I’ll Never Let My Girlfriend Feel Like She Has to Fake an Orgasm
By: Renee Rose
Tags: Gender, Relationships, Equality, Culture, Sexuality

I’ll Never Let My Girlfriend Feel Like She Has to Fake an Orgasm

Faking orgasms is a feminist issue

From the time I became sexually active, I felt the need to fake orgasms. I still remember the first time my ex-girlfriend slipped her hand down my pants and I instinctively faked an orgasm within roughly 60 seconds. Apparently, I was under the impression that if it took any longer than that, there was something wrong with me.

What a joke.

I just did what I’d seen in every porn video I’d ever watched. I gripped the sheets, moaned, rolled my eyes back in my head, and tensed up. She sat up in bed, proud. “Did you like that?”, she asked with a sly smile on her face. “That was amazing,” I replied, making sure to give the impression that I was having a hard time catching my breath.

For the next 6 years of our relationship, I faked an orgasm when having sex with my ex almost every single time. In the entirety of our 7 years together, I genuinely came maybe three times. When she broke my heart and left me for someone else, I still didn’t tell her that she seemingly had an inability to make me finish (although I certainly thought about saying it to be petty).

While I felt the need to fake orgasms, I felt like I had to be in the minority. There was no way that the majority of women found it necessary to fake orgasms. As it turns out, it is clear that I was young and inexperienced.

According to a variety of studies, somewhere between a third and 75 percent of women report faking orgasms. It should also be noted that faking orgasms is much more common amongst heterosexual women with straight women having way fewer orgasms than straight men.

To anyone that knows me today, I’m very open about talking about my sex life. I talk about it openly, I write about it openly, and I feel no shame discussing my kinkier side. That being said, I used to be pretty self-conscious when it came to sharing my sexual needs- especially when I was intimate with my partner. This is why, many, many times, I faked orgasms. It felt more reasonable to just let my sexual partners feel good about themselves than to be the biggest advocate for my sexual needs. I mean, I could always finish on my own later, right?

Because of this, I now realize that I missed out on years of sexual pleasure.

Now, with my current partner, I absolutely refuse to fake an orgasm. I just don’t do it anymore. And I won’t let her either. I decided pretty early on in our relationship that while I would certainly always try my very best to make her cum, I wasn’t going to put pressure on her. I wasn’t going to make her feel like that’s what it was all about. I wasn’t going to make her feel like she had to lie to me to spare my self-esteem.

Put simply, if my girlfriend couldn’t finish, I wasn’t going to take that shit personally. Sure, I was going to open up a line of communication with her and ask her what she needed me to do and I’d do that. But, at the same time, if she was tired and just wanted to stop, for example, I wasn’t going to push it. I wanted intimacy to be about the love between us and while orgasms are really, really nice, I was never going to act like a dick if she couldn’t get there. And I certainly wasn’t going to continue pretending to have earth-shattering orgasms every time someone went down on me.

Work for it, dude.

Why Do So Many Women Feel Like They Have to Fake Orgasms?

The first time I realized that I’d been going about everything completely the wrong way was during a hookup with a girl I met soon after my ex-girlfriend dumped me. We had spent the night having drinks at a local bar and drunkenly stumbled our way back to her apartment which was a few blocks away. Not 30 seconds after making our way inside, we started shedding our clothes. Despite how turned on I was, I found myself accepting that I was about to have to put on a performance yet again.

As I laid down on the bed and let her move down south, I started taking a mental note of the time and decided to give it 5 minutes or so before I’d pretend to finish. It’s not necessarily that what she was doing didn’t feel great, it was more that I had cut off any possibility of orgasming in my mind for years and I wasn’t expecting it to change any time soon.

Then she did something that shocked me.

She looked up at me and said, “Tell me what you like.”

Now, while this may seem pretty sad to many of you reading this, I had never once been asked by a partner about “what I liked” in the past. They simply did things and I pretended to really enjoy it. There had never been a conversation. We just went through the motions and I pretended to cum. Then it was over.

But this girl looked me dead in the eyes and asked me to tell her what I liked.

I’m assuming that the look on my face probably told her everything she needed to know because she looked at me questioningly.

“What’s wrong?”, she said.

“Um. I- I’m just thinking,” I sputtered.

“You have to think about what you like?”, she responded with a slanted eyebrow.

I just looked at her.

“Has nobody ever asked you what you like?” she asked.

I just shook my head.

“Do you usually just fake orgasms?”, she asked with a knowing look in her eyes.

I nodded.

What followed was her pulling her pants back on, sitting cross-legged on the bed with me, and having a conversation that would change my entire perspective on what sex should be.

She told me about how sad it was that women felt like they needed to fake orgasms. She argued that feeling the need to fake an orgasm was creating a vicious cycle in which women would always feel like they had to fake it and therefore always would. They’d never even experience an orgasm. They would just become comfortable with convincing their partner that they had. They’d be missing out on something that we, as humans, should experience.

