30% Is A Stat About Female Orgasm, But It's Not What You Think...probably, unless you read my blog a lot...

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30% of Women Orgasm from Intercourse??? 

I have been recently using a set of pages in a book to cite the numbers I use in regards to how many women claim to orgasm from intercourse alone. I use the stat of 'around 30%.' The book is "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Study of Evolution" by Elisabeth Lloyd (Harvard University Press 2005), and the pages are the first 22 pages after the introduction, actually the whole first chapter titled 'The Basics of Female Orgasm' (p21-43). 

So that 30% number. It, or numbers close to it, are thrown around quite a bit as the stat on how many women vaginally orgasm. It seems like it's a real number that is scientifically backed up. Actually, it is a real number. It comes from somewhere, but as they say - it doesn't mean what you think it means.  The truth is that there is no number out there that realistically reflects the percentage of women that orgasm from inner vaginal stimulation alone, with no additional clitoral stimulation. At the very best that 30% number is loose, and certainly over inflated to some degree that is unknown. The number is based on a variety of studies that reflects not how many women vaginally orgasm, but how many women claim to orgasm during intercourse. There are known and uncontroversial biases in all of these studies that cause that almost certain over inflation of that number. There are also more complicated, slightly more controversial problems and biases that likely cause even further inflation of that number. I'll get into all that in detail below, but first I want to break this down a bit. There are mainly 3 categories that these numbers get related to. They are very different, but these important differences are rarely acknowledged and get jumbled up together in the conversation causing unnecessary confusion and misinformation. I'll separate them out and for fun give you my best prediction of what the percentages on those questions actually are.

Vaginal Orgasmers

If you ask me, the % of women that orgasm vaginally, that is orgasm from stimulation in the vagina but without external clitoral stimulation, is most likely, well, about zero. But, that's just like, my opinion, man. It's not willy nilly, and I have plenty of arsenal I use to back up that prediction, but also, despite what it may seem,  there simply isn't actual existing data on it. So, anyone that says they know, even vaguely, what that % is, well, they are either ill educated on the subject or lying. 

Hands-free Intercourse Orgasmsers

The % of women that can and/or regularly do orgasm during intercourse with no hands and/or vibrator, is truly unknown because the questions asked in surveys about this stuff are generally thoughtless, uninformed, and unfocused, so the results are shitty and don't allow for the distinctions needed to get real answers. 

I'd guess it's somewhere under that 30% - closer to the 20-24% in the Hite and Fischer studies below, but to me, the thing to remember here is there's no reason to assume this % reflects some sort of innate ability some women have and some women don't. Let's not forget that that the act of intercourse is not an act that necessitates the involvement of the clit, the organ of female sexual pleasure, like it does the penis, so getting a lady-gasm is not something that will just happen...unless you believe the vagina has some magical ability we don't understand yet, for some women, that causes an orgasm. I clearly don't buy that, but even for others that don't buy that, there is still a push to show that some women carry an innate quality that makes it more likely for them to orgasm during intercourse without using hands. It's still related to the external clit stimulation, which I appreciate because, well that is how women do in fact orgasm. It's become recently repopularized among sexperts (and unfortunately Lloyd herself has gotten into this) to explain why assert that the distance between the clit and vaginal hole is an innate quality in women that affects her ability to orgasm this way. The closer it is, the more a woman is able to come. 

I call hardcore bullshit on that. Besides not having strong evidence to back it up, let us not forget a woman can grind out her own clit stimulation. I highly doubt a clit a couple millimeters further from or closer to her vagina than average would have anything to do with the innate potential. The truth is there is every reason to assume every woman is biologically capable, with time, experience, and a partner that doesn't fuck it up for her, of grinding her clit against her partner or some bedding while she has a penis in her vagina (honestly though, that penis might need to just fucking stay still for a minute while she grinds). 

also, I'd like to reiterate that a partner that doesn't fuck it up is uberimportant because angle, pressure, and freedom of movement are key and need to be figured out on a case by case basis depending on how 2 people fit together. Where her clit is would certainly affect how she angles her hips to get the right grinding pressure on her clit, but there's just no reason to assume it says something about her biologically innate ability to orgasm. The only sticking point here, and it's actually a big one, is that the lady has to figure out this grinding thing on the fly while dealing with all the restrictions of movement keeping a penis up inside her creates. That's likely way more of a challenge than it should be and is likely why the numbers for this are so low...not because some women are biologically incapable of finding a situation that works for grinding her clit into an orgasm. 

Orgasming During Intercourse

The % for women that can and/or regularly do orgasm during intercourse is also unknown because again survey questions about it are generally shit, but at least some surveys either discern between hands-free vs. manual stimulation intercourse orgasm or acknowledge that additional manual stimulation during intercourse is a thing. I would guess that the numbers could be a bit higher than the 30%, like the 50%ish  Kinsey's study showed. Kinsey's team assumed manual stimulation was a normal way to orgasm during intercourse and so those numbers are intentionally included but not discerned from their overall intercourse orgasm numbers.  

Here's the deal though. Any woman that masturbates can do this. Ya just do what you do to masturbate but with a dick up your junk. There is absolutely no element of innate ability that some women have and others don't. It's open to any woman. Of course easier said than done. It's clearly not something that is modeled much and it unfortunately feels to a lot of people like a cheat, or an ego punch to the partner. It's something we consider and do in our culture much, much too seldom. 

But also, why are we so worried about having a dick in us when we orgasm?

And on that note, let me end my number best-guesses here by pulling out (pun intende) a bit and asking this. Why do we give so much of a shit about orgasming during intercourse at all, much less hands-free during intercourse? I mean, I get why Lloyd does. Her book is about the evolution of the female orgasm so she was specifically investigating how often lady-gasms arise form nothing but the reproductive act. But, most of us aren't writing Philosophy of Science books. We're just trying to have a good time fucking, and the truth is orgasms arise from penis and clit stimulation, not penis and vagina stimulation. 

