Episode 395: Why Women Pursue Orgasm Less Than Men
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Leigh Miller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. In heterosexual relationships, women don't orgasm as frequently or consistently as men, a phenomenon known as the orgasm gap.

There are many different theories as to why this gap exists. For example, some argue that it's due to some innate biological difference. That it's simply far more difficult for a woman to reach orgasm than it is for a man. But if that were true, then why do women orgasm at similar rates to men during masturbation? Others argue that the orgasm gap is mostly because men just don't care about partner pleasure. But that's not true either. Most men want their partners to be sexually satisfied.

So in today's episode, we're going to give you a new way of thinking about the orgasm gap. Specifically, we're going to explore something called the orgasm pursuit gap. We're going to explore how sexual scripts lead women to pursue their own orgasms less than men and to perceive less support from their partners for their own pleasure. We're also going to discuss how achieving pleasure equity and closing the orgasm gap necessitate reframing orgasm as a team sport, not something that one person is entirely responsible for.

My guest today is Carly Wolfer, a sex researcher, relationship scientist, and health educator whose work explores how to create more equitable and pleasurable sexual experiences. She's working on her PhD in social psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies sexual pleasure equity through the lens of interdependence theory. Her research has been published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and Archives of Sexual Behavior. She also teaches a human sexuality course.

This is going to be another fascinating episode. Stick around and we're going to jump in right after the break. If you love the science of sex as much as I do, consider becoming a friend of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. The Kinsey Institute is the world's premier research organization on sex and relationships, and you can help them continue the legacy of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose pioneering research changed everything we think we know about sex.

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Hi Carly, and welcome to the show. Hi Justin, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining me. So we're going to be talking all about women's orgasms today. And as we've discussed on the show many times before, there is a well-documented orgasm gap such that during partnered heterosexual encounters, men tend to orgasm more than 90% of the time on average, compared to around two-thirds of the time for women.

However, no such gap exists when we're looking at orgasm during masturbation or when women have sex with other women. This disparity in rates of orgasms seems to be unique to contexts where women are having sex with men. Now, you have some new research that challenges us to think differently about the orgasm gap, and it starts with this idea of orgasm goal pursuit. So as a starting point, what are you talking about when you use the term orgasm goal pursuit?

So goal pursuit in general is this motivational process of setting and striving toward a goal. That could be any goal in your life. When we apply that to orgasm specifically, orgasm goal pursuit is the extent to which someone sets and strives toward an orgasm goal. So in other words, how much did you want to orgasm, try to orgasm, and take steps or put effort in terms of your orgasm? This can be measured in general.

or on a more discrete and event level basis, like during a particular encounter. Thanks for sharing that. So you say that there's a gender gap in orgasm pursuit and that this contributes to the orgasm gap overall. So how so? You know, in other words, what's the nature of the orgasm pursuit gap and what role does this play in women having lower rates of orgasm during sex with men?

Yeah. So before I tell you about the gender orgasm pursuit gap, I'll explain the three dimensions of orgasm pursuit that I usually try to capture in my work. So previously, most scientists have measured orgasm pursuit at the individual level, as in how much did you personally pursue your own orgasm? Now, given that partnered sex is inherently relational and interpersonal context, and given that the orgasm gap is

is only happening when women are having sex with men, not when they're masturbating or having sex with women. I am expanding this construct of orgasm pursuit to also capture interpersonal dimensions. So the three dimensions that I look at are personal orgasm pursuit, the extent to which you personally wanted to and tried to orgasm,

Partner orgasm pursuit, which is the extent to which you supported your partner's orgasm. And then this one's more of a mouthful, but I'll talk through it. Perceived partner orgasm pursuit. The extent to which you feel like your partner supported your pleasure or orgasm.

Now, these three dimensions have a pretty complex interaction. So we find that even if someone personally wants to or tries to orgasm, the sex and orgasm is satisfying only if they feel like their partner is supporting them and supporting their orgasm as well.

So essentially, if you are trying to orgasm during sex with a partner, but you're getting the vibe that your partner is focused on themselves or isn't explicitly caring about your pleasure, your orgasm and the sex won't really feel that good. Now, to address your question about the gender difference, we find significant differences in those three dimensions of orgasm pursuit between men and women.

So specifically, we see that men pursue their own orgasm more than women pursue their own orgasm. We see that men pursue their partner's orgasm less than women pursue their partner's orgasm. And we also see that men feel more support from their women partners than women feel from men.

