Scientific evidence shows that the majority of women are able to orgasm from vaginal penetration and find it appealing.
This will be the first of a series of articles in which I want to debunk some of the most obnoxious dogmas of political correctness.
Although some of these beliefs are quite harmful on their own, what I found most appalling is the underlying notion that truth can be sacrificed in the name of political expedience.
This degrading of the value of truth translates into the science denialism that we see in both the Left and the Right. The politically correct dogmas of conservatives - like anti-vaccine beliefs and climate change denialism - are frequently debunked by progressives. But I think that we progressives need to clean our own house as well. The consequences of not doing that can endanger our most valuable causes. Not only our lack of intellectual honesty will give good arguments to conservatives, but the confusion we bring to our own actions will render them much less effective.
For this article, I picked one of the dogmas most easy to debunk: the myth that women do not orgasm from penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse, and do not like it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think clitoral stimulation is great. It’s just that it has become a bit overrated of late. Penis-in-vagina penetration is also great and takes most women to orgasm.
Let’s take a look at the evidence.
The erroneously cited Herbenick paper
It is common to read that most women are not able to have orgasms from penetration.
A Google search on “women do not orgasm from penetration” found 780 results.
Here are few examples:
“The vast majority of women do not orgasm from penetration alone.” Psychology Today.
“Research has found that 81.6% of women do not orgasm from intercourse alone, with the majority needing clitoral stimulation to be able to orgasm.” healthnews.
“Mintz says we need to first realize that the way we’ve traditionally been taught women orgasm—via penetration—is wrong: 95 percent of women do not orgasm from intercourse alone.” goop Wellness.
“This is despite the fact that 75% of women do not orgasm from penetration alone and require direct clitoral stimulation.” Refinery29.
“Did you know that over 95% of women who have given birth have never experienced an orgasm from penetration?” The HealthSite.com.
“70% of women do not orgasm from penetration and need external stimulation of the clitoris.” Nut Nut.
“We now know that plenty of women do not orgasm from penetration alone and that orgasm can occur without penetration at all.” Astroglide.
“A study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy surveyed 1000 women aged 18 to 94 and found that 80% of women had never orgasmed from penetrative sex.” Medium.
Most of these sites do not offer any evidence for these bold statements. Sometimes, they cite each other, a great way to propagate disinformation. The few that refer back to scientific research cite this the paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy as evidence:
Women's Experiences With Genital Touching, Sexual Pleasure, and Orgasm: Results From a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Ages 18 to 94. D. Herbenick, T. J. Fu, J. Arter, S. A. Sanders and B. Dodge. J Sex Marital Ther 2018 Vol. 44 Issue 2 Pages 201-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2017.1346530
Here is the relevant part of the abstract of the paper:
"While 18.4% of women reported that intercourse alone was sufficient for orgasm, 36.6% reported clitoral stimulation was necessary for orgasm during intercourse, and an additional 36% indicated that, while clitoral stimulation was not needed, their orgasms feel better if their clitoris is stimulated during intercourse."
I guess what happened is that people stop reading after the first line. It says that 18.4% of women had orgasms from intercourse alone, so they subtract that from 100% and come up with 81.6%. There you go! More than 80% of women do not orgasm from penetration! Ever! Those selfish, evil men!
But, if you keep reading the abstract - or, the unthinkable, read the entire paper - you find that an additional 36% of women do not need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, but touching their clit made their orgasms better. Which makes total sense. However, since these women were also able to reach orgasm from penetration, we need to add them to the first group: 18.6% + 36% = 54.6%
Now, 54.6% is larger than 50%. So we reach an astonishing conclusion!
The majority of women are able to orgasm from intercourse.
What about the remaining 9.4% of women? Well, “7.5% did not have orgasms during intercourse” and 1.9% achieved orgasm before intercourse with cunnilingus, stimulating the clitoris or other means.
Dr. Debby Herbenick is one of the best sex researchers in the USA, with many published surveys like this one. This one used a sample of 1,055 American women interviewed by email.
To be clear, ‘intercourse’ here means penis-in-vagina (PIV) penetration. ‘Clitoral stimulation’ means direct stimulation of the clitoris, not the indirect stimulation that may be provided by the penis in certain sexual positions.
If you have access to the entire paper, a detailed breakdown of the number of women able to reach orgasm without clitoral stimulation are in Table 2.
