Tabby’s Deep Dives 2
The Female Orgasm
Everything you ever wanted to know about how to make a girl come
Despite all the research that has gone into the subject, science has yet to come up with an adequate definition of the female orgasm, let alone a complete understanding of what goes on during one — which just goes to show what a complex thing an orgasm is. Back in 1966, Masters and Johnson described it as ‘the few seconds during which the vast concentration and myotonia developed from sexual stimulation are released’, which makes coming sound about as exciting as emptying a washing machine. Another group of scientists, led by Meston, decided the orgasm was ‘a variable, transient peak sensation of intense pleasure creating an altered state of consciousness usually accompanied by involuntary rhythmic contractions of the pelvic striated circumvaginal musculature, often with concomitant uterine and anal contractions and myotonia that resolves the sexually induced vasocongestion (sometimes only partially), usually with an induction of well-being and contentment.’
Hmmm, I have read more exciting technical reports.
Meston’s definition may be dry, but at least it makes it clear that a female orgasm has multiple components. Since the cycle of sex has been described as having four phases — which are desire, arousal, orgasm, and resolution — then orgasm is a complex event which is itself part of a complex series of events in which the brain is involved as much as the rest of our bodies.
What does a female orgasm feel like?
For any guys reading this, or women who haven’t had an orgasm, this is what a full-on example feels like. Coming hijacks your brain, and the house could fall down without me noticing while one was going on — thanks to that intense peak of pure pleasure. Second, the muscles in your pelvis (including the wall of your vagina) go into waves of contractions that are completely outside of your control, and, although Meston’s team didn’t see fit to mention it, this is usually powerful enough to trigger your quads and your abdominal muscles to do the same. If you have ever wondered why you end up alternately contracting into a ball and then arching your back, that is why. On top of that, you get contractions in your anus — which can set up the most stunning feedback of sensations if you have an orgasm while you are having anal sex — and your womb contracts too, which sends powerful kicks of pleasure that can be strong enough to overwhelm almost everything else. Finally, all the blood vessels in your pelvis, clitoris and labia that have been fluffing up with blood in expectation of what is going to hit begin to empty their contents, leaving you awash with good feelings.
The final phase — resolution — isn’t an afterthought, it is an event so powerful that in men, it results in a ‘refractory period’ which prevents another orgasm occurring for so long that it causes the penis to go completely soft again. This may be the price that guys pay for having a mechanism which allows them to become almost instantly erect, at least when they are younger. Fast arousal, lengthy refractory period.
Women are slow to arouse, but we have a very short refractory period, during which most of the effects are internal, so they aren’t visible. We can have lots of orgasms.
How long should an orgasm last?
Measurements suggest that the average for a major orgasm (however, see ‘Intensity of orgasms’ further down) is about twenty seconds, with a range of ten to thirty seconds, although quite how you can time a wave of pleasure with degree of accuracy I cannot say. I was fascinated to discover that in a small study which asked women how long they thought their orgasm had lasted, the subjects routinely believed that theirs were a third shorter than the measured average. This, I have no problems understanding, because counting seconds is the last thing on my mind when I come — in practice there isn’t anything on my mind.
One of the reasons why our brains empty when we come is that the waves of contractions of our pelvic muscles are synchronized with the waves of pleasure that sweep over us. If there is a cock inside me when I come, the general feeling I get is that it has become one size too large for me and that the waves are radiating away from it in every direction, while my body has contracted into a small pulsing ball surrounding it. The waves bounce off the skin of the ball and into each other, cannoning all over the place, and it feels hugely and very pleasantly chaotic, which is probably why it is so relaxing.
In circumstances like this, I am not to be trusted with a stopwatch, but based on videos taken of me (no, you aren’t going to get to see them) I would say that 20–25 seconds is realistic in my case. When I did a double-check against the few porn movies where women were actually allowed to have orgasms — thank you SexArt — I wasn’t too surprised to discover that most of the girls fell in the same bracket that I did.