The fact that we as a sexual culture are obsessed with women back-bending themselves into orgasming during a sex act that is shit for their orgasm just so their orgasm doesn't inconvenience anyone by needing something other than the very male-orgasm-centric act of intercourse - is kinda sad. God forbid the sex act include the kind of intentional focused stimulation to the clit that we almost always, under any circumstance, afford penises in a sexual situation. 

I mean, if you have figured out a great way to reliably get orgasms during intercourse, cool. But also, like fuck intercourse (so to speak). We should be less focused on intercourse when talking of female orgasm and exponentially more on external clit stimulation...because it's literally as important to lady-gasm as penises are to male orgasm. 

Back to the 30%

Why it's important to understand correctly

What is Lloyd saying and doing in those pages, why is she doing it, and why do I choose to use those pages over everything else out there as my citation on the lady-gasm during intercourse stats. I'm doing this post because I was reminded about the importance of that 30% stat recently by my incredibly Dedicated-To-Orgasm-Equality webfriend who keeps me honest, supplied with resources, and filled with thoughtful reflection. She quite rightly worries about how other people, and in fact Lloyd herself in later work and interviews, uses the orgasm-from-intercourse stats from this book. 

Specifically, these stats are often (I'd actually say mostly) incorrectly used as an indication of how many women do/can orgasm vaginally as opposed to how they should be used; as a loose and likely overinflated indication of how many women claim to orgasm during intercourse. It's important (and worrying) because without that discernment, and without having a full background understanding of the significant biases in the studies from which these numbers come, it gives the impression that about 1/3 of women have some quality that other women don't - an ability to orgasm from nothing more than a penis moving in and out of the vagina intercourse-style, when that is almost certainly not the case at all. 

But why even use the number at all

That said, these very imperfect, often misleading stats are all we currently have, and I refer to this chapter because the starting point from which I must begin many of my arguments is that stats seem to show, and lots of people believe, that there is a percentage of females that can and do orgasm from nothing more than stimulation inside the vagina. Those stats don't actually mean that, but I can't ignore that there are numbers out there, numbers like the ones we're discussing, that people (everyone really) use to make that argument. 

What I can do is begin by pointing out the reality of those numbers: What do studies really suggest is the % of women that claim vaginal orgasm? What exactly are the studies behind these stats and what story are the numbers really telling?  Why does claiming a vaginal orgasm not strongly indicate that the person actually had a vaginal orgasm? Lloyd's overview of these studies and those stats are the best out there for actually getting an idea of what women claim. Referring people to Lloyd's chapter has been s a shorthand for me to reflect the complexity and the flaws in these stats without having to detail it all out like I'm doing here. But...I'm probably going to start sending people to this page instead of her chapter, given that someone randomly reading my blog on the internet can find this page, but probably won't go buy Lloyd's book and read the first chapter unless they are REALLY into this stuff...

So to dive into these numbers we have to go through a few levels (listed below). I'll hit on each and how Lloyd's chapter and how I deal with them.

• Understanding what stats are out there that speak to % vaginal orgasm among us ladies
• Understanding the % of women that we can fairly assume orgasm during intercourse given the existing data
• Digging deeper into the study assumptions from which these numbers came
• Critiquing how these numbers are used

Understanding what stats are out there that speak to % vaginal orgasm among us ladies 

There are lots and they give a variety of numbers. Lloyd's all over this. Her review is comprehensive and touches on 32 major studies. The only really big one I know of that she doesn't include is Master's and Johnson's groundbreaking study, but that study was focused on the physiological investigation of orgasm as oppose to getting the % of vaginal orgasmers in a random (or at least somewhat random) population. However, if she had included it, it would not be counter to either Lloyd's argument or mine.  

Understanding  the % of women that we can fairly assume orgasm during intercourse given the existing data

This can only happen, of course, after  taking into account widely understood weaknesses of these many studies and how they negate and/or confirm each other, but also taking them generally at face value because they are all we have so far and any argument that outright ignores these stats would hold no water in a scientific argument. 

Lloyd nails this. She's goes through the studies and discusses how they relate to each other along with their strengths and weaknesses. It is a comprehensive review of these 32 studies, and in the end she doesn't come out with an exact % of women. She takes the pulse of all these studies and gets to a general scientifically conservative (meaning the reality is probably much lower) estimate of around 1/3 of women could be expected to claim orgasm during intercourse with no additional manual clitoral stimulation. She uses this number with full understanding of the huge problems with the studies from which these numbers arise. I usually say about 30%, and use this whole chapter as a reference for why that's a solid conservative number to start out with. What I'm saying is that there is no one number. the 30% I use and the 1/3 Lloyd uses are just best estimates. It's complex, but we have to start somewhere that scientists can agree on based on existing scientific data.   

Now here's some of the main points in her review. If you are interested, though I do recommend reading this chapter.

Important studies in Lloyd's review

There are two studies I, and I'd say she as well, take with more weight because of how they discern the questioning. Hite (1976) and Fischer (1973) both discern orgasm from additional manual stimulation during intercourse from orgasm during intercourse without additional manual stimulation (those who say they don't need any manual stimulation at all - Hite 24%, Fischer 20% - Hite's number is only among respondents who have ever orgasmed under any circumstance and who have had intercourse). 

Kinsey (1953) and Gebhard (1966) did not make that discernment in their numbers, although they acknowledged that they did not. Their numbers for orgasms during intercourse intentionally include women that used additional manual clitoral stimulation to orgasm and don't discern them from the overall total, so if you are looking to find percentages of women that orgasmed without additional manual stimulation of the clit, these aren't it. They are certainly and admittedly inflated if looking for vaginally orgasming women, but to what degree, we don't know (Gebhard 35-59% always or almost always depending on how happily married the women said she was) (Kinsey 50-62% anywhere from always to regularly).

No other studies Lloyd looks at make this discernment in their stats nor do they acknowledge that they don't. So, that alone would indicate to me that none of those other stats about intercourse orgasms give any kind of clear indication about how many women can orgasm from merely a dick moving in and out of her vagina without manual stimulation of the clit.

