SMNTY Classics: Who fakes orgasms?

How many people have actually faked an orgasm? How have cultural perceptions of orgasms changed over time? Join Cristen and Caroline as they cut past the cultural baggage and get to the facts behind sex and orgasms in this classic episode. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. If I ever told
you protection I hiar Radio. Here's a personal question for you.
I suppose have you ever had a celebrity sex dream? Yes? Oh,

(00:27):
mind sharing, Uh, always kind of vague. I feel like
the last celebrity sex dream I had, I think I
ended up telling my partner and he was like, thanks,
I want to say it was Brendan Fraser. I think
it's like the mommy yes, yes, and it would be

(00:49):
that time frame as well, And it was just pretty
much like I have some weird dreams, and all of
it has implications of like is romantic and sweet but
also confusing because typically in public and I don't know
why weird dreams, but it takes place either where it's
public enough that we may be in a children's little

(01:15):
like playhouse, you know, those plastic playhouse that would happen
one time, and or a tree house, so but people
are around, and it's like it doesn't make sense while
we're there. But it's typically those types of dreams. Somebody
might interpret this. Yeah, please don't don't tell me. I

(01:36):
don't that. Um. I remember very vividly the first sextream
I had with celebrities and it was after I saw
Black Swan, So I was I was in college. Uh,
I had a sex dream with Mila Kunes and Joseph
Gordon lived it was so it was a threesome. But

(01:58):
I know we talked about this in our um A
sexual episode. I normally don't like. I don't fantasize about people.
I don't normally have sex streams. A few times i've
had them, it's almost always been with a fictional character
that I don't like, and I wake up really angry
about it. Why I hated every second of that? Why

(02:19):
that guy? Which also probably says something about me, and
you can interpret it if you want, But I just
wanted to ask because recently we we've done a lot
of talking about orgasms and virginity as we are want
to do on this show, and UM a while back,
Kristen and Caroline did an episode on who Fakes Orgasms,

(02:41):
which is something that we talked about in our orgasm episode.
So you'll probably hear some of the same stuff, but
some new new stuff are like updated stuff from us
and then more in depth stuff here. So please enjoy
this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you
From housetop works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(03:08):
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline. And Caroline, since we're talking
about fake orgasms today, I just want to go ahead
and get the one Harry met Sally reference out of
the way. In almost every article that we read, Nora
Ehron's hit about friends who can't possibly not be lovers

(03:30):
came up because there's that famous Dean with Meg Ryan
faggy an orgasm to Billy Crystal and Cats his deli
in New York City, and it's hilarious and no, I'm
not going to reenact it because that would be very inappropriate,
but there it is, and their conversation in the movie
during that scene pretty much sums of everything that we're
going to talk about, and which is basically like Meg

(03:53):
Ryan saying, oh, well, everybody every woman's faked at one
point or another, and Billy Crystal is like, oh, but
not with me, and she goes, well, you do the math.
Every woman's faked it and every man thinks that they haven't.
So but not, it's not the entire conversation that Carolina,
it's not that cutting dry. Yeah. So before we get
into statistics, because we got a lot of statistics to

(04:15):
go over with fake orgasms, because I'm sure everybody's wanting
to know what percentage of women have done it? Have
men done it too? Um? But the whole female faking
thing has a lot of cultural baggage with it as well.
That goes way back beyond when Harry Melt Sally Yeah,

(04:36):
goes back to the Victorians, those dark Victorians. They always
come up, what do they Why? Why are we still
suffering under Victorian things stuff? At least we got graham
crackers and corn flakes out of it, I guess, and
doubt Navvy And although it's more of an Edwardian anyway. Um. Yes, Well,
during the Victorian era, the woman's orgasm came to be

(05:01):
seen as sort of an unnecessary part of sexual intercourse.
It really was sort of viewed as a man's thing
to really enjoy sex and have an orgasm, whereas women
were supposed to lie back and think of England and
if they didn't orgasm, who cares? Right? Well, there was
the point made by Brian Fawz in Performing Sex, The

