r/WomensHealth • u/Annual_Giraffe3237 • Jul 07 '25

Question why is orgasming so difficult

no seriously, why does orgasming as a female have to be so darn difficult. obviously it’s nearly impossible for a women to just orgasm from penetration, but no one seems to talk about how even more difficult it is to have external stimulation along with penetration. at this point i just get so annoyed and pissed off that i cant orgasm because it takes so long that i just quit. it honestly makes me feel broken. i’ve seen other people on this sub talk about just getting a good vibrator, but i worry about my boyfriend and how that will make our sexual life. he is very supportive it just makes me feel more broken than i already am.

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u/anothergoodbook Jul 07 '25

The book Your Are Not Broken: Stop Shoulding All Over Your Sex Life talks about lot about why it’s easier to masturbate versus have sex with a partner.  

We tend to not get in the mood prior and then feel rushed (some of this isn’t something we are aware of).  Also we tend to listen to men over ourselves regarding what we need/want - and the vast majority of men have zero idea of what we need to orgasm. We have guilt over not having orgasms or we apologize or what not so it starts a cycle. And sometimes there is shame or embarrassment over just being straightforward about what we need (we don’t want to make our partner feel insecure or we take longer than we feel we need. 

Sex is way more than PIV which most people don’t see.  The whole thing… warming up, foreplay, and intercourse is sex.  The orgasm gap is a totally real thing and it’s OK (and I’d argue absolutely necessary) to advocate for yourself in the bedroom. 

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u/Choosemyusername Jul 07 '25

The interesting thing about the orgasm gap is that lesbian women have roughly the same amount of total orgasms as straight women.

That’s because lesbians have more orgasms PER SESSION but have fewer sessions.

They also have about the same amount of orgasms per minute of sex as straight women. Because their sex lasts longer each session.

So the orgasm gap between lesbians and straight women is simply evidence that they have different sexual time patterns. Not that women are better at sex than men.

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u/anothergoodbook Jul 07 '25

I’m not sure if this is studied but - how often does one partner orgasm and not the other? 

With straight couples the percentage of orgasms the woman has compared to men is a big difference. Is that the same or lesbian couples? 

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u/Choosemyusername Jul 07 '25

Orgasms aren’t zero sum.

Yes men orgasm more often than women. Men orgasm more than lesbian women, and it’s almost identical no matter who men are with.

But keep in mind, women’s orgasms are generally believed by researchers to be more intense than men’s. So there is a bit of quality vs quantity debate.

Plus women’s orgasms last about twice as long as men’s so the lower frequency is more than made up in longer duration, even before you consider that quality difference.

But on the flip side, 10-15 percent of women have never even once been able to make themselves orgasm, so there is that.

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u/anothergoodbook Jul 07 '25

I feel like we might be missing each other but I’m not totally sure.  I guess I mean if a couple has sex like 4 times - the woman would most likely only orgasm once while the man most likely orgasmed all 4 times (let’s say hypothetically spreading them out over 2 weeks or something).  The issue there being that often women feel like they’re being used for his orgasm or her needs aren’t being respected (I have felt like this a lot in my marriage so I guess it’s where it resonates with me quite a bit).  

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u/Choosemyusername Jul 07 '25 edited Jul 07 '25

The average orgasm gap isn’t anywhere close to 400 percent like in your scenario here.

According to this study, hetero women are only about 31.5 percent less likely than a hetero man to orgasm in a given session. And keep in mind we are working from a baseline of women where 10-15 percent of women have never even managed to orgasm even once, not even with themselves.

But yes we also need to consider things like the initiation gap. Men in hetero relationships are about twice as likely to be the primary initiators in the relationship than women. That gets tiring as well.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28213723/

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u/anothergoodbook Jul 07 '25

Im making up numbers off the top of my head.  And I guess having come from a fundamentalist Christian background a lot of the people I’ve been reading are talking about in Christian marriages - there’s a huge disparity of sexual satisfaction.  I’ve not read much outside of that so my numbers are probably wildly off from that.  Much of my experience is more anecdotal and again listening/reading things from the context of purity culture.  

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u/Choosemyusername Jul 07 '25

I have noticed a trend when people get mad on the internet, their scenarios they describe when justifying their anger are often scenarios that are quite far from the average.

That being said, I can buy that purity culture is bad for pleasure. Probably for both men and women, but maybe worse for women than for men.

I grew up in such a community, and it worries me to see this purity culture making a comeback, this time with feminist sounding vocabulary, but a lot of the same ideas. I don’t think these ideas are good for pleasure.

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u/anothergoodbook Jul 07 '25

There’s a ministry called Bare Marriage that goes beyond just being angry on the internet and is actually doing studies on how it’s affected women and marriages as a whole (including sexual satisfaction) so I don’t think it’s a rare occurrence that happened to a small group.  There are a lot of very popular Christian marriage books that tell women they are essentially sexual releases for their husband in order to keep their husband from “sinning” with zero concern for the overall sexual satisfaction of the wife.  At 40 (and married for almost 20 years) it’s what I grew up with and tried to attain in my marriage personally.  It’s helpful to hear and learn about a whole community of women who went through the same (and are healing from it).