On relating our exper­i­ence to others, we all tend to gloss over details or not own up to diffi­culties that were perhaps transient.

I told Linda, a mother of three in her late forties, that I had never had an orgasm during inter­course. Linda looked at me incred­u­lously and laughed as if I must be ignorant of the most basic sexual facts. Natur­ally, I died with morti­fic­a­tion at the implied sexual inadequacy.

“In fact, since only about 30 percent of women achieve orgasm with inter­course but over 80 percent exper­i­ence a climax with masturb­a­tion, orgasm by means of masturb­a­tion rather than by sexual inter­course, should be regarded as the normal exper­i­ence.” (p53 Healthy Sex 1998)

Later when Linda joked that she would rather do her gardening on week­ends than have sex, I was confused. Although I would not go to the ends of the world to enjoy my own sexual arousal and orgasm by masturb­ating, it is defin­itely worth investing a few minutes of effort from time to time. Women who have never masturb­ated presum­ably assume that reaching orgasm must always be a drawn out affair.

If I am already turned on and have an effective fantasy to hand, it is no trouble reaching orgasm from female masturb­a­tion within a couple of minutes. Masturb­a­tion is very enjoy­able but I have no sense of needing to inter­rupt other activ­ities to engage in it. I usually consider masturb­a­tion when I am already lying in bed either on waking or on going to sleep.

“In fact, women do not take longer to orgasm than men. The majority of women in Kinsey’s study masturb­ated to orgasm within four minutes, similar to the women in this study. It is, obvi­ously, only during inad­equate or secondary, insuf­fi­cient stim­u­la­tion like inter­course that we take ’longer’ and need prolonged ’fore­play’.” (p46 The Hite Reports 1993)

The only women I have found to be confident about orgasm are those who masturbate. This is because in order to aim for orgasm a person needs to know how to become sexu­ally aroused. I believe that many women never learn now to do this. Those who claim to orgasm the first time and every time from inter­course are simply bliss­fully ignorant of the facts.

The fact is that women have to learn how to orgasm. One woman told me that it had taken around ten years for her and her partner to achieve a ‘good’ sex life. Surely this fact is worth passing on to younger generations?

Imagine telling a man he has to wait ten years to learn how to orgasm from sex! Young women often don’t know how to orgasm and older women are not always that open about their own sexual exper­i­ences. The huge gap between how women’s sexual arousal is portrayed in the media compared with reality means that sex advice for women is often misleading.

Months later, when we had talked around the subject a few times Linda told me that she did not always exper­i­ence orgasm, that orgasm was not that important to her and that her partner was the prime initi­ator in their sex life. So, her exper­i­ence of sex with a partner was little different to my own. Linda explained that she had never approached sex expecting to exper­i­ence orgasm.

Linda liked to dress provoc­at­ively and was evid­ently one of those women who enjoy attracting a man’s atten­tion. For her, sex was about sharing an intimate phys­ical act with her partner and so masturb­a­tion was mean­ing­less. They watched porn movies together and Linda confirmed that she preferred some story content rather than the endless banging sessions.

“For some women love­making without orgasm is unsat­is­fying and they feel they have missed out on some­thing precious. For others the journey holds more rich­ness and delight than the getting there.” (p80 Woman’s Exper­i­ence of Sex 1983)