« My Least Favorite Kind of Mormon Man: The Dirty Old One | Home | Voter Fraud, and What to Do about It »
October 9, 2006
Women, Education and Orgasm
I found the links featured in this entry in Broadsheet, Salon's blog on women. I would have simply included a link to their post, but reading Salon requires a subscription and I know several of my readers don't subscribe, so I decided to be nice and go back to the source.
According to the headline of a story in Toronto's Globe and Mail, "Smart, rich women more likely to have orgasms, study suggests." That's right: for the more than 9,100 straight women polled, (the study, conducted in Australia, focused on straight men and women) there's a link between education, income, profession and sexual pleasure, but
Becoming sexually active before age of 16, length of time they were sexually active, number of past sexual partners, whether they masturbated, trolled Internet porn or watched X-rated videos had little association with a woman's ability to have an orgasm.
The results were much different when it came to the 10,100+ men who responded to the survey: education, occupation, income made no difference in whether or not a man could have a "toe-curling climax."
These statistics were also interesting:
Confirming a widely held belief, the research also found that men were far more likely than women to experience an orgasm during their last sexual encounter, 98.4 per cent and 68.9 per cent respectively.
and
Almost all the men surveyed said they reached orgasm from vaginal intercourse. Roughly 80 per cent said they did from oral sex.For women, however, it was a different picture. Only 50 per cent reached orgasm from vaginal sex, while 70 per cent said they did through manual or oral stimulation.
That last bit might explain results reported in this story from the Australian Herad Sun: According to "The Turbo Twenties" study, a study of 570 Australian women in their 20s, if given an option between a nice dinner, a massage or sex, dinner is the first choice for women and sex the last:
About 30 per cent of participants said they preferred a romantic dinner to bedroom action, while a further 22.5 per cent rated a massage as better than sex.Only 16.6 per cent said they would rather have sex.
Posted by holly at October 9, 2006 9:26 AM
I have read somewhere recently that it can take women twice as long to reach orgasm as men. This study said that men reached orgasm in about 15 minutes and it took women 20 minutes to half an hour. So is it that the women don't like sex or that they are not as willing to participate in sex if they know that they are not going to have the same fulfillment as their partner?
I am a woman who can reach orgasm ONLY with my vibrator! I suspect my mother was the same way. She certainly perked up when she got HER vibrator!
It could be the partners I've had, but I just think it would take hours and hours for me to come with anything but my trusty Prelude 3, twenty years old and still going strong!
In the old days women like me would have faked it or been considered "frigid."
There is a lot of shame around this topic, so it would be difficult to know what the real situation is for women.
I was just reading Nancy Mitford's biography of Marie Antoinette, who was said to be anorgasmic but who stood for female sexuality as few other women have. That's quite a paradox.
I'm quite surprised that there's no correlation between masturbation and ability to orgasm. Surely if you knew that you could feel that good, you would want to see if you could do it for yourself? One of my female friends didn't start masturbating until after her first serious boyfriend, because she missed the orgasms and had figured out that she could do it herself, but I think if she broke up with her current boyfriend, she would go back to self-reliance.