Biases and problems to consider

On top of all that messiness, Lloyd points out a variety of other problems with comparing data from different studies about women's claims of orgasm during intercourse. First, she notes the populations the studies used. Many were quite small, some were only gynecological patients, some only college educated people, and they were all from Europe or the US. These all may have a biased impact on the resulting stats.

Also, they all use different, and sometimes non-quantifiable ranges for their categories of how often the women claim to orgasm during intercourse. Some studies break it down to Always, Sometimes, Never. Others break it down by % of times. Others have a Always/Almost always category or a Sometime/Never category. It's almost impossible to really compare. 

And if I might be so bold, I have an additional problem with this, because...what does 'sometimes' mean to someone?  I have talked to a few women who when we first discussed it said that yeah, they do orgasm sometimes from intercourse. Then later in the conversation, it adjusts to that they have orgasmed once or twice, they think. Eventually, and usually not in that same conversation, they tell me that they probably have never orgasmed during intercourse. I bring this up not as a fact, but as something to think on. People can convince themselves of things when they want to, and doesn't it sound nicer to say 'sometimes' you do something rather than you 'seldom' or 'never' do something that you believe you should always be able to do. It's a way of hedging your bets without really feeling like you're lying. But this is really a personal sidetrack to the larger, and well-known problem in science of inaccuracy in all self-reporting studies, and Lloyd does indeed bring this up as another problem with all these numbers. Also, she very rightly says the following:

"Furthermore, the fact that all of the survey results reviewed earlier in this chapter are based on self-reporting, either through interviews or through questionnaires, probably biases the results towards reports of orgasm higher than those experienced. Ever since Freud, there has been a heavily normative equation drawn between a woman having orgasms with intercourse and her true womanliness and femininity, thus producing great pressure to have orgasm with intercourse. Given this enormous social pressure, the surveys are most likely to yield higher rates of orgasm than actually exist."

So given all those problems that Lloyd openly acknowledges, she asks an important question in the final paragraphs of this chapter.  

"Given the methodological problems just discussed with the sexological literature, what should our approach be to treating it as evidence? Simply put, we must use the evidence we have but without illusions about some of the studies apparent flaws. First, no one study should be treated as representative of the population at large. We should instead look to trends in the studies taken as a whole for a more representative understanding. Second, we should be aware that face-to-face studies may artificially inflate reported rates of orgasm, especially of orgasm during intercourse. And third, we must bear in mind that almost none of the studies draw the crucial distinction between assisted and unassisted orgasm with intercourse."

 She goes on at the end of the paragraph to comment on the use of existing evidence as the professional standard in scientific arguments.

"...if a researcher is writing about the evolution of female orgasm, then he or she should use the best, most scientific description of the phenomenon being explained. The fact that "the best, most scientific description" may, in fact have faults is not a good excuse not to use it."

I agree wholeheartedly, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't also critique that evidence with all the appropriate gusto it deserves.

Digging deeper into the study assumptions from which these numbers came

Once you have a sensible starting number from existing data, what are the underlying assumptions in the creation, execution, and conclusions of these studies and how do they affect the numbers? 

Vaginal orgasms are assumed to exist, but, like, do they???

For instance: that orgasms caused by stimulation inside the vagina (vaginal orgasms) exist is an assumption that is absolutely not proven but affects everything about these studies. Seriously. There has never been a physically observed or physically recorded orgasm caused by stimulation of something in the vagina (cervix, 'g-spot', inner clit stimulated through the vaginal walls) in all of scientific literature. 

One would assume when a women says she orgasms that she knows what an orgasm is, if she's had one, and reports it accurately, but like, is that a smart assumption???

Also, it's well understood that self-reporting can be flawed and that the female orgasm is a behavior women very likely feel pressure to exhibit. Lloyd touches on the way this might inflate orgasm, particularly orgasm during intercourse, numbers when she is going through the sensibly understood weaknesses of these studies. However there's a further question of underlying assumptions that's harder to swallow: Can women accurately report whether or not they have orgasmed? Do women have the correct understanding and underlying assumptions/knowledge about female orgasm to correctly differentiate a physical orgasm from other sexual, arousing, climactic mental or physical experiences? 

The hard truth is there are very real concerns that for a variety of reasons women might say they orgasm vaginally when they don't. Female orgasm is a very special case when it comes to self-reporting - much, much more so than male orgasm because of the quite unnecessary but nonetheless deep and ubiquitous confusion and misinformation surrounding the physical realities of female orgasm...for instance most people are misinformed that there is physical evidence of vaginal orgasms. there's not. 

The word 'orgasm,' is not clear (well, when speaking about female orgasm, but not so much when talking about male orgasm) and so why would we expect clear answers when questioning about it. Although it has a widely agreed upon physical quality in science that discerns it from other sexual experiences like arousal, ejaculation (in both men and women) or spiritual/mental climaxes, 'orgasm' is used wildly (again - for women, not so much men) both in the public and sadly also by scientific researchers and sex professionals. It is often said to mean whatever one believes it to mean. Any climactic experience can be described as orgasm without a 2nd thought. So, it is incredibly naive, in my opinion, to trust that when a woman says she orgasmed during intercourse, that she actually physically did so. The want for intercourse orgasms is so socially desirable, the discussion and depictions of female orgasm so unrealistic and convoluted, and the evidence that anyone ever in all of scientific literature has ever had a vaginal orgasm so non-existant (seriously, this is a real problem, people), that any study that's using only women's self-reporting about intercourse induced orgasms is suspect at best. 

And, have we talked about how grinding orgasms factor into answers about intercourse orgasms?

How might people report orgasms during intercourse without additional manual stimulation, but while specifically grinding the clit against the partner's body or against a surface like bedding or a pillow.  I imagine there are women who orgasm this way and distinctly understand it as creating additional clitoral stimulation for themselves, and there are also women who are specifically moving in ways that stimulate the clit, but internalize and express it as general movement during intercourse to get to an intercourse-induced orgasm. This is opposed to internalizing and expressing it as moving during intercourse as a means for getting the appropriate external clitoral stimulation they need for orgasm. It's a subtle but important difference and it might affect how a woman answers a survey on orgasms. I feel like it could easily be reported as a vaginal orgasm for some, but others may put it under 'orgasm during intercourse with additional clitoral stimulation' or something like that. It's really just a matter of how the person came to and internalizes that orgasm, but it can easily affect the numbers in ways researchers don't get because they simply haven't considered these possibilities and thus haven't created their research in ways that would account for issues like this.

