Interview with Dr. Laurie Mintz on “the Pleasure Gap”
By: Rachel Mundaden
Dr. Laurie Mintz, PhD
Sexuality psychologist// Author of Becoming Cliterate // Professor at University of Florida // Sex therapist // Speaker
To start off, could you please define what the pleasure gap (also known as orgasm inequality) is?
DLM: The orgasm gap/orgasm inequality/pleasure gap (goes through all different names) is the consistent empirical finding in multiple published studies, that when cisgender women “get it on” with cisgender men (I say that because we don’t have enough research on people who do not identify on the gender binary), the women are having substantially fewer orgasms than men. While this is true in all types of sex, the biggest pleasure gap is in hookup sex, it gets smaller with repeat hookups, gets even smaller with friends with benefits, but even in relationship sex, it never closes all together. Women are still have significantly fewer orgasms in relationship sex than their male partners. I’m going to drop the word “cisgender” for the rest of the conversation but please know that’s what I’m referring to.
From your expertise, what do you believe to be some of the reasons for the existence of the pleasure gap?
DLM: Let me first tell you what is NOT the reason and then I will tell you what IS a reason! You may have heard the idea that women’s orgasms are difficult or elusive or were hard to make orgasm. That’s BS. When women pleasure themselves, 95% reach orgasm easily and within minutes. And when women “get it on” with each other there is not a problem with reaching orgasm. We know that the problem (and I’m not blaming men either) is our cultural institution of heterosexual sex and our cultural privileging of male sexual pleasure. And going along with that I think the biggest reason (there’s all kinds of reasons: there’s slut shaming, getting in our heads about body image issues, being raised to think his pleasure is more important than ours) is silence and shame around women’s most reliable route to orgasm: clitoral stimulation. We see this reflected in our language for sex too. Talking about sex and intercourse as if it were the same. Foreplay as something that leads up to the “main event.” Even though foreplay includes the type of stimulation that people with vulvas need to reach orgasm. So it’s this cultural script that values penetration, penetrative sex, penetrative orgasm, which is men’s most reliable route to orgasm, not the most reliable route for the vast majority of women.
Could you touch on how our everyday language regarding sex and/or the female anatomy may contribute to the pleasure gap and how our culture views female pleasure?
DLM: Our language surrounding sex both reflects and perpetuates the overvaluing of male sexual pleasure. We use the words sex and intercourse as if they were one and the same. We call everything before, foreplay. And most importantly we call our entire genitals “the vagina.” Therefore, linguistically erasing the part of ourselves that gives us the most pleasure from our vocabulary. Some people have gone as far as calling it a “symbolic clitorectomy.” By doing this we are calling our genitals the part that men find the most pleasure from, not the part that women find the most pleasure from.
So many women don’t even realize that when they talk about their vaginas they are actually meaning to refer to their vulvas (the general external part of our genitals). It’s quite bothersome to think that sex education is so behind that so many women don’t even know the correct words for their own anatomy!
DLM: Oh that totally bothers me too. It’s like saying:
“Oh I breathe out of my ear”
“Nope that’s wrong...”
“No, it's fine! It’s all on my face! It’s all the same thing!”
It’s NOT the same thing though! The vagina is a hole where penises can go in and babies can come out. It is not the main source of the female orgasm.
The truth of the matter is that only 4-18% of women can orgasm from penetration alone. 4-18%! Expecting a woman to orgasm from penetration with no clitoral stimulation is like expecting a man to orgasm from stroking his balls and no penile stimulation. It just isn’t biologically happening for most women!
Why do you think so many women might not advocate for their own pleasure in the bedroom? I’m assuming it’s primarily because a lot of women don’t do much self exploration with their bodies and women are less likely to masturbate than men.
DLM: I’m not anti porn at all, but I am against people using porn as sex ed (which we often do). Without sex ed that teaches us about female pleasure and orgasm, people are relying on porn as a role model. And what we see in porn is very little fooling around, the man puts his penis in her vagina and she’s instantly moaning. So many women don’t even know about their clitoris. They may have sex with a guy, very little warm up, she doesn’t have an orgasm. In fact she probably has pain under those circumstances. And then she thinks “something is wrong with me.” This happens a lot. Or women do know what they need because they do masturbate, but they still think “Ooh that’s weird. I couldn’t ask for that, that’s too pushy.” Again because we don’t value it and because we are still socializing young women with “if it’s good for him, it’s good for me. I’m not as important.” And then with masutrbation: there’s images of male masturbation, jokes about male masturbation. There’s not much information about female masturbation. So I’m a sex thereapist, as well as a writer and a professor and the most empirically supported technique for helping a women to orgasm is telling her to go home and masturbate to figure out what she likes. But then that’s not enough, because then you need to get that into partner sex as well. And that’s where the whole cultural socialization, “it’s too pushy” comes in.
Why do you think a lot of women might resort to faking orgasms with a partner?
DLM: So there’s actually a lot of research on that. Usually women give three main reasons.
Because the sex is bad and they want it to end
To avoid appearing “abnormal”
To make him feel good about himself
All of this hurts men too! Because they are told a woman’s orgasm is by penetration alone and that this reflects their masculinity. So we are feeding their egos by making them feel good about themselves and all we are doing by doing that is teaching them exactly what doesn’t work. And most guys do care about women’s pleasure and want their partners to orgasm. If you do find one who doesn’t care, then run away! Men do care but they are often misguided. And if the truth was out there, they would enjoy sex more too.
Within sex education curricula, the majority of topics that are covered are pregnancy prevention, STD prevention, consent, prevention of sexual assault, etc. (which are all incredible important topics obviously). Why is it also important to discuss the concept of sexual pleasure in sex ed?
DLM: Sex is supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be pleasurable and we need to let people know that. I think we don’t for a lot of reasons. I think if we start teaching women that sex is supposed to be pleasurable for them, then we would have less sexual pain (which is rampant in young women). We might also have less sexual coercion. And I’m definitely not blaming women but we would be more likely to recognize sexual coercion. If we take the attitude “sex is for me and my pleasure” we will tolerate less sexual pain and we will recognize sexual coercion more readily. Plus if we don’t tell people this, we are scaring them and we are lying to them. Sex ed is the only subject where we are allowed to tell people lies based on “values.” It’s like teaching someone 2+2 = 5 because I like the number 5 better than I like number 4. That’s not okay in education!
Why do people who engage in non-heterosexual sex, have better sex?
DLM: Well okay, so if we are talking about two people with vulvas now...some people say it’s because having a clitoris teaches you how to pleasure another person with a clitoris but that’s not completely true because everyone likes something a little different and everyone’s nerves are positioned a little differently in the vulva. It’s because having a clitoris teaches you you need to ask your partner how you liked to be pleasured. And by not having a penis present, there is nothing to center the whole activity around!
Going off what you were saying before, sex is very intercourse focused because when sex ed is taught it’s mainly about reproduction. But obviously most people are not always having sex just for the purpose of having babies! The aspect of sexual pleasure is completely ignored in sex ed even though that is one of the sole reasons as to why young adults are sexually active.
DLM: Right. And it’s very heteronormative too. Like when we define sex as PVI, or don’t even define it but just assume, every LGBTQIA+ kid in the room is left out. I’ve talked to young people who say “I was taught that sex can give you an STI but since I’m a lesbian I assumed that didn’t apply to me. So I shared my sex toy and then I got an STI...” We need to teach more comprehensive, sex positive, pleasure focused sex ed. A lot of times (it depends on what state you grow up in and if you even receive a sex edcuation) they separate the boys and girls. They teach the boys about wet dreams, masturbation, and ejaculation, which is all pleasure focused. And then they teach the girls about periods, which has barely anything to do with sex!
What are some (first) steps to address this, fix this, solve this issue; that is the issue of orgasm inequality aka pleasure gap?
DLM:
Know your anatomy
Masturbate. Find out what works for you.
Feel equally entitled to pleasure. Go and get the same stimulation with a partner as you get while alone
And shameless plug: read my book Becoming Cliterate! It lays it all out for you and research published in a scientific journal shows that women who read my book have more orgasms, feel more entitled to sexual pleasure, are more sexually assertive, and have less sexual pain.