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The experience of orgasm, both clitoral and vaginalBy comparison with men, women have a much more variable ability to reach orgasm. A large majority of men have their first orgasm and ejaculation very close to the age at which they begin puberty, but women generally report a much wider range of age at which they first experience orgasm: this ranges from before puberty to some time during adulthood. In 1953 Kinsey and his colleagues discovered that 23% of women had experienced orgasm by the age of 15, and just over half had experienced orgasm by the age of 20. By the age of 25 three quarters of women had experienced orgasm, and by the age of 35 about 90%. Kinsey concluded from this that about one in 10 women were unable to experience orgasm through their entire lives. Nowadays, with much more information about orgasm and female sexuality easily available, it's probable that a lot more women have their first orgasmic experience much earlier than in days gone by, but there isn't any evidence that the number of women who don't experience orgasm has reduced. It's also clearly observable that women do not all reach orgasm with the same readiness, so while some women can enjoy an orgasm from sexual fantasy alone, or from stimulation of some part of their bodies such as their breasts, other women need a very particular form of stimulation applied to the genitals before they will reach orgasm. Research by Laumann has revealed that about 29% of women always experience orgasm during sexual activity with their sexual relationship partner (but not necessarily through intercourse) -- a figure which is in dramatic contrast to the 75% of men who achieve orgasm during sexual activity with their partner. Evidence about the duration of female orgasm seems to imply that there is also a considerable degree of variation among women in this respect. Levant and Wagner reported in 1985 that the average length of the female orgasm was 20 seconds. They reported that a few seconds after the individual's experience of orgasm begins, there is an initial spasm in the vaginal muscles in the lower one third of the vagina (this is called the orgasmic platform), followed by a number of rhythmic contractions which vary in number between eight and five. Some women also experience simultaneous contractions of the anal sphincter or the uterine muscles -- although the evidence here is less consistent and some scientists have observed these uterine contractions taking place in the final stages of orgasm. Masters and Johnson thought that the perivaginal contractions (the perivaginal area is the area around the vagina, including the area between the vagina and anus) were the most fundamental aspect of female orgasm, in that they were directly compatible to the rhythmic muscular contractions of ejaculation in men. However some researchers suggest that women can experience orgasm without perivaginal contractions, and the issue is not yet resolved, although lack of tone in the perivaginal musculature (the pubococcygeus muscle) may contribute to orgasmic dysfunction. In fairness, we should observe that other researchers have discovered no relationship between the strength of the pubococcygeal muscle and a woman's ability to reach orgasm. The general pattern of skeletal muscular activity during sexual arousal, both orgasmic and non-orgasmic, shows considerable differences between individuals although in fact there is no obvious difference between men and women in this aspect of orgasm. As sexual arousal increases, there are defined and predictable responses in the musculature of the body which gradually become less voluntary: these include pelvic thrusting, the contraction of the rectus abdominals muscles, the facial muscles, and sometimes spasm of the muscles of the toes. Muscle tension declines rapidly once orgasm has occurred. Both the intensity and the extent of the muscular spasms which take place during orgasm can be very different from one person to another, and they can also take different forms in the same individual on different occasions of orgasm. More specifically, there is a predictable albeit short lived rise in both heart rate and blood pressure that begins shortly before sexual climax starts. Littler and colleagues demonstrated that rises in blood pressure during the sexual arousal phase of the sexual response cycle are variable because of compensatory bradycardia which appears to be overruled at the moment of orgasm, a time during which the heart rate increases by between 20 and 80 beats per minute, systolic blood pressure increases by between 25 and the 20 mm of Hg and diastolic pressure increases in a range from 25 to 50 mm of Hg. During orgasm, respiration rate also shows variable changes but there is a consistent experience of hyperventilation during orgasm where rates of around 40 breaths per minute are not uncommon. Some men and women experience a characteristic sex flush which is an erythematous rash affecting the skin of the body. This was displayed by 75% of the women and 25% of the men in Masters and Johnson's research. Bodily sensations of orgasmThe feelings that a man or woman experiences in the body during orgasm are related closely to the genital responses of the individual concerned. So, rather obviously, the sensations of vaginal or uterine contractions and the sensations of ejaculation are unique to men and women respectively. However, apart from those specific differences, much research has demonstrated that men and women feel orgasm -- or at least they describe their experience of orgasm -- in very diverse ways, with no consistent factors in the descriptions of either men or women. Indeed, a mixed group of women and men will produce written descriptions of their experience of orgasm which are