Mr. Michael Castleman over at Psychology Today posted an article in 2009 called "The Most Important Sexual Statistic: Intercourse Is Not The Key To Most Woman's Sexual Satisfaction," and dag burn it, it was a good one - simple and on point.
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| Meet Michael Castleman - Orgasm Equality Ally! |
The statistic was this:
"Only 25 percent of women are consistently orgasmic during vaginal intercourse"He took this from a book I could not recommend more, Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm. I wrote a little about it HERE. It's great in many ways, but the statistic Castleman pulled from this book is important because it's not just from one little study. It's from all the studies. It is a statistic that arises from the best of places - an assessment of all the statistics available about lady-gasms and intercourse put together. So, it's a solid stat, and Castleman clearly saw that and clearly saw how incredibly important the stat is.
The gist of the article was as true and direct: Most women don't orgasm during intercourse. Most women need clitoral stimulation. How you have sex should take that into consideration.
I am highlighting this article not just because he said the clit is important. There is plenty of sex advice out there touting the importance of the clit, but most of them speak about it as simply another option, like the use of a sex toy or playing with a dude's balls might be discussed. It's as if 'remembering the clit' is icing on the sex cake. Very few articles, however, take the bolder stance that this article has taken - that the clit stuff is the sex cake for us ladies; that intercourse always gets depicted as the cake, but it simply is not. He says lovely and extraordinary Orgasm Equality Revolution things like:
"But they key to most women's erotic pleasure comes not from the penis and intercourse, but from direct clitoral stimulation, using the fingers, palm, tongue, or sex toys."and
"Finally, because so few women are consistently orgasmic during intercourse, it's fine to have sex without intercourse."Yes and yes. We need more people- especially more men saying these things and saying them boldy because even though there is really nothing about this article that is scientifically controversial, simply speaking about this topic is still super sensitive and contentious. I hear from time to time, from people who hang in more sexually liberal circles that this is all old news, but the truth is it's not. It's very much still revolutionary to even hint that intercourse isn't great for women's orgasms. When I write about this stuff, I speak about there being a real possibility that orgasm from stimulation inside the vagina isn't even possible This article is much more forgiving and only said something that is well known among sexual educators and really people in general - that most women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm and that this fact should really affect how we have sex. But there is such a cultural allegiance to intercourse as the end-all-be-all of heterosexual sex that it's still unusual to even hear that said in a bold way.
Thank you Mr. Michael Castleman! I have placed you in my my ever-growing list of Orgasm Equality Allies for speaking about female orgasm in a more realistic and bold way. It's not the norm and it takes a little bit of bravery and thoughtfulness to do so. My hat off to you.
Your title is backwards; he says 25% of women ARE having vaginal orgasms. That’s what’s implied by “orgasms during intercourse.”
ReplyDeleteBut more important: it’s not true. No percent is true. Lloyd’s “meta-analysis” of literature is crap. She admits that it is deeply flawed, e.g., she doesn’t know how many of the responses included what she calls “clitorally assisted” intercourse orgasms. As if it’s the vagina generating the orgasm, but with a little help from the clitoris.
It’s like saying 25% of men have their orgasms without any penis stimulation — and they are the more sexy men. I asked Castleman why he cites Lloyd but not Hite — who found that all women require clitoral stimulation to orgasm, with 30% getting that stimulation from grinding or other indirect friction or pressure. His answer: we’ll, when she wrote that book, the people who didn’t like her message attacked her study methodology, so he backed away to avoid being tarred by the same brush.
Lloyd is the new Freud. After this book, she published a “study” of clit distance from vagina as the explanation for intercourse orgasms. Also junk. She was never a scholar of sexual anatomy, physiology, or neurology. She soared to fame on that chapter because people wanted a number — how many women come the right way? When this elevated her to a status as a sex expert, she decided to look for the explanation of her number by looking at meaningless numbers from other junk science. You should watch her YouTubes. Very disturbing.
Anyway, IT IS NOT A SOLID STAT. IT IS JUNK.
It’s good to applaud his correct points, but it is just muddying the waters to praise him for the erroneous points. He doesn’t have to be consistent — he just has to bait clicks. But YOU have to be consistent, or the message gets mixed — and then the popular myths win.