The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm - Why Does it Persist?

A few months ago, while reading my favorite sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, I came across a question from a reader that destroyed a tiny bit of my faith in humanity (or at least, my faith in our culture's understanding of sex). A young man was wondering why it was that his girlfriend was, for some strange reason, unable to orgasm during intercourse. "Is there something wrong with my penis?" wrote the young inquisitor.

Happily, Mr. Savage set him straight, but incidents like this are far from isolated. In one of Margaret Cho's recent tours, she complains of an ex-boyfriend who, uninterested in making the efforts to provide clitoral stimulation to his partner, asked her in frustration, "Why can't you just c*me when I f*** you?"

Now, there are many people who shrug their shoulders and proclaim that the reason men are so often unwilling to go in search of their lady's little joy button and give it what it needs, is that they are simply lazy. Personally, this doesn't make sense to me: given how much work straight men are willing to go through in order to have sex with a woman, what kind of sense does it make that they wouldn't be willing to do just a little more in order to keep her happy and therefore, continue having sex?

In my observation, for men who have this particular little hang-up, it is not a matter of work, but a matter of insecurity. As is demonstrated by the very question, "Is something wrong with my penis?" many men seem to think that success in pleasing a woman is based utterly in how they are using their penises during the act of intercourse.

Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of pleasure that can be derived from women through intercourse. But when it comes to orgasm, it's just not going to cut it for most of us. Only about two-thirds of women can orgasm through the act of intercourse alone, and for most of those women, the necessary stimluation comes from the grinding of the man's pelvic bone against her clitoris and has very little to do with what his penis is up to at all!

Here's why this is: men and women are, in case you've forgotten, of the same species. We are more closely related in anatomy than we are generally led to believe, and our bodies are extremely similar blueprints which, during natal development, simply go in slightly different directions at the end. This is why men have unnecessary nipples, and it is why the sex organs should be more closely compared than they are.

In the same way that women's nipples develop with breasts and functioning mammary glands (technically, men's can function too, but let's not get into that), a woman's G-spot is what's left over from the nerves which, in a man, become the prostate. G-spot stimulation in a women, therefore, is comparable to prostate stimulation in a men. It is possible for both men and women to achieve orgasm through stimulation of these nerves alone. Possible, but relatively rare. (And even for those who can, they often find it's not a particularly satisfying orgasm.)

And yet somehow, we have myths that all women not only can, but should achieve orgasm through this means alone. We have the writings of Freud, which stated that a woman should be considered "sexually immature" if she requires stimulation of her clitoris in order to climax. We have droves of young women feeling like there is something wrong with them if intercourse isn't enough and men who reinforce this. And we have the myth that the vagina itself can orgasm, when in truth, the G-spot itself is incapable of this - it merely triggers the clitoris to orgasm.

Do you see the double standard? Where are the myths about men's bodies? Where are the prominent writings establishing that if a man prefers to orgasm through penile stimulation rather than prostrate stimulation (a process which necessarily involved anal penetration, BTW), that he is somehow "sexually immature?"

The answer is simple enough, and sad: we are still a patriarchal culture. This myth has its roots in the idea that sex is defined by male pleasure alone, and that a woman's place in sex is to serve the role of the man.

So why should defying this idea make men insecure? Well, for many men, of course, it doesn't. But for those that do, it's high time they reconsidered many of their ideas about sex. If the idea of female pleasure is somehow a threat to your manhood, don't you think, perhaps, it's time to reconsider your ideas of what "manhood" means?