Lloyd and I are interested in different types of intercourse orgasm discernment: An Aside

On that note, I'd like to mention that for Lloyd's argument in the book, the discernment I just made between orgasm during intercourse caused by hands-free stimulation of the external clit vs. orgasm during intercourse caused by stimulation from the penis inside the vagina are not necessarily a discernment important to her argument. Her book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, is not really about female orgasm. I mean, not really. It's a book that uses mainstream theories on the the evolutionary beginnings of human female orgasm to make important points about bias in evolutionary biology - I assume the female orgasm got chosen because it's such a fucking blatant example of the bias. Lloyd, the author, is not a sexologist or even a biologist. She is a philosopher of science, and the book is squarely a philosophy of science argument. 

Lloyd is interested in how many woman can orgasm from only the sex act that is responsible for reproduction. We know men are closer to 100% on that. But what about women, she asks? The center of her argument is that the majority of women absolutely do not orgasm from this reproductive act, no matter how you look at the relevant studies that exist out there. She elegantly and decisively fucks up all the theories about female orgasm evolution that refuse to acknowledge that very clear reality (pretty much all of them). It's a thing of Philosophy of Science* beauty, but she is not interested in quite the same thing I am. For her, it doesn't matter that grinding the clit against a partner during intercourse isn't a 'vaginal orgasm' but instead a clitoral orgasm during intercourse. Either way the point to her is about ladygasms that happen without anything more than the reproductive act - even if it's because the clitoral glans just happens to get some action in the process. It's nice to note, though, that what she finds, even with the assumed inclusion of these hands-free grinding orgasms during intercourse, is that the numbers still clearly show most women don't orgasm from just the reproductive act. 

So while Lloyd's point, when looking at female orgasm and intercourse, is related to what the existing scientific inquires can tell us about how female orgasm relates to reproduction and what that says about how female orgasm evolved, my focus on the topic is different. 

Mine is focused on the use of the existing science related to specific details of physically achieving female orgasm. I use this in order to build understanding of how female orgasm happens and what anatomical parts and types of physical stimulation are important to achieving female orgasm. From this, a base physical understanding of how lady-gasms might realistically happen during sexual interactions can be attained. Further, my activist hope from clarifying the scientific understanding of the physical female orgasm (a clarification that our culture is incredibly resistant to illuminate, by the way), is that it will lead to substantial change in how female orgasm is studied, depicted, taught, discussed, and real-life attempted in a way that eventually results in as many female orgasms during sexual interactions as male orgasms. 

In more casual terms, my point here is to use actual existing physical scientific evidence to convince people how fucking ridiculous it is to assume women will come from getting fucked. I want to make it clear that stimulation to the inside of the vagina has never in all of scientific literature been shown to physically cause an orgasm and probably isn't a way orgasms are induced and that the overall indication from the scientific literature is that the female orgasm needs stimulation of the clitoral glans and surrounding external tissue as much as the male orgasm needs stimulation of the penile glans and surrounding external tissue. And, if our culture were to understand those things, I mean truly, fully 'get' it, we'd all be appalled at how shitty and unorgasmic most sex is for porn stars, movie/TV/novel characters, and most importantly - actual women in actual relationships...particularly, but certainly not limited to cis hetero ones. 

Even without digging deeper into these underlying assumptions, Lloyd's numbers are still important

These are things I live/love to pick at. However, although these questions are not something that would have been outside the realm of what Lloyd could have delved into, these questions of the existence of vaginal orgasm or of women's capacity to accurately identify an orgasm much less specifically an orgasm caused only by stimulation to the inside of the vagina are more controversial questions and would have put her lady-gasm evolution argument on shakier ground. 

What she did do, though, I think is still important. She showed that the data we already have in front of us indicates that most women don't orgasm at all during intercourse most of the time. That was all she needed in order to move forward on her argument from rock-solid ground, and personally, I think that's powerful in itself. That even in a quite conservative (scientifically speaking) accounting of what we know, we KNOW that intercourse is shit for lady-gasm. We KNOW it, yet it's still the most culturally beloved, go-to hetero sex act. 

The 30%ish  number that come out of her review in that chapter are powerful to me because it really highlights that even without all my uber-orgasm-equality-activist critiquing of the stats and studies, the scientific world should know better. Scientist and studies regularly ignore that reality, and it's bullshit. There's no excuse for scientists to uncritically take claims of vaginal orgasm at face value or to create studies and conclusions with underlying assumptions about a strong connection between intercourse and female orgasm. Yet they do.  Most women don't orgasm when intercourse is happening to them. Full stop.  

Lloyd's numbers are not the whole story, and clearly there is a lot more critiquing of them that is needed, but if even just these uncontroversial stats would be taken seriously, there could be some progress just from that alone. 

Critiquing how these numbers are used 

After looking deeply at the simple biases and weaknesses as well as the larger problems with the underlying assumptions, one simply cannot abide by something like a sex advisor saying that 30% of women orgasm vaginally. It's misleading and not actually backed by the studies that produced those numbers. 

1 The studies, all of them, are quite literally not giving us numbers for how many women orgasm vaginally. They, I'm saying it again, are only giving us numbers for how many women claim to orgasm from vaginal stimulation alone (if they even do that - most just give us numbers for claiming orgasm during intercourse, which might include women orgasming from a variety of clitoral stimulation options that happen during intercourse, but not necessarily because of vaginal stimulation). 

2 A vaginal orgasm isn't even a verified physical thing that has ever been known to happen, so it's a little problematic to be spouting off, without qualifying it, that 30% of women do this thing that we aren't even sure exists. 

