Come as You Are (39 page)

Now, if penetrative orgasms are comparatively uncommon, why do women ask about it so often? Why is it so often viewed as “the right way to orgasm”?

And the answer is, of course, “Ugh, patriarchy.” Men-as-default again. Centuries of male doctors and scientists—Freud is often pointed to as a key offender here, and rightly so—claimed that orgasms from vaginal stimulation are the right, good, normal kind, and clitoral orgasms are “immature.”

But it’s men-as-default in a different way from how it worked with arousal and desire. Culture sanctions spontaneous desire as the “expected” kind of desire because that’s how men experience desire, and culture sanctions concordant arousal as the expected kind of arousal because that’s how men experience arousal . . . but if women’s expected kind of orgasm is whatever men experience, then that should be clitoral stimulation, since anatomically the clitoris is the homologue of the penis. To say that women should have orgasms from vaginal penetration is anatomically equivalent to saying that men should have orgasms from prostate or perineal stimulation.

Certainly many men
can
orgasm from that kind of stimulation,
¹⁵
but we don’t judge them if they don’t, and they don’t usually wonder if they’re broken if they don’t.

So apparently, according to cultural myth, women should be just like men—with concordant arousal and spontaneous desire—right up until we actually start having intercourse, and then we’re supposed to function in an exclusively female way, orgasming from a behavior that also happens to get men off very reliably. Men’s pleasure is the default pleasure.

But it’s not
just
men-as-default—if it were only about male pleasure, then women might be expected to orgasm while giving a male partner a
hand job or oral sex, as much as we’re expected to orgasm during intercourse. No, there’s a specific, special expectation around orgasm with intercourse.

the evolution of the fantastic bonus

So why, apart from men-as-default, is orgasm from intercourse the expected kind? And, while we’re at it, why do women vary so much in what kind of stimulation gives them orgasms?

The answer to both questions is, for different reasons . . . evolution!

Throw your mind way back to chapter 1, where I described our tendency to metaphorize biology—like how anatomists called a woman’s genitals “shameful” because you can’t see them when she stands up. Nowhere in science is this metaphorization tendency more pervasive, more insidious, or more misleading than in the science of the evolution of women’s sexuality. Boy howdy, do we get it wrong—not so much because the science is wrong (though it has been!), but because we tend to interpret the science through cultural lenses, from the point of view of what we already expect, want, or like from women’s sexuality.

And what a men-as-default, puritanical culture expects, wants, and likes is pleasure for men and babies for women. For centuries, scientists assumed that if orgasm during vaginal intercourse is how men make babies, then orgasm during vaginal intercourse must be how women make babies, too. As I mentioned in chapter 6, women’s orgasm was even believed to be a sign of conception.

So that’s why orgasm during intercourse is such a big deal: women’s sexuality as Men’s Sexuality Lite.

But.

In
The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution
, a book perhaps best described as “relentlessly precise,” feminist philosopher of science Elisabeth Lloyd analyzed forty years of research and more than twenty theories about why women have orgasms.
¹⁶
She concluded that the theory best supported by the available evidence is that women’s
orgasm is not an evolutionary adaptation. Women’s orgasm has no relationship to reproductive success, it doesn’t promote egg fertilization or prevent miscarriage, it doesn’t even “suck” sperm into the uterus—in fact, it turns out sperm is transported most efficiently through a completely unstimulated uterus!
¹⁷

Instead, women’s orgasms exist as a byproduct—a result of the fact that male and female genitals develop homologously (remember from chapter 1?). Male ejaculation, with its close tie to orgasm, is crucial to reproduction, so orgasm is embedded in male sexual hardware in the brain and genitals. As a result, orgasm is embedded in female sexual hardware, too, because: homology.

Women’s orgasms are, in this way, rather like the hymen. We make a really big deal out of them, culturally—both pro and con—but evolutionarily they’re more or less an afterthought. Both orgasms and hymens are all different from each other because the variety doesn’t affect reproductive success.

In other words, women can have orgasms for the same reason men have nipples.

My students often hate this idea. They are not intuitively comfortable with the idea that men’s orgasms are evolutionarily crucial and women’s orgasms are just a side effect. It feels Adam’s rib-y, as if the hypothesis is saying women’s orgasms aren’t important. And there are deep historical realities behind that feeling; somewhere in the three hundred years between figuring out that female orgasm isn’t necessary for conception and figuring out female orgasm isn’t an evolutionary adaptation, scientists began saying things about how female orgasm and the clitoris were “of no utility.”
¹⁸
Vestigial, like the appendix. So if the phrase “not an adaptation” sounds to you like “not important,” well . . . yeah. That could easily be what science used to think.

What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid.

Fortunately, the scientific method is specifically designed to help us overcome our stupid! And so science is moving forward, and the rest of us should move with it. In the twenty-first century, only some kind of
woman-hating asshat would think that just because it doesn’t help make babies, women’s orgasm isn’t important. Lloyd, only half kidding, suggests we call the byproduct hypothesis the “fantastic bonus” account of women’s orgasm. As in, you don’t have to have orgasms. You may, if you like—they are available to most every woman—but you get to choose! You can have orgasms if you want! Because: pleasure! Hooray!

Women’s orgasms are important because women’s sexual wellbeing is important, and orgasm is part of that for a lot of women. Not everyone is passionate about them, and that’s cool, too. Women vary, and we’re all normal.

Camilla, with her relatively insensitive sexual accelerator, had always been slow to orgasm and wasn’t all that interested in having more of them. They were a lot of work most of the time, and not rewarding enough to bother. She had masturbated very rarely in her life, and then more out of curiosity than desire. And she often wasn’t too interested in having an orgasm when she had sex with Henry.

Henry, gentleman that he was, had a hard time with this.

