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NewsvineWe’ve all heard that women in the workforce make only 75 cents for every dollar earned by men. This factoid, long a rallying cry for women’s rights activists, may be trumped by a statistic uncovered by new research out of Stanford’s sociology department: in the college hookup scene, men are having orgasms at two and a half times the rate of their female partners.
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“The orgasm gap is worse than the sex gap in pay,” says Sociology Prof. Paula England, who teaches the popular class “Sex and Love in Modern Society.”
England conducted an extensive online sex survey of over 4000 undergraduates at Stanford, the University of Arizona, Indiana University, UC-Santa Barbara and SUNY-Stony Brook. When male and female college students hook up, she found, 44 percent of men orgasm — compared to only 19 percent of their female partners.
What’s behind the orgasm gap?
In the survey, students reported on their last hookup — anything from kissing to oral and manual sex to intercourse. The three kinds of activities were about equally likely. But when it came to purely oral sex — about 16 percent of the time — women were much more likely to dish it out than receive it.
In England’s survey, if a heterosexual hookup included oral sex, but not intercourse, the oral sex was reciprocal less than 40 percent of the time. In 45 percent of the cases, men were the only ones on the receiving end, and women were the sole recipients just 16 percent of the time.
Are men who don’t reciprocate callous boors who don’t care about their partner’s pleasure? Probably not, England found. Women reported being more reluctant to receive oral sex or performing oral sex without payback because they thought it was expected.
In addition, men often didn’t know if their female partner had had an orgasm. England compared men and women’s reports of the woman’s orgasm in heterosexual hookups. The women themselves reported an orgasm 25 percent of the time, while the men thought their partners orgasmed 60 percent of the time.
Are women wantonly faking their orgasms? Or are men just inept?
If it’s male ineptitude driving the orgasm gap, women having sex with women should be immune to the problem. Consequently, the rates of orgasm in lesbian hookups should be much higher than in straight hookups. This idea is born out to some degree. The women in England’s survey who reported on a same-sex hookup that included oral sex had an orgasm 62 percent of the time, while women reporting on an opposite sex hookup of the same variety had an orgasm just 39 percent of the time.
Short of becoming lesbians, women can increase their odds of having orgasms by having sex in the context of a relationship. According to the England survey, if a woman has intercourse in a first-time hookup, her chances of having an orgasm are less than 30 percent, but if she has intercourse in the context of a relationship, her odds of reaching orgasm shoot to over 60 percent.
But even within relationship sex, women’s orgasms are trailing men’s. When couples in a heterosexual relationship have intercourse but not oral sex, the man’s odds of reaching orgasm are 89 percent compared to the woman’s 60 percent.
Could it be that female orgasms are just physiologically harder to produce? Although England’s data can’t rule this out, she doesn’t think it’s the main reason for the orgasm gap.
Cultural attitudes toward male and female sexuality seem to be a better explanation. Of England’s subjects, 97 percent of men have masturbated to orgasm, but only 60 percent of women have done the same. Men are no strangers to their own orgasms, but women may not even know how their bodies work.
To close the gap, societal attitudes need to shift toward valuing female pleasure in hookups and enabling women to understand their own sexual response.
In addition to “Take Back the Night” marches, maybe college campuses should host “Take Back the Orgasm” rallies.