Some may counter that there are a few studies out there where researchers assert that vaginal orgasms happened in their lab during experimentation.. These kinds of studies aren't included in Lloyd's chapter because they are usually super small, but more importantly, they aren't surveys out to get intercourse orgasm numbers within a random(ish) population, so they wouldn't make sense to include. However, they also wouldn't contradict neither Lloyd's nor my arguments. Although the researchers in these studies may have taken the time to bring these women into the lab to orgasm, and they may have gotten some things like blood pressure and heart rate measurements during orgasm, they didn't didn't get physical verification of the orgasm. Heart rate and blood pressure aren't able to mark orgasm. They needed to check for the rhythmic pelvic muscle contractions that mark orgasm in both men ans women, but they didn't. So yes, there are claims of women in labs orgasming through only stimulation inside the vagina (cervix, G-spot, inner clitoral legs through the vaginal wall, whatever), but not one of those studies actually verified physically that the orgasm happened. Not one. These studies are still all claims of orgasm. 

And of the studies that have taken the time to physically verify orgasm claims, none of the verified orgasms were from stimulation anywhere inside the vagina. Clit, baby. 

(I review a lot of those studies HERE if you're interested in seeing more)

Make sure your local sexpert gets it right

So, next time you see a stat for the number of women that are able to orgasm 'vaginally' or 'from intercourse' or 'with no additional clitoral stimulation' or 'during intercourse,' I hope this helps clear up the different meanings those statements have, where those stats come from, what they indicate/don't indicate, and what kinds of problems, biases and silly underlying assumptions are at play. I hope you see, frankly, how complicated and ultimately unreliable they end up being and how casually they are thrown around. I hope you see how nobody ever seems to make sure it is known these stats are indicating women's claims orgasm even though that is what they indicate. 

Most importantly, I hope you notice that when they are used, they reiterate the incorrect but widely, almost universally, believed assumption that there are women out there who can orgasm from a penis rubbing the inside of their vaginas and that this is a known of science. It absolutely is not, and it is harmful to women and to the sexual culture that this is believed so strongly. 

Correct the next sexpert you hear that uses these numbers incorrectly.

*Although, unlike Lloyd, my focus is not a specifically Philosophy of Science argument, I have deep love and respect for the discipline. I 100% credit my Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology classes in college for flipping my brain and making me think of feminism, science, and orgasm research completely differently, for allowing me to put the infant thoughts of this work together in the first place. Those classes sparked my lifelong passion and activism in the lady-gasm space - so big love from me to Philosophy of Science (Thanks Dr. Stuart Glennon). 

You might not be beautiful and other things I want to say to the ladies in my life

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I've been thinking about being a lady in this world today. Usually I think and write in this blog about being a woman specifically in relation to the sexual culture, but I want to broaden out a bit today because you know what? If the state of womanness during sex is such a hot mess; if we can live in this world fully knowing how women's bodies orgasm, yet ignore that reality at every turn - in our media, our education, and our actual sexual activity - then imagine what other non-sexual aspects of womanness we are treating with similar disrespect and disregard. So, I thought I'd approach the topic in terms of the 3 most common things I seem to hear us woman say to each other to build each other up; that we're beautiful, strong and can do anything we set our minds to.

I love these words in so many ways. I love the immense support I see women giving other women. I love women feeling strong and beautiful and full of possibility. However, I think these words, in many ways, are us ladies making the best of our situation, which is lovely, really, but I want to look at the gritty nasty center of these words and how they speak to the shitty realities of being a woman that we don't usually have time or energy to focus on. I want to do this because I think it's so important to acknowledge among friends, that sometimes things aren't so good. I think speaking truths about hurtful forces in our lives lessens the power of those forces, and I think we need to step outside our day to day lives from time to time in order to see how we might change our world for the better.

So this is for you, my ladies.

My mom and sis and me (2 of the many important ladies in my life. I'd love to add more, but I don't feel right putting all their faces up on my lady-gasm blog)

Dear ladies in my life,

You are all different parts of me. Some of you have helped shape me my whole life. Some of us helped shape each other as we grew into women. Some of you have been important parts of my adult life, some my childhood, and some of you I don’t see all that often and maybe we’re not even particularly close, but you have imprinted on me in some way that feels important. You are fellow scientists, writers, artists, activists, bloggers. You ran for office. You have advocated and volunteered to make your community a better place though boards and charities and organizations. You did all you could to raise people who would give more to this world than they took. You are doing the hard, slow work of parenting as we speak. You educate yourself in both traditional and nontraditional ways and you work. You build, create, innovate, cooperate, communicate, educate, and move. You work.

Some of you were brought into this world with more than others. More emotional support, more money and things, more people around you, more kindness and understanding, more education, more beauty, more positivity, and more sense of normalcy and comfort. Some of you with less. Some were born to the words, “It’s a girl” and others to “It’s a boy.” Some to more medical attention in their lives and some to very little. We are women, but we are all quite different. Our varied experiences gave us differing abilities to soak in, bounce off, embrace and ignore each little thing - the good, the bad and the downright ugly - that our culture insinuates about women. So, although in some ways it’s hard to relate to each other when it comes to our feeling about what it means to walk this world as ladies, I also know we share so much and sometimes it's hard to recognize that inside the nitty gritty of our own lives.

It’s easy to rally with each other around the uniquely exciting and bright parts that our world’s understanding of femininity allows us; the ability to cry, hug and create intimacy in platonic relationships without feeling scared of how you will be perceived, the assurance that nurturing and caregiving for our friends and families is valuable and important work, the acceptance of our prerogative to primp and sparkle and have style, the comfort in knowing that women are traditionally strong in our endurance of pain and in our ability to move through adversity and just get on with it. We can and should be excited that femininity allows and applauds these things. They are good things – not just for us but for all people to have.

It’s also easy to rally around our accomplishments - our shared history of obtaining certain legal rights and certain expectations of respect and fairness. We have come a long way in a short amount of time. It’s not really a matter of if we continue to make progress. It’s inevitable. The gendered stereotypes that held our mothers to restricted life experiences also held men to restricted life experiences, and humans don’t do well with restrictions. I believe the real question is how fast and which changes come first.

