What if we’ve been trying to close the orgasm gap in the wrong direction?
We talk a lot about the ‘orgasm gap’ between men and women, and generally the conversation goes something like this: men have orgasms more easily and reliably than women do, so how do we help women catch up?
But I want to challenge the implicit assumption there and ask:
Why is male sexuality the benchmark?
Along with all the other assumptions embedded in the ‘orgasm gap’ narrative:
What if women aren’t actually sexually deficient versions of men?
What if female sexuality contains extraordinary capacities that we’ve barely even recognised, let alone valued?
And what if our conventional model of male sexuality is incredibly limited, and men too have capacities they’ve barely begun to explore?
And what if some of the very capacities men could expand into are those we’ve traditionally associated with female sexuality — and systematically devalued?
What if closing the ‘orgasm gap’ is less about women becoming more like men, and more about men expanding into the breadth of female sexuality?
The reframe is this:
Women have capacities we’ve radically undervalued, and men have capacities we’ve radically underdeveloped.
Therefore the real question becomes:
What happens when we become curious about each other’s erotic possibilities?
Now that is a much more exciting vision of sexual equality.
It’s not about women catching up with men. It’s not women versus men, or female sexuality versus male sexuality.
It’s expansion for everyone:
Women becoming more confident in the breadth of their own sexuality.
Men discovering that their erotic potential extends far beyond erection, performance and ejaculation.
And both becoming more able to meet each other in the vast territory in between.
Sexual equality doesn’t require sexual sameness — it requires us to value the full range of what we each bring.
When equality means becoming more “male”
Let’s take a moment to look at how we came to be asking the wrong question in the first place.
Because, as with so many aspects of life, when women’s sexuality differs from men’s, we have tended to assume that our conventional model of male sexuality is the one we should aspire to.
Hence assumptions such as:
Men can become aroused quickly. So women should too.
Men’s arousal builds with more stimulation and intensity. So women’s should too.
Men can reach peak orgasm reliably. So women should too.
And of course, there’s nothing wrong with women doing any of those things. However, the question is why we so often define sexual liberation as women gaining access to qualities traditionally associated with male sexuality.
Because beneath that sits a much bigger cultural hierarchy. We tend to value intensity over subtlety; action over receptivity; striving over allowing; achieving over experiencing; the visible over the felt; and the measurable over the ineffable.
It’s a hierarchy deeply embedded in patriarchy. In my preferred language of Yin and Yang, we’ve privileged Yang over Yin. And then we wonder why our sexual liberation still feels rather… Yang.
I sometimes joke that you can’t smash the patriarchy because “smashing” is itself inherently patriarchal!
But there’s a serious point underneath the joke.
If the only way women can become sexually equal is by becoming better at the things our culture already associates with masculinity, we haven’t actually dismantled the hierarchy. We’ve simply allowed women to climb it.
What if genuine sexual liberation requires us not merely to give women equal access to traditionally masculine sexual values, but to restore value to the qualities traditionally coded feminine? Or, in the language I prefer, to restore value to Yin.
Values such as receptivity, spaciousness, sensitivity, subtlety, allowing, internal awareness, relationality.
Not as lesser qualities, nor passive qualities, and certainly not as qualities belonging exclusively to women.
But as enormously valuable human capacities that our culture — and our sexuality — has neglected.
The orgasm gap
Which brings us back to orgasm.
The modern focus on women’s orgasm emerged for very good reasons. For far too long, women’s pleasure was overlooked and misunderstood. Women were expected to orgasm through intercourse because that was how men orgasmed through intercourse — and if they didn’t, the problem was assumed to lie with them.
So, we corrected that and put the clitoris firmly back on the sexual map. We acknowledged that many women require direct clitoral stimulation to reach a peak orgasm. And we began insisting, quite rightly, that her pleasure mattered just as much as his.
But we corrected the inequality without questioning the model itself.
Because if sexual equality becomes he gets a peak orgasm, therefore she should get a peak orgasm too, we’re still using the conventional male sexual response as our measure of success.
