Up until the 1950s society believed that women only had sex either for the purposes of procre­ation or to satisfy their partner. Alfred Kinsey’s revel­a­tion in 1953 that women also exper­i­ence orgasm caused a sensation.

His report was attacked for being ‘anti-family’ in finding high incid­ences of male infi­delity (40%) and homo­sexu­ality (37%) as well as female masturb­a­tion (62%), which others thought to be unrep­res­ent­ative. Never­the­less the media jumped on the idea that women could match men’s exper­i­ence of orgasm, espe­cially during sex. Kinsey’s find­ings indic­ating women’s much lower levels of sexual respons­ive­ness (based on incid­ences of orgasm) compared to men were simply ignored.

Women who did not achieve sexual arousal and orgasm during sex as easily as men, who had previ­ously been labelled ‘frigid’ were now considered to be sexu­ally dysfunc­tional. The fact that this ‘dysfunc­tion’ was so prevalent among women, and yet unheard of in men, was never questioned.

This new defin­i­tion of female sexu­ality implied that, once relieved of the old-fashioned female inhib­i­tions, truly modern and liber­ated women’s minds and bodies would respond just the same as men’s had always done. Women were pres­sured into exag­ger­ating both their sexual desire and their sexual arousal as well as into faking orgasm to keep men happy.

Others under­stood that women’s sexual role is to satisfy men’s sexual desire and that some women are more manip­u­lative than others. What have women to gain by admit­ting to any sexual inad­equacy? So women fake orgasm rather than visit a sex clinic. They assume that sex is one of those areas of human life that will never be truthful (and as I found they are right).

The power of female sexu­ality is to arouse men

When girls become women they learn that men’s response to their body provides them with a tremendous advantage both in earning easy admir­a­tion and in their rela­tion­ships with the opposite sex.

In the film ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ (1988) Glenn Close asserts that sex involves women using their sexu­ality to manip­u­late men. Women’s advantage comes from the fact that men need sex so intensely whereas women do not need sex at all.

This power causes resent­ment between women because those who pander to men’s sexual fantasies are seen to be capit­al­ising on this male vulner­ab­ility and thereby often threat­ening the stability of marriage and family.

As a teen­ager, I was naive (or optim­istic) enough to believe in the prom­ises of the sexual revolu­tion. Later, after meeting with so little sympathy and so much defens­ive­ness, I decided to high­light the diffi­culties for women who hope to orgasm during sex.

“Since the frequen­cies of masturb­a­tion depend primarily on the physiologic state and the voli­tion of the female, they may provide a signi­ficant measure of the level of her interest in sexual activity.

Hetero­sexual activ­ities … are more often initi­ated by the male partner and, in consequence, they do not provide as good a measure of the female’s innate capa­cities and sexual interests.” (p146 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

So despite the claims of orgasm during sex, women rarely initiate sex. Kinsey acknow­ledged that female masturb­a­tion was used as the basis for observing women’s sexual responses including orgasm.

My famili­arity with orgasm from masturb­a­tion made it more diffi­cult for me to accept a lack of arousal during sex. That said, although orgasm is a very pleasant feeling it is still not some­thing that I would think life was not worth living without.

Female orgasm is important not only to some women today but also to many men who want their partner to be aroused through sex. A woman can ignore the problem to a degree because she doesn’t have the same need that men have to orgasm with a partner. So the modern pres­sure on sexual rela­tion­ships is often driven by men’s insist­ence that women should orgasm.