It's harder to rally around the uniquely shitty and limiting parts that our world’s understanding of femininity forces upon us, and sometimes even harder to admit to ourselves that we are affected by these forces.  And, I’m not talking about these forces affecting women of the past. I’m talking about us now, living our lives day to day. I think it's important to take a minute and consider what our shared situation of being women might bring to our lives now, the nitty gritty stuff of living as a woman; the stuff that often feels like it’s just part of life, but is actually just part of being a woman in this world, and a part that isn’t necessary or inevitable. It’s the invisible things men don’t have to endure – or at least not to the degree that we do.

I think it's actually hard not only to accept these things about being a woman, but even to see them at all. They are tangled in our shared humanity and have always been there, so it's hard to discern our personal situations and struggles from the shared struggles of womanhood. We often default to assuming our personal failings are to blame for things that actually have more to do with our situation as women. This is certainly true when it comes to orgasm. So, we need to talk with each other in utterly real ways from time to time to even begin to recognize these shared experiences. This was how the feminist movement of the 60's and 70's moved us forward. Women all over the country took part in Consciousness Raising groups where they talked honestly about their lives, and in doing so began to see what kinds of problems out there were common to being a woman and needed to be addressed through feminist activism.

The truth is that the unnecessarily hard parts about being a woman in this world don’t always come from people being outwardly sexist. It also comes from inside us and from inside the people we hold most dear. It comes from a culture that has evolved to accommodate men’s needs more than women’s and to expect different things from men and women. It doesn’t mean that all men or even most men are sexist assholes that disregard women (I mean clearly there are some that do, but mostly not). But it does mean that we all drag some of that culture around with us.

So, I’d like to start a discussion and hope you continue it with those closest to you. I’m going to do that by focusing on 3 things we ladies like to say to each other; that we’re strong and beautiful and capable of anything. I really want to say that to you all, because it’s nice and true in a way, but it also is not completely true or maybe it's more true of humanity than just women, or maybe it's true but not in the way we tend to speak about it. I don't know, but it's not the whole story about women, and it's not what I want to say to you all.

Maybe women feel like we're so strong because life forces us to be strong in ways it does not for men.
Strength comes in all kinds of packages. Sometimes it’s sudden and life dependent. Sometimes it’s short term and all consuming. Sometimes it’s constant and under the surface. Sometimes it takes everything we have to give. We, all people, possess potential for all these strengths, and if you ever really need it, you will dig in and find enough of it somewhere because that is what people do.

But I also want to say that maybe we talk about strength in women so much because women so often are in that position where we are forced to find it. Not necessarily in heroic spurts but in constant subtle ways throughout our lives. Maybe the amount of strength women must conjure into everyday things is more than for men because our culture evolved with male comfort in mind more so than female comfort.

Maybe every time you choose an outfit to leave in, you have to muster a bit of fortitude about your outward appearance; about what it does and does not say about you; about how people will react to you; about the aching sadness so deeply ingrained in all of us that we do not fit within the sliver of acceptable appearance afforded women.

Maybe every time you decide to go on a date or go somewhere alone, you have to overcome all those voices inside you fueled by years of hearing how vulnerable women are and centuries of men feeling like they can prey on women without consequence, and decide to take the risk anyway.

Maybe being the ‘first’ to do a job or to be in the minority population at a job takes a ton more umph to get there, stay there, and fit in than it does for those who’ve watched people like themselves do the job for years before they join and get to be with mostly people like themselves while doing the job.

Maybe we’ve been trained in ways boys were not to notice and accommodate and feel responsible for others, and so we are more often in the position of taking on the everyday drudge of putting others’ emotional comfort and well-being in front of your own,

And Maybe all that takes some endurant strength,

And Maybe women tend to bear this burden far more than the husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers and male co-workers in their lives.

Maybe we mostly don’t even notice that we are gathering strength for these things because we just do it. We just get on with our lives, but maybe it’s more draining than we realize, and maybe the next generation of men and women deserve better. So, maybe we should try an recognize this and acknowledge it more openly.

Maybe you're not actually beautiful and maybe that matters too much
I don’t want to tell you that you are all beautiful either. You probably look fine – and a bit better than that if you put work into it. What I want to say is that looking fine is, well, fine, and that we don’t all have the power of great beauty just like we don’t all have the power of great athleticism or great artistry.

It’s fine. You're fine, and I wish beauty wasn't so important that we feel we need to make sure every woman thinks she's beautiful.

I also want to say that I know it’s also in many ways not fine; that the pressure to look a certain way is so very heavy and the repercussions for not doing so are sometimes so severe and painful that the question of a woman’s beauty is not something to be sloughed off so simply. I also want to say that although this affects all women, even the most supermodelly among us, some of us get harshly confronted with their beauty-standard inadequacies more than others, and it sucks, and it starts to scar and twist us in a variety of ways from a very young age. And it’s not just men or ‘others’ or ‘culture’ that make it this way. Just because we are women doesn’t make us immune to the hatefulness toward women’s appearance we see all around us growing up. We often become the aggressors to other women (and certainly to ourselves), sometimes in silence and sometimes out loud and sometimes even with what we feel is good intent.

There is no easy answer to this, but I can tell you that although all people battle with this, women take the bulk of the hit, and you’re allowed to be sad and mad and hurt by this, but please don’t ignore it. We can’t change something we refuse to see clearly.

Maybe you can't actually do anything you set your mind to...at least not in the same way men can
I would also love to tell you you’re capable of doing anything you set your mind to, and you are. But, I think we should be real with each other about the obstacles. People still use gender stereotypes to box men and women into ways of being and jobs to do. This affects how easy it is to do things we might want to do. It just does, and although you can do whatever you want, you might have to bust shit up on your way there. It might be hard.