(05:22):
Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives that the sort
of self imposed sexual oppression became linked during that era
to higher class for women. Yeah, um, not only higher class,
but it's it's funny to talk about uh sex and

(05:43):
gender and all this stuff in the Victorian area era.
Excuse me because UM. Tied into all this is hysteria,
the female disease which was caused in their minds by
a wandering womb, which goes back to Hippocrates Hippocrates um
who said that the you know, women might go crazy

(06:06):
because they're their uteruses are are wandering around, just wandering,
wandering the womb. But if you fast forward to the eighties,
when the first vibrators were invented, Um, they realized that
they could cure hysteria, all of this anxiety and sleeplessness
and excessive sexual fantasy that these women were experiencing by

(06:29):
bringing women to orgasm. Right, and this was something done
in doctor's offices, Like medical professionals were leading women to
orgasm as a way to be like, hey, just calm down,
don't don't have so much anxiety in your life, lady.
And it's it's I can't believe that an orgasm went
from being a normal thing that men and women experience
to something that women shouldn't experience because they're too classy

(06:52):
for that to being something that happens in doctor's offices.
But then after that though, I mean, like, if we're
talking about orgasm today, not only is it considered this
normalized part or expected part of the sexual experience, but
that is we conflate sex with orgasm. Yeah, good sex

(07:13):
equals having an orgasm. It's an expectation. It's also um,
I think brand Faz also frames it as a type
of gift that women give. And we're talking to at
this point about heterosexual women a gift that they give
to their male partner. Yeah, and as as far as
it's more of the history goes of of sexual intercourse

(07:34):
and orgasms and how they relate um, the psychoanalysts. Freud
got in on the discussion and it became okay suddenly
for women to have orgasms, expected for that to happen.
But you're a weirdo if you can't have an orgasm
through vaginal intercourse alone, right. Floyd Freud was very dismissive
of c literal stimulation. He said that was basically for girls,

(07:57):
and if you cannot figure out how to have an
orgasm through penile vaginal intercourse, you really weren't a woman, Yeah,
not a real woman. And then so fast forward, way
forward into the dawn of the feminist movement. Feminist activism,
and the female orgasm, according to Jane Gerhardt, came to

(08:18):
signify the political power of women's sexual self determination. So
suddenly the discourse was more about we can have an
orgasm anyway we want, and we deserve to have an
orgasm any way we want, right, and it shouldn't just
be some kind of gift or performance unless it is
a gift or performance, you know, for ourselves. Maybe that

(08:39):
just sounds like masturbation though, which was another two part podcast, Right, yeah,
we've already covered that. Yeah. The author of that Making
an Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives book sites research that
shows that some women tend to downplay the significance of orgasm,
while other women rate it as the most important feature
of sexual satisfaction. And so now we're getting into more

(09:01):
of the oh well it's okay, you just go ahead
kind of mentality that some women have about sex. Right,
and a lot of surveys from the Kinsey Institute have
found that if you ask men and women whether or
not sex can be satisfying without an orgasm, way more
women will say yeah, that's okay, compared to men who

(09:24):
are like, oh, I gonna know, I mean sort of,
that's what that's my end goal, right, And that Fause
says that by downplaying the importance of orgasms, women may
be indicating that they don't value their orgasmic pleasure, or
like you were saying, it could be that they have
placed a greater importance on other aspects of relationships. So
maybe just emotional connectedness, but uh, having the connectedness of

(09:48):
sex is more important than actually achieving orgasm um. So
by that, by extension of that logic, you would think
that if we're faking orgas um, it would be too
foster emotional intimacy or to trappaman depending on what you're reading,

(10:09):
depending on what you're reading, because there's also the notion
that you know, completely opposite to that, that faking an
orgasm is a way for us to distance ourselves from
male sexual partners by ourselves. I'm still talking again about
heterosexual women. Will talk about same sex relationships a little
bit later on. Um, do you want to get into
some statistics. Let's do it the stats. Let's set the