The brain
This is where the science gets complicated, because although we can describe what happens in an orgasm, and we know which buttons to press to cause one, we don’t know what triggers the actual event. What we do know is that many different sensory systems link back to the brain, including feeds from the vulva, pelvic floor muscles, our erogenous zones on the skin, touch, smell (think pheromones), and sound and vision. If the last two didn’t play a big part in arousal, then the porn studios would all have to close down overnight.
It makes sense that vision plays a large part in our mental arousal, because that is, after all, how we spot partners. We look at a guy across a room, and we think, ‘Hmm, nice…’ and in the right circumstances, just a glance can be erotic. The same goes for flirting, which relies on voice as well as vision to arouse one of both parties. Knowledge of how all these mechanisms feed into our arousal is why guys who rely entirely on clitoral stimulation generally make such mediocre lovers — they fall short because they ignore all our other arousal feeds.
We do know that the brain is the final arbiter on whether and when an orgasm occurs, but precisely how has not been established. It has been suggested that a site in a part of the brain stem called the pons — literally ‘the bridge’ — is the final arbiter. The researchers named it the Pelvic Organ Stimulating Centre (POSC), and if they are right it is a girl’s best friend. However, since areas all over the rest of our brains also light up during orgasm, the POSC may not be anywhere as influential as has been made out. The concept though, is useful, even if many areas of the brain combine together to form a ‘virtual POSC’ and pull the trigger on an orgasm.
The brain also takes care of sex at at a much higher level, which is where desire lives on the positive side, and emotions like worry on the negative side. Some of this is under conscious control — I look at a guy, and I think, ‘Oh, yes…’ — and some of it is not, for example, I am thinking about a contract and so never give the guy more than a glance in the first place. I have seen this pathway referred to as an accelerator/brake system, which isn’t a bad analogy, because it explains why women who have more negative thoughts about their bodies and about having sex find it much harder to become aroused, because their brakes are always on, if you like. The classic is being depressed, which pulls the parking brake on most women’s sexual desire.
As a simple way of understanding how arousal mechanisms work at the level of consciousness, the accelerator/brake analogy is useful, until you run into problems associated with sexual scripting, which are often buried so deeply within us that we aren’t even aware they are there. In general, however, the accelerator/brake stuff is only indirectly relevant to orgasm, because it operates at the desire and arousal level and if you don’t get past those, orgasms aren’t very likely anyway.
From the point of view of what happens in the nervous system, the two sexes are probably wired more or less identically, the only differences being where it comes down to pelvic anatomy, and that girls are multi-orgasmic, whereas men are not. Both sexes, for example, get quite rapid contractions of the rectum during orgasm, which doesn’t happen if we are faking it, and accounts for why a girlfriend tells a hilarious story of a butt plug shooting out when she came and being fetched back by her ever-faithful dog. That was the end of that experiment.
The importance of arousal
Once desire has set everything in motion, and we are mentally aroused, then the changes that occur in women’s bodies during the physical arousal stage link together in the most incredibly neat way to prepare us for orgasm —which means that if the preparation is skipped or truncated, the sex that follows may not be so good.
During arousal, the blood flow to the vaginal wall increases, leading to the blood vessels there becoming congested, and causing us to lubricate — which not only makes sex possible, but provides a welcoming environment for sperm. The blood flow to the labia minora and majora also increases, with the result that the former ‘flower’ and become wet, while the latter swell up like a pair of cushions, in some women going cherry red. At the same time we develop marked pelvic congestion, which forces everything together in the pelvis, while parts of our internal clitoral complex may double in size.
The fastest way to orgasm for most women might be by stimulation of the glans clitoris, but it isn’t the only way (do follow the link for much more on this!). Here I should point out that the clitoris is much more than the little button we derive so much pleasure from, hence the term ‘clitoral complex’ or CC. The ‘glans’ or the little button that you can see on the outside is the business end of a very much larger organ, which wraps its tentacles around the vagina, and extends deeply into the pelvis. The clitoris is supplied by two large nerves and the glans has such a high density of touch receptors on it that it leaves the sensitivity of the head of the penis in its dust. Nature went out of its way to make sure we can enjoy ourselves, girls.