Only 18.2% of women never achieved orgasm without stimulating their clits.
21.8% of women achieve orgasm less than 25% of the time.
8.2% of women achieved orgasm 25%-50% of the time.
10.5% reached orgasm 50% of the time.
12.3% reached orgasm 51% to 75% of the time.
15.5% reached orgasm more than 75%.
And the winners are the amazing 13.5% that always got to the big O, clit-free.
With clitoral stimulation, the number of women who always orgasmed with intercourse increased to 22.3%. However, 9.6% never achieved orgasm, even with clitoral stimulation.
So 81.8% (100% - 18.2%) of women had an orgasm from intercourse at least once in their lives. This is a curious reversal of the number that is often cited.
Much as I admire the work of Dr. Herbenick, I fault her for writing the abstract of her paper in such a confusing way. It would have been more honest if she stated outright that 54.6% of women reached orgasm through penetration alone, and then subdivided this number into those who prefer and do not prefer to add clitoral stimulation. Perhaps she was afraid to make a politically incorrect statement?
The Kontula study of Finnish women
This study has a bigger sample size than the Herbenick study. It compared women in six different age groups.
It also checked changes in orgasms from 1971 to 2015. Spoiler alert: orgasms did not improve during those 44 years. Despite the advances of feminism, sexual techniques, sex education and all the blaming and shaming of men that took place during that time, the frequency of female orgasms stayed the same. It even decreased for the younger generations.
Here is the full reference and a link to the PDF of the whole article.
Determinants of female sexual orgasms. O. Kontula and A. Miettinen. Socioaffective neuroscience & psychology 2016 Vol. 6 Pages 31624-31624. Link to full article (PDF).
The study used data from the FINSEX national surveys, conducted in 1971, 1992, 1999, 2007 and 2015 by randomly sampling the entire population of Finland. It gathered data from “10,613 responders, 4,482 men and 6,155 women.” The data analyzed in this paper were from women only. The sample size for each of these five years was between 1,496 and 2,590 women.
Women were divided into 6 age groups: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and 65-74 years of age.
The percentage of women who had orgasms “most of the time or always” during intercourse was 30% to 50% for ages 18-24, 40% to 60% for ages 25-54, and 40% to 50% for ages 55-74.
Around 60% of women reported having an orgasm during their last intercourse, except in the older group (65-74), where this number decreased to 40% (Figure 2).
Curiously, the percentage of women who orgasmed “most of the time or always” during PIV intercourse in the 18-24 age group declined from 50% to 30% from 1999 to 2015. In the age group 25-34, it declined from close to 60% in 1999 to 40% in 2015. For women aged 35-54, it stayed constant around 60%. For the two older groups (55-74), the number was still high, 40% of the women. So, even after menopause, numerous women orgasm during intercourse.
In this study, the majority of women (54%) reported that “they usually achieved orgasm via stimulating both the clitoris and the vagina.” Another 34% reported that they did it by stimulating only the clitoris, and only 6% did it by stimulating only the vagina. However, orgasms were more frequent (64%) in the women that achieved them through vaginal stimulation that in those who achieved them via clitoral stimulation (40%). Women who preferred clitoridal stimulation were less likely to achieve orgasm during intercourse.
Other interesting findings:
Orgasm frequency was higher in women who thought that having an orgasm was important.
Women who had intercourse at an earlier age had more frequent orgasms during intercourse.
However, age at first masturbation was not correlated with orgasm during intercourse.
Masturbation frequency was not related to the frequency of orgasm during intercourse.
“Nearly half of women (48%) reported that they achieved orgasm more easily in masturbation than in intercourse” while 14% of the women had an orgasm more easily through intercourse.
“Duration of intercourse was strongly associated with women’s ability to experience orgasm.”
The cowgirl (women on top) position and using several positions for intercourse were more likely to produce orgasms.
Having a stable relationship (married, cohabiting or dating long term) increased the frequency of orgasms during intercourse.
Good communication on sexual topics also increased orgasm frequency.
Do women like having sexual intercourse?
The full politically correct dogma is that women do not experience orgasms during PIV intercourse and, therefore, women do not no like intercourse and only put up with it for the benefit of men.
To address the second part of this dogma - whether women enjoy sexual intercourse - I will refer to another paper by Dr. Debbie Herbenick:
Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. D. Herbenick, J. Bowling, T. J. Fu, B. Dodge, L. Guerra-Reyes and S. Sanders. PLoS One 2017 Vol. 12 Issue 7 Pages e0181198. Link to full text (PDF).