indistinguishable once the factors specific to either sex (such as vaginal contractions or ejaculation) are removed. One consistent aspect of the descriptions of orgasm is an increase in muscular tension and its release at the moment of climax. Another common thread in the descriptions of the experience of orgasm is reference to some state of altered consciousness, perhaps even a virtual loss of consciousness. This has been likened, neurobiologically, to certain types of epileptic fit. Types of female orgasmWhile the male orgasm appears to be comparatively straightforward, there has been much debate over a period of many years about the nature of the female orgasm, and whether different types of female orgasm do in fact exist. Of course, the starting point of this debate was Freud's doctrine that a clitoral orgasm, that is to say an orgasm achieved by means of continued clitoral stimulation, was a sign of emotional or sexual immaturity. For Freud, the transfer of sexual responsivity from the clitoris to the vagina was a transfer that signaled emotional and sexual maturity. However, Kinsey and his colleagues challenged the conventional Freudian view of female orgasm by pointing out that the vaginal wall was comparatively insensitive, an observation from which they concluded that the distinction between vaginal clitoral orgasms was a biological impossibility. This is a rather unexpected finding, since few women today would agree that the internal vaginal walls are comparatively insensitive. In what may be an example of how the first opinion raised on a subject influences subsequent opinion, Masters and Johnson develop the theme of sexual orgasm in a woman being achieved only through stimulation of the clitoris. The work of these researchers led inevitably to the conclusion that was only one type of female orgasm, a position which is becoming less and less credible, as evidence continues to accumulate that there are fundamentally different types of female orgasm. For example, research by Bentler and Peeler discovered that female students draw a clear distinction between orgasm experienced during vaginal intercourse and orgasm which was caused by direct clitoral stimulation whether they were masturbating or sharing sexual activities with their partner. Singer reached the conclusion that there were two female orgasm patterns which could potentially combine in a variety of orgasmic outcomes: he called these the vulval orgasm and the uterine orgasm. In his terminology, vulval orgasm is an orgasm that is reached through stimulation of the clitoris, either directly or indirectly, and which produces vaginal contractions. The uterine experience produces deeper emotional reactions and might or might not involve vaginal contractions. Like Deborah Sundahl he believes that this might be the result of uterine buffeting by the penis which can occur during deep vaginal penetration during sexual intercourse. This type of orgasm, which appears to be more emotional, might have been missed in the observations made by Masters and Johnson because of the difficulty of obtaining appropriate an psychological environment in the laboratory. In some ways this view fits with the experience of many couples, where a vaginal orgasm is the result of regular rhythmical stimulation of either or both of the G spot area and the uterine wall around the cervix. Indeed, the most recent developments in the field of female orgasm research focus on the stimulation of the G spot. Although there has been limited research into the different types of female orgasm, there is much evidence that orgasm produced by stimulation of the anterior vaginal wall and orgasm produced by stimulation of the clitoris actually have different patterns of uterine and pelvic floor muscular contractions. What is very clear is that Freud's description of the maturity and immaturity of a woman's sexuality being determined by the type of orgasm that a woman experiences is complete nonsense. In what may be a derivation of this line of thinking, though, it's been suggested that women who rely on vaginal intercourse to produce orgasm rather than direct clitoral stimulation may have more anxiety, or maybe inclined to reach orgasm this way so as to avoid the more intense sexual excitement that perhaps would be threatening to them. (This might be the case if a woman wasn't comfortable with the physiological responses of her body to sexual stimulation. It might also be the case that women who are more accepting of vaginal stimulation as opposed to clitoral stimulation have anxiety about masturbation or clitoral stimulation.) One of the most important aspects all this work, which by any standards is rather inconclusive, is that in the majority of surveys, starting with the work by Shere Hite in 1976, one finding occurs consistently: a substantial majority of women require stimulation of the clitoris before they can achieve orgasm. Even this, a simple factual observation, can raise controversial conclusions, since some commentators have observed that it is only when the G spot has been awakened by sexual experience or an emotional connection to the partner that a woman can experience orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone. Certainly there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence which suggests that there is some fundamental difference in origin and experience between an orgasm that's achieved by clitoral stimulation compared to one achieved by stimulation of the vagina alone. Even now after all the work that has been conducted on the experience of orgasm, it's not understood why orgasm produces such intense pleasure. This reflects the difficulty of associating subjective experiences such as orgasmic pleasure with neurophysiological events inside the brain. Certainly the production of opiates