Why Is Orgasm So Difficult For Some Women?

How easy is it for a woman to reach orgasm?

Well, as you may know, knowing the right way to make a woman come can be a real challenge for a man. After all, we know it is more challenging for a woman to reach orgasm than a man. To make things worse, many men have the wrong idea about how quickly women can come because men watch a lot of porn on the Internet. This tends to show women reaching orgasm after just a few moments of male thrusting. Real life isn’t like that!

Oh dear! Porn presents us with these illusions about female orgasm. But often enough, female porn stars are faking orgasm. As a man who wants to know how to make a woman come, you need to know that if you do what you see in porn movies, you’ll most likely never be able to satisfy a woman!

The truth is that women take longer to arouse than men. And they want romance, sensitivity and emotional connection as well as physical pleasure. Also, woman often need a long period of sexual connection and intimacy – call it foreplay – to become sufficiently aroused to have an orgasm.

So if you want to be a success at taking a woman to orgasm, those are the kind of things you need to keep in mind.

Video – How To Make A Woman Come

One of the side-effects of ready accessibility to internet porn is that teenage women and women in their 20s – and their boyfriends – have been brought up with a diet of Internet porn.

These guys and girls might believe that there’s something wrong if a woman can’t come really quickly. So here’s the reality: on average, women need 20 to 30 minutes of foreplay to ensure they will enjoy an orgasm.

During the last 20 or 30 years, the importance of female pleasure has become much more obvious – and happily women are now beginning to demand physical pleasure and orgasms during sex.

Having said that, there’ still a big gap in orgasm frequency between men and women. And women might secretly be very dissatisfied with a relationship with a male partner who isn’t willing to learn how to make  a woman come.

So the ability to give a woman pleasure by knowing how to give her an orgasm is a fundamental requirement of male sexual skills.

Female Orgasm Capacity – How To Give A Woman An Orgasm

All women can come – sometimes written as “cum” – provided the circumstances are right.

And the best way to help a woman achieve orgasm is to be a sensitive, caring partner who knows how to please a woman in bed. While, at the same time, being masculine and confident in bed. Oh yes – and one other thing – to have a relationship in which your woman respects and trusts you.

With such a man, the average woman will enjoy regular orgasms. She can also explore the territory of multiple orgasm. May she will even enjoy the sexual liberation which comes from the extraordinary achievement of female ejaculation. 

First Things First!

Like boys, most women reach climax for the first time through masturbation. Interestingly enough, the age of first orgasm for women is apparently round 18 years. This is much later than the average age of boys’ first experience of orgasm.

That’s because women have to “learn” to reach orgasm – and even women in their 20s and 30s may find they have some problems reaching orgasm. Of course one of the best ways to get over this is to practice – either alone or with a partner!

I’d like to believe that today most women were comfortable with masturbation, but research suggests otherwise.

Video – Problems Reaching Orgasm

Advice to women About Reaching Orgasm

The majority of women require clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, whether during foreplay or during intercourse itself. The intensity of orgasm can be greatly increased if an area inside the vagina called the G spot is stimulated with a finger or two at the same time as stimulation is applied to the clitoris.

And for men who are lucky enough to have good control of their own ejaculation during intercourse, that stimulation can be applied by the penis thrusting in and out of the vagina.

Such deeper or more long-lasting sexual experiences can be the way in which a man succeeds in making a woman come through intercourse alone. 

Anorgasmia In Women

But why do some women find orgasm so difficult?

This New Scientist article investigates a woman aged 45 who’d never had an orgasm in her life. Years of therapy had proved completely unhelpful, her sex life was diminishing rapidly, her husband had an affair and her marriage finally broke up. In desperation she went to a surgeon.

He discovered that her clitoris was covered by a fused piece of skin, and the removal of that skin allowed her to reach orgasm freely. When a physical problem like this exists, therapy and education is not much use at all!

So perhaps for some women, a lack of orgasm may be rooted in a physical problem of some kind.

But such cases are rare. For other women, is anorgasmia a physical disorder, which is treatable with drugs, sex toys like vibrators, or surgery, or is it an emotional or mental problem which results from the social, cultural or relationship status of women in our society?

Widespread female difficulty in reaching orgasm: Female sexual arousal disorder or FSD.

Female sexual arousal problems, or lack of orgasm, needs to be looked at in the context of the relationship, and the culture of society, which may value sex with orgasm much more highly than sex as a means to achieve physical pleasure, intimacy or bonding.

Satisfactory sex is of course contingent upon several things – satisfactory ejaculation control from the man, an ability to open up and enjoy orgasms from the woman, and good health, including freedom from genital infections like yeast infections – which, incidentally, can affect both women and men.

What Would Cause Female Sexual Arousal Problems?

In the normal course of events when a woman is sexually aroused nervous impulses from the brain reach the clitoris and labia, causing the smooth muscles in these tissues to relax. Rather like the process of penile engorgement, this relaxation allows cavities within the tissues to fill with blood and makes them erect.

A similar process causes the muscular wall of the vagina to swell and start the process of lubrication: normally this process of engorgement is terminated when the woman reaches orgasm.

It’s been observed that in woman with so-called female sexual arousal disorder the clitoris and vagina do not effectively engorge with blood and the result of this is that penetration and intercourse can be difficult without artificial lubrication, and orgasm can be impossible to achieve.

If female sexual disorder is defined as a condition which precludes lubrication of the genitalia and relaxation of smooth muscles of the vagina, how do you deal with it?

