It’s International Female Orgasm Day and my question is how are you celebrating?
I hope wherever you are you can, at the very least, have an orgasm. But more importantly I hope that you are in dialog with your sexuality endlessly in open and honest ways.
Growing up as a Catholic girl the only reference I ever heard to sex and sexuality was in reference to the Virgin Mary.
As a young Evangelical the conversation around sex and sexuality wasn’t much bigger with a shift of focus onto men, their sexual needs, and how women were to help keep them in line. The dialog centered around purity culture, waiting until one was married to have sex, and to dress modestly (only directed at girls, of course) as to not be a tool of temptation.
As a young preteen and then teenager I was happy to comply and go right along with this kind of instruction. I had a relationship with God, read the Bible, and went to church, youth group, and anything extracurricular having to do with all the above. I was a model Evangelical girl. Just the way I liked it. Why would I question what pastors and church leaders told me about sex, purity, and God’s plan for it all?
And it wasn’t just about not questioning because one already knew the answers as we were told. If you questioned stuff like this it meant you might actually be interested. And young girls, young pure girls anyway, weren’t supposed to be interested in sex in the slightest. All we needed to know was that sex before marriage was bad and sex after marriage was good. And it all seemed good enough for me. It seemed good enough for a lot of us.
Not only were conversations extremely anaemic, at best, in the church about sex, but there was absolutely no mention of female pleasure and god forbid the word ‘orgasm.’ While the big O was never mentioned there was certainly enough talk about male sexual pleasure and how men were designed sexually speaking. I remember sitting under many a teaching that sounded like this and thinking to myself, ‘I’m so lucky I’m a woman and made so differently with different wants, urges, and needs.
I wish someone, anyone, had come along side me and said ‘there is more.’ This doesn’t mean that I would have run out of the church and started to have sex with anything that moved. But it might have meant that I would have introduced myself to a conversation with my body that I wouldn’t actually start to have for many years.
Now, at 40, happily married to my husband for two and a half years, having had a fulfilling sex life throughout my 30’s and continue to, having been in conversation with myself and others about the complexities of female sexuality, orgasms, pleasure, masturbation, and other topics of a sex positive variety, there is nothing I shy away from. Because these conversations must happen. And not just behind closed doors. Women having orgasms should be the most normal and welcome part of our life. Are our bodies a little more complicated? So it would seem. Is a female orgasm guaranteed every time a woman engages in sexual activity, partnered, solo, or otherwise? Not exactly. But it can be. Or very close to it. But it starts with being open, honest, vulnerable, and being ruthless and utterly committed when it comes to a woman’s own sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, it has been something that has been pushed to the side for far too long. Women expect an orgasm to be the exception and not the rule. Far to often our sexual partners adopt this view as well. And this an orgasm does not make.
The age old adage, “Knowledge is power,” is not lost on this conversation.
Talking more about orgasms, as a woman or non-binary cis female, creates safe spaces for us to explore the sort of sexual engagement and pleasure many women believe is beyond their reach, at least on a regular basis.
Earlier I started this article with my experience around sexuality in the church. And purity cult(ure) has a lot to answer for certainly. But we can’t blame it all on God, as much as we want to. Until recently much of society and culture taught us similar values when it comes to women, well, coming.
Musical artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson (both of which I wasn’t allowed to listen to growing up) took a beating from old-fashioned values, despite their worldwide fame and success.
Singers like Britney Spears weren’t treated much better.
Now we have rappers like Cardi B waxing lyrical about ‘wet ass pussy’ and Rihanna singing about ‘sex in the air’ and how she loves ‘the smell of it.’
Women asserting themselves as sexual beings with needs and desires they want to have met have come along way over the last 40 years.
The Orgasm Gap, sometimes known as the Pleasure Gap, speaks to the disparity in heterosexual relationships when it comes to orgasms. Studies show that women report having the least amount of orgasms in their sexual intercourse with men. Orgasm Gap researcher Laurie Mintz, in her book Becoming Cliterate, puts it down to “cultural ignorance of the clitoris.” But why such ignorance? Not straight forward enough? Ignored by medical research for centuries, equated to the male penis by Freud, and seen as mysterious yet superfluous by many a heterosexual man was it not deemed worthy enough? Too complex. Too unreliable. Or maybe more than a tinge of jealously as the clitoris is the only organ designated solely for pleasure.
Catherine Malabou in her book, Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, opens with a story of a gynecologist attempting to explain the clitoris to a group of what she describes as “a dumb-struck male audience.” The doctor goes on to talk about “how the clitoris responds to a penis, dildo, fingers or tongue during love-making, describing how it moves and the form it takes during penetration or stroking. She describes how the clitoris is the vagina’s accomplice, its partner. But also how it plays solo. How the clitoris enjoys a dual erotic orientation: swaying along with the movements of the vagina during penetration, but also stiffening and standing up like a crest. Sometimes both, other times just one. Opting for neither one, the clitoris confounds dichotomies.”
The clit should be running the show. Not the other way around. It is multi-faceted, yet continues to defies its own brilliant categories. It cannot be domesticated and the only way to even try to understand it is to engage it often and well. And, finally, when you think you may have it mastered it will surprise you and offer even more. New pathways to pleasure, to ourselves, and our orgasms.
Some fun facts for you:
Did you know that the female orgasm stimulates more parts of the brain than in men? This is something that was just discovered fairly recently (of course!). Because the female orgasm can come from several areas on a woman, as opposed to just the penis on men, more of the brain is stimulated during the female orgasm. This also leads to more intense orgasms than a man could ever have, and the coveted multiple orgasms, as all these areas are stimulated unto orgasm. And while both men and women release oxytocin during orgasm, women have the capability to release more making us feel better and more connected to our partners and ourselves.
Did you know that female masturbation has some serious health benefits? Regular orgasms can help reduce stress, contribute to better sleep as your brain releases vasopressin and melatonin, aid in cardiovascular health by increasing breathing and heart rate, and can ease menstrual cramps with the release of endorphin hormones into our bloodstream.
This is not your Sunday School conversation. It isn’t so much given a nod anywhere in purity culture. I have yet to hear a primary school sex education lesson on such, and it most likely isn’t going to show up in the good ole birds and bees conversation with your mother. And even when you are older, bringing up the female orgasm with your friends might feel like the blind leading the blind. This is where we must be unwaveringly committed to our sexual wellbeing and becoming. Because while International Female Orgasm Day is only once a year, it’s worth celebrating and honoring all year round.
Have the conversations. Read the books. Walk into the sex shops. Buy the toys. Enjoy the lingerie. Love the sex. Engage your clit! Experience the fullness of who you are which very much includes sexual pleasure and do so unapologetically. Become conversant with your clitoris and make sure your partner does as well. And f*ck the line that says, “I enjoyed it because he did.” As someone who has been an insider to toxic conversations around sex and who took great pains to break out of all that gross misogyny and internalized patriarchy the journey is worth it, you are worth it, and your future orgasms are depending on your grit and gumption!
If you are new to these conversations, there is no time like International Female Orgasm Day to start putting yourself and your clit first.
So, happy International Female Orgasm Day! How are you celebrating?
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