Imagine the scen­ario: a man and a woman facing each other, naked, in a world where men and women have an identical sex drive.

So, of course, they are both standing there with an erec­tion. Just to be clear: the man has an erect penis and the woman has an erect clitoris.

Would they mutu­ally choose to engage in vaginal inter­course? No because inter­course does not stim­u­late the clit­oris enough for female orgasm. Even a man would struggle to orgasm from a partner banging her groin against his penis.

So the ‘sexu­ally equal’ couple would presum­ably prefer oral sex or mutual masturb­a­tion. This way both sexes could enjoy equal genital stim­u­la­tion. Would Nature be happy? No because these activ­ities are not repro­ductive and so the human race would die out. After all, the PRIME purpose of sex is repro­duc­tion. Sexual pleasure is merely a by-product.

In ten years of researching female sexu­ality very few women have been able to explain convin­cingly how they orgasm with a partner. It either ‘just happens’ or it happens ‘naturally’.

Such explan­a­tions indicate how obli­vious many women are to the psycho­lo­gical elements of sexual arousal and even to the appre­ci­ation that genital stim­u­la­tion is required for orgasm. Women claim that inter­course is orgasmic the ‘first time and every time’ and get away with it. We are all so totally convinced that because men find inter­course arousing so should women.

Men are lucky because they get turned on (enough for orgasm) by the body of a sexual partner and during inter­course the penis is directly stim­u­lated by thrusting. Women are not so lucky. They do not become aroused enough for orgasm simply by looking at the male naked body nor is the clit­oris stim­u­lated adequately during intercourse.

Women need direct clit­oral stim­u­la­tion for orgasm but, much more import­antly, they need an intense mental focus on fantasy to achieve the kind of sexual arousal that leads to orgasm. Such focus is often impossible to achieve with a partner and this explains why female masturb­a­tion alone tends to be the easiest source of female orgasm.

Women who claim to reach orgasm from inter­course alone are mistaken

If women were able to orgasm through vaginal inter­course, without any direct clit­oral stim­u­la­tion, it would imply that women are MORE HIGHLY SEXED than men. Even men need DIRECT penile stim­u­la­tion for orgasm.

So anyone who claims that women orgasm during vaginal inter­course is mistaken. Of course, women are known to fake both their own sexual arousal and orgasm. Equally many women simply assume that they orgasm during inter­course because few women masturbate so they never know what orgasm is. This explains why so few women ask about lack of orgasm.

It is only women who are familiar with orgasm from masturb­a­tion who realise that orgasm is missing from sex with a partner.

“Never­the­less, many women prefer inter­course to masturb­a­tion because it gives them addi­tional sensual bene­fits such as being held and being kissed and also makes them part of a spon­tan­eous give and take.” (p587 Human Sexu­ality (fifth edition) 1995)

Vaginal inter­course, for a woman, feels like affec­tionate hugging since the vagina has little sens­it­ivity to any sensa­tion from penile thrusting. Vaginal inter­course is liter­ally a hetero­sexual ‘love-making’ act. The diffi­culty over the longer-term is that a man forgets to ‘make love’ to his woman by including sensual petting and sex play before heading for his orgasm through thrusting.

Equally, women are not motiv­ated to seek other more explicit forms of genital stim­u­la­tion during sex because (1) they do not approach sex already aroused and (2) female sexual arousal does not arise from an appre­ci­ation of a lover’s body.

Women co-operate with men’s sex drive and provide men with sexual pleasure to create the emotional bonds needed for long-term rela­tion­ships. Inter­course provides women with an easy way of satis­fying a man with the least incon­veni­ence to herself.