So this imbalance, which is what I've coined the orgasm pursuit gap, helps explain that widely documented orgasm gap that we observe when women are having sex with men. So it's really this disproportionate pursuit of men's pleasure and orgasm more broadly, which we see linked to men's increased and women's decreased orgasm likelihood, sexual satisfaction, and orgasm satisfaction.

Yeah, so there are lots of different elements of this idea of orgasm pursuit, and you see these pretty consistent gender differences across all of them.

Now, on previous episodes of the show, we've talked about how it can be problematic when sex becomes too goal-oriented. And so specifically, if you adopt the belief that sex isn't really sex unless orgasm happens, it can create this feeling of pressure that can actually make orgasm less likely to happen. And likewise, if you put a lot of pressure on your partner to have an orgasm, that can have the same effect of diminishing their odds of having an orgasm.

So when we're talking about orgasm goal pursuit, I think we need to distinguish between simply wanting to have an orgasm versus the orgasmic imperative or this idea that an orgasm has to happen and where there's all this pressure to have an orgasm. So I was curious if you could speak a little bit about what you see as a healthy pursuit of orgasm as opposed to when you become overly fixated on orgasm and that ventures into problem territory.

Yeah. And this is a really important caveat that I always talk to people about, and especially my students, because when we talk about goals, it makes people think that they're only looking at the outcome, right? So orgasm goal pursuit is actually more about the process. It's about exploration and trial and error and exploring possibilities of pleasure and the possibility that orgasm could be or might be a goal for you or might not.

So the way I look at orgasm goal pursuit is actually more of a proxy for looking at pleasure access and pleasure possibilities in general, but

So it's really important that we don't put pressure on the outcome, but instead try to think about who even has access to that outcome in the first place. So when we measure specifically orgasm motives, we're able to isolate certain ways that women particularly have dampened the possibility that they could even want to orgasm in the first place.

And we know that because we see evidence that prior orgasm access and likelihood has basically ended up predicting future orgasm pursuit and future orgasm expectations. So it's really more about the process and expanding our possibilities of pleasure rather than creating orgasm imperatives, which is a core part of dominant sexual scripts that actually underlie the pleasure gaps in the first place.

Yeah, I appreciate you explaining all of that and totally agree with you. So in your work, you talk about the importance of having partner support for your orgasm goals. So what happens when you have a personal goal to orgasm and you feel that your partner's support is high versus low?

Yeah. So what we see is this interaction between a partner's support and your own goals. So even if you're personally trying to orgasm, it doesn't actually translate into satisfying sex or satisfying orgasms unless your partner is also on board. The important distinction here too is that you have to feel like your partner is on board. And so even though a partner could think that they're trying, they're not.

It's really about perceiving that responsiveness. So we see that the benefits of personal orgasm pursuit actually disappear or backfire when you feel like your partner is not supporting you. So this really shows that pleasure is a shared process. It's about collaboration and mutual care and effort rather than this like tit for tat or transactional or individual process that's happening.

Yeah, and I think that perception piece is really key because the perception really underlies so much when it comes to satisfying sex and whether we're getting what we want. And sometimes our partners might be very invested in and interested in our pleasure, but we might be perceiving it very differently. And we'll talk more about that a little bit later in the show. But I want to talk first about something

where if we go back to this idea of the orgasm gap, you know, so much has been said and written about it in the popular media, including how we close it. And a lot of the narrative is focused on individual level fixes for women. But you see the orgasm gap as being a relational issue as opposed to being an individual issue. So tell us a bit about that. You know, how do you think current thinking or conventional wisdom on the orgasm gap and how to close it might be wrong?

Yeah. So most advice that we see focuses on trying to fix women, right? We see headlines, what is the orgasm gap and what can women do about it? We see researchers or popular media focused on telling women, get out of your head, be more assertive, masturbate more. But really we know from these data that personal efforts to orgasm actually backfire without partner support. And

And we know that women have no problem accessing the pleasure that they define and prefer when they're alone and masturbating or when they're with other women. So the problem is not women's only issue, right? It's not an issue for women to either tolerate or fix on their own.

And so we can't just keep telling women to try harder to orgasm because it's not going to actually translate into pleasure unless they feel their partner is collaborating and that men are also buying into this process. Now, there has been a shift in the last decade or so where especially sex researchers are importantly taking the focus away from the individual level and looking more at social cultural determinants of the pleasure gap.