(10:31):
stats there have been a number of studies and surveys
on women faking it, women specifically faking it from nineteen
seventy three to the present day. A series of studies
have found that anywhere from fifty three to sixty five

(10:51):
of both married and unmarried women have pretended to climax
at some point. Um there was a study at leave
It came out in two thousand and ten from Aaron
Cooper who was a psychologist at Temple University, and she
talked to three hundred and sixty six women ages eighteen
to thirty two and found that about sixty of these

(11:14):
women faked it. And I thought that this study was
kind of compelling because the number one reason that she
found for these mostly college females faking it was creating distance.
And then she also found for a small subset said
that it actually enhanced their own sexual experience. Was kind

(11:36):
of a fake it till you make it sort of thing. Yeah,
maybe the faking it just turned them on more, and
maybe they could actually achieve a real orgasm, well yeah,
by maybe by by faking excitement, that could turn the
other person on more as well. And then it's sort
of snowballs perhaps, Yeah, UM some other reasons that people
say in various studies that they faked orgasm. We're avoiding

(11:59):
the blame, aim and pressure that comes along with with sex,
and avoiding conflict, doubt, guilt, shame, whether it's yours or
your partners. UM and some people that Fause talked to
you in her book. Basically we're saying, you know, well,
I don't have a good reason for not you know,
orgasm NG, so maybe I should just go ahead and

(12:19):
fake it. I feel bad about it. Oh, these expectations.
A lot of this goes back to UH, to these
sex roles and these sexual scripts that we take into
the bedroom and feel so compelled to follow. UM. And
in addition to you know, not wanting to have to
explain yourself, there's also the idea of wanting to make

(12:42):
your partner feel adequate, especially among UH opposite sex couples.
There was a study from the University of Kansas from
Charlene L. Mullen Hard and Sheina KA Shippy, and she
similar to the Temple University study I just mentioned, pulled

(13:03):
both male and female students and asked whether they had
faked orgasm and the number one reason why the of
women said yes, they had faked an orgasm, was that
they didn't want to bruise the guy's egos. This would
be called altruistic deceit. Yeah, that's uh, that's interesting because

(13:25):
men's a lot of men's reasons for faking it are
similar to women's the same, like they just wanted to
be over or they know they're not going to achieve orgasm,
so let's just go ahead and get this over with.
But I wonder if men have the same the same
reasoning as far as not wanting to hurt someone's feelings.
There is a gender difference um that Dr Mollenhard at

(13:46):
the University of Kansas uncovered between men's and women's rationale
for faking an orgasm. More women said that they wanted
to either avoid the negative consequence of having to explain
why they weren't able to finish um, or they wanted
to please their partners, So kind of from both angles,

(14:07):
it's a way of it's sort of a subservience to
the other person. Yeah, and going back to Aaron Cooper
who you mentioned earlier, and altruistic deceit, you know, saving
the person's feelings. Um. Aaron Cooper called it a relationship
maintenance strategy and basically said that this leads into another
study called do women pretend orgasm to retain a mate?

(14:30):
I was not on board with a study from Todd
Shackelford and Dr Shackleford. If you're listening, No, nothing personal,
but I question your methodology. It felt like one of
those kind of self fulfilling prophecies that's set up like
these researchers basically went into this study assuming that via

(14:50):
evolutionary biology, that women who suspected their partner of cheating
were more likely to fake because it was it was
a way to manipulate a partner's conmit meant by signaling
a mate selection, because it also goes back to this
theory of female orgasm existing as a way for um
women to retain sperm of fitter mates, so that you know,

(15:15):
it's a signal to guys that were like, hey, you
know what my body is into your body? That means
you're amazing. I'm boosting your ego right now. And uh so,
so they pulled these women for how often they faked orgasms,
and then they also asked about certain behaviors such as
intentionally flirting in front of other guys to make their
partner jealous or displaying jealous tendencies toward other women that

(15:39):
they're uh, their mates might interact with. And so they said, yes,
there is a correlation, and women be faking just to
keep their men around. Exactly. That's actually a quote from
the study. And really, I mean, if you think about it,
we have like listed out so many different reasons why
women might fake. It might be to keep a man.