We’ve made things fairer. But only within the limited model that we call ‘sex’.
Nearly sixty years ago, Masters and Johnson, the renowned sex researchers, observed something fascinating about female sexual response. Men generally entered a refractory period following orgasm and ejaculation. Women, on the other hand, could remain highly aroused and move into further orgasmic experiences without the same inevitable drop in arousal. Female sexual response also showed considerable variation in intensity, duration and pattern.
In other words, their research revealed something much more interesting than simply women can have multiple orgasms.
It suggested that female sexuality had capacities that didn’t fit neatly into the conventional male model at all.
And therein lies the problem - we’ve missed the enormity of that.
What if female sexual response wasn’t a more complicated, less reliable version of male sexual response, but a different doorway into understanding the breadth of human erotic capacity?
Instead of becoming deeply curious about what those differences might reveal about female erotic capacity — and what men might potentially learn from them — we largely continued to measure sexual success by the thing the conventional male sexual response does particularly reliably: reach a peak.
But when we wander around the broader orgasmic landscape I described in my last Erotic Provocateur, Beyond the Peak, we discover very different experiences…
…Pleasure can rise and fall. Spread. Deepen. Transform. Move through different parts of the body. Become exquisitely subtle, then suddenly intense again.
There doesn’t even need to be a definitive ending — you can simply bring your gorgeous ramble in the countryside to a close when you feel sated.
So, in viewing sexual pleasure beyond summit-bagging, we can ask:
What if the extraordinary thing isn’t how many peaks a woman can achieve?
What if it’s how long, how deeply and in how many different ways she can remain orgasmic?
Now that is a female capacity worth getting curious about.
And then comes the really interesting question:
What might happen if men learned to do that too?
What sex looks like
Pornography provides an almost comical illustration of the problem of experiencing the whole landscape.
Porn has to make sex visible. And audible.
So we see lots of movement. Vigorous thrusting. Intense stimulation. Dramatic vocalisation. Lots of evidence that something Very Sexual is happening.
Because that’s interesting to watch.
Two people lying almost motionless, deeply connected and in extended orgasmic bliss, barely managing the occasional shiver?
Not such riveting viewing.
They might be having the most extraordinary sexual experience of their lives…But they’d make terrible porn.
And this highlights something important.
What is visually sexually impressive is not necessarily what is internally sexually impressive.
Yet we’ve absorbed a model of sex in which pleasure is supposed to be demonstrated. The more movement, noise and intensity, the more sexual it appears.
Again: Yang.
And that can affect intercourse itself.
So let me be very clear here, I am not suggesting that women should give up on intercourse and find their pleasure elsewhere. Quite the opposite in fact.
I question why we accept the conventional way we have intercourse — lots of thrusting and intensity building towards his ejaculation — as the fixed variable, and then conclude that intercourse simply “doesn’t work” particularly well for women.
What if we changed the intercourse?
What happens when we slow down enough for both bodies, and souls, to truly wake up to pleasure?
When a woman has time to open, soften, engorge, invite and receive, and become exquisitely sensitive internally?
When a man stops using his penis primarily to do something and becomes capable of relaxing and receiving in the process too?
When intercourse itself becomes less about friction and more about sensation, connection, responsiveness and mutuality?
There’s a whole Erotic Provocateur in that. In fact, I think that might be the next one.
But for now:
Perhaps intercourse isn’t the problem. Perhaps the way we’re having intercourse is.
Men deserve more too
None of this is about declaring female sexuality superior. That would simply turn the hierarchy upside down.
Men have been short-changed by our conventional model of male sexuality too.
Think about what we ask of them:
Get an erection. Keep it up. Know what to do. Approach at the right time. Perform. Thrust. Monitor her response. Make sure she’s enjoying herself. Try to make her orgasm. Don’t come too soon. Don’t take too long. Stay hard…And eventually, ejaculate (at just the right time of course…)
That is an extraordinarily narrow definition of male erotic capacity. And a profoundly pressurised one.
What if men were allowed more?
More receptivity.
More subtlety.
More whole-body pleasure.
More capacity to soften without panicking.
