What A Fake ‘Female Orgasm’ Statistic Says About Gender Bias
For years, experts have been peddling a damaging falsehood about the time it takes for cis women to orgasm.
While I was doing research for my book on female sexual empowerment, I kept coming across a statistic online: that cis women take 20 minutes on average to orgasm. It’s in articles with vague citations like “according to statistics,” “some experts say,” and “studies show”; it’s in blog posts and advice columns by sex therapists. Few of these sources say where the data comes from.
I began hunting down this figure’s source after reading Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How to Get It by University of Florida psychology professor Laurie Mintz, PhD. Mintz writes that women take four minutes to orgasm through masturbation on average, which was indeed found in sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey’s interviews and published in his 1953 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. But with a partner, she wrote, women take 20 minutes, while men took two to 10.
Mintz is adamant that the orgasm gap — the tendency for men to orgasm more than women — is cultural, not biological. (Note: Not all women’s bodies have vulvas, and not all bodies with vulvas belong to women. But as I researched this article, I found no…