At least one large study has shown that the consistency of women achieving orgasms is associated more strongly with the duration of penetrative sex than it is with foreplay. Not only is this counter-intuitive, it runs contrary to what many sex therapists believe, but much depends on what is included in the definition of foreplay and what is not. If the 2360 Czech women in the study were culturally inclined to have sex where stimulation of the glans clitoris to bring them to orgasm wasn’t routinely a part of foreplay, then by definition, most of their orgasms would take place during penetrative sex. It goes to show that there are no hard and fast rules.
Many ways to come… but only one kind of orgasm
I was reared on the old idea that there were two distinct types of orgasm, a clitoral one and a vaginal one (through the infamous G spot, see below), which always seemed strange to me because although my orgasms varied in duration and intensity, they didn’t differ in detail. The same sequence of feelings happened every time I came, regardless of whether I had a ‘clitoral’ or a ‘vaginal’ orgasm.
I began to worry — which is not me — about whether I was missing something. Could other women feel a difference between their clitoral and vaginal orgasms? Was there some higher plane of orgasm that I had as yet failed to unlock? Yet the more experienced I gained of sex, the less likely it seemed that this higher plane existed, especially when I discovered that it was routine for me to have much more devastating orgasms than many of my friends.
All the same, I accepted this mantra without question until I met the guy I have chosen to call Toby in Complications. Largely due to my own prejudices, I embraced the sexual side of this particular relationship rather more slowly than I should, only to discover that our shared interest in the tactile side of sex meant that he could make me come just by arousing me to the absolute limit before teasing my nipples.
I had got near to this point having sex with women, but had never arrived at a place where a single touch of a tongue on my nipple was guaranteed to tip me over the edge. If you have never experienced this, it is like being struck by a bolt of lightning.
Without any clitoral or vaginal stimulation at all, I could routinely achieve orgasms with him this way — as long as my clitoral complex was ramped up to 100% — and it subsequently transpired that he was equally good at making me come through pure anal sex. After that experience sank in, I was forced to rebuild my ideas about orgasm from the ground up, and completely rewrite my approach to sex, the message here being that the old clitoral versus vaginal orgasm duality really should have been laid to rest with Freud.
There is only one kind of orgasm, and it is mediated via the clitoral complex. Although the trigger for the orgasm can come from many places around the body, especially within the pelvis, but including the nipples, it is the brain that fires the starting gun that makes us come. The female orgasm is a vast subject, and while the clit has been helpfully provided to give beginners a chance, I would suggest that viewing it as the be-all and end-all source of all orgasms is simplistic.
Intensity of orgasms
In terms of the sequence of events that are triggered when an orgasm occurs, the intensity can vary considerably in women. As far as I can judge, with guys, the situation is different, and 95% of their orgasms feel the same, with a few feeling more intense, but the majority fall within the same narrow spread of pleasure. With girls, it is much more complicated, and the result can vary from a sweet, but short little roller coaster, to a ‘wake the neighbors and call the police’ cataclysm.
The problem here is that the only orgasms that I have ever directly experienced are my own, which are divided into two types. At the deep end of the pool is the major event described in ‘What does a female orgasm feel like?’ while at the shallow end is the ‘two-beat’ or mini orgasm, and both have their virtues. Since my orgasms give every appearance of being identical to the ones that other women experience, what follows is based on them, but majors aren’t necessarily better than minis, or any orgasm in between.
Major orgasms are usually the longest, but even then, the intensity can vary from woman to woman. With some of us, you can barely tell that anything is happening, and whilst the waves of pleasure are still there and are usually just as intense, the muscle-related events are several orders of magnitude less fierce. Some women have orgasms that are so low intensity that even they have trouble working out what is happening, but usually, when they are done, they know they are done. If your lover has orgasms like this, please learn to recognize them, because now is the time to stop doing what you are doing and let her enjoy coming.
There is absolutely nothing worse than a lover who carries on stimulating you during an orgasm because for many of us it can actually become quite unpleasant. The glans clitoris in particular becomes super-sensitive at the moment of orgasm and is much better for being left alone to recover.