More ability to allow pleasure rather than manufacture it.
More experience of pleasure as something that can spread and deepen, rather than something inevitably funnelled towards a quick peak and resolution.
More Yin alongside their Yang.
Not less masculine. More erotically capable.
Which brings me back to my provocation:
Rather than women trying to limit themselves to the conventional model of male sexuality, men need to expand themselves into the breadth of female sexuality.
Both women and men can expand their erotic capacity. Because none of these capacities ultimately belongs to one sex.
A different kind of sexual revolution
I understand why women can feel angry about the orgasm gap. If you believe he has easy access to the sexual prize and you don’t, of course that feels unfair.
But what if you’re comparing the extraordinary complexity of your sexuality against a very narrow measure of sexual success?
What if there’s nothing for you to catch up to?
What if there is, instead, something within you to discover?
And what if the man beside you isn’t the lucky bastard who got the better sexual deal?
What if he has been confined too?
A different confinement, perhaps, but confinement nonetheless.
Suddenly we have a very different conversation.
Not: You have something I don’t.
Not: Your job is to give me what I’m missing.
Not even: We need to make sure we both get an orgasm.
But: What are these bodies capable of?
What can I discover about mine? What can you discover about yours? What can we learn from each other? And what becomes possible between us when neither of us is trying to conform to a narrow idea of what sex is supposed to be?
That feels much more relational to me, considerably more loving — and definitely more pleasurable.
Because nobody wins when the model is too small.
The answer to the orgasm gap isn’t to diminish what men have or demand that women acquire it.
It’s to enlarge what we believe is possible for both:
More Yang and more Yin.
More action and more receptivity.
More intensity and more subtlety.
More freedom to roam the whole erotic landscape
More confidence in our own erotic capacities and more fascination with those of our partners.
Women have capacities we’ve radically undervalued. Men have capacities we’ve radically underdeveloped.
Neither needs to become the other. But imagine what might happen if we became genuinely curious about each other’s erotic possibilities.
Perhaps that’s where the real sexual revolution begins.
Join me in the Salon
For a deeper exploration of this topic….
You know I've always felt that the discourse surrounding the orgasm gap needs more critical understanding because even the way we perceive orgasm may be shaped by patriarchal assumptions. Why have we so consistently equated orgasm with coming, as if pleasure needs to have a biological manifestation? Since the erotic is much larger than the sexual and is a source of power, a life force that enables us to feel more alive , it can emerge through creativity, intellectual exploration, critical thinking, artistic expression, and other activities that empower and enliven us. If the erotic can manifest itself in so many different ways, why should its culmination, its moment of heightened intensity or fulfilment be confined to a single biological manifestation of coming?
Also we shouldn't forget how historically women's bodies have been interpreted, classified, and regulated through systems of knowledge that have privileged the phallus. Cixous in "The Laugh of the Medusa" argues again and again that woman has been constructed as the "dark continent", an unknowable territory that patriarchy fears and yet seeks to control. Women's sexuality has always been shrouded in shame, silence, and mystery, leaving women alienated from their own bodies and desires. But women's experiences of arousal and pleasure are complex and individual as our errogenous zones extend far beyond the genitalias. But at the same time, Patriarchy has also imposed its own anxieties upon men, as you rightly said men are taught that sexual competence depends on performance, erection, size, stamina etc.. But who established these criteria, and whose pleasure do they actually serve? Why should penetration be treated as the ultimate measure of satisfying sex? Why must sex become a performance in which bodies are evaluated against predetermined standards rather than spaces of mutual exploration, communication, and pleasure?
I feel if sex has to become truly erotic we need to move away from the obsession with penetration, performance, and orgasm as the ultimate goals of sex and focus more on the idea of foreplay, which isn't simply the preliminary stage before intercourse, but what counts as foreplay also includes communication, intellectual, emotional and other forms of intimacy and so on.
So may be its not simply why women experience fewer orgasms than men, but also how we have come to define orgasm, sexual satisfaction, and erotic fulfilment in the first place.
Love that! It’s so true!!