(16:01):
It might be to drive him away. It might be
to go to bed, it might be to stay awake
and cuddle. And I would just like to state my
favorite quote from this this Retain a Mate study. Uh.
You know, we talked about how women are are faking
orgasms to to retain their mate and being like, you're sexy,
so I'm going to fake it and look at how
sexy I am by making all these noises, So let's

(16:23):
be sexy together. Um. Another reason is to prevent defection
from the relationship, which I think is a great way
a great of course a scientist person would write that,
so instead of saying we broke up, just starts saying, well, uh,
she defected. Yeah. I think the next time that anything

(16:46):
like this happens to me, like a breakup or something.
I think I'm going to say, it's I'm not breaking
up with you, I am defecting. To defect from this relationship,
it sounds much more revolutionary like rod affection from the anyway,
moving on, Um, well, a lot of this research is
focused on women, but we have not gotten to one

(17:09):
of the most groundbreaking points of all this research, which
is that guys, guess what, you're doing it too. Guys
are doing it too, and not just a couple of
fellas here and there no no going back to that
University of Kansas study which was done specifically because Charlene L.

(17:35):
Mullenhard wanted to know whether or not men pretended orgasm,
and of the men surveyed said that yes, they had pretended,
and another in addition to that, another sixteen percent said
that they had kenna sort of pretended, done something along

(17:55):
the lines to to deceive their partner in terms of
how my they were really enjoying the sexual activity. Um.
And there was one interesting difference that she found in
the ways that men and women faked it. Uh, Carolin,
you mentioned, you know, looking sexy and being all like

(18:16):
oh wow, you know, going back to the when Harry
met sally, oh wow. Women tend to fake by becoming
a lot more vocal, whereas men tend to fake by
clenching their muscles more and thrusting harder and then being like, Okay,
I did it, I'm done, or just stopping. Some of

(18:38):
the guys were like, well I just I just stopped. Yeah,
it's over now. And and some of the studies talked
about scripts for this kind of thing, relationship and sexual
scripts for this kind of thing, and how, um, when
a man fakes it, or when a man orgasms real
or fake, uh, that signifies that's faith over, whereas if

(19:01):
a woman fakes it, that signifies like okay, honey, you
can go now, so that we can stop right. Um.
And I think it's also worth pointing out that a
vast majority of this fakery takes place during penile vaginal intercourse.
Oral sex came in a quote distant second, So there's

(19:24):
something about intercourse that that that sets these crazy scripts
into play. And the script, the established script is that, uh,
that the woman should orgasm first and then the man
should orgasm, because the male orgasm signals the end of sex.

(19:45):
Because in the physiological process of sexual intercourse and climax,
men go through a latency period after sex, whereas women
can have multiple orgasms. And playing off of some of
those differences you were talking about, UM, a study bisexual
research team William Masters and Virginia Johnson found in the lab.

(20:05):
I wonder what kind of experiments these were found in
the lab that men took about four minutes to orgasm
with their partner, while women took ten to twenty minutes
to orgasm with a partner. But when masturbating women took
about you guessed it four minutes. So there, you're right,
there is something about partnered sexual uh, penile vaginal intercourse

(20:30):
right because um, and I don't have the statistics in
front of me, but women will report far higher prevalence
of achieving an orgasm through clitoral stimulation versus achieving orgasm
through vaginal stimulation exclusively a lot of women. I think
it's something around of women rarely will have an orgasm

(20:53):
just from vaginal intercourse. But there was all this brought
up a question in my mind of whether or not
this is just an issue for heterosexual couples. UM. And
while a majority of the research is done on on
street women, there was a study that we found from
the Journal of Sex Research in a little bit dated,

(21:16):
and the researchers were investigating the differences in self reported
sexual satisfaction among lesbians compared to straight women, and they
found that lo and behold, lesbian's report having sex more often,
feeling more sexually satisfied, and having orgasms uh more often