There’s a device called the Eros-CTD, which stands for clitoral therapy device. It’s a small suction pump cup which is placed over the clitoris to provide an increase in blood flow and theoretically simulates the experience of oral sex. While it’s not a vibrator it does apparently induce orgasms in some women, and there are reports of women who refused to give the device back once the clinical trials were finished!

But sex therapist Leonore Tiefer at New York University says that treating any kind of female sexual problem from the physical viewpoint is inappropriate.

For one thing, since up to half the female population seems to have some degree of difficulty reaching orgasm, you have to think that FSD isn’t actually a physical problem but a societal, cultural and emotional problem.

For example, in a trial where women were given Viagra (which can increase lubrication and tumescence of sexual tissue in women) or a placebo, a large percentage of the women given a placebo sugar pill were able to achieve orgasm.

Maybe simply taking a pill and focusing on the possibility of the woman having an orgasm changes a couple’s behavior? For example, they may take more time, and expect more successful sex when they focus on it in this way.

You see, the expectations which a couple bring to sex around female orgasm might be almost as important as what the couple do physically!

Sex Therapy Or Physical Therapy?

Tiefer believes that while society can’t change overnight, sex therapy is certainly a route to allowing women to reach orgasm without having to resort to drugs. This might look like a combination of education about sexual techniques, and some kind of therapy to help them work out what is making sex unenjoyable or inhibiting orgasmic responses.

Another problem, of course, is that many women are too embarrassed to talk about sex openly. But there’s another issue, too….

Carol Ellison, a clinical psychologist in California, observed that among 2600 women whom she asked about sexual problems, the large majority associated their orgasmic difficulties with simply being too tired, being too busy, having too much to do, or combining home and full-time work.

Ellison takes the view that prescribing pills to help women achieve orgasm more easily and diminish their dissatisfaction with their sex lives is akin to the 1950s practice of prescribing sedatives to housebound women while simultaneously preventing their access to meaningful employment.

You take the point? It’s about giving women equality of opportunity – sexual, social and personal.

Ellison talks about the idea of sexual self-acceptance, which might mean an acceptance that caressing, intimacy and sex talk is a route to the physical release of intercourse and orgasms.

By the way, just to prove the point, we know that a large proportion of the men who take Viagra to overcome erectile dysfunction do not experience any improvement because there are deeper emotional issues between them and their partners preventing arousal. These problems may need traditional sex therapy.

However, Laura Berman, a sex therapist at the University of California in Los Angeles makes the observation that doctors who specialize in sexual health will probably now have a lot of high-tech alternatives which can identify and then alleviate physical causes of sexual dysfunction.

For example, ultrasound probes may be used inside the vagina to measure blood flow, pH probes can measure the acidity or alkalinity, a measure which depends on how much lubrication a woman is producing, and a third probe can be used to measure changes in length and width of the muscles of the vagina.

As we know there are changes in the size and shape of the clitoris, vagina and labia during sexual excitement. There are also machines that can determine sensitivity of the clitoris or labia to pressure and heat and cold.

Taking these measurements and combining them with a psychological interview, often permits an effective sexual therapy, with or without physical solutions like drugs, to be devised.

But Berman also makes the observation of a lot of women who come to the clinic have already tried traditional sex therapy and found it unhelpful so that their treatment may well involve some combination of a clitoral therapy device, surgery or even drugs.

But Is Lack of Arousal Physical or Emotional?

Probably both. For example, one of the physical sexual issues in women is low libido, which has been linked to psychological problems, relationship issues, stress, depression and fatigue. However, recent research has revealed that a woman’s testosterone levels may be just as important.

Clinical practice is gradually waking up to the fact that testosterone is indeed central to a woman’s sexual drive, her experience of sexual desire and possibly even her ability to reach orgasm.

In particular, testosterone levels fall dramatically in women after the menopause, and therefore the addition of testosterone to a hormone replacement regime can help these older women become sexually active again. But some doctors are also prescribing it to younger women and claiming great success.

Needless to say medical caution is preventing the rapid growth of testosterone prescription to women who are experiencing low sex drive. Yet finding the right dosage (one which avoids side-effects such as hair growth and clitoral enlargement) is not difficult.

Irwin Goldstein at Boston University has given both pre-and post-menopausal women dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), which is a testosterone precursor.

He claims that prescribing both DHEA and Viagra to women produces a much more marked response and gives women hope of achieving a normal sex life with full orgasmic ability. 

So on the one side of this debate there are doctors like Goldstein and Berman who are ready, willing and very prepared to use every drug and scientific or medical gadget available to them to improve a woman’s chance of reaching orgasm.

On the other side are psychotherapists like Tiefer who take a more political position and claim that women’s sexual problems are rooted in cultural, social or emotional factors. Given the chance, they believe, sex therapy can solve most women’s sexual problems.

Certainly it’s true that sex isn’t just physical: it also involves emotional, physical and interpersonal issues between men and women. That much is obvious.

However the problem is that where a physical disorder does exist it needs to be identified, and an approach that routinely diminishes the value of physical therapy may prevent women from achieving a normal sex life, which is something that all doctors and clinicians and scientists on either side of this divide would agree is the ultimate objective.

Bibliography

1.Further reading: For Women Only: A revolutionary guide to overcoming sexual dysfunction and reclaiming your sex life by Jennifer Berman and Laura Berman with Elizabeth Bumiller (Henry Holt and Company, 2001, New York)

2.Women’s Sexualities: Generations of women share intimate secrets of sexual self-acceptance by Carol Rinkleib Ellison and Beverly Whipple (New Harbinger, 2000, Oakland, California)

https://www.newscientist.com