Grace Wetzel: Orgasmic Inequality

I am not entirely comfortable with talking about sex on this blog, but in this case, it is important for discussing an important dimension of sexism in our society. Grace Wetzel—in her TEDx talk which you can watch above—does an admirable job of driving home the argument that there is orgasmic inequality as a result of inegalitarian attitudes toward women. Here is the argument she makes:

  1. In heterosexual encounters, women experience only about 25% of the encounters.

  2. This is associated with the fact that only 25% of women regularly experience orgasms from penetration without additional clitoral stimulation.

  3. However, it is not due to female orgasms being any more difficult to achieve for women than for men: for both men and women, the average masturbation time to orgasm is 4 minutes.

  4. The fact the orgasm rates for lesbians are almost the same as orgasm rates for men also suggests that there is no great inherent biological difficulty in female orgasm.

  5. Despite oral sex received by women being one activity that is especially helpful for clitoral stimulation and therefore for female orgasm, men receive oral sex much more than women do.

  6. Orgasmic inequality is not confined to being a lower-class phenomenon: orgasmic inequality and the behavioral patterns that lead to it are rife among college students.

  7. Grace discusses many of the gender dynamics that help preserve orgasmic inequality. One telltale sign of the dysfunction in our society that preserves orgasmic inequality is the statistic that more than half of all women have faked an orgasm.

A religious belief that the only purpose of sex is reproduction would reduce the concern about orgasmic inequality, since there wouldn’t be the need for much sex at all, and what sex there was could be quite humdrum and still do the reproductive job. But to the extent that sex also serves the purposes of pleasure and emotional bonding for a couple, mutual satisfaction is quite valuable.

Somewhat relatedly, below is a TEDx talk reporting research indicating that even short-term participation in a peer-support group of other women can improve women’s sexual experience substantially: