Sex and Statistics

“I’ve been… fakingorgasmsforninemonths.”.

I’ll admit, it wasn’t the most tactful of confessions. Nor was it a comfortable conversation to have with my well-meaning high school boyfriend, who had done enough research to know the difference (in theory) between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm. But it was the conversation that taught me never to fake another orgasm.

As you probably know, given you’re on a website called sexwithcatalina.com, my name is Catalina and I’m a second year MBA student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. While many of my classmates have spent the summer interning at the world’s most prestigious investment banks and management consultancies, I have spent my summer on a Stanford Innovation Fellowship using data analytics and statistics to study sex.

You see, I’d begun to suspect that I wasn’t the only woman on the planet to have ever faked an orgasm, and that maybe there were lots of women out there still languishing in the land of lackluster lovemaking. So I did what any reasonable, easygoing woman would do: I set out to find cold, hard data that I would analyze with rigorous statistical methods that no one could argue with.

My three big questions

  1. Is there a pleasure gap between men and women, both in terms of orgasms and subjective experiences of pleasure?

  2. Is there a gap between what people actually experience and what their partners believe they experience?

  3. What factors correlate with orgasm frequency?

Armed with a grant from the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, an undergraduate degree in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and a can-do attitude, I interviewed 200 random people and got my answers.

Curious to know what I found?

Is there a pleasure gap between men and women?

Several studies, such as this 2017 study by Frederick et al, have found the existence of an “orgasm gap” between men and women. Happily (or rather, sadly), I found something similar. Heterosexual women reported orgasming on average 56% of the time with a partner since they became sexually active, while heterosexual men reported orgasming 83% of the time.

In other words, the orgasm gap is alive and well, as is the age old adage “Fake it till you make it”. While men only fake orgasms 5% of the time, women fake them 15% of the time – so about the same odds as getting a specific number on the roll of a die.

But what if women simply don’t need orgasms as much as men do to enjoy sex? Let’s pretend that’s true for a moment. I also asked people to estimate what percentage of their sexual encounters had been what they would describe as “bad sex”, as well as “painful sex”. Women rated nearly a fifth of their sexual encounters on average as “bad” while men rated less than 14% of them, and women’s estimates of painful sex were more than 1.5 times higher than men’s.

So yes, there is a sizable orgasm gap between men and women (and in this instance, size does matter), and smaller but still statistically significant subjective pleasure and pain gaps.

Is there a gap between what people actually experience and what their partners believe they experience?

This is where it starts to get, to use the scientific term, juicy. I wanted to see if heterosexual men and women had an accurate perception of their partners’ realities. As well as asking people to rate how frequently they had orgasmed with a partner, I asked them to estimate how frequently they thought their partners had orgasmed with them, and I then compared heterosexual men and heterosexual women’s responses.

It turns out, heterosexual women’s guesses of their partners’ orgasms were pretty close to reality, and not statistically significantly different from men’s own reports.

Heterosexual men on the other hand significantly overestimated how frequently their female partners had orgasmed, guessing 65% of the time vs women’s self-reports of 56% of the time.

Men also rated themselves more likely to communicate with their partners about what they want during sex than women thought their male partners did, and more likely to be able to accurately guess their female partners’ best and worst sexual experiences with them than women thought they could.

Bottom line? It’s not just orgasms where there’s a gap. There’s also a gap between what women experience and what men believe they experience.

But that’s not the whole story. As it happens, men are keener on feedback than women are. They want their female partners to give them feedback much more than women think they do, meanwhile women are more likely to agree with the statement “I would rather have slightly lower quality sex with my partner if it meant not having to communicate my preferences to them and give them feedback”.

What factors correlate with orgasm frequency?

So far, we know that men orgasm more than women, are less likely to experience bad and painful sex than women, and have skewed perceptions around how much women orgasm, how effectively they communicate with women, and how in tune they are with their female partners’ preferences.

But perhaps men have an inkling that all of these might be the case, because they really want feedback from their female partners – female partners who would rather take lower quality sex than have to provide feedback. No one said this was going to be simple.

How do we fix it?

Well, a good place to start is looking at factors that might correlate with orgasm frequency. In other words, are there any particular sexual acts or behaviors that correlate with increased orgasm frequency with a partner?

Yes, there are! For heterosexual women, 50% of the variance in orgasm frequency with a partner is explained by how frequently they receive oral sex. So on average, a 10% increase in how often women receive oral sex is associated with a 5% increase in frequency of orgasm.

For heterosexual men, the strongest association with orgasm frequency is how often they estimate that their female partners are orgasming.

And last but not least, masturbation. For men, the older they were when they first started masturbating, the lower their orgasm frequency, and for women, moving up one answer (e.g. from neutral to slightly agree, or from agree to strongly agree) on “I know how to reliably make myself orgasm” was associated with an 11% increase in orgasm frequency with a partner.

What does it all mean?

Could it be that we have a win-win on our hands?

Men: statistically speaking, the best thing you can do to improve your partner’s sexual experience is simple: Perform. More. Oral. Sex. Quantitatively, the numbers don’t lie. Qualitatively, it gives her dedicated time to focus on her pleasure, helps you learn her physical likes and dislikes, and just plain shows you care. Willing and able, but wondering how to get started? Check out Your Oral Pleasure Encyclopedia.

“Yeah, he’s a great guy, but he’s just too good at and interested in going down on me. I’m not sure it’ll work.” — A conversation no woman has ever had with her friends.

Women: Communication. I know it’s scary and awkward, and there’s a strong impulse to close your eyes, blurt it out, and hope that’s the end of it. Or worse, say nothing. But as it turns out: most men want our feedback, and want to learn what makes us feel good. Down to give it a shot, but not sure how? Check out Your Guide to Bedroom Communication.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “I don't say women's rights—I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women.” Let’s close the gender orgasm gap, and while we’re at it, spare any more well-meaning 18 year old boys from learning their girlfriends have been faking it for nine months.