Society has
an orgasm gap - but why do women have to suffer?
Credit: CAMILLE FERRARI
For many of us, the only thing getting us through recent weeks has been Bridgerton’s hot duke initiating a tremulous virgin into sex. Thanks to his expert tuition, we are all now familiar with how women achieve pleasure. Everyone knows instinctively what to do to arouse each other and engage in instant multiple orgasms. Elsewhere, good-time girls will mount young bucks at boxing matches, the pair climaxing mutually and ecstatically after seven seconds.
If only life – specifically our sex lives – were this straightforward. Instead, as Dutch journalist Laura Hiddinga makes clear in her new book, Are You Coming? A Vagina Owner’s Guide to Orgasm, heterosexual women are consistently short-changed. According to a report published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour in 2016, only 65 per cent of straight women achieve orgasm during sex, compared to 95 per cent of men. Other studies put this fem