Mini orgasms are just that — we experience a couple of beats and it is over. The duration is short, and the intensity is usually (but not always) much less than a major. Minis often fall into the class described as ‘vaginal’ orgasms, but as we know, they are no such thing, and like majors, minis feel exactly the same whether you are having vaginal or anal sex. I have experienced them with women too, so they aren’t sex-specific. In my experience minis usually, only occur after you have had a major orgasm (or three), and although there is no science behind this statement, logic tells me that they may occur because the CC hasn’t reached peak excitability and movement of the cervical root isn’t quite enough to throw the cusp catastrophe switch fully across.
Once they start happening, it often doesn’t take much to bring a mini on, and just the feeling of a guy’s cock swelling inside me just before he comes is enough to trigger one in me. I do, however, need to be absolutely in the zone for them to occur, and they are much, much more likely to occur with guys who don’t go for the boilerplate ‘stimulate her until she comes and then penetrate’ approach. The latter, common though it might be on screen, is the calling card of a lover who has stuff to learn. Sit down talk required.
The cusp catastrophe theory
One surprising discovery I made while I was researching this piece was the concept that orgasm might be a ‘cusp catastrophe’. I adore the idea behind this since many of my orgasms are nothing if not catastrophic. The basis of the cusp theory is that the response of our bodies is linear through the arousal phase before a tipping point is reached, at which point the response changes its nature entirely and orgasm follows. While the idea is unorthodox, and it is more influenced by math than it is by physiology, it does describe precisely what I feel, and it goes a long way to explain why I can hold myself on the brink of an orgasm for an extended period without actually going there. Eventually, I reach a point where a single touch is enough to catapult me over the edge — and I mean catapult.
Having raised the process of holding myself on the brink to a fine art, thanks to some incredibly cooperative lovers, I would recommend exploring it if you have a partner who is sensitive enough to be able to work with you. The trick is not to give in to what most guys seem to think is the height of sophistication and bring you to orgasm using clitoral stimulation early on — it is to use every single avenue of skin stimulation available (clit included, but at a lowish level) and then stop just before you reach tipping point. At that stage, if a lover keeps you aroused with nipple stimulation, kisses on your neck, and the occasional lick of your clit, your whole body begins to tingle with warmth and expectation. After that, it is just a case of how long you can stand it, which in my case is not very many minutes, because I can only resist the payoff for so long.
Frequency of orgasms
I have put this in here because there is a certain type of guy who delights in lines like, ‘I never give any woman I have sex with less than a dozen orgasms before I come’.
While it is true that women can come again and again, reducing the quality of sex to numbers is a peculiarly male obsession. My eyes used to glaze over when I was treated to pickup lines this bad even back in my late teens — but nowadays I instantly lose the will to live. One look at the self-assessed sex star before you is usually enough to work out that his math is unreliable, but in most cases the problem can easily be fixed with a complete personality transplant.
Since the question has been raised, how many orgasms in one session of sex is enough? Your mileage may vary. I have had great sex where I haven’t come once, and have basked instead in the warm feeling that only a caring, sensitive and talented lover can bring. By contrast, in one of the most epic beddings to which I have ever been subjected, I came a mere three times and was penetrated for a grand total of less than three minutes. And no, he didn’t have a particularly remarkable cock, he just really, really, really knew what he was about in a relationship and in bed. It was divine.
I have orgasms pretty easily, and although I have never done anything as dumb as counting them, as a rule of thumb, I can personally manage about three majors before I begin to get ‘orgasm fatigue’, but in practice, coming that many times is plenty to be going along with, thank you very much.
One other thing. Even if you do have orgasms they are less likely to occur at the beginning of a new relationship than they are when it has been on the boil for a few weeks or months. Why? It just takes most of us a little while to bed in. Literally. Once we are used to and confident of a new partner, then we can relax and that is usually enough to open the gates.
