I get what you’re saying, I guess, but I kind of laughed at this bit. It didn’t really take me all that long to find my clitoris as a kid — there’s not really thaaat much going on down there and a ton of nerve endings is pretty good at letting you know when you’ve found something. :D So I don’t think a diagram, for example, would have sped up the process. (Maybe it would help *other* people find it, but once you start exploring yourself you can find things pretty quickly, it seems… leaving aside shyness and hangups of course.)

If that kind of behavior hurt my hand’s feelings maybe I’d go the fake orgasm route too (or sit it down for a serious talk), but as it doesn’t I don’t. ^^

Not to TMI you. :p

I know what you are going for here, but I am a woman that grew up in a sexually repressive/shaming household. Although I’ve done a lot of work to undo this repression, there is still a long way to go- I still can’t tell my husband when I don’t have an orgasm. So (while I don’t think you were targeting people like me) I fall into your group of people that shouldn’t be having sex. Thanks for being another voice in my head telling me that I should be ashamed for being who I am. (Shaming women for not being open enough is just as stressful and silencing as shaming them about sex).

Also, on the faking-orgasms front I’m with karinova — as a mostly straight man, there are times when I’m just not going to have an orgasm, and I’d prefer that neither of us have a complex about it (especially since my impression is that for both men and women, orgasm-related stress — will I have one? what if I don’t? — detracts from the experience and actually makes orgasms less likely). And for me, the correlation between whether or not I have an orgasm and how much I enjoy the sex is pretty weak if it exists at all. I think the orgasm-centrism of our thinking about sex is a little silly, to be honest (although I can’t really argue with efforts to replace male-orgasm-centrism with broader orgasm-centrism, and I recognize that comparing frequencies of orgasm is useful as an approximation of how much effort is invested in each person’s pleasure). I think it’s important to recognize and celebrate a variety of sexual needs, desires, and sources of pleasure.

And for some reason oral sex often makes me orgasm without ejaculation, and sometimes without being fully erect, so that’s hard to explain to my partner. I don’t understand it myself.

And the fact that so many women do fake it, for the reasons you’ve given, just reinforces the idea that you’d only not have one if you’re not enjoying it. I’m not interested in perpetuating that myth, or in misleading my partner about what good sex means to me.

(So now you can say that you’ve talked to one heterosexual 30-year-old woman who’s never faked one – although as a teenager, I once pretended not to have had one, b/c my boyfriend didn’t realize that’s what had happened and I was too embarrassed to point it out. See also “If you can’t talk to them about it, you’re probably not ready to be doing it with them”…)

For sure, sometimes they don’t for the wrong reasons. I know what you’re getting at. But my reference pool consists of women who range from relatively to extremely empowered (for lack of a better term). These women do not feel the need to conform; some of them occasionally rebel on purpose. So that’s less of an issue.

I was astonished to see, in the linked study, that 75.2% of the responding women thought that “most women will have an orgasm from penis-vagina intercourse” was true! When you look at the “orgasm with a partner” numbers, you see that 61% of the women are not reliably having orgasms with a partner (which I assume/hope includes more than just penis-vagina intercourse). So the message (that they should be having orgasms from intercourse alone) clearly gets through, despite actual experience.