It is natural that female sexu­ality is misrep­res­ented by the media. We all watch films and read books in part to be enter­tained. We don’t neces­sarily want to see real life because we know what that’s like. We want to be uplifted by a fantasy view of the world.

Unfor­tu­nately this huge gap between sexual fantasy and reality means that men and women today are often disap­pointed when real life does not match up. Until we change our sexual expect­a­tions, sex will always be taboo because we end up feeling inadequate.

One sex expert admitted that sex advice is appallingly bad today but, as he put it, he is not prime minister and so cannot change what people think. I suppose it’s like global warming. The problem is so huge that no one person feels able to do anything about it.

I have to disagree. Public health organ­isa­tions should provide advice that reflects women’s real life exper­i­ences. Although, erotic liter­ature, as a form of fiction, can reflect our sexual fantasies, educa­tional books should publish the facts about female sexu­ality.

Very few sources today offer sex advice or inform­a­tion to couples on the basis of the facts that Shere Hite high­lighted in the 1970s. So today young people are still not told that vaginal inter­course is rarely orgasmic for women or that a woman is likely to struggle with orgasm during sex by any means. The fact that female masturb­a­tion is relat­ively uncommon is glossed over when talking about women’s know­ledge of how to achieve their own sexual arousal.

Even when experts acknow­ledge that women do not orgasm during sex, they seem obli­vious to the rela­tion­ship issue. Women may accept that sex doesn’t provide female orgasm but many men expect a partner to be equally enthu­si­astic about sex.

Self-evidently, women’s sexual perform­ance is not a show-stopper and so most people assume that women do not have sexual prob­lems. Relat­ively few women ever consult sex clinics. How many are concerned enough about lack of orgasm to pay out over $100 an hour to find a solu­tion? Even in my own case, I went to a clinic more for my partner’s sake than for my own.

No one seems to think it wrong that the current defin­i­tion categor­ises huge numbers of women as sexu­ally dysfunc­tional. Yet this is purely because women are assumed to respond sexu­ally as men do. Since female orgasm is not required for repro­duc­tion I don’t see how it makes a woman dysfunc­tional if she doesn’t orgasm with a partner.

Kinsey commented in 1953 on the astounding variety of exper­i­ences that women report: from never having an orgasm throughout their lives to others who claim to orgasm easily and even multiple times often with minimal stim­u­la­tion of any kind (phys­ical or psychological).

It’s surprising (to me at least) that no one EVER ques­tions how a woman can be MORE sexu­ally responsive than a man is. Is it that we (men in partic­ular) are fascin­ated by such fant­ast­ical stories, no matter how unrep­res­ent­ative they may be of women in general?

Let’s be honest… We are mesmer­ised by stories of women who orgasm multiple times a session not just because this would be unheard of for a man. The truth is that a similar story about a man would hold little interest because there is nothing news­worthy about male orgasm.

But just how helpful is it to suggest that every woman responds sexu­ally as men do? And how fair is it to imply that women are dysfunc­tional if they cannot match these experiences?

We never admit that there are many reasons why people say things. They want to impress. They say what they think other people want to hear. They need to make money and have to print what people will read or what sells.

Why do men apolo­gise to women for sexual innu­endo? Why do women rarely make sexual remarks? Why do men buy women flowers? Why does exper­i­ence improve men as lovers and yet younger women are thought sexier than exper­i­enced women?

I wanted to know the answers to ques­tions like these and I am surprised that no one else wonders. No one seems to demand that one and one must add to two. Emotional taboo and sexual politics mean that all rational argu­ment is suspended.