Pam, an attractive woman in her late forties, told me that she had never had a problem with sexual arousal and orgasm. She started masturb­ating at the age of eight and after thirty years with the same man, she was still enjoying orgasmic sex as she had done from day one.

Women’s sexual arousal and orgasm are not auto­matic for reasons of anatomy if nothing else — the clit­oris is not directly stim­u­lated during inter­course. So it is diffi­cult to know how to respond to someone who suggests that fantasy sex is a reality for them. The implic­a­tion is that the rest of us have gone badly wrong somewhere!

In an attempt to identify some specifics of her sexual exper­i­ences, I asked Pam when she exper­i­enced orgasm. She replied that the timing of her orgasm was ‘a moving feast’ and that she could orgasm before, during or after intercourse.

“Even Sharon Stone admits that she did women a disser­vice in ‘Basic Instinct’ by suggesting that they could reach orgasm in about 30 seconds flat. This is just not how the female body works, and anyone who suggests other­wise is either a good actress, deluded or blessed by the gods.” (p17 The Bluffer’s Guide to Women 1998)

Are these women bluffing or are they just incred­ibly lucky? If this approach works for you then defin­itely stick with it!

Fantasy sex where orgasms just happen

I was inter­ested to find out some more details in order to find paral­lels with other women’s exper­i­ences. However, Pam replied that sex was not a subject that could be analysed. She suggested that orgasms just happened natur­ally, flowing from the passion of the sexual act.

People get away with claiming complete nonsense about sex just because no one chal­lenges the common sense of their asser­tions. As many women never exper­i­ence real female orgasms they can bluff and be bluffed surpris­ingly easily.

For example, eight-year-old girls may touch their genitals inno­cently but this is very different to the kind of adult sexual activity that leads to orgasm. Most women never compare masturb­a­tion with sex because they never learn to masturbate to orgasm in the first place. They assume that sexual arousal and orgasm must come from the emotional aspects of a loving relationship.

I asked Pam whether she had continued to masturbate. She replied that masturb­a­tion was ‘but a sneeze’ compared with the orgasms she enjoyed with her partner. Men continue to masturbate throughout their lives but women often imply that the emotional rewards of a sexual rela­tion­ship replace any need to masturbate.

We all draw different conclu­sions from our sexual exper­i­ences. After thirty years in a rela­tion­ship, Pam told me that she could not recall even one serious argu­ment. She and her partner bickered endlessly about trivial matters but had never fallen out over anything serious (even though they had raised chil­dren together).

This exper­i­ence is so different from my own, or that of other couples I have observed, that it is easy to react cynic­ally. Perhaps Pam’s idea of bick­ering was my idea of a full-scale war. However, let’s be generous and allow that anything is possible, even the ‘perfect’ match. One explan­a­tion for this anomaly could be that the couple place few demands on each other.

Presum­ably, for a fortu­nate few, the erotic stories describing the over­whelming sexual arousal that fictional women have from vaginal penet­ra­tion are a reality. For the rest of us these stories remain in the realm of fiction – frankly unachievable.