THE BIG O: "has anyone ever actually given you an orgasm before?"

“I stopped expecting to cum from sex.”

“Then why bother having it at all?”

I was at a bar in the city celebrating a friend’s birthday when conversation in the girls bathroom turned to the almighty O. It seems that my most memorable and profound conversations occur in the bathroom on a drunken night out with women I have never met before, and women I love, all of whom ultimately become the latter. After all, what is a girl’s bathroom but a piss-smelling confessional booth for drunk women to vent about their relationship problems, hype each other up, and spill their most traumatic secrets upon a group of strangers, only to then follow each other on social media and never speak or meet again. After many cocktails and cigarettes, I turned to the women and asked the almighty question: has your partner ever actually made you have an orgasm?

“Alex has never made me cum.” We all audibly gasped. 

My friend and her partner had been together for over two years, and seemed, on the outside, like the perfect couple: both great-looking people who you’d only imagine capable of having the most animalistic sex. Only, they weren’t having that sort of sex at all. It turned out Alex had never made Sal cum, not once. And yet, if you asked him, he would say she came every time, that there was nothing wrong with their sex life at all, and that he was fully capable of making her have the most eye-rolling orgasms.

My assumption that they had a great sex life was rooted in the fact that only months prior had this same friend told me she came every time she had sex with Alex. I wondered what had happened between the first time I had asked and now, that had caused her denial to fester into a full-blown confession. Was it just that more time had passed, thus more orgasms had been faked, and patience was thinning? Or did she experience a sense of shame over it, or more so, was ashamed to voice it, and mostly I wondered, for whose sake exactly? I recognised the shame in Sal. It was the same shame I had in myself that, too, caused me to lie about the quality of sex in my relationships.

“I sneak off to the bathroom to finish myself off”. 

“I don’t even have the care or energy to finish myself off.” Another woman added. 

It seemed that many of us weren’t experiencing orgasms during sex, and hiding it from our friends, with some of us even going to the extent of lying about it for months and years. When I inquired about their partner cumming, however, it seemed it was most always guaranteed: a “95% likelihood of rain”, as Jen summed it best. I wondered how these drunk estimations correlated to the current stats on orgasms.

According to a 2022 study by YouGov, just three in 10 (30%) British women reported orgasming every time they had partnered sex – compared to 61% of British men. Additionally, one in four women (27%) reported that they orgasm on most occassions, with 7% of women claiming to never have orgasmed during partnered sex. These statistics do differ across sexualities, with lesbians (you guessed it!) reporting the highest percentage of likelihood to orgasm during sex, at 40%. These statistics call attention to the disparity in sexual satisfaction between men and women during heterosexual sex, highlighting what is known as the Orgasm Gap. 

I wondered why so many of us weren’t having orgasms during sex. I knew in my experience, I was too afraid to tell my partners that it wasn’t working for me in fear of hurting them. It seemed many of my new half-naked-drunk friends, too, were afraid of hurting their partners, feeling it would be insulting to tell them that they weren’t even close to cumming. But mostly, in the back of our minds, the thing we were all afraid to say was that we felt that maybe there was something wrong with us, some biological default. And yet when alone, none of us had issues climaxing. It seemed only in the company of someone, albeit a stranger, or the love of our lives, we experienced this inability. 

Once we had finished blaming ourselves, it became easy to blame our partners, to declare them terrible lovers.

“They’re all useless fucks.” 

“And their fucks are useless.” 

When you turn the blame to your partner, you start questioning how sexually compatibile you are. This, then, begets the questioning of how important sex is to you in a relationship, but more specifically, good sex. If you don’t reach orgasm during sex, but your partner fulfils every other need of yours, how fulfilled are you ultimately? 

This will differ between people; we all have different capacities and desires, and the importance of an orgasm, too, will differ between everyone. But for me, no-orgasm was enough to end a sexual relationship at this stage in my life, and it seemed the same way for my friend Camile. 

“No climax, no relationship.” 

My friend Camile is the sort of person I tend to turn to when it comes to matters of sex. Camile is a self-proclaimed slut with a preference for men with mullets and money. 

“What’s the point of getting them off if they’re not getting you off?” 

“That’s so unromantic. Sex is about two people showing how much they love each other.” That was Carmen, a hopeless romantic whose only active relationship was with a wattpad fanfiction and a Temu bullet vibrator. She is very much a proud virgin.  

With the devil and angel on my shoulder, I contemplated ending my current relationships in search of my O. Ultimately, I did. I deemed it too important in both the pursuit of feminism and my own personal journey, that I committed to the quest. I would, singlehandedly, close the orgasm gap if it was the last thing I did. And so, I started the journey by hooking up with a fantastically-hot musician, who came over one summer’s night and, then, came over me. 

While I appreciated his efforts, I ended up faking it when I realized it wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t let it discourage me, so I got back on the saddle and tried, tried again. This time - in public - thinking perhaps the novelty of the situation would get me there. It didn’t. 

I repeated this process in different positions, contexts and settings, with different lovers of all kinds, and still there was nothing that would deliver me my orgasm – it was one exhausting, perpetual edging session, and I was growing restless and resentful towards anyone who even tried. But in my restlessness, I had succumbed to the realisation that, while it was easier to blame my partners, it wasn’t actually their fault. This inability seemed to be more general than individual, and I was very certain it wasn’t biological, so then what was it? Why was I, and so many other women, not cumming during sex? 

In the brilliant words of psychologist and sex educator, Laurie Mintz, the orgasm gap is a result of the cultural ignorance of the clitoris. With over 10,000 nerve fibres, the clitoris is the only part of the female body that exists purely for pleasure, and yet, it seems to be the part most ignored during sex, with attention to it treated as optional or a mere part of foreplay to skim over. Our cultural prioritisation of penetrative sex, reinforced by porn and media, perpetuates the chronic abandonment of the clitoris, resulting in less and less women orgasming during sex. We also can’t ignore gender socialisation and how this impacts our ability to assert needs. 

This was the case in my experiences, as not only was I unable to assert my needs, but I was being dishonest, faking it and pretending my needs were being met. And so, I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: how am I complicit in not getting my needs met? 

It was a question intended to highlight how I had a responsibility when it came to my own sexual experiences. After all, sex and intimacy are learnable skills, but if I was handing out gold stars and giving A’s to D-worthy experiences, then how would my students know to do anything differently? If I knew what made me orgasm, why couldn’t I relay this information to them? 

It feels hard and confronting to communicate your needs when you have a lifetime of believing your needs are not important. And, if you have been with your partners for a long time and faked your way through, it’s challenging to admit you’ve lied. The emotional risk of being honest can feel so big, that it’s completely understandable why so many of us fawn our way through sex. Perhaps we worry we will hurt our partners, or they will abandon us if we were to be honest. But what is ironic, is that sometimes the most selfless thing we can do for our partners is to lovingly teach them how to give us the pleasure we want. 

It’s a gift to be able to communicate our needs and teach our partners what gives us pleasure. It gives them the joy of connection and getting to experience you in authentic pleasure, and, you finally get to experience the sex you want. When you become an advocate for your own pleasure, you begin to foster your sexual agency, and your confidence and pleasure grow as a result. And while it is a life-long journey to self-advocate and take responsibility for our own experiences, the best thing we can do throughout is give ourselves compassion. Then, we try our best. We show up vulnerably and honestly, even when it feels confronting and challenging. 

And, maybe, that’s the real climax here. Maybe it is the moment we stop performing, and awaken the parts of us that have been quietly, achingly, waiting to be met.