(21:38):
than their straight counterparts. And so the researchers wondered if
maybe this had to do with the type of sexual
stimulation that is going on now. At the same time, UM,
I also was doing a little little poken around on
the interwebs and landed on a column on AlterNet basically

(21:59):
urging p people to dispel this myth of the perfect
lesbian sex because that only perpetuates this idea that all
women function sexually the exact same way and that's not true.
Um But statistically lesbians do seem to have seem to
have a better, better time of it. But I wonder

(22:19):
if it's because they're breaking there, they're not operating within
that rigid heterosexual script. Could be they feel more free
to um do whatever feels good instead of just what
they think their partner wants or what they think sex
is supposed to be like um. Going back to Masters
and Johnson, who you referenced, their research showed that same

(22:41):
sex couples of both genders were more likely to take
their time, maybe because there's not some order in their
head of Okay, well you go first, and then I'll go,
and then we'll then we'll fall asleep. Yeah. Maybe so.
Going to the Journal of Sex Research from three uh,

(23:03):
they cited some stats that of heterosexual women reported difficulty
reaching orgasm and fifteen percent reported inability to reach orgasm.
And this compares with twenty percent of lesbians who reported
difficulty reaching orgasms and only seven percent of lesbians who
reported inability to reach orgasm. So a big difference there, right,

(23:26):
which just makes me think of that the statistic of
how pan vagual intercourse is usually far more correlated to
fake orgasms where both men and women compared to other
forms of sexual contact. But the whole faking thing, I mean,
it's it's a it's it's pretty fascinating that we that

(23:48):
we would a lot of times when you read in
women's publications about faking orgasms, it's urging us not to
because the bottom line is you might not need to
fake it if you're sexual communication is open and honest,
and you're telling your partner you know what feels good
and what you like, and hopefully that will help things.

(24:08):
I mean the fact though, that people in that master's
in Johnson study were able in a laboratory setting to
the orgasm within ten minutes, it's pretty astounding to me.
I wonder how they set the lab up, Like, did
they did they make it look like the Playboy Bunny?
A lot of tea candles in sense, lots of pillows.

(24:29):
It was the early sixties, so you know, beaded curtains, yeah,
a lot of shag carpeting. And one more thing, just
bring it back to men, because we've talked about how yes,
men do it, but we spent a lot more time
talking about women. And it reminds me of an article
that came out a couple of years ago in New
York Magazine talking about this phenomenon of men faking it

(24:53):
and especially men using condoms as a tool of subversive
uh fakery. And one of the guys said, one of
the men who was who was interviewed for the article says,
as a guy, your biggest fear is that you'll come
too soon and Another man who has interviewed said that
there was a double standard because men are expected to

(25:16):
be the sex craze beast who can yes, achieve an
orgasm within four minutes and even a laboratory of a setting,
whereas women are almost assumed to take longer and maybe
not even be able to reach orgasm at all. And
if we are, we might be faking it. So I

(25:37):
can see how how some some fellows might might see
a double standard there. But to all of this, I say,
maybe we should just use this as a lesson in
why communication is so important. Yeah, pheel, I mean, tell
your partner what's what works for you and what doesn't.
But also, if it's not going to happen, it's not

(25:59):
going to happen. And yes, there is the fear that
you might hurt someone's feelings or someone might feel guilty
or insulted or whatever. But yeah, I think opening those
channels of communication my lesson the need to fake it right,
because if you look at psychological studies of couples who
are complaining of having disappointing sex lives, a lot of

(26:23):
times it traces back to their level of sexual communication.
If there's a dip in the activity. A lot of
times there's been a dip in or non existence of communication,
and I mean, communication is not an easy thing, but
it's something to keep in mind. And can I can
I toss that one last fun finding only if it's fun,

(26:47):
it's pretty fun um And I have tweeted about this,
so Twitter followers, you're already in the know. But there
was a two thousand and ten study from Emory University
looking at the economics of faking it, and they found
that a funny correlation between education levels and uh faking
orgasm and found that people who are more highly educated

(27:10):
tend to fake it because quote, love making takes time
and people and people with more education may have a
higher opportunity cost of time and may therefore be more
likely to fake just to get it over with. Perhaps
this is a quote, perhaps so they can return to
writing papers. So doctoral students out there, we are onto

(27:33):
you interesting now. I mean the study really had like
whole giant formulas with symbols and things division signs. I
don't know. Uh So now that we have bombarded you
with statistics and theories about who's faking it and why,
do you know what we're gonna ask for your stories.