Let me just use female orgasm as an example. Yeah, you are fully capable of having an orgasm when you have sex with a man, but you're probably going to have to bust some shit up first...like:

• the completely un-evidenced yet widely believed notion that female orgasm originates though stimulation of the vagina, 
• the lifelong sense you’ve had that women aren’t supposed to masturbate and explore their ability to orgasm on their own, or the cultural norm of a male-female sexual encounter focused on intercourse
• the lack of knowledge you and your partner have about the clitoris being as important to female orgasm as the penis is to male orgasm
• everyone’s ignorance of the fact that no peer reviewed scientific study out there has ever shown that stimulation inside the vagina has caused a woman to orgasm
• lack of good examples in media to show how a woman and man could have sexual interaction that involve appropriate, orgasm causing, stimulation to both the penis and the clitoral glans/vulva area
• The feeling men have that they need to give women orgasms with their penis to be a real man and a good lover
• The sense that if the women needs to work her clit, her partner's not 'doing it right' 
• the feeling that you are not cool/sexy/sexually mature/normal/healthy/having good sex if you can’t just come from a man having intercourse with you. 

It seems on paper like the ability for a woman to have an orgasm while having sex with her male partner should be just as natural as can be, but it’s not. It’s really not. Although women’s bodies are capable of orgasming as quickly easily and reliably as men’s they often don’t in a partnered sexual situation, and it’s due to the ways of the world, not biology, or personal problems or bad communication. It's because the culture is BS for lady-gasms and needs to be changed...we just don't notice how BS it is most of the time, because we just think it's the way things are and get on with our lives.

So if something as natural as our ability to have an orgasm when we have sex with a partner has been so strongly and deeply impeded by the sprawling roots of our male-centered history and norms of our still very gendered society, then imagine how problematic other things like stepping into a male dominated profession, or maneuvering a home life with non-gender-traditional roles, or creating gender progressive policy and laws might be.

So talk to each other, honestly. You deserve to see when your problems are not just yours and yours alone. You deserve to grieve together when your precious reserves of human strength are wasted on everyday bullshit to a degree that men's, in general, are not. You deserve to investigate with each other how your beauty, or lack thereof, defines and traps you in ways it does not for men. You deserve to understand the reality of the subtle and rarely discussed hurdles that await you as you seek to do or be things outside the norm in our male centered, gender-role obsessed world.

Women, like all humans, are survivors, but we need each other to not just survive, but to grow and change and make the world better.

Love to you all,
Trisha

Sad As Shit To Remember How America Feels About Women

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Pre Election
If you're not okay with a grown woman in a gym doing bicep curls while crying to the new Lady Gaga album Joanna, then you can kiss off because that is how I'm rolling these days.

The Sunday before election Tuesday, my sister invited me to the super secret, not that secret FB group Pantsuit Nation and guess what? I bawled my eyes out reading all the posts with stories from people who were supporting Hillary Clinton for president all over the country. It was positive and kind and supportive and it really brought home the fact that having a woman president means something. Strangely, it hasn't been easy to show and feel that excitement for this piece of history because there is this thing that is said all the time about how much people hate her. I never did. I've always loved her - from the time I was a pre-teen and she was first lady. It's like people have been afraid to say how excited they were about HRC - but not in this FB group. I don't know you guys, it was just so...something...to see all that excitement. I'm not the only one. My friend Stephanie texted me asking if I was just sitting around liking every post, and I was. And she was. And we both were tearing up. And my sister was too. And so were a bunch of women I'm friends with. There are like 3 million people in it or something, but if your friends like the posts, it pops up, and clearly these lady FB friends of mine were also just sitting there and liking every damn post they saw - every post.

So that was Sunday night. I continued reading Pantsuit Nation posts throughout work on Monday and continued tearing up. Monday night, I'm all excited because it's election day tomorrow and I'm taking off work and me and Charlie are headed to the gym. He keeps up on new music like 50,000 times more than me and he plays some new Lady Gaga, and I like it, so I listen to it on Spotify while I'm working out. It's nice because I'm sweating and you can't tell much, but I'm a hot crying mess listening to her lovely voice. I've had only passing interest in Lady Gaga in my life so far, but now I'm suddenly hysterical mega fan #1. It's got this country feel and there's these songs about girl friendships and people coming together, and it's just all too much. I have all kinds of feels about coming together and sisterhood and progress and beauty and more love and all that shit. All of it. And I'm excited and nervous and full of something that I can't quite explain.

Election
Okay - so I wrote all that above on election day just before I headed out around 6:30pm to an election results watch party at my fellow AnC Movies dude / long-time friend Barnaby's parents house in beautiful Fortville, IN. It's now Friday. I wanted to keep all that above as is because I just wanted to.

So, we're on our way out there and we hear Indiana got called for Trump. It was the first to go. We went blue in 2008, and I had a small hope it would happen again. My stomach was doing flips the whole way out. Barnaby's mother, a woman I absolutely love for a hundred reasons, met me in her kitchen with a make-shift pantsuit on, and we squeezed each other and talked about how terrible our stomachs felt. She was straight up raised in the hills of North Carolina  - which also went blue in 2008, so she was hopeful for both her states to do it again too. We watched the 2008 election results in that very house in '08 and saw the first black man become president. I was with my parents and sister and her family and a bunch of other people I love very much.

It was a much smaller party this time. A couple of fairly recent Hoosier transplants were there too - people I feel really lucky to have met and grown close to over the last couple years. My stomach never got better (somehow I ate a bunch of crap though). We went outside for a while to walk it off a little, and then we went into the living room and watched more. I can remember looking at the TV and imaging myself punching it. We left at about midnight not completely certain Trump won, but pretty sure. Me and Charlie stayed up through his acceptance speech. I tried to sleep, but my stomach hurt and I couldn't stop crying and I wanted to sob loud and uncontrollably, but I felt stupid even though I know Charlie wouldn't have cared. So I went into the bathroom and sobbed but not loud or uncontrollably. We live in a one-bedroom and I was only about 15 feet from him.

Post Election
I had taken the next day off because I thought I'd just want to enjoy it - first woman president and all, but I ended up having to go into work from 10-12 for a meeting anyway, and I did and I did a pretty good job of not crying randomly. But I cried a lot. I'm still crying a lot. I feel like an insane person. I read friend's FB post or Pantsuit Nation posts, or I listen to Lady Gaga, and I tear up. I think of something and I tear up.

