The Orgasm Gap: Straight women can learn from lesbian sex
Many studies have shown that lesbian couples have higher-quality sex than their straight counterparts: lesbians have more orgasms during partner sex than straight women, and lesbians find sex more enjoyable overall.
The latest report to show the hetero-women/lesbian orgasm divide was conducted by researchers at several U.S. universities.
The researchers solicited participants by posting on the MSNBC website, and more than 24,000 heterosexual women replied, along with 340 lesbians.
Demographic matching produced a final sample of 2,510 straight women and 283 lesbians, aged 18 to 65, who were in ongoing relationships and reported partner sex during the previous month.
The lesbians reported a significantly greater likelihood of orgasm.
Female orgasm: All in the mind?
For decades, sex researchers and the public assumed that there was something wrong about women- that women are the more emotionally complicated gender and even minor emotional upsets might derail their orgasms.
Heterosexual women also tend to believe that their difficulties reaching orgasm during partner sex say something about them and their psychology.
Investigators at Valparaiso University in Indiana seem to have confirmed this when they asked 452 women why they had trouble coming. The women’s list: anxiety, pain, poor self-lubrication, and body image issues.
If true, however, it does not explain the orgasm gap between straight women and lesbians.
More recent data on lesbian sex would seem to show that women are not innately prone to dislike sex, find it less enjoyable, or want less of it.
Now, if straight women can enjoy sex as much as their lesbian counterparts, why don’t they?
Female orgasm: Stimulating the right parts
Since the millennium, several sex experts have turned away from a microscopic focus on women’s psychology to analyzing the nitty-gritty of partner lovemaking.
They have discovered that women’s ability to have orgasms has less to do with their emotional complexity than with the erotic caresses their partners provide.
What their lovers do— or don’t do— in bed largely explains the orgasm divide between straight women and lesbians.
For example, Australian researchers surveyed 5,118 straight men and women aged 16 to 59, then asked them to describe the genital touch they had received during their most recent partner play— and if they had come.
Among the men, the likelihood of orgasm varied only slightly based on the kinds of genital touch they received.
But for the women, the likelihood of orgasm varied considerably based on the types of genital caresses they received: just intercourse – 50 percent; vulvar-clitoral massage, fingering, and intercourse – 71 percent; vulvar-clitoral massage, fingering, intercourse, and cunnilingus – 86 percent.
Researchers at Chapman University in Southern California analyzed orgasms among 52,588 American adults. Lesbians reported coming 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.
Straight women, take note: Intercourse does not provide much clitoral stimulation‚ even if it is extended intercourse with a huge penis- but clitoral massage and cunnilingus do.