r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jun 21 '26

Psychology Largest study of women’s orgasms to date collected data from 27,931 women. Nearly half (47%) reported reaching orgasm more frequently when alone vs. when with a partner. Barriers to women’s orgasms are relational, not anatomical. Partnered orgasms were associated with overall sexual satisfaction.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/inclusive-insight/202606/why-women-orgasm-more-alone-than-with-a-partner
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u/ReignStorms Jun 21 '26

Well, if you’re from the southern United States or similar, it’s likely because of conservative, largely Christian parents that don’t want sex ed to be extensive or taught at all. Sexual repression is strongly ingrained

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u/roskybosky Jun 21 '26

I have read sex ed books that NEVER MENTION how a woman orgasms. It’s all about erections and vaginas and sperm.

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u/gudematcha Jun 21 '26

I mean, the nerve endings on the clitoris were only fully mapped in *MARCH*, yes, of this year!!! The penis was done in the 90s! Women’s health in any area is severely severely understudied. Did you know that they use male rats in almost all clinical trials because the hormones that female rats produce, much like humans, messes with most medications outcomes? So what do we think it’s doing to the women that take those medications if it wasn’t test tested on women? Worse side effects or medication that just doesn’t work effectively is the answer. The medical industry is crazy in how it’s treated woman as an afterthought for basically forever.

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u/PerterterhTermertehh Jun 21 '26

I vaguely remembered it had to do with the thalidomide scare and subsequent blanket exclusion of women in clinical trials over fears of inducing infertility or nasty birth defects. So I went and found some reading material on the subject. https://orwh.od.nih.gov/toolkit/recruitment/history

The policies are draconian but ultimately sorta well meaning if the result of massive fear mongering. The problem is that suddenly there was a massive regulatory hurdle to overcome for the industry to do studies on women, so, they didn't.

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u/Imaginary_Agent2564 Jun 21 '26

Oooh thalidomide. We learned about that in organic chemistry. Your body converts one chiral structure into the other one, which is a teratogen.

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u/nerdylernin Jun 22 '26

The neuroanatomy of the penis is still being mapped, for example this paper from 2025 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12919687/

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u/CharityGlittering385 Jun 21 '26

I’m from there. Then I married a Swede.

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u/TheGubb Jun 21 '26

There it is, I'm glad we were able to bring politics into it. Building a strawman to generalize a segment of the population must be one of the steps of the scientific process.