No, no. Since they can give birth, they have organisms. It's a common mistake.

Well, this is solid proof that women are better at getting women off than men are.

Wait... Ortho, your setup was begging for generalities, right?

Next: Sun Very Hot and Far Away, Experts Say! After this break.

Are there now posting limits on metachat? I can't post a new post.

Only for you. Everyone else can post as much as they want ;-) I don't think there are limits - what message are you getting?

This female orgasm nonsense won't last - it will fade away soon enough, just like that myth about the "clitoris".

Ah, ok, I can post now. Seems like a half-hour limit. The message is some cryptic pseudo-zen thing.

there's always been a half hour limit, I think.

orgasms? what are they?

i keed...

What an irritating article!

The researchers, a bunch of mouth-breathing 18 year olds who maybe have seen a person naked twice no your sister doesn't count, and who are having difficulties asking the proper questions and understanding the answers couldn't find the clitoris or an orgasm with both hands, a flashlight, a GPS device and a pack of (adolescent) Boy Scouts, from Melbourne's La Trobe University and the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales said they were surprised at the "extreme discrepancies" between men and women.

There. That's better.

Oh, now don't start with that whole mythical clitoris thing.

*AHEM*

I appreciate the "lebanese" / "lesbian" homonym as much as anyone but it is not as cute if you actually have BOTH Lebanese family/friends as well as lesbian ones. It gets confusing as much as anything.

"What do you mean? My Lebanese cousin or my lebanese cousin?"

I ain't freakin' or nothin' but I wish I could discourage it somehow. Most folks have no Lebanese in their lives but I have many in my family and acquaintance.

I am interested to see a study of Lebanese lesbian orgasms... I bet they raise the roof.

What's news is that the percentage of women who report regularly having orgasms and the number of women who report being orgasmic at all has gone up pretty dramatically in the last fifty years. You can attribute a portion of this to reporting effects where women in years past were reluctant to admit to being orgasmic. However, anorgasmia was known to be a large and common problem by the 70s when cultural attitudes reversed and there suddenly existed a lot of cultural pressure for women to be orgasmic.

Young women are particularly prone to being anorgasmic, even now I think the stats are still around 50%.

The three chief factors which probably cause anorgasmia among women are lack of masturbation, poor technique of partners, and societal mores which teach women to repress their sexuality.

With regard to the first, Masters and Johnson found that the most effective sex therapy for resolving anorgasmia was teaching and encouraging masturbation. Reported rates of female masturbation have gone way up in the last 35 years and I feel pretty sure that the majority of that increase is real. And it's likely that that alone may account for the largest portion of of the increase in orgasmic sexual response among American women.

I really have no clear sense of how much the sexual technique of partners has improved. I'd suspect that the only thing of significance here would be an increase in cunninglingus, which I think exists but it relatively mild. There are subpopulations of the American population where cunninglingus almost doesn't exist at all. Anyway, overall, the increased male awareness of the central importance of the clitoris is probably making some difference.

Finally, the last influence, cultural attitudes about female sexuality and how that affects female sexual psychology, is a big unknown. Even so, I think it's quite important. My intuition is that overall (not just the specific context of orgasm) with regard to the female sexual experience, the American cultural repression of female sexuality qua female sexuality (not female sexuality as an extension of male sexual desire) is by far the biggest factor diminishing female sexual response. And my intution is that this has gotten considerably better, even if there's still a long way to go.

Actually, I think you may be overcomplicating thinks a touch, kmellis. I think the rise in the number of women reporting regular achievement of orgasm is simply because their partners now care whether or not women have them (or at least pretend to care). I'm not saying women can't provide for themselves, but it seems to be pretty much expected these days that, when a couple have sex, both of them will come, not just the man (assuming there is a man present, of course) and there is an expectation that this is a goal worth working towards rather than a happy coincidence when it happens.

Of course, I don't really know what I'm talking about, so you should probably ignore me completely.

so dg, you are saying that women actually come more now.

kmellis is saying that they simply report it more now.

(to simplify both of your points)

I have to side with kmellis. Perhaps women are coming more these days, not just reporting it more. But I think if that's so it has more to do with their own awareness of the "O" and moving away from shame and effacement of their own desires & passions than it has to do with the enlightenment of men. Many men are more enlightened than they once were, but the overall number who "care about their partner's orgasms" is, I suspect, still dismally low.

I also find that, woman to woman, orgasm has more to do with her own emotional connection with sex and understanding of her body than it has to do with my level of enlightenment. Small sample size, admittedly :)

Personally, I'm beginning to suspect that the male orgasm is a myth. (It IS hair gel)

[grumpy old man] BAAAH! You'n yer FANcy orgasms and yer havin' to concentrate on "HER needs!" Orgasms... FLIBBIDY-FLOO! In my day we didn't HAVE orgasms! Why, we had to hop in the ol' Model A and drive 500 miles - THROUGH the desert! - an' go to a health resort where we would have MEDICALLY INDUCED HYSTERICAL PAROXYSMS!!! And that's the way it was AND WE LIKED IT!!!! [/grumpy old man]

I think kmellis has it right. He also makes an important point: that with the women's movement of the 1970s, increased awareness of orgasm and assertion that it was an achievable right resulted in actual pressure on women to be orgasmic. The idea is that if the man is any good, and the woman is 'in touch with' her sexuality, whatever that means, she'll come like crazy, and if those conditions aren't met, she won't, and there's been failure on someone's part. At times a woman's orgasm can even take on a sort of 'trophy' status for men, and the focus on it can be too great.

Though everybody likes coming (duh), the implication that a woman should come at some point during every sexual encounter, or it means she has repressed sexuality, is, I think, nothing more than a projection of traditional male expectations of sexuality on women. Certainly it's a worthy goal. However, sexuality can be constructed differently, so that orgasm is seen as one among many pleasures, not necessarily the only satisfactory result. There is a tremendous amount of sexual pleasure that can be derived from being on the 'plateau' state for women, and the climax phase isn't quite the be-all and end-all it is for men. I think the difference between the plateau phase and orgasm for men seems to form a very steep slope, where the difference between plateau phase and orgasm for women is a smaller leap. Anecdotal, yes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not down on the female orgasm, in the least. I am certain that women do come more than they did fifty years ago. There's no doubt in my mind about that, simply based on the conversations I've had with generations of my elders who were involved in the women's movement and some of this sexuality education and body image acceptance stuff in the 70s and 80s. And I've certainly encountered the occasional woman, even of my own generation, who was afraid to masturbate or who is otherwise repressed and has psychological barriers to orgasm. But those women also have psychological barriers to every other type of sexual pleasure, not just orgasm.

It's just interesting that as female orgasms have become more central a focus of sexual activity, they have fallen prey to some of the same social pressures and performance standards that plague other areas of sexual activity.