I am asking such women to come forward and talk about how they achieve orgasm. In particular I want to understand what physical stimulation they need and what mental turn-ons they use to become aroused enough to reach orgasm.

So far the women who have come forward have all talked about ‘love-making’, passion and emotional sensations. They have not referred to specific physical stimulation of any kind. Orgasm just happens at some point while their partner is stimulating them but not in a way that another woman could learn from.

Women who talk about orgasm in public so often refer to political aims (such as proving that women are just as sexual as men are) rather than their enjoyment of sexual pleasure and how they can help other women share this. The inference is that other women are inhibited in some way and that they are specially endowed. This display of ego makes me question how genuine such claims are.

I read the report with interest but I’m not sure that asserting that everyone’s sex life runs down by the age of 70 is telling us anything new…

The challenge seems to be getting any acknowledgement that men and women in the prime of life also have very different attitudes and potential to enjoying arousal and orgasm.

Men are able to go from masturbation to sex fairly easily because they use images of a naked woman for masturbation and then during sex they can substitute a real woman’s body. A woman tends to use quite surreal sexual scenarios (basically kinky and unrealistic) during masturbation.

I have not been able to use my fantasies effectively during sex. I would like to compare notes with other women to understand more about how they overcome the difference between their experience of masturbation and sex with a partner.

… in female homosexual relationships, the stimulation of all parts of the body may proceed for some period of time before there is any concentration of attention on the genitalia.

We have histories of exclusively homosexual females who have had overt relationships for ten or fifteen years before they attempted any sort of genital stimulation.” (p658-9 Sexual behavior in the human female)

Kinsey’s work was based on a sample of around 5,000 women over a period of 10 years ending in 1949. He concluded:
(1) Men approach sex already aroused — women don’t.
(2) Most women find the genitals of both sexes ugly and are not turned on by seeing their partner nude.
(3) Most women do not orgasm every time they have ‘coitus’ (vaginal intercourse). Some women never orgasm during coitus throughout their lives.
(4) Men usually initiate heterosexual activity with a partner. Hence female masturbation is a better indicator of female sex drive.
(5) Female masturbation was used as the basis for observing female sexual arousal and orgasm.
(6) By the age of twenty over 90% of men masturbate but only 20% of women do at any one given time.
(7) Women who do masturbate, masturbate less frequently than men tend to.

These conclusions were not popular because everyone wanted to believe that the facts were otherwise whatever the evidence. So it continues today…

What is difficult to appreciate is that no one can be obliged to contribute their sexual experiences. Hence surveys will always involve people who are relatively liberated in their views and who are confident about revealing their sexual experiences to others. The population of the US at the time would have been a few 100 millions so 5,000 women is just a drop in the ocean and can never represent the whole population.