Shameless self-promotion… and some really interesting findings regarding knowledge and frequency of orgasm in a non-random population of undergraduates. This first graph shows the percent of male and female respondents who (1) correctly located the clitoris on a map of the vulva and (2) correctly answered a series of true/false questions about the clitoris.

You’ll see that there is surprising little difference between men and women (considering that women have had access to a clitoris all their lives and men have had access only recently, if at all), though you’ll see that men are more likely to think most women will have an orgasm from penile-vaginal sex (most women don’t) and women are more likely to think the g-spot is another name for the clitoris (it’s not). These two cancelled each other out such that the average knowledge score for men and women was statistically the same. The same!

It’s this next graph that’s the real kicker. This graph shows the relationship between how well a woman scored on the clitoral knowledge tests (on a 0-5 scale) and how frequently she has an orgasm during masturbation and with a partner. You’ll see a nice positive relationship between knowledge and orgasm in masturbation and no relationship at all between knowledge and orgasm with a partner. (For fun, notice that the average score on the clitoral knowledge measure for women who’d never had an orgasm with a partner and who always do is the same. Also notice that there are 124 women in that never category, it’s not just a handful of women who are somehow “dysfunctional.”)

So, for some reason (feel free to speculate), even when women know about their own bodies, they either keep it to themselves, or have partners that don’t want to hear it, or both.

You can download the paper here.