Recent research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin When climax occurs infrequently, both women and men suggest that it is less important for women to experience climax. This psychological adjustment tends to protect a person’s self-esteem and relationship satisfaction in the short term. Over time, this mental change likely contributes to the continuing orgasm gap, a consistent difference in how often heterosexual men and women experience climax during sex with their partners.
Cultural stereotypes often suggest that women care less about their physical satisfaction than men. Past scientific studies provide mixed evidence on this topic. Some studies show that women prioritize emotional connection during intimacy, while other studies show that women desire physical climax just as much as men.
Scientists conducted this study to reconcile these contradictory findings by investigating the specific conditions under which women lower their expectations. They thought that downplaying the importance of climax might function as a psychological defense mechanism against feelings of inadequacy. When people feel like they are failing at a particular goal, they often protect their self-esteem by deciding that the goal is not important at all.
“I study the orgasm gap, a well-established phenomenon in which men, on average, have more orgasms than women during sex with a partner,” said Grace Wetzel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Indiana University School of Public Health who conducted the study while attending Rutgers University.
“There’s a debate in the field and in popular culture about whether women simply care less about orgasms than men. But we know from the motivation literature that people generally care less about outcomes they don’t expect to achieve. So we designed an experiment to investigate whether women care less about orgasms, especially when they haven’t had one.”
For the study, researchers recruited 271 adult cisgender women for an online experