Laura was educated and cultured but she also had a world­li­ness and the classy sex appeal that attracts the most ambi­tious men. In her early thirties, Laura told me that she had always been confident that she had orgasms during sex.

“…in regard to sexual respons­ive­ness the female matures much later than the male.” (p126 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

When she was twenty-eight, a liber­ated friend told her how to use a vibrator to enjoy orgasm through female masturb­a­tion. Her friend was so convinced that Laura should try the exper­i­ence that she took her to a depart­ment store to buy the gadget. If only we all had friends like this!

Laura admitted that this piece of equip­ment sat in her bedroom drawer for some time. Even­tu­ally when she was brave enough to try it, she learned for the first time what orgasm was. Laura masturb­ated as a means of going to sleep as well as enjoying orgasm.

Tracy Cox gives ten good reasons to masturbate including: “It releases tension and helps us sleep – a secret sleeping pill without any side-effects!” (p18 Hot Sex 1998)

In over ten years of sex with different part­ners, Laura had always assumed that she exper­i­enced orgasm during sex. It was only once she discovered masturb­a­tion that she found out what real female orgasms felt like. Despite the evid­ence of her own exper­i­ence, Laura still believed her friends when they said that they had orgasms during sex.

Laura even believed her mother who said that she had never had a problem with orgasm. We now have more inform­a­tion and more oppor­tunity to explore our sexu­ality but our expect­a­tions are corres­pond­ingly higher. Thanks to the pill, women today come to ques­tion their sexual exper­i­ences in a way that women who had chil­dren earlier in their lives prob­ably had little time for.

Great sex even when female orgasm is missing

Having told me that she had never had an orgasm with a man even now, Laura went on to describe some of her sexual encoun­ters as ‘totally amazing’. Laura did not see any contra­dic­tion because, for her, sex with a man was about personal chem­istry. Laura got a great ego boost from the sexual power of being pursued by men.

It is easy for a woman to pleasure a man and the fantasy leads us to assume that it ought to work the other way around. When it doesn’t, both part­ners can end up feeling inad­equate. Laura admitted that she felt selfish in asking a man to spend longer than a few minutes on pleas­uring her as she knew it would take far too long for him to be able to arouse her sufficiently.

“During ‘sex’ as our society defines it both people know what to expect and how to make it possible for the man to orgasm. The whole thing is prearranged, preagreed. But there are not really any patterns or prearranged times and places for a woman to orgasm — unless she can manage to do so during inter­course. So women are put in the posi­tion of asking for some­thing ‘special’, some ‘extra’ stim­u­la­tion…” (p61 The Hite Reports 1993)

Laura still hoped that one day she might discover how she could orgasm during sex. Despite Shere Hite’s sugges­tion that nature never intended women to orgasm from inter­course, women today still have the strong impres­sion that they should.

The advantage of masturb­a­tion is that a woman at least knows what orgasm is. Whether this helps with orgasm during sex is another matter. The only disad­vantage of masturb­a­tion is that a woman is likely to realise that some­thing is missing from sex.

It is wrong that women, who have explored their own arousal suffi­ciently to have discovered masturb­a­tion to orgasm, are described as sexu­ally dysfunc­tional (pre-orgasmic). The truth is that they are only unusual for being more sexual than average.

What man ever concludes that he is dysfunc­tional because he masturb­ates? Yet we are told that female masturb­a­tion prevents women from enjoying orgasm during sex. This is rot. Masturb­a­tion is the first step in anyone learning how to orgasm.