So low levels of clitoral knowledge or gender norms and gendered sexual scripts. This is a really important shift because it takes away the blame from women, but it also ends up diffusing a little bit of responsibility in a practical way because it's actually very difficult to change macro level social cultural norms.

And we actually see that existing interventions that focus on increasing clitoracy, for example, across the board end up supporting women's pleasure when they're masturbating, but it actually doesn't translate into increased pleasure access when they're with men. So this brings us all back to the fact that we do need men to be engaged in this work. We need men to be

collaborating with us on these efforts. And we really need to take more of this dyadic and interpersonal approach instead of just collecting data from individuals and particularly women.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting when you look at media narratives about who's responsible for whose orgasm, right? You know, we hear a lot about how women, you know, should take responsibility for their own orgasm in some of the ways that you just mentioned. But we also hear a lot of men who feel like they're totally responsible for their partner's orgasm. And I like the way that you approach it as being more of kind of like a team sport and something that you're working on together and you need investment

an interest in both sides. And it's not that any one person is totally responsible for somebody else's orgasm, but rather it's something that you work together on collaboratively.

Yeah, definitely. And it's a really delicate conversation because when we talk about what it would look like for men to be collaborating and supporting, we don't want to add to the performance pressure or anxiety. Men already have a lot of responsibility to perform in bed, to make sure that they are not going to orgasm too soon or caring for their partner or initiating the whole entire encounter. So this is less about putting more pressure and responsibility on men and more about

leveling the playing field and thinking about what it would look like to authentically explore each other's pleasure rather than putting the pressure on one person or another because it's not about responsibility. It's really about play and it's about pleasure. Yeah, I love thinking about sex as about play as opposed to, you know, some of these other things that can convey sort of a high sense of pressure.

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Now, if orgasm is a goal that you have during sex, you know, and it's important to feel supported by your partner in reaching that, how do you actually make this happen? You know, how do you get your partner to support your pleasure if you don't feel like they're supporting it?

Yeah, there is a ton of research on the importance of communication. Generally, we know for relationship and sexual satisfaction, less has been done on specifically orgasm communication. So in recent work, we actually asked people to tell us the extent to which they express their orgasm desires and needs to a partner during sex.

We wanted to see whether this would actually facilitate a partner's support of your pleasure. We also asked them how they went about doing that. So people shared in an open-ended response what that communication actually looked like. We ended up coding the strategies people reported and looked at whether people used verbal or nonverbal strategies. So when people use nonverbal, they said things like, I put his hand where I like it. Or verbal, don't stop, that feels good, just like that.

this positive reinforcement more explicitly. We found significant gender differences here. So men communicated to a greater extent and also more verbally, and women communicated to a lesser extent and more non-verbally.

However, when we model to see whether degree or type of orgasm communication actually then predicted orgasm and satisfaction and partner support, we actually see that degree but not type of communication matters. So...

Regardless of whether you are sharing with your partner verbally or non-verbally, if you are telling your partner or communicating in some way, that can actually then translate into their ability to respond to your needs, which in turn can increase satisfaction and the likelihood you're going to orgasm.

So especially, for example, for women who might feel nervous or uncomfortable more verbally or explicitly mentioning what their orgasm desires are, people might actually be able to use the strategy, whether verbal or nonverbal, that feels most comfortable for them in that moment.

Yeah, and I think when it comes to sexual communication of all kinds, there's no one size fits all answer. You know, different people are comfortable with different forms of sexual communication. Sometimes

Communicating non-verbally might feel more comfortable or easier in certain situations. And also different people's communication strategies might differ across different situations or different partners. So it's about finding what feels right and comfortable for you in that situation. But it's not just about communicating about your orgasm needs and desires and what it is that gets you there. It's also having a partner who is receptive to

to that information and is willing to work with you on that in the pursuit of your pleasure. Yeah, and I think that goes back to the relational perspective that is really important to take here. So it's not just about what you want, but it's also about asking your partner what they want and what it would look like. So if you actually want to translate intentions into impact, we have to have a conversation about what your partner wants that impact to even look like or feel like.

Yeah. Now, I think a common misconception about the orgasm gap is that men only care about their own pleasure and not at all about their partner's pleasure. And it so often gets turned into this really unhelpful blame game in lots of media posts and social media posts.

