The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex
Photo illustrations by Aikaterini Gegisian
I am a 39-year-old woman, and I have never, to my knowledge, had an orgasm. I include the caveat because I’m often asked—by the men I’ve slept with, by my closest friends, even by my gynecologist—if I am sure. The question can feel vaguely patronizing, but it also fills me, and others like me (studies tend to put the share of nonorgasmic women at 5 to 10 percent), with a creeping sense of self-doubt.
“Do you think we actually have and just don’t know it?” my friend Lizzie—not her real name—wondered aloud the other day. “Like maybe orgasms simply aren’t that great?”
I thought for a moment. I love sex, and I’m probably on the kinky side—there’s very little that I haven’t tried. But no matter how much I am enjoying myself, there inevitably comes a time, both on my own and with a partner, when the physical pleasure, having built and built, either fades to nothing or becomes a sensation too uncomfortable to bear, and provides neither the rapture nor release I have imagined and sometimes even conjure in my dreams. “I don’t think that could be it,” I said to Lizzie. “I mean, we’re not idiots.”
The nonorgasmic thing wasn’t really a problem when I was in my teens and early 20s. For years I relished the novelty of touching and being touched by someone separate from myself, not to mention the discovery—I must have been about 11—that I could slide my pelvis beneath the bathtub faucet and elicit that delicious-and-then-unbearable sensation I described above. Even in college and beyond, when physical intimacy became more commonplace, I remember being fairly phlegmatic about the whole thing. “These boys, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said the pediatrician I still saw as an adult when I asked her about it, and she was largely right, of course, not just of the boys who had never once thought to ask if I had also come, but also of those for whom my gratification became a kind of virility contest, and one at which I may as well have been a spectator. (I can only speak to the experience of being a straight, cisgender woman, but it’s revealing to note that 86 percent of lesbian women report that they usually or always orgasm during sexual encounters, in contrast to only 65 percent of heterosexual women.)
Yet there were other men who knew exactly what they were doing, among them my future ex-husband, whom I met when I was 25 and who, from our very first night together, stunned me with his seemingly preternatural understanding of my clitoris. Paradoxically, it was the sheer intensity of our sexual attraction, the dawning hope that maybe one day he could make me climax, that not only triggered my frustration but also inspired me to act. In the early days of our relationship, I made—at a cost of $250—an appointment with a sex therapist, therein getting a glimpse of the growing and highly lucrative female-orgasm industry. A plump, elderly woman with an office full of gray tones advised me to eat more dark chocolate, stop taking birth control, and sign up for what she called “orgasm camp,” an immersive experience somewhere in the American Southwest that would have me masturbating all day long. She also sent me home with some female-centric 1980s porn, a list of recommended herbs and vitamins, and a prescription for Viagra that the pharmacist, alarmed by my gender, initially refused to fill.
For months I dutifully followed her advice, masturbating daily, popping Viagra on date nights, enduring improbable narratives about sensitive plumbers with frosted tips and acid-washed jeans, and even going off the pill. (Orgasm camp was too expensive.) But although my sex life continued to thrill—to reiterate: Pleasure and climax are not synonymous for women like Lizzie and me—I still failed to come. Eventually, exhausted and even a little bit bored by the effort, I once again resigned myself to my anorgasmic fate.
F Aristotle first argued, more than 2,000 years ago, that only women “of a feminine type” ejaculate, the female orgasm has been the subject of a massive misinformation campaign. The Greek physician Galen, convinced that a woman’s reproductive organs were the exact inverse of a man’s, maintained that the female orgasm was necessary for procreation, a belief that lasted into the 18th century. (Galen also believed that women were immune to postcoital tristesse, clearly never having hung out by my bedside. “Every animal is sad after coitus,” he opined, “except the human female and the