She was right. As women, we’re doing ourselves absolutely no favors by faking an orgasm. According to Gigi Engle, a certified sex coach, sexologist, and author of F*cking Mistakes: a guide to sex, love, and life, faking orgasms can lead to an overall less satisfying sex life. According to Engle, when you continuously fake orgasms you create a loop of repeated faking-it behavior.

“Because you’ve never taken the initiative to speak up on your own behalf, you don’t know how to tell a partner what you need,” she said. “Your partner is not responsible for your orgasm, you are. If you don’t tell them what you like, want and need, how are they supposed to know? They are not a mind reader.”- Gigi Engle

So why do so many people fake it? Well, there are a few different reasons for this. In a published study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that explored why women faked orgasms, the researcher found themselves in a series of different conversations with women concerning whether or not they “faked it”. While some women replied, “Of course, who doesn’t?” others replied, “What? Women should demand an orgasm.”.

As it turned out, many of women’s thoughts about why so many of us feel the need to fake orgasms grounded these thoughts in beliefs about gender. There was plenty of narrative surrounding “men should” or “men do” and “women have to” or “women should”. The inability of a partner to recognize the clitoris from the labia will of course cause the chances of a woman electing to fake it to skyrocket. That being said, there are other reasons that so many of us just fake it.

Faking It Because You Want Your Partner to Feel Successful

When I was faking orgasms regularly, the biggest reason I did so was so that my girlfriend would feel accomplished and good about herself. I loved the smile on her face when she thought she had made me cum and couldn’t stand being honest with her. I wanted her to feel good about herself and capable. As it turns out, 57.1 percent of the women in the study reported that they wanted their partner to feel successful and that’s why they faked it.

As women, we’re conditioned to believe that it is our place to make our partner feel good, capable, and powerful. Society would have us believe that it is our place to make our partners (especially male partners) feel like they’re the best at what they do, that only they can make us feel pleasure. This is part of the reason that the female orgasm was a myth for so many years in the eyes of our male counterparts.

As women, we should deny this logic and fight for our needs.

I refuse to fake orgasms just to make my partner feel good about themselves anymore. Further, I encourage my girlfriend to never feel so vulnerable that she has to fake an orgasm so that I’ll feel good about myself. Sure, making my girlfriend finish is something I take pride in, but I don’t want her to feel like she has to fake pleasure on my behalf. That isn’t her job, just as it isn’t my job to do that for her. If one of us can’t finish, we talk about it. If one of us simply wants to stop, that’s more than okay because sex is more to us than the climax.

Something else that should be talked about is partners that make women feel like they have to cum or else the entire act is for nothing. I recently read an article entitled, “Why do women fake orgasms — and is it anti-feminist? We asked five women” and one of the women interviewed, when asked why she felt the need to fake an orgasm, said something that many of us women can relate to:

“There are lots of reasons. Sometimes the guy seems so fragile, he’s just asking how you’re feeling constantly and you can tell he’s not going to stop until you finish. I think they wouldn’t be able to take the truth, so I fake it.”

Why do we feel the need to make a fragile man feel less fragile? I’ve been there a few times in the past (back when I was trying to convince myself that I was straight) and I’ve faked an orgasm for this very reason.

One time, I was letting a male friend of mine finger me (despite having no interest in the act whatsoever) and he consistently rubbed my labia, clearly having no idea about the existence or function of a clitoris. I let a few minutes go by and then I faked it. Why? He was my friend, I knew he was fragile, and I knew that telling him the truth would upset him.

I didn’t want to hurt his ego.

As women, many of us have been conditioned to feel that we are nothing more than tools for male pleasure. If a man seems insistent on making us cum, if that’s his ultimate end-goal, we have to appease him. We have to give him exactly what he’s looking for. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right?

Wrong.

Women deserve to only be touched when they want to be touched.

Women deserve pleasure.

Women deserve an understanding and patient partner.

Nothing less.

Faking It Because You’re Tired and Want It to End

In the survey, another common reason that so many women faked orgasms was reported to be the fact that they simply wanted sex to end because they were tired. In fact, 44.6 percent of the women surveyed reported this. That’s a pretty significant amount.

On the few occasions that I tried really hard to have a legitimate orgasm with my ex-girlfriend, so long would go by that I would not only start to feel insecure about how long I was taking but I would also just get incredibly exhausted. So I faked it just so it would end.

Why didn’t I feel comfortable just telling her I was tired and wanted to stop?

Put simply, because I was conditioned to believe that sex couldn’t end until somebody came.

Sex is so much more than an orgasm. Sex should be about intimacy, mutual respect, and thorough communication with your partner. Sex should be about appreciating each other’s bodies, listening to each other’s needs, and enjoying the closeness of someone you care about. Further, sex should be about communicating what we need as women.

The reason that so many women fake an orgasm simply so that sex will end because they are tired is due to the fact that we really just don’t feel comfortable communicating with our partners. In the study, the authors hypothesized that lack of sexual communication may be partially responsible for orgasm faking. This is because, after all, if we are comfortable telling our partners how and where we like to be touched, they are more likely to be receptive and our chance of experiencing sexual pleasure becomes much greater.