in the brain has been implicated in the excitement and pleasure of the orgasmic experience. There is however a major difference between men and women in terms of the return of the various physiological aspects of the body to normality after sexual climax. The refractory period, that is to say the period after orgasm during which an individual remains unresponsive to further sexual stimulation, is much longer in a man than a woman. Indeed it's not uncommon to find that a woman can experience repeated - or multiple - orgasms in a short period. This doesn't mean that women don't have a refractory period; rather, it means we just don't know what the parameters of this aspect of orgasm are in women. Kinsey reported that only 14% of the women in his research were capable of multiple orgasm on a regular basis. But although there may be many women who have not achieved their full potential in terms of orgasmic frequency, the research has simply not been conducted to understand exactly how many women are capable of multiple orgasm, nor indeed how many would wish to experience multiple orgasm, nor has there been any investigation of the conditions under which this phenomenon might be achieved. Female ejaculation during orgasmSome women are worried by a tendency to release fluid during orgasm, often assuming that the fluid is urine. However, analysis of the fluid suggests that it contains chemical compounds which are reminiscent of prostate secretions in men. Women who undergo the experience of female ejaculation appear to develop a swelling in the anterior vaginal wall close to the area of the G spot which disappears when ejaculations taken place. This swelling seems to be caused by the fluid collecting in the urethra at that point, before it is expelled from the body during sexual arousal. Although there is considerable variability between different women in the degree to which they have paraurethral ducts around the urethra, it may well be that the fluid secreted by these ducts and the associated glands is the one that can be expelled during "female ejaculation", a process that appears to be similar to the ejection of semen from the body after the emission phase of sexual response (when semen is released into the urethra before expulsion) in men. The function of orgasmAlthough the obvious function of male orgasm is the ejaculation of semen, it's not quite so clear what the function of orgasm in women might be. Suggestions include the simple emotional reward of pleasure "for" allowing sexual intercourse to take place, the resolution of vaginal tenting (ballooning of the vagina during orgasm) which allows the cervix to dip down into the pool of semen left in the vagina after ejaculation, stimulation of the man's penis so that he ejaculates because of the stimulation of the vaginal contractions on his glans and penile shaft, the reinforcement of pair bonding, and the upsuck of semen into the uterus. The problem with these explanations is that very few women experience orgasm as a result of sexual intercourse. This makes it difficult to explain how female orgasm came to evolve if it was reward for allowing intercourse to occur! It's much more likely there is a potential for orgasm during intercourse, but the success of reproduction is by no means dependent on female orgasm, and nor is the female orgasm dependent on the experience of sexual intercourse. On another website we discussed the theory of sperm competition, but like all other theories that have been put forward to explain the purpose of the female orgasm there is no clear evidence that this has anything whatsoever to do with why orgasm evolved. A more plausible explanation, perhaps, is that orgasm is a neurophysiological pattern which developed to allow orgasm and ejaculation in men but which still occurs as a potential response in women because there was no evolutionary reason why the neural pathways that result in orgasm should be suppressed in the female of the species. This isn't merely a patriarchal view of the female orgasm, it's a biological hypothesis which explains the presence of the orgasm rather in the way that evolutionary theory explains why evolution did not suppress the development of nipples in men. The ease with which women achieve orgasmThis is clearly affected by a range of factors, including a variable genetic factor. Although work has been done on this, the research methodology was somewhat flawed, but in general it indicated that there is a genetic component of around 34% in the difficulty women have in reaching orgasm during intercourse, and 45% for any difficulty in reaching orgasm during masturbation. Although this data is interesting, it's not actually particularly helpful in understanding why women can't reach orgasm and in offering them methods by which they can facilitate their achievement of sexual climax. For example, the range of factors that impact on a woman's ability to enjoy maximum sexual pleasure will include sociological factors such as the meaning and acceptability of orgasm in her culture and her social environment. And we've already implied that some women feel more comfortable reaching orgasm during vaginal intercourse than through masturbation because of an association in their minds between clitoral stimulation or masturbation and unacceptable or otherwise negative behavior; it's possible they even see it as a taboo activity. Equally, any sexual activity which might threaten the intimacy of a sexual relationship could be potentially threatening for some women. In addition, personality factors and the influence of religion are likely to be of major importance in the complexity of the variability of female orgasm capacity. Needless to say, regarding women's orgasm as a byproduct of human male embryonic development is contentious position, one that