So what conclusions can we draw from this? This is clearly an area in which one must tread with care, so let me firstly state that if a woman wants an orgasm during sex, she should get one, and for a partner of any gender to fail to help her achieve this without a damn good excuse smacks of laziness and insensitivity. Now I have hopefully protected myself from allegations of unreconstructed male boorishness, I can tell you my theory.

It's no great intellectual breakthrough to state that men and women have their differences. We prioritise different things, have differing emotional makeup and do have very different expectations of certain things in life, even if we're not from different planets or locked in a perpetual battle as some writers have proposed. Now as a man and only an amateur sexologist (hur! hur! hur! what a great t-shirt that'd make!) I'm only partly qualified to comment on women's sexuality, but one of my responses to those statistics (and do remember please what I said earlier about knee-jerk idiocy) is that perhaps women don't necessarily see orgasm as the defining aspect of a sexual encounter in the same way that men do. I'm pretty sure one would be hard pushed to find a man anywhere, gay or straight, who would see a sexual encounter as satisfactory or fulfilling if it didn't culminate in an orgasm. If the same was true of women, would two women who understood first hand the female sex drive leave either partner unfulfilled in such a high proportion of encounters? Maybe men aren't doing so badly after all at fulfilling women. I suspect that, were we to compare these data with the same survey conducted in the 1950s we might find some much more depressing results.

Page 2 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next