Orgasm fatigue
I have never seen this discussed anywhere, but it is a thing that I and other friends have experienced. As I related in the paragraph above, it is possible for a woman to reach a point where after she has had several orgasms, the idea of having any more begins to appeal less and less. This is not too much of an issue for women who have low intensity orgasms (or minors), but it can be for those of us who get high intensity ones, because they are exhausting.
Surely it can’t be possible to get tired of coming?
For guys reading this, a woman having a full-on, high intensity orgasm is getting more or less exactly the same kind of experience that you have when you come—and which leaves you collapsed on the bed and dopey for at least a quarter of an hour and usually for twice that long. But, sexual athletes that we are, girls can do the very thing that flakes you out over and over, with only a minute or two between each orgasm. The organ that rescues us is our CC, which, as long as care is taken to make sure it stays aroused and gets a little bit of time to recover, pumps out enough happy chemicals around to keep us awake and interested.
The message? Be aware that your partner can hit the point of diminishing returns as far as coming is concerned, because when we reach this stage, a change of plan is required, which has the title, ‘You do the heavy lifting, while I will lie back and enjoy it’.
Unwanted orgasms
This will bring a few readers up with a jolt — if only Medium supported reverse flashing text, I would have turned it on to highlight the following statement:
Just because a woman has had an orgasm doesn’t mean to say that she has been enjoying what you have been doing to her.
An orgasm is a response by the body to sexual stimulation, and it is possible for a woman come even when she is being raped. Under such circumstances, an orgasm will be absolutely the last thing that she wants to have happen, but her body may do it despite the fact that she is in extreme distress. Some of our less educated judiciary have been inclined to accept an orgasm occurring during rape as evidence of consent, but it absolutely is not, and all they are doing is parading their abysmal ignorance of human physiology.
The fact that it is possible for a woman to have an orgasm even when she does not want to is why I am so keen to discourage the depressingly common male mantra of ‘the best thing you can do for a woman is to make her come’. Not only is the thinking simplistic, it is part of the objectified thinking that is so frequently applied to our sex, by reducing us to the level of objects to be manipulated — literally in this case.
A final thing is that it is possible for a woman to have an orgasm and for it not bring any pleasure with it. This is more common than most people imagine, and can be associated with depression and with abuse. Just because she came doesn’t mean to say that it was good for her.
Anorgasmia
What if you don’t have orgasms? It is thought that at least 10% of women have never experienced one, and that up to 40% experience difficulty having one, but pinning down an accurate number is like chasing a will ‘o the wisp. There are too many variables involved — some lovers are better than others, much depends on your state of mind, and physical illness and past pelvic surgery can play a major part.
First, forget all the Freudian crap, if you don’t have orgasms, there is probably nothing wrong with you. I have met some healthy, happy women who have never had an orgasm, but who still get just as much pleasure as I do from having sex. Equally, I have met women who have been abused or have had traumatic sexual experiences, and who rarely have orgasms. It is easy to understand why they have problems, the good news being that with time, patience, a lot of sympathetic expert help, and a supportive partner, the problem can be fixable.
Finally, there is FGM, which is barbaric and should condemn anyone associated with doing it to the inner circle of hell. FGM sentences many, but not all, women who have been put through it to failure to experience orgasm. The good news is that because the practitioners of FGM are fools, the bulk of the clitoral complex is left intact, and there is still a chance of experiencing orgasm.
Coming is nice, but it isn’t all of sex, and (cover your eyes and promise never to repeat this) there are times when I simply can’t be bothered to have an orgasm. Why? Well, there are many reasons for having sex, as every woman reading this will know full well.
The problem for women who don’t have orgasms is that it freaks some guys out. It shouldn’t, but there are numerous men who are so inexperienced, or insensitive that the only way they can work out if a woman has enjoyed herself during sex is by whether she has had an orgasm or not. I can have sex with the same guy twice in succession, come three times during the first episode, and not at all in the second, but have enjoyed the second session more than the first. This is usually because of context, but orgasms aren’t the only way that women get pleasure out of sex. Nor should they be for men, but that is another story.
