men’s orgasms should primarily result from having their testicles stroked while direct stimulation of the penis was considered supplementary.

• Imagine magazines publishing endles