This was a survey done by email with a sample size of 2,021 individuals.
Table 5 of this paper is a long list of sexual activities, classified for their appeal for men and for women. The whole table is very interesting, but I will refer only to the line about vaginal intercourse.
The numbers for men and women were similar: 72.8% of men and 69.9% of women found vaginal intercourse very appealing. The “somewhat appealing” response was chosen by 16.4% of men and 19.7% of women. Only 3% of men and 3.5% of women found it not appealing, while another 11.6% of men and 7.0% of women responded “not at all appealing.”
Table 2 shows that 85.6% of men and 91.1% of women had vaginal intercourse during their lifetime. The percentage that had vaginal intercourse in the last month was 52.1% for men and 52.6% for women. This number increase to over 70% of women in the age groups 25 to 39 years old.
Therefore, vaginal intercourse is greatly popular amongst both men and women, both in their stated preference and in practice.
Where did the belief that women do not enjoy vaginal intercourse come from?
This is a complex historical question that I addressed in another article:
In a nutshell, a puritanical form of feminism arose during the 70s, which targeted pornography, BDSM and prostitution as forms of exploitation of women by men. It was called anti-porn feminism, but today we know it as Radical Feminism. One of its main ideas was that penetration was intrinsically degrading for women, encapsulated in the phrase by Andrea Dworkin “penetration is rape” - found in her book Intercourse - and adopted by many feminists.
In 1980, a long war inside feminism started - the Feminist War on Sex - which endures until today and split feminism into Radical Feminism and Sex Positive Feminism.
The latest salvo in this war was the book The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan. Purportedly a proposal to end the War on Sex, it insists in its condemnation of pornography and sex work, and says that BDSM is only good when women dominate men. She argues that nobody has a right to sex. Especially men.
Many feminists do not want to take sides in the War of Sex, so they endorse a mild condemnation of vaginal intercourse. While they say it’s okay, they insist that cunnilingus, mutual masturbation and other forms of non-penetrative sex are better for women.
It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that the attack on vaginal intercourse was a power move that sought to subjugate men by depriving them of their favorite sexual act. The fact that this damaged the sex lives of countless women did not seem to bother these radical feminists.
Conclusions
Most women find vaginal intercourse appealing and enjoyable. Most of them have orgasms from intercourse. Although many women can have orgasms from vaginal stimulation alone, a majority prefers to combine it with clitoral stimulation. Because, why not take advantage of the full power of your body to give yourself pleasure?
The politicization of sex by feminism has not helped neither women nor men. The paper by Kontula et al. shows that, in recent years, young women have become less able to orgasm during intercourse. This may be a consequence of the relentless indoctrination about intercourse being bad. It may also result from sex education steeped in ideology. For example, leading to the enthroning of the clitoris as the sole source of female pleasure. The paper indicates that when women masturbate focusing exclusively on the clitoris, their ability to orgasm from intercourse decreases. This may be similar to what death-grip masturbation causes in men.
Death-grip and death-grip syndrome are slang terms for suffering adverse effects from one's aggressive and recurrent male masturbation technique, which result in an unsatisfactory experience when engaging in regular sexual intercourse with a partner. A similar condition, dead-vagina syndrome, has been asserted to exist in women. Wikipedia.
In fact, orgasms are not triggered exclusive from the clitoris or the vagina, they can also be started from many different areas of the body. Orgasms produced by erotic fantasies without any physical stimulation are also possible. The paper by Kontula et al. underscores the importance of relationships and good sexual communication in getting orgasms.
Women vary wildly in their capacity to orgasm and how orgasms are triggered, more so than men. Some women seem to be anorgasmic, while others are able to have multiple orgasms with the slightest stimulation. Perhaps there is a way to turn an anorgasmic women into a multi-orgasmic one, we just haven’t found it yet. It’s up to every woman to explore her body and find what works best for her.
What is clear is that ideology, blaming men and political correctness are not the right way to get to the big O.
More politically correct bullshit is on its way!
This article will be the first of a series of posts debunking politically correct dogmas that nobody dares to question. For example:
That there are no psychological differences between men and women.
The fragile male ego.
The gay gene.
Sentience.
That hating men is okay.
That eating meat is unhealthy.
That scientific research with animals is useless.