I don't know if it's that there was such a switch from hope and excitement to disappointment. I've never ever even shed a tear for an election outcome - I'm not normally that cry-y. I don't know if it's because the man who won felt so mean - like the villain in an 80's movie won the lottery, got the nice girl, and fucked over the nice guy instead of getting his comeuppance. I don't know if it was because I felt like the woman who lost was so misunderstood and so thoroughly fucked over by a lifetime of immersion in a world soaked in lady-type-things-distaste and topped off by a campaign filled with judgement colored deeply and stealthily with misunderstanding of how women must move in the world and in politics. Or maybe it was that the man who won seemed like the very face of 'the man' - a rich old asshole who does what he wants, says what he wants, hurts who he wants, finds power in making others less powerful, and is just kinda mean - but succeeds anyway. It's gross. It might also be that his VP is the former Indiana governor who put forth some of the meanest, most restrictive and thoughtless abortion laws in the country and also one of the shittiest anti-LGBT laws in the country. Or maybe it was because the KKK endorsed him or that he not only never got Black Lives Matter - he was incredibly shitty and dismissive about it. Maybe it was the heartless crap he said about immigrants and refugees.

From where oh where did that seething sadness arise? 
Honestly, I'll admit that I am pissed and worried about all the racist, anti-abortion, and anti-LGBT kinds of things, but I don't think that's what has stirred all the raw emotion up from the pit of my stomach. I think maybe it's just the sudden feeling that people still really prickle at women doing things that don't fit comfortably in our understanding of womanly-ness - that compounded by the knowledge that a man who very outwardly said raggedy ass nasty shit about women was rewarded for that raggedy ass shit. It is somehow sad to me in a very deep way.

I spend so much of my time and energy thinking about the reality that women all over the world engage in consensual hetero sex acts that result in orgasm for the man but not the women. I think about why we do that. I think about how strange it seems that women have a clit in our genital area that can be stimulated to orgasm just as quickly, reliably, and easily as a penis can be, but we don't often do it, and men don't often do it, and sometimes neither of us even know that we can do it. I think about what it is that makes this very simple pleasure. a pleasure women can obtain using nothing more complex than our own bodies, seem so unreachable, so foreign, and so invisible to so many when it doesn't need to be.

I think about all that and I do something almost every single day to make other people wonder those things too. It definitely sucks sometimes because often I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. I mean isn't it kinda insane that women are being hoodwinked by the very make-up of our world to believe that somehow orgasm is essential and glorious for males during sex, but it's either non-essential, impossible, or not really on the table for women? Isn't it some crazy anti-lady bullshit hidden in plain sight? Why don't people care more? I mean, how toxic to the ladies is this culture if this can feel normal to both men and women?

I know it's something deep I'm fighting against. I know that truth as solidly as I know I am alive. And, I also know logically that it's not just an isolated instance of our culture being harder on women. I know it is merely a grotesque piece of a larger poison in our culture. I know it, and it's sad, but like most women, I can mostly ignore the sadness of that reality. I can pretend that it's not that bad or that deep. I can pretend that I am untouched by it's slithering, secret tentacles that live both outside and inside me.

Clearly, I can't and don't ignore the orgasm piece the way I seem to with the rest of the puzzle. I mean, I spend lots of my time noticing and writing about that one orgasm piece. It's also not like I haven't felt a similar weird pang of sadness and desperation about the reality of our culture's outlook on ladies and our orgasms. I have, but it was over time. I'm hardened to it in a way because I've lived with it so long, and I have a plan and I know how to argue it and I do argue it and I know sometimes I make a small difference, and I keep moving forward, and it's okay.

Then I see that a man will become President of the United States of America who embodies all that cultural meanness towards women, and I suddenly realize that people saw it in the light of day, and didn't say, "What the Fuck? No."  They said, "Okay, that's fine." Men and women said this. So, it was like a gut punch reminding me that all the toxicity in our culture making people feel like our f'd up understanding of female orgasm is normal - that toxicity also makes us feel like the things Trump embodies is normal. Our sense that women don't need, deserve, or can even have orgasms is sitting there with all the shitty feelings about our appearance and our worth, and I know, as solidly as I know I'm alive, that all that stuff is as deep, as hard to verbalize, and as hard to fix as the the orgasm stuff, and that's fucking depressing.  I'm not hardened to that yet, and I don't know if I ever will be because the problem seems too big for me to make a dent in. At least I have a plan for the orgasm stuff.  So, it's just...sad in a way that makes me feel it in my whole body.

Let's review this man's bullshit nastiness about women
Seriously, our president will be a man that did not even have the basic decency to hide his shitty attitude about women. He's a man that:

• Openly spoke about how easy it was to sexually assault women to Billy Bush in a bus
• A man who tweeted "26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?"
• A man who retweeted "If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband, what makes you think she can satisfy America?"
• A man who said in a 1991 Esquire interview of the importance of arm candy, "It doesn't really matter what (the media) writes as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of a**."
• A man who the Telegraph quoted as super arrogantly and likely obliviously saying, “All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”
• I don't even have room to go into the shit he said on Howard Stern. I mean Howard Stern himself said,“This is who Trump is...None of this was hidden...He was always bombastic. He always rated women. He always talked in a misogynistic, sexist kind of way, but he did it sort of proudly and out in the open. And he still won the Republican primary.”

No sir. He won the Presidency, and above is just a bit of it, and just the stuff about the ladies.

I'm still very raw and emotional about this, and I'm still processing everything. I do feel crazy for how sad and emotional I feel about this, but fuck it. I feel this way, and I'm not a particularly dramatic person. I think I feel this way because I should feel this way when the leader of my country openly shows me that he thinks something I am is a lesser thing - a thing for him to use as he pleases and not respect. I should feel this way, and so should all the other people he and his VP have openly told us are not important or even respectable in their eyes. We should be sad and we should be mad, and we should be vigilant.

Some nicer things to leave you with
As a parting gift, I want to post one of my fave (I like a lot though) songs from Joanne, and as I was getting a video for it, I realized there was a live version from a Hillary Clinton Rally. Love both them bitches.