Faking orgasms, which up to 80 percent of women say they do, is a good example of how the belief that men are owed nurturing, emotional protection, and niceness from women plays out in intimate ways. A massive 2018 study found that heterosexual women have fewer orgasms than any other sexual demographic, and substantially less than heterosexual men. Women say that they fake orgasms primarily to protect the feelings and egos of their male partners. Of those women who fake orgasms, 92 percent say that they believe it contributes to higher self-esteem for their sex partner, the primary reason that 87 percent of them did it in the first place. Being careful with other people’s feelings is generally good, but not when it becomes one-way sexual entitlement.
In a searing 2018 piece titled “The Female Price of Male Pleasure,” writer Lili Loofbourow relentlessly described how normalized prioritizing male sexual pleasure is and how it relates to ignoring women’s needs and even pain. She pointed out that 30 percent of women experience vaginal pain during intercourse, 72 percent experience pain during anal sex, and yet “large proportions” never say anything to their partners. “A casual survey of forums where people discuss ‘bad sex’ suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience…But,” she goes on to say, “when most women talk about ‘bad sex,’ they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort, or, even more commonly, physical pain.”
What does this look like in day-to-day life? Five times as many clinical trials have been conducted on the topic of male sexual pleasure, such as for erectile dysfunction, as on female sexual pain. What does this look like in terms of resources? Loofbourow, putting a fine point on the topic, looked at Pubmed, which publishes medical research studies and found 446 studies of dyspareunia, vaginismus, and vulvodynia, all highly painful conditions affecting women’s ability to have sex. Studies of erectile dysfunction? 1,954. As one doctor she quotes explains, women will silently provide sex “with their teeth tightly clenched.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Chapter 4: The Caring Mandate, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
The 2018 study she’s referring to is:
David A. Frederick et al., “Differences in Orgasm Frequency Among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 47, no. 1 (January 2018): 273–88, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0939-z
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