Women, Sex and Orgasm
Little, if anything, is known about whether orgasm is more likely to occur at certain times in the menstrual cycle as compared to others.A definite trend was found for the women studied to have higher libido and be relatively more sexually responsive during the week before the onset of menstruation as well as the week following the cessation of menstruation. The augmented responsiveness in the week preceding menstruation was explained as being the result of an anticipation of sexual deprivation during menstruation (during which intercourse either ceases or is considerably reduced for many women). The peak of responsiveness following menstruation was attributed to the actual deprivation that does occur during menstruation. If orgasm capacity were to vary in a similar fashion (that is, if it paralleled reports of sexual responsiveness) it would mean, of course, that an additional element governing the ability to have an orgasm during intercourse in women pertains to how sexually deprived they feel. But we do not know whether orgasm capacity varies in an analogous fashion. It is important to note, too, that no direct information is available about the effects of actual sexual deprivation upon orgasm capacity. If a woman has not had a sexual experience for a long period of time, is she more likely to attain orgasm than if she has recently had such an experience? Two facts come to mind that suggest the amount of deprivation does not generally affect orgasm capacity. First, there is no indication that women who have much less regular intercourse attain orgasm in a greater percentage of their intercourse contacts. In fact, as already described, the opposite seems to be true. Secondly, there are no consistent relationships between orgasm consistency and intercourse rates. Presumably, a woman who had intercourse with low frequency would come to each sexual encounter in a greater state of want than the woman who engaged frequently in intercourse. If relative deprivation did increase orgasm consistency, and all other things were equal, one might expect at least a low positive correlation between these two indices. There is a need for more direct studies of how various amounts of sexual deprivation affect orgasm capacity in both sexually experienced and inexperienced women. A key question that arises in discussing a woman's orgasm consistency concerns how early in her development it is determined. Do her childhood relationships with her parents already define whether she will be "high" or "low"? Are the early years of her heterosexual liaisons of crucial importance? Is the whole process actually unpredictable because single dramatic or traumatic events (such as first intercourse experience) have significant impact? If childhood relationships are important, to what degree can their influence be altered by adult love relationships and adult sexual experiences? There is a fair amount of information that permits partial replies. First of all, it seems fair to say that there are research findings that indicate that early interactions with parents do play a role in a woman's later ability to be orgasmic. These findings specifically involve her relationships with her father. There's a trend for a woman's orgasm consistency to be positively correlated with her recall of how demanding and definite (as contrasted to casual and permissive) her father's expectations of her had been. If her perception of her father's behavior toward her mirrors, to some extent, how he treated her as she was growing up, one would have to conclude that during childhood she was already having social experiences that would influence her later orgasmic potential. It may be that when he is sufficiently seriously interested in her as a person to expend a good deal of energy in guiding and helping her to structure her life, and if he is obviously seriously interested in guiding her, she could, even if she resented his authoritarianism and his intrusiveness, feel that he was dependably invested in her. Incidentally, the fact that a woman's perception of equivalent qualities in her mother was found not to be correlated with her orgasm consistency suggests that it is particularly the father's dependability that is important in shaping her orgasm potential. The most obvious way to explain this differential would be to point to the fact that her orgasm potential does, after all, express itself in her interactions with a male sex partner, and so it would be logical that her feelings about the dependability of the prime male figure in her early life should be the specific ones to carry over to her later sexual relationship with men. In any case, all that we can say is that to some significant but unknown degree the nature of a woman's transactions with her father as she is growing up will probably affect her orgasm capacity. Because of the imperfect techniques available for measuring the variables involved, one cannot begin to define realistically how influential these early transactions are. They could be enormously important and even the prime determinant of orgasmic potential. This remains to be seen. Indeed, one is tempted to ascribe great importance to this kind of early socialization influence because there have been so few, if any, other influences that have shown even a hint of a link to orgasm consistency. It has been noted that there is little evidence that the average woman's orgasm potential is shaped by one or a few special traumatic sexual episodes. For example, women who find it necessary to obtain an abortion, which may be a severe traumatic event, do not later show lowered orgasm consistency. Women who report childhood episodes in which they were raped or forcefully seduced are not less orgasmic than women who indicate they did not suffer in this fashion. There are no consistent correlations between orgasm consistency and how a woman experienced such major sex development landmarks as her first menstruation, first serious date, and first intercourse. Those who recalled their first intercourse as extremely unpleasant were no less orgasmic than those who remembered it as being very pleasant. The temptation to minimize the influence of actual sexual learning experiences, as such, upon orgasm capacity is encouraged by the findings, across several studies, that a girl's dating history gives no hint as to her orgasm consistency. How early a girl begins to date, or the average frequency with which she dates at different phases of her adolescence and early womanhood, or the seriousness of her relationship do not foretell her orgasm behavior. Whatever a girls learns about heterosexual behavior and about relating to a male intimately from her dating experiences does not seem to affect her orgasm potential. This is a truly remarkable finding and it's difficult to believe that a girl's history of sexual experience and her apparent capability of attracting and pleasing men counts for nothing in her later ability to achieve orgasm during regular intercourse. Does sexual practice does materially affect orgasm consistency? Kinsey published data in 1953 bearing on this matter; he reported that practice derived from regular intercourse did have an appreciable effect on the likelihood of attaining at least "occasional" orgasm. Illustratively, whereas 75 percent of married women know how to have an orgasm and attained at least occasional orgasm during the first year of marriage, this increased to 83 percent by the fifth year, and 89 percent by the twentieth year. In other words, there was a 14 percent increase in this "at least occasional" orgasm category over a 20-year span. Another way to look at this result is that it represents a 14 percent decrease in those who "never" attain orgasm. Note too that over the span of the first three months of marriage there was an analogous 10 percent decrease in the "never" attain orgasm category. But approaching the data from another perspective, one finds that the percent of women who attained orgasm in "nearly all" (90-100 percent) of their coitus increased only 8 percent from the first to the twentieth year of marriage. In other words, 20 years of practice produced an 8 percent increment in those able to attain orgasm with high regularity. Whereas 39 percent of married women attained orgasm 90 to 100 percent of the time during their first year of marriage, this value increased to only 40 percent by the fifth year of marriage. After five years of practice only a 1 percent increase could be detected! Even after ten years of practice the increase was only 3 percent. If one looks at the less extreme category of those women able to attain orgasm 60-89 percent of the time, one finds only a 3 percent improvement after five years of practice and a 5 percent improvement after ten years. Kinsey concluded: "These data provide impressive evidence that experience and psychological reconditioning may, in the course of time, improve the ability of the female to respond to the point of orgasm in her marital sex." The Kinsey view seems exaggerated in its optimism. If after five years of practice only 1 percent of the women studied show an increase in being really consistently orgasmic, or if after five years of practice only 8 percent of those who are totally non-orgasmic begin to have an occasional orgasm, how can one attribute much influence to practice effects? The role of practice is detectable but otherwise of small proportions. Overall, practice may, to a limited degree, decrease a woman's likelihood that she cannot orgasm during intercourse, but it has minimal effect on her probability of attaining orgasm with high consistency. Intensive practice can help a woman who has serious difficulty in attaining orgasm at all to build up an orgasmic level of excitement occasionally, but it seems rarely to transform her into one who achieves orgasm with great consistency.
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