But when we look at the research, we see that most men say that they do want to satisfy their partners. And most men find their partner's orgasms and pleasure to be very arousing. And so in many cases, men do have that intention to support their partner's orgasms, but it's not always effective. So how do we help men and women move toward more mutually pleasurable dynamics in the bedroom?

Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up the importance of not placing any blame because we actually do see really high intentions and intended care from men. So in recent work that we just did, we asked men what their intended pursuit of their women partner's orgasm is at their next encounter. And we see really at the top of the scale, like really high intentions to pursue their partner's orgasm. Where we see the gap is...

in the way that those intentions are being executed. So when we asked men how they would go about doing that, how they would go about pursuing women's orgasm, we have a range of responses. Some people say things in all caps, find the clitoris, which shows high levels of clitorisy or understanding of women's most reliable or common route to pleasure, right? However, we also see a group of men who said things like, give her that dick deep, right?

which displays a little bit more imperative around penetration and maybe not understanding the way that women's sexual function and sexual response works. And again, this is not to blame men. This is actually a reflection on a deficit in our sex education system. And many people just don't understand the importance of clitoral stimulation for people with vulvas.

Yeah. And if you think about this, right, a lot of men want to satisfy their partners and they have that intention. But how is that actually being translated? And where are their ideas of what brings women pleasure coming from? And are they coming, for example, from porn scripts, which might give you this idea that,

harder, faster, deeper, jackhammer-style sex is what women want, and it's their route to orgasm. And, you know, when you watch a lot of traditional pornography, that's, you know, it's easy to come away with the impression that that's what women like or enjoy, because the women who are performing in these videos often...

display these very overt signs of pleasure, you know, and it seems like they're having very intense and exciting orgasms. But again, porn sex is not real sex. And, you know, using it as a how-to guide for what it is that's going to bring every woman pleasure can be misleading.

Yeah, definitely. There's a tweet from Dr. Lori Mintz that I always share with my students that gets them thinking about this, that expecting a woman or a person with a vulva to orgasm from vaginal penetration is like expecting a man or a person with a penis to orgasm from stroking his balls alone. But we honestly never think about the clitoris with that much value as we do the penis.

Yeah. And you know, there are some men who might totally get off on scrotal stimulation. There are some women who can orgasm easily from just vaginal penetration alone. Everybody's different. But on average, there are some pretty big differences. And when it comes to women's sexual pleasure and orgasms, clitoral stimulation much more often than not is key.

Yeah. Now, something you talk about in your work is why we need to move toward thinking about pleasure equity rather than orgasm equality. And this reminds me of a recent interview I did with Dr. Candice Nicole Hargens, where we talked about the problem of even trying to define orgasm.

orgasm equity. You know, what does orgasm equity even look like? So for example, if we have a heterosexual couple where the man orgasms 95% of the time, but he only has one orgasm each time, whereas his female partner only orgasms half of the time, but she has two orgasms each time, is that equity? You know, they're having roughly the same number of orgasms, they're just spaced out differently.

You know, so this question of what counts as orgasm equality is a tricky one. You know, if you're not orgasming every single time that your partner does, is that necessarily inequitable? You know, I don't think we want to get to a place where we're trying to like keep track of orgasms and doing this tit for tat thing saying, you know, we have to have the exact same number of orgasms. Right. So what are your thoughts here and why do you think pleasure equity is the approach that we need to take?

Yeah, and this is really important because it's not all about orgasm, even though there are correlations between orgasm and pleasure and satisfaction. It is really more about people feeling supported to access sex

equitable definitions of pleasure, whether that includes orgasm or not. And so when we look at the World Health Organization's definition of sexual health, it's not just about the absence of disease or dysfunction, but it's about the possibility of pleasurable and safe experiences. The way that our social world has been set up and the dominant heterosexual script

it has created this imbalance in whose possibility of greater pleasure is valued. And so in my work, I think it's really more so about the process of getting there rather than the outcome. And that's why when I measure orgasm motivations, we're almost able to capture the

who even has a goal to think that they could in the first place? And so we're getting to honor whether people even wanted to or tried to orgasm rather than counting or tit for tat. Okay, you orgasmed one time, so I'm gonna orgasm one time. The other thing that's really important when we're thinking about the orgasm gap is it's not just about quantity, it's about quality. And so in my work, I look not only at orgasm

occurrence, but also orgasm satisfaction. How satisfying was that orgasm? And more generally, how satisfying was that sexual experience? So ultimately closing the gap isn't about counting orgasms or making sex feel tit for tat. It's about ensuring that partners have access to the conditions that actually make fulfilling sexual experiences possible in their body.

