Men are often blamed, unfairly, for the diffi­culties that women have with orgasm during sex. For example, it is suggested that, by coming too soon, a man fails to provide enough stimulation.

In fact, inter­course is unlikely to provide women with enough clit­oral stim­u­la­tion regard­less of how long the man keeps thrusting for.

“Closely linked with the tradi­tional pres­sure on men to main­tain long erec­tion and thrusting during inter­course is the idea that it is a man’s role to ‘give’ the woman an orgasm during inter­course. … In addi­tion to the pres­sure created by this role, this idea also often puts the man in a no-win situ­ation since the inform­a­tion he has been given — that thrusting during inter­course should bring a woman to orgasm — is faulty. This places him in a vulner­able posi­tion, leaving him to doubt his masculinity whenever female orgasm does not occur and also possibly pres­suring the woman to fake orgasms.” (p160 The Hite Reports 1993)

Older gener­a­tions of women never hoped for orgasm from their rela­tion­ships, but equally a man never felt obliged to facil­itate a woman’s orgasm during sex. The sexual revolu­tion has made men feel just as inad­equate as women. The diffi­culty for couples today is matching reality with the unreal­ist­ic­ally high expect­a­tions (fuelled by the media) that we have for our sex lives.

Sexual arousal depends on the mind more than the body

Sex advice today often plays on male insec­ur­ities by suggesting that a man can ‘give his woman an orgasm’ or even (for heaven’s sake!) multiple orgasms. This is ludicrous. The fact is that most women use fantasy to reach orgasm and no man can control what is going on inside a woman’s head.

A woman can arouse a man simply by revealing her body. This is just the way nature intended things to work and not down to her indi­vidual talents (pole & lap dancing aside!). A male lover does not have the same natural advantage because most women do not become aroused enough for orgasm simply by enjoying male naked­ness. So there are few male lap dancers!

Many women do not know how their own sexual arousal works so small wonder that men struggle to find tech­niques to turn their woman on! In ‘The Hite Reports’, a male respondent points out: “It seems that women have only recently discovered the nature and depth of their own sexu­ality… Yet women are angry at men for not under­standing their sexu­ality already… as if men should be experts at some­thing about women that even women didn’t know!” (p182 The Hite Reports 1993)

Touché! Perhaps, because men appear to enjoy sex so spon­tan­eously, women assume they have some innate under­standing of sex that we funda­ment­ally lack. So we leave the initi­ative to the man hoping against all odds that some­thing will happen as if by magic. Unfor­tu­nately, women’s sexual arousal and orgasm are not auto­matic and so pleas­uring a woman is not easy.

My partner joked that he will most likely to die of old age before he gets around to trying all the different sugges­tions on the web for locating a woman’s G-spot! The G-spot may be amazing but if it is so obscure then just how useful is it to the average couple? This search for the Holy Grail is yet another indic­a­tion of how many women struggle with orgasm during sex.

Person­ally, I have never found the so-called ‘G-spot’ nor have I exper­i­enced multiple orgasms. There are plenty of jokes about nympho­ma­niacs but I have never met a woman with this condi­tion in real life. Whether these aspects of female sexu­ality are myths or simply rare occur­rences, they under­mine any attempt to gener­alise about the average woman’s exper­i­ence of sex.