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A new research study is shedding a light on why straight women have fewer orgasms than lesbians — and it's exactly the reason you think.
Sorry, straight men — queer women just do it better.
A new report is shedding light on why straight women have fewer orgasms than lesbians — and it's exactly the reason you'd expect.
Published this month in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the report included two surveys: one of lesbian and straight women, and another of bisexual women.
The first survey asked the mixed group of 476 how important they value orgasms during sex. While both lesbians and straight women valued climaxing the same, lesbians reported more clitoral stimulation and more orgasms overall during intercourse.
The second survey of482 bisexual participants found that bisexual women value orgasms the same regardless of the gender of their partner, but those partnered with women had higher clitoral stimulation and orgasm expectations than those partnered with men.
Part of this could be influenced by media, researchers said, as sex scenes are often framed around the man's pleasure. Clitoral stimulation is overlooked for basic vaginal penetration, and the scenes typically end with the man's orgasm.
“This heterosexual script prioritizes the man’s orgasm, as intercourse alone is associated with the lowest orgasm frequency for women,” the report states, noting that women who have sex with women are "more likely to engage in nonpenetrative acts."
Grace Wetzel, one of the study’s authors and a psychology doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, told NBC News that the surveys of the two groups show that there’s “nothing inherently biological” about the orgasm gap between men and women, as also demonstrated in previous studies.
“What we should take away from this research is that when women are having sex with men, in general, they’re typically not experiencing enough clitoral stimulation to facilitate an equal opportunity for orgasm,” she said.
Wetzel also suggested that women may feel more comfortable expressing their needs to other women compared to men. While pressure to orgasm can make sex less enjoyable, she said that couples regardless of gender should “work to make their sexual encounters more pleasurable in general by including those sex acts that are most likely to result in orgasm for their partner.”