(27:55):
Don't be ashamed. Yeah. Also, don't be too dirty. We
can't read them on the air to dirty, right And uh,
you know, or if someone out there who has never
faked it before, let us let us know, or you
just did in an incredible communicator. Yeah. Oh, another group
of people I would like to hear from. Some of
these studies talked about people who fake it intersect with

(28:17):
women who have report never having had an orgasm. And
so if we have any people out there who have
never had an orgasm, they've they've tried, but maybe just
have never gotten there. Do you fake it for that reason?
Let us know. Mom stuff at Discovery dot com. And
you can also head over to Facebook. But again, please

(28:39):
keep our Facebook walk clean. Uh. And in the meantime,
we've got a couple of emails here. I have one
in response to our long ago episode about female scientists,
and I really wanted to share this one because it
is from Chloe, who is a PhD student in chemistry
at one of the top research institutions in the US,

(29:00):
and she writes, first of all, I think people should
understand that STEM females may make a little more money,
but it's also the result of an additional five to
ten years ten to fourteen hour days six days a
week of additional experience post post bachelor degree. I think
this is something important that should be considered before convincing
people to pursue careers in stem. Secondly, I think your

(29:23):
lack of role models explains explains the gender gap very well.
But it's not because there aren't lack of successful female scientists.
There are plenty of these very successful, intelligent scientists, but
that doesn't translate to an individual we can look up to.
I have a female advisor, and while she is a
successful scientist, she has to nanny's on rotation, travels at
least a week out of the month, and makes it

(29:44):
clear that family is not high on our list of priorities.
The sad part is this is an uncommon Many women
my age and their late twenties scientists are not want
a family. However, it's very difficult to find a role
model who can show us how to balance family life,
their love for fience, their careers, and also show compassion
toward others. I think this is often the case that

(30:04):
successful scientists might lack the more quote unquote human side
of things that many women consider to be important. This
is why I and many of my friends are not
pursuing This is why I and many of my friends
are not continuing to pursue traditional academic careers. So some
great insight from Chloe, Thank you. We have some more

(30:25):
insight from Jessica. This is about our friendship podcasts plural.
She says that she's in somewhat unique of a position
of being best friends with a male and female romantic couple.
Through an odd but not uncomfortable set of circumstances. We
have ended up sharing a two bedroom apartment here in
Korea along with their two cats, also a male and
a female. The difference in our friendship pretty clearly exemplifies

(30:46):
the differences you mentioned between male and female roommates. With
my female best friend, I share a very caring, warm bond.
I call her when I'm upset about something, and she
is the one who keeps up with me when I'm
out of town. We know just about all of the
him at details of each other's lives, from my dating
foibles to her relationship with her parents, her boyfriend. My
male best friend loves and cares about me, but expresses

(31:08):
this through wanting to spend time with me and watching
funny movies, are making jokes together. We rarely talk about
our emotions, and when I gave him a hug the
other day at his receiving some bad news, it's probably
the first time we touched affectionately in months. They're very
different friendships and having them both is a complimentary force
that means I don't have to search for someone to
share brunch or a movie. And thanks to everybody who's

(31:30):
written in again. Our email address is mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com. But of course you can also head
over to our Facebook page and send us a tweet.
We're at Mom's Stuff podcast. And if you want to
know more about orgasms, both fake and not, you can
read How Orgasms Work by me written by me How

(31:50):
Stuff Works dot com. Be sure to check out our
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Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
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(32:15):
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