Yeah, I love that. And I wish that that was the bigger conversation we were having about the orgasm gap, you know, which is about let's make sure everybody has equal access to pleasure and that when you have that goal of orgasm, that you feel supported in that and that orgasm might be a possibility in that case. And, you know, it is also important to recognize that.

If you have orgasm as a goal, something that you would like to have, and even if you have your partner supporting you, sometimes the orgasm isn't going to happen. Orgasms are complex, and there are lots of factors that play a role in terms of whether or not we have an orgasm in a given sexual situation. You can have all of the stars aligned, but if it happens to be taking place during a really stressful period in your life, and you find that you're

distracted and can't really focus in that moment, it might make it so that you can't have an orgasm. And it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you or with your partner or the relationship. It's just that orgasms are complicated. And as much as we wouldn't like them to happen every time we have sex, they just don't always happen for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, absolutely. And I use a framework called intimate justice in my work. So Sarah McCulland talks a lot about how these external social systems end up informing or shaping how entitled we feel to positive experiences in the bedroom. And so when we measure women's self-reports of sexual satisfaction,

we actually see that women and queer people tend to anchor their self-reports of satisfaction in their partner's pleasure. And so in a way, this is an example of how it might look equal because satisfaction rates are actually showing little gender difference. But if we unpack it and look at

crude examples of what that satisfaction looks like and what it's based on, we see that it's actually not an agentic or expansive definition of satisfaction. It's actually been supplanted by the need to nurture men's pleasure in many ways.

So there's one other thing that I want to talk about here that I think is really important. And when we talk about the orgasm gap, it depends, you know, the size of that gap in terms of whether we're talking about a casual situation versus being in a long-term romantic relationship.

And what we see is that when people are in long-term relationships, the orgasm gap is much smaller compared to, say, when it's taking place in the form of a hookup or another casual situation. And there's some really compelling work that's been done here showing that

The very first time a woman has sex with a casual partner, her odds of orgasm, at least among college student samples, are somewhere around 15% or so. So we're talking about a huge orgasm gap in first-time encounters, especially among younger women in that hookup context.

But the more sexual experience she has with a given partner, the odds of her orgasm tend to go up after that. But when we're talking about orgasm as being this relational thing and feeling supported in your pursuit of orgasm, how do you feel supported in having an orgasm with a partner in a casual context where you don't necessarily know the other person very well?

Yeah. And this, I think, says a lot about how the barriers to doing relational research in the orgasm gap with casual sex partners are actually probably the same barriers that are contributing to greater pleasure gaps in casual sex compared to committed. So we see more individualistic motives, less communication, less accountability, lower retention, maybe less investment in each other's needs.

This pressure to not catch feelings or show you care too much, which is emphasized especially in younger hookup cultures. But ultimately, these findings about relational or partner ingredients to pleasure equity, I'm hoping to basically extract from what we learn from committed sex, queer sex, and bring it into casual, straight hookup encounters because women shouldn't have to wait to be in a long-term relationship

or have sex only with women to be able to access pleasure equity. And we actually just collected data from undergrads in New York City about their ideal versus their actual orgasm pursuit at their last encounter. And we looked to see whether relationship context or commitment to the partner shaped those outcomes. And what we found is that particularly in casual encounters and first-time hookups,

People often pursue their own orgasms to the extent to which they want to, but fall short of pursuing their partners. So people actually are desiring more effort than they experience or enact in those casual encounters. This is...

Fresh off the press, so I just analyzed this this week, but it maybe says something about how the pressure to adhere to and remain casual and adhere to that hookup script might actually prevent people from showing more care and effort to their partner. But I think it's important that we remember that even casual sex is a partnered relational experience.

And it's okay if you don't want to be committed or monogamous with this person. You can still have pleasure be a shared and fun project together.

Yes, we need pleasure to be a shared and fun project in all sexual encounters. Yes. Well, thank you for sharing all of this with us, Carly. It's been fascinating and I'm looking forward to continuing my conversation with you in the next episode and diving even deeper into the topic of orgasms. Awesome. Thank you. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work?

Yeah, you can visit me at carlywolfer.com. And I'd love to hear from you if you are interested in any of this work or have thoughts about how we can make the world more pleasurable. Let's make the world a more pleasurable place. Well, thanks again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you so much, Justin. It was great to be here.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.