Only 18% of women can orgasm through penetration alone
Men have been conditioned to think penetration is the be-all and end-all of sex. And it's holding us back.
The first porn movie I ever watched is still burned into my neurons. The woman’s see-through black lingerie. The man’s curly hair. The cheesy soft jazz soundtrack. A few seconds of foreplay before what felt like an hour of penetration from different positions and angles.
I’m surprised there was foreplay at all. Most of the porn I’ve seen since has focused on penetration. A woman moaning and groaning (sometimes screaming!) from regular, old, vanilla intercourse.
So it was a shock when I heard this statistic: Only 18 percent of women say that vaginal intercourse alone is enough to orgasm. Vastly more women say they prefer or require clitoral stimulation. Either simultaneously during penetration or through oral sex.
It was a shock—and it showed me I was locked inside a tiny, boring, confined cage. A cage created by our culture’s severely limiting ideas about sex.
These ideas start in teenage sex ed (or a lack thereof). As writer Miranda Gershoni writes:
“Rather than serve as a learning space to cultivate healthy, mutually pleasurable intimacy, most sex education in the U.S. opts for a fear-based approach. Disconnecting young people from our bodies, effectively placing blinders over our eyes, we find a common exit strategy in anxiety-induced sexual autopilot.”
This leaves teens (and adults!) relying on movies and mainstream porn for information about sex. We fumble through intimacy relying on unspoken scripts (“anxiety-induced sexual autopilot”) that leave many of us unsatisfied and some of us harmed emotionally or even physically.
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To be sure, porn didn’t create the myth that penetration is the most pleasurable thing for all women.
It goes back to at least the early 1900s, when Sigmund Freud said clitoral orgasms were “immature.” But mainstream porn definitely seems to make penetration the main event.
(By the way, by “mainstream” I mean the porn produced by a small handful of powerful corporations, like PornHub and Xvideos. Like social media, they collect user data and sell it for ad revenue. Sex workers have little to no power on the job. There are ethical, sex-positive porn sites that pay performers fairly and are truly made with enthusiastic consent, like Bellesa. I’m still trying to take my porn consumption off of the big, popular sites. It’s hard, because it’s a habit—but I’m committed to doing it.)
In a typical mainstream porn scene, there might be a little foreplay (mostly focused on pleasuring the man). But mostly there’s penetration. And then boom! The man orgasms and it’s over.
Calling it “foreplay” is even limiting. “We call everything that comes before penetration ‘foreplay,’ implying that it’s just a lead up to the main and most important event,” writes Laurie Mintz, author of Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters—And How to Get It.
Since learning that statistic about women’s orgasms, I’ve been trying to unlearn what I learned from porn.
It’s taken awhile—and lots of conversations with my partner. But putting penetration on the same level of importance as foreplay and other forms of intimacy, I’m now having more pleasurable, more intimate, more connecting, more fun sex.
I want to be clear: This isn’t just about making my partner happy. Though, that’s a good thing too.
When I started slowing down and focusing on pleasure rather than what I thought I was supposed to be doing as a man having sex, I realized that I enjoy other things too.
Penetration is just one way my body experiences pleasure. There are all kinds of ways to play in bed. Foreplay. Fantasies. Sex toys. BDSM. Kink. I’m new to exploring this stuff. And it can be scary! But apparently, I might be something called a “Pleasure Dom,” a dominant partner who focuses on providing pleasure to their partner. Who knew?
Point being: We’ve been conditioned by mainstream porn to think penetration is the be-all and end-all of sex. And if your heterosexual, it’s not only likely less pleasurable for your partner, but it’s also less pleasurable for you.
Now, a question for the comments below (or email me at jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): How do you feel about your body?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get my weekly Friday Q&A posts with tips for a healthier, more fulfilling relationship, plus the warm feeling of supporting my writing.)
The education gap is real! Which leads to the massive orgasm gap. To be fair, even medical professionals don’t learn about the anatomy and communication of pleasure. The main gynecology surgical textbook didn’t contain anatomy of the clitoris until 2019.
I do a lot of writing about intimacy, pleasure, anatomy and kink on my stack. I’ve even started producing educational videos; the first of which is all about female anatomy. By FAR my most read articles are about kink and intimacy.
Porn is bad but it is every mainstream film or series with a sex scene too. I’m so very very tired of seeing the woman climax and that’s the end with penetration. There are very few exceptions (I think I’ve seen a few where he goes down in her) but is so rare. I understand ratings and that producers seem to need to keep the sex limited but this is perpetuating the myth in a way that is just as harmful. More so, because it is viewing that is *normal* and acceptable unlike porn.