On the other hand, when we don’t feel comfortable talking about sex with our partner, or have a partner that is unwilling to be open when it comes to listening to our needs, there is much less of a chance that our needs will be met.

For many women, this is a conversation we just don’t feel like we’re able to have. Over half of the sample involved in this study (55.4 percent) reported that they wanted to communicate about sex but that they either didn’t feel comfortable voicing their concerns to their partner, didn’t want to hurt their partner’s feelings, or were simply embarrassed by the notion of demanding what they needed.

When looking at these statistics, it’s no wonder that so many women try their hardest to orgasm but simply give up due to exhaustion, faking it so that their partner’s fragile ego isn’t bruised.

Faking It To Sexually Satisfy a Partner

Finally, and perhaps one of the biggest reasons that so many women feel it is their responsibility to fake an orgasm, many women believe it is their role to ensure the sexual pleasure of their partner.

According to a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, “women have fewer, less predictable, and more varied orgasm experiences than men”. According to a Healthline article that summarizes this study, there is also a clear pattern in a woman’s frequency of orgasm depending on sexual orientation:

“Researchers from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University found that people of different genders and sexual orientations experience orgasm during sex with a familiar partner at different frequencies. While there are slight differences in orgasm rate for men across sexual orientation, for women the variation is more significant. Straight women are less likely to reach orgasm than lesbian women, and bisexual women experience orgasm the least frequently of all.”

So why do so few women have legitimate orgasms with their partners and what is the link with sexual orientation?

According to one of the authors of the study, there are a few different answers to these questions.

“We know that the classic argument is that for men, [orgasm] is so tied to ejaculation. There is also the possibility that among lesbian women, there is better mutual attention paid to both partners and different sexual activities like cunnilingus. For heterosexual pairs, a tendency towards one type of sexual activity may reduce orgasm rate for the female partner. Among heterosexual couples it is often penetrative behavior over another type of activity. Familiarity, variation in sexual activity, and duration of sex may all contribute to a higher rate of orgasm for women. We know that there are all those different experiences, but there is very little research on the different types and what they mean. Those are questions for another day.”- Justin Garcia, Ph.D

As it would appear from the findings of this study, women in heterosexual relationships may have a tendency to orgasm less frequently due to less mutual attention paid to their needs as in same-sex relationships as well as a tendency to almost always resort to penetrative behavior.

In my own opinion, I would also go so far as to say that many women in heterosexual relationships believe (perhaps subconsciously) that their partner’s pleasure is more important than their own. This could be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they feel like it’s more difficult to bring them to orgasm so they give up completely. Perhaps they believe that as long as the male gets off, the entire act was “successful”. Perhaps they feel embarrassed being advocates for their own sexual enjoyment when they hold the sexual enjoyment of their partner on such a pedestal.

Regardless of the reason, women should never feel like their own sexual pleasure is less important than that of their male partner. Or their female partner. Or anyone they choose to sleep with.

In the Archives of Sexual Behavior study, the researchers looked at how specific beliefs about gender and sex may be associated with faking an orgasm and they found that if a woman thinks, in general, that men need their partner to orgasm in order to feel sexually satisfied, she is more likely to fake it. In my opinion, most feminists would agree that a man should know where a clitoris is (and in most cases, heterosexual men do) but it should also be argued that men shouldn’t be selfish in the bedroom- they should be attuned to what their partner wants. That includes knowing if she wants to just stop whether an orgasm is achieved or not. Women just don’t need all of that extra pressure.

It should be noted that there is a very big difference between wanting your partner to experience an orgasm for the sake of their own pleasure and needing your partner to orgasm in order to feel satisfied yourself. Further, this very thing can mean the difference between a woman experiencing an orgasm and electing to fake it completely. That is one of the biggest reasons that I choose to communicate with my girlfriend that while I would love to make her cum, I would never pressure her to do so for my own gain. Our pleasure is equally important. That’s what sex should be all about.

Faking Orgasms is a Feminist Issue

The key takeaway that I want you to have from reading this story is that faking orgasms is absolutely a feminist issue. Put simply, women fake orgasms due to societal pressure to be desirable and to avoid upsetting other people. While I’m definitely not suggesting that it is anti-feminist to fake it, it is important that we accept that in the society that we live in, women feel pressured to behave in a certain way and give men a certain thing when they ask for it. This is something that we need to work on changing and I believe that that starts with practicing a form of self-love.

We should be the biggest advocates for what we desire, what we need, and what we deserve. All women deserve to experience orgasms if they so choose. We also deserve the understanding of our partners when we just aren’t in the mood, are too tired, or don’t feel like we can get there. There should be no pressure. The more we feel pressured in a world where there is already so much pressure on us will only make it that much more difficult for us to experience sexual pleasure. Further, men should learn to communicate with their female partners and work tirelessly to make them feel comfortable and heard.

Everyone deserves a good orgasm and honesty is the best policy.