Ways Women Orgasm

As our bodies develop through puberty, young men and women become aware of them­selves as very different sexual beings.

Boys have erec­tions as early as 8 or 9. During puberty the penis increases substan­tially in size and becomes much more responsive to stim­u­la­tion, both mental and phys­ical. By the age of 12 or 13, most boys have learnt how to reach orgasm through masturbation.

There is no similar natural trigger for a girl to explore her own sexual arousal and discover how her genitals respond to phys­ical stim­u­la­tion. When girls reach puberty they get breasts and periods: body changes linked to women’s child-bearing role. So even today women often approach sex from the perspective of family and relationships.

“While women read romantic novels, men read porno­graphy. While romance pack­ages sex with love, fidelity and marriage, porno­graphy pack­ages sex with viol­ence, posses­sion and promis­cuity. This means that women and men often have very different views of sex and what it is all about.” (p28 Woman’s Exper­i­ence of Sex 1983)

Through masturb­a­tion boys learn how to use genital stim­u­la­tion to bring a psycho­lo­gical state of sexual arousal to orgasm. Yet, against all logic, it is often implied that women can hope to orgasm during sex without the benefit of the same learning process.

Some­times it is even suggested that there is some myster­ious disad­vantage to female masturb­a­tion. It’s not that women who do not masturbate have more success with sex but that, with no compar­ison, they have no reason to ques­tion their sexual exper­i­ences. Most women are not aiming for orgasm through genital stim­u­la­tion so they inter­pret sexual rela­tion­ships as ‘love-making’.

Female masturb­a­tion is relat­ively uncommon

The publi­city given to women’s use of vibrators today leads many people to assume that every young woman masturb­ates. After ten years of talking to women in the UK, I now realise that female masturb­a­tion is relat­ively unusual. If female masturb­a­tion were common more women would empathise with men’s use of porno­graphy because they would under­stand that anyone who masturb­ates needs to use a source of erot­i­cism to achieve the kind of sexual arousal that leads to orgasm.

By the way, it’s never too late to learn. See how a woman can learn to masturbate. A woman needs the oppor­tunity and privacy to explore her own body’s responses, usually during a period of being single. If they do discover masturb­a­tion to orgasm, women are typic­ally in their twen­ties or thirties and often they have already had the exper­i­ence of a sexual rela­tion­ship.

Some women say that they find masturb­a­tion unin­ter­esting or lacking in emotional context. I remember as a teen­ager occa­sion­ally exper­i­menting by touching my body, in the bath for instance, just to see if anything sexual might happen. Of course it never did because women’s sexual arousal and orgasm are not auto­matic as a man’s tend to be.

Any inef­fec­tual touching of a person’s genitals could be described as masturb­a­tion and little girls often touch them­selves in this casual way. A better defin­i­tion would be to describe masturb­a­tion as an activity where a person has at least the inten­tion of enjoying sexual arousal and orgasm. Girls learn to masturbate later than boys because their fantasies are more complex.

On the positive side, female masturb­a­tion is an inno­cent pleasure that has no harmful side effects either for the indi­vidual or for the couple’s sexual rela­tion­ship. Women can learn how to orgasm by combining a conscious mental focus on their sexual fantasies together with genital stim­u­la­tion if they are provided with know­ledge about their bodies and their sexual psychology.