What Explains the Large Orgasm Gap Between Men and Women?

Recently, German researchers used an internet questionnaire to quiz 573 adults about their sex lives and their knowledge of the clitoris, the little nub of erotically sensitive tissue located outside and above the vagina beneath the top junction of the vaginal lips that triggers women’s orgasms. The questionnaire included nine statements that could be answered True, False, or Don’t Know. Correct answers received one point. The highest possible score was nine. The participants, 368 women and 205 men (other genders excluded), answered only half the questions correctly, with an average score of 4.56. Alas, lots of people don’t know much about the clit.

Compared with the men, the women knew somewhat more, but the women, too, were poorly informed. One statement said: The clitoris exists solely for pleasure. True. Slightly more than one-third of the men (39 percent) answered correctly. The women did better, 51 percent—but half the women did not know the answer.

Another statement: The sexual practice most likely to bring women to orgasm is oral sex (cunnilingus). True. Somewhat more than half the men answered correctly (57 percent). The women did better, 80 percent—but almost half of the men and one woman in five got this wrong.

Two reasons explain why so many people are poorly informed about the clitoris’s primacy in women’s sexual satisfaction:

• To most people, “sex” means vaginal intercourse. But the clitoris sits apart from the vagina, an inch or so above the vaginal opening. Even vigorous, extended intercourse rarely provides sufficient clitoral stimulation for women to work up to climax. Consequently, few women have orgasms solely from intercourse—but they are often reluctant to say so. Many fake orgasms, which denies them pleasure and leaves the men in their lives clueless about what really turns women on.
• Sex education largely ignores pleasure. Many of the nation’s middle and high schools offer no sex education. Those that teach it focus not on pleasure, but on the dangers of sex—unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Young people need to know how to prevent pregnancy and infections, but public school sex ed never mentions either pleasure or the clitoris. College sexuality courses often do, which is why, compared with the non-college-educated population, those who have attended college report higher rates of female orgasm. However, in the German study, only half of the participants displayed familiarity with the clitoris, so it’s clear that contemporary sex education is inadequate.

The researchers also surveyed participants’ sex lives. Not surprisingly, as knowledge of the clitoris increased, so did the women’s likelihood of orgasms and sexual satisfaction.

The German study is just one of many that highlight the single most consistent finding of more than 100 years of sex research, the enduring “orgasm gap” between men and women.

Documented for a Century: The Great Orgasm Divide

Conventional wisdom holds that scientific sex research began during the 1940s at Indiana University with studies led by Alfred Kinsey. Actually, sex research began 20 years earlier during the 1920s, when New York gynecologist Robert Dickinson, M.D., quietly surveyed 1,000 married women in his practice. Their main complaint? No orgasms during partner sex. Almost all were orgasmic solo, but with their husbands, even those in loving marriages usually found climax maddeningly elusive.

Kinsey’s much larger studies in the 1940s confirmed that during partner lovemaking, considerably fewer women than men had orgasms. Subsequently, dozens of studies have reconfirmed the orgasm gap. With partners, men report orgasms around 95 percent of the time, but depending on the study, for women, it’s only 50 to 70 percent. Why? Two possibilities—either something is wrong with the women, or something is wrong with the sex.

Complicated Women?

The psychological literature has focused on women. Many psychologists believe that compared with men, women are more emotionally complicated, therefore, even minor upsets might derail their orgasms.

Investigators at Valparaiso University in Indiana asked 452 women why they had trouble coming. The women’s list: anxiety, pain, poor self-lubrication, and body image issues—all issues about them, not about their lovemaking.

Other research has shown that some differences among women do, indeed, impact the likelihood of orgasm—but only slightly:

• Demographics. As women’s age, education, and incomes rise, their likelihood of orgasm increases a bit.
• Religion and roles. Compared with women who embrace religious fundamentalism (sex only for procreation) and traditional gender roles (male breadwinners, female homemakers), women with more liberal attitudes are a little more likely to have orgasms.
• Relationships. As relationship happiness increases, women are slightly more likely to climax.
• Sexual trauma. Women with no history of sexual trauma are somewhat more likely to orgasm.

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However, add these all up, and they don’t come anywhere near explaining the orgasm gap.

Not the Women, the Sex

Since the millennium, several sexologists have pivoted away from women’s psychology to focus on their sex. They’ve discovered that, compared with the factors just mentioned, what couples do, or don’t do, in bed makes a much greater difference—and largely explains the orgasm gap.

Australian researchers surveyed 5,118 men and women aged 16 to 59 about the four factors just mentioned. As usual, 95 percent of the men reported climaxing, but among the women, just 69 percent did. The women’s demographics, beliefs, relationships, and trauma histories didn’t make much difference.

Then the researchers asked participants to describe the genital touch they’d received during their most recent partner play—and if they’d had orgasms. Subjects reported three types of play: genital hand massage (80 percent), oral sex (25 percent), and vaginal intercourse (95 percent). Among the men, orgasm likelihood had little to do with the genital caresses they received. But for the women, the likelihood of orgasm varied considerably based on genital caresses. When women just had intercourse, 50 percent had orgasms. When they received vulvar massage, fingering, and intercourse, 71 percent. And with vulvar massage, fingering, intercourse, and cunnilingus, 86 percent.

Reproductive sex is all about intercourse. But for women’s orgasms, it’s mostly about men providing all three kinds of genital touch.

Many other studies corroborate this finding:

• Compared with partner lovemaking, women have orgasms more reliably from self-sexing. It involves direct clitoral caresses.
• The 1976 Hite Report chronicled women’s sexual complaints about men, chief among them, too little clitoral caressing.
• Scientists from several universities surveyed 407 lesbians and 370 heterosexual women. The two groups were demographically comparable, but the lesbians reported significantly more orgasms. They received more vulvar massage, fingering, and cunnilingus.
• Researchers at Chapman University in Southern California analyzed orgasms among 52,588 American adults. Lesbian women reported them in 86 percent of encounters, heterosexual women only 65 percent. The lesbians kissed more, shared more mutual whole-body massage, and received more vulvar massage, fingering, and cunnilingus.

The recent German study shows that half of men and women don’t appreciate the importance of the clitoris in women’s erotic pleasure and orgasms. To end the orgasm gap, we need TV commercials, billboards, skywriting, newspaper headlines, and social media blaring Hey, everybody, get hip to the clit! Of course, that’s unlikely. Instead, I recommend a marvelous book by University of Florida professor Laurie Mintz, Ph.D., Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It.