“If you don’t have an orgasm, how can I tell that I satisfied you?” he would ask.

“You can tell because I say that I’m satisfied! If I eat less pizza than you and say that I’m full, do you doubt me? If I have two glasses of wine and feel as tipsy as I want to feel, am I supposed to try to increase my tolerance? If I read a novel but don’t feel compelled to read the sequel, is there something wrong with that?”

“Of course not,” was the answer to all three questions.

“So why,” Camilla said, “do you need me to experience some physiological reflex in order to feel like I’ve had an awesome time?”

“Because that reflex is how I know you were satisfied!”

It was one of those disagreements where each person’s point of view is so obvious to themselves but so foreign to the other person that they didn’t even know where to start. Their solution was the kind of problem solving that shows me they’ll be together for decades. They literally switched places—they swapped seats—and took on the other person’s point of view. Camilla argued for Henry, and he argued for her.

Camilla said, “If you don’t have an orgasm, then I can’t feel certain that you really liked and wanted the sex we had.”

Henry said, “If I don’t have an orgasm, all that means is I had as much pizza as I wanted, it was great, and now I’m all set.”

And then he said, “Oh.”

Camilla continued, “But pizza isn’t the same as sex. Sex has a destination, a goal, a ‘Final Real Ultimate It,’ and if you don’t have that, then I’ve failed you!”

And then she said, “Oh.”

Henry said, “The only way you fail me is if you can’t accept me the way I am.”

Camilla said, “Your orgasm tells
me
you accept me the way
I
am.”

And they both said, “Oh.”

And then she moved from Henry’s chair to sit next to him with her head on his shoulder. “Does my orgasm really mean that much to you?” she asked.

Henry answered, “If I make you a special pizza and you only eat one slice, how can I not wonder if you didn’t like it?”

“Hm. We’ll have to see if we can think of a logical solution,” Camilla said.

They do, in chapter 9.

difficulty with orgasm

Very early on in grad school, two classmates and I sat together before class one fall afternoon, talking about—what else?—sex. One of them was recently married but had yet to have an orgasm with her new husband.

“I can orgasm on my own, but somehow when he’s with me, I can’t get there,” she said, her eyebrows sad and her mouth quirked in confusion. “I know he feels rejected and takes it personally, but I love him, I
want
to have an orgasm with him. I just can’t.”

She blamed herself. Her husband blamed himself. Both felt ashamed and broken and anxious that they would never experience “normal” sex.

At the time, I had no idea what was going on, but not long after that I began a clinical internship where I learned that such difficulties are both common and eminently treatable.

Distress about orgasm is the second most common reason people seek treatment for sexual problems (after desire), occurring in about 5 to 15 percent of women.
¹⁹
Difficulty with or absence of orgasm in certain contexts is very common. For example, only 11 percent of college women report having an orgasm the first time they “hook up” with a new partner, compared with 67 percent of college women having sex in the context of a relationship of more than six months’ duration.
²⁰
Around 16 percent of women have not had an orgasm, or are unsure whether they’ve had an orgasm, by age twenty-eight.
²¹
And there probably are some women who never experience orgasm—the research indicates something like 5–10 percent
²²
—but it’s not clear how many of them are not able to orgasm under
any
circumstances and how many are just not interested enough to keep looking for the right context. Orgasm is, in some ways, like riding a bicycle—it comes more naturally to some people than others, and if you’re not motivated enough to keep trying until you figure it out, you’ll never learn. And it’s a rare person who genuinely needs to learn to ride a bicycle.

Most problems with orgasm are due to too much stimulation to SIS—too much brakes, too many worries, too much stress, anxiety, shame, or depression, including stress, anxiety, shame, or depression
about
orgasm.
²³
If you’re interested enough to want to have an orgasm, chances are you can, given the right stimulation and a context that lets you turn off the offs. And if you can orgasm now in an
ideal
context, chances are you can orgasm in a new and different positive context—like with your partner.

The most common word women used to describe their struggle with orgasm is “frustrated.”
²⁴

We learned a lot about frustration in the last chapter. Remember the
monitor who watches your progress toward a goal? If orgasm is the goal and the little monitor expects you to move quickly and smoothly toward that goal, it will begin to get frustrated when the brakes are preventing you from moving forward.

And does frustration fuel your accelerator . . . or does it hit the brake?

Yeah. Brake.

The solution to frustration about orgasm is the same as the solution to frustration around sexual desire. You have three potential targets: the goal itself (orgasm), the kind and amount of effort you’re investing, and the criterion velocity—your expectation about how much effort should be required to achieve this goal.

The central approach to orgasm difficulties is to make
pleasure
the goal, not orgasm. When you begin to feel frustrated, remember that’s your little monitor feeling like you’re not making progress toward the goal of orgasm. That’s the time to remind yourself that you are already at the goal state as long as you are experiencing pleasure.

Orgasm isn’t the goal. Pleasure is the goal.

For women who sometimes (or always) struggle with orgasm, I’ve included step-by-step instructions for practicing the skills of paying attention to pleasure and letting go of the goal, including ways to adapt the skill to having orgasm with your partner (see Appendix 1).

Never Had an Orgasm . . . as Far as She Knows

Students laugh when I add “as far as she knows,” but several times I’ve talked about what childhood masturbation to orgasm is like—squeezing your legs around a swing set pole or rocking your vulva against a stuffed animal, as well as touching your genitals with your hands or pressing your pelvis into the mattress—and people have said, “Oh! So that’s what I was doing!” Memories of childhood orgasm are often more like sleep orgasms or exercise orgasms; they’re not particularly erotic. You’re not having sexual fantasies to fuel your accelerator, but nor do you have a decade or more of cultural shaming to hit your brakes.