Arousal non-concordance
Some women are familiar with this, while others experience it from time to time, but it is possible for us to be fully aroused mentally, but for our puss to stay dry. I have had it the other way around, where a guy has got me wet down there, but my desire simply hasn’t come on line — either because I am worrying about something else, or because my man hasn’t ticked a crucial box or two in the good relationship stakes.
For women, arousal of our minds is as important as arousal of our CC, but the two don’t always overlap — which guys often find difficult to handle, because they aren’t built like us. For girls, context is highly relevant to sex, which is why we wrinkle our noses at stuff like, ‘To get her coming back to you, you must make her come,’ because most of us wouldn’t be coming in the first place if the relationship wasn’t working for us (notice I say ‘most’, which is not the same as ‘all’).
The most challenging type of non-concordance is the one mentioned above — you get wet despite the fact that your brain doesn’t approve of the type of sex on offer. If your man then decides that you can’t really mean no because you are lubricating, you have a problem, but if you don’t know that it can happen, it can be really difficult to explain to him.
If you are mentally aroused, but you aren’t lubricating, and you want to have sex, then the answer is either to allow more time for you to become aroused, or to use some lube. If you lubricate, but your head isn’t in it, then the choice depends on the situation — all of us have probably had sex from time to time when we weren’t so keen on the idea, but the relationship was good, so we weren’t minded to say no. Why? Because most women are scripted to be pleased by pleasing others, and there isn’t a deal of harm in doing that from time to time. But if you really don’t want, then he has to accept that the answer is no.
Why do women have orgasms?
Nobody has the faintest idea. They don’t help us conceive, they don’t do anything to make sperm swim faster, or live longer, and it is entirely possible that the only reason we are able to have them is because men do. If you read the previous article in this series, you will understand that both sexes are wired the same way, and that may well be all there is to it.
Getting better
The nature of our orgasms can change as we get older, which I can bear out, because mine are even more wonderful now than they were when I was in my late teens, and I have friends who have made the same journey. Unless women can actually learn to take more pleasure from coming as they get older, this journey could be due to some — as yet unquantified — process of sexual maturation. I have no problem believing the latter explanation, because the change in me began to take place after my early twenties, and was accompanied by a transition in my attitude to sex.
Before I was about 23 or 24, sex was more important to me than relationships, but after that age, it flipped the other way around. From my late twenties onward, all the really great sex I had taken place within relationships, and sex outside of them struggled to compete. It took me a while to understand that the quality of a relationship leveraged the quality of the sex, and — asking around — every single one of my girl friends confirms it.
If you have read any of Complications, you will understand that I was fairly sexually relaxed from the get-go, but once I had dealt with a few hang-ups that were keeping me away from partners who could really read what my body was trying to tell them, my orgasms moved onto a new plane, and cusp catastrophes became the rule, rather than the exception. Things like the stimulation of my nipples at the same time as my clit, stimulation of my anus, and especially, the feel of a hand moving across my skin, but separated from it by a layer of lingerie, or even a stocking, can be shockingly effective. When all of this is coupled with fantasy and role play, the sky is the limit, and once I am up there, I take a long while to come back down again. Not only can a long-term partner who knows my responses by heart use the knowledge to my advantage, but I can do the same for them—guess why starting from scratch in a new relationship has such little appeal from a sexual point of view?
This is a really, really big thing that men need to understand about women — we are wired differently. Women prioritize relational aspects of sex over the physical side, whereas men are inclined to see it the other way around. Guys see sex in terms of orgasms and ‘release’, whereas girls look forward to it more in terms of bonding and emotion. That is why women can still enjoy sex to the limit even if they don’t come, while I doubt any man would be able to say the same. We are scripted differently, we think about sex differently, and while we can unite in orgasm, it isn’t the be-all and end-all of sex for girls.
We have come a long way from Masters’ and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response, published all those years ago back in the sixties. It was a visionary work, for which we have a great deal to thank the authors, but although science has moved on, we still don’t know why women have orgasms. No-one has ever been able to find out what purpose they serve apart from giving us a great deal of pleasure. Which seems a pretty good excuse for having many more.
More homework here:
