Some women refer to ‘making love’ because the term more accur­ately describes their motives in terms of loving emotions rather than as an explicit sex drive.

Modern expect­a­tions cause some women to talk about their sexual exper­i­ences (whatever they are) in terms of arousal and orgasm. Some women know­ingly fake orgasm but there is almost a sense of bravado asso­ci­ated with faking. We assume that women only fake part of the time or are sexu­ally exper­i­enced enough to know how to fake. Many others inter­pret sex as a loving act without needing to talk about orgasm at all.

The resulting confu­sion leads many people to believe that women orgasm during sex despite their own exper­i­ences (that women are much less driven by sex) and despite the fact that inter­course provides insuf­fi­cient clit­oral stim­u­la­tion for female orgasm.

As in the fable ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ it takes great courage to ques­tion ‘truths’ that the majority consider indis­put­able. Any woman brave enough to ques­tion is labelled ‘sexu­ally dysfunc­tional’ and this humi­li­ation alone is enough to silence most people.

Women who ques­tion are confident of their exper­i­ence of orgasm from masturb­a­tion. Sadly the majority of women do not under­stand this interest in orgasm though genital stim­u­la­tion, which is more readily asso­ci­ated with men and with gay women.

Inter­course was never intended to lead to female orgasm

Confu­sion over female orgasm arose during the sexual revolu­tion, which discovered that women were capable of orgasm. It was mistakenly assumed that female orgasm must natur­ally occur during the core hetero­sexual love-making act of vaginal inter­course. Consequently although men and even lesbian women use genital stim­u­la­tion to reach orgasm, hetero­sexual women get away with claiming that they orgasm during sex without any clit­oral stim­u­la­tion whatsoever.

Vaginal inter­course is a repro­ductive act whereby the male impreg­nates the female. Male orgasm (since it usually involves ejac­u­la­tion of sperm) is required for repro­duc­tion but female orgasm has no role in repro­duc­tion. There­fore women do not need to be as sexu­ally driven as men nor do they need to become aroused or to reach orgasm as easily as men.

Some women are motiv­ated to explore their sexu­ality and do discover orgasm. However, there is no reason for Nature to ensure that this exper­i­ence of female orgasm occurs during sex. Relat­ively few women masturbate but, even if they do, sex with a partner does not natur­ally provide women with the sexual arousal that causes genital stim­u­la­tion to be effective.

Since women’s sexual arousal is not needed for repro­duc­tion, there is no natural phenomenon that causes female arousal. Some women make a conscious effort to become aroused but it does not happen spon­tan­eously as it tends to with men. Women’s use of fantasies may work well when masturb­ating alone but during sex, male orgasm needs to be centre stage.

Not only is female orgasm more elusive but also women gener­ally are not as strongly motiv­ated by sex as men are. So, for example, when I have offered my part­ners oral sex (fellatio) they almost swoon with pleasure and yet I rarely find oral sex (cunni­lingus) arousing enough for orgasm. Even women who orgasm from cunni­lingus need the circum­stances to be just right and I suspect that few women would be willing to pay for the pleasure as men do.

Women’s ‘sex drive’ is much more likely to revolve around ensuring the welfare of their chil­dren. Equally, their sense of their own sexu­ality or sensu­ality is much more likely to involve an ability to make them­selves sexu­ally attractive to men than to involve them actively seeking sex with the aim of enjoying their own sexual arousal and orgasm.