has been termed "politically incorrect", if for no other reason than the fact that orgasm is an extremely important source of pleasure and a valued element of sexuality for many women. In a survey of women in heterosexual relationships, Bancroft asked them how important various factors were to their sexual happiness. In order of importance, the percentage of women answering "very" or "extremely" important to the following questions were: 1) to feel emotionally close to your partner - 83.5% 2) to feel your partner is sexually satisfied - 78.9% 3) to feel talking comfortable but your partner about - 61.5% 4) to have an orgasm - 29.6% This clearly indicates that sex and orgasm has a different significance to women than it does to men, although again one has to ask to what extent woman's limited expectation of orgasm is determined by socio-cultural factors. Frequency of orgasmKinsey defined total sexual outlet in men as orgasm and ejaculation combined, regardless of what sort of stimulation produced it. On this basis he found that 2.1% of his male research subjects had a zero frequency of sexual outlet. Among men who are sexually active, 72% claim that they always had an orgasm to climax and ejaculated during sex with a partner, 21.8% said they usually did, 3.7% said they sometimes did, and 2.6% said they rarely or never did. This latter figure presumably represents the percentage of men who, at the time, were prepared to admit to having, or were identified as having, delayed ejaculation. In a French research project in 1994 a group of men reported that they achieved orgasm most easily through vaginal penetration, while 47% of men said they always came that way and 49% said they came "rather easily" that way. Interestingly enough, during masturbation by their partner, the percentages of men who always came were 22% and who "rather easily" came was 53%: the comparative figures for achieving orgasm by fellatio are 22% and 43% respectively. Orgasm in women is, of course, a rather different story. We know that women vary considerably in the type of stimulation that is required to bring them to orgasm, and we've already observed that many do not experience orgasm through vaginal penetration. When combined with the fact that women actually have a much more variable capacity to achieve orgasm during sexual activity, you'd expect the figures for men and women to be very different. Lloyd scrutinized the literature reporting on women's orgasmic experience and summarized data from 32 research projects. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with research into sexuality, many of these studies were poorly conducted with ill-defined terms in the research or unrepresentative samples of women. However, using the best judgment possible in the circumstances, the proportion of women who report always experiencing orgasm during intercourse is 25.3%. The women who "sometimes" or "rarely" reach orgasm during intercourse is 19.7%. Similarly, Lloyd found that the percentage of women who never reach orgasm during their lifetimes was reported as between 5 to 10% in a number of different studies. This broadly matches the figure of 10% in Kinsey's pioneering research in 1953. When you consider all kinds of stimulation during a sexual act with a partner, studies have demonstrated that 27% of women say they will always achieve orgasm, 41.3% say they usually reach orgasm, 21.6% say they achieve orgasm "sometimes", and 10% say they achieve orgasm rarely or never. If this covers any kind of sexual activity with a partner it is incompatible with the research reported above, because this revealed that women claim to experience orgasm during intercourse 25.3% of the times they have it. Intuitively it's extremely improbable that only 2% of orgasms experienced by women during any kind of sexual interaction is accounted for by activities other than sexual intercourse. This seems to imply that the real figure of women who are able to achieve orgasm during intercourse is much lower than 25%, and that would be broadly in line with our own unscientific research projects and informal e-mail enquiries that we've had from women on our websites over the years. Broadly speaking, we would estimate that no more than 15%, and possibly as few as 10% or even 5% of women achieve orgasm on a regular basis during sexual intercourse. There is certainly a widespread recognition in research projects that the cultural environment suggests that people are more sexually active than they actually are, and it may be that the over-reporting of orgasm during intercourse is a reflection of this cultural bias. Nonetheless an important question arises: how important is orgasm is for women, and orgasm and ejaculation for men? In a research project conducted in 1994, 49% of men agreed with the statement that "sex without orgasm or climax cannot be really satisfying for men" and 34% disagreed. In response to the same question 43% of women agreed and 29% disagreed. Interestingly, when the same statement was made for a woman i.e. "sex without orgasm or climax cannot be really satisfying for a woman", 29% of women agreed, and 50% disagreed, while 37% of men agreed and 35% disagreed. This clearly emphasizes the different importance which men and women apply to orgasm during sex. In a more recent survey of women in heterosexual relationships by Bancroft, it was discovered that the frequency of orgasm which women experience during sexual activity with their partners did not have any correlation with how the women evaluated the success of their sexual relationship or indeed their own sexuality. When asked how important it was to their sexual happiness to have an orgasm, only 29.6% of the women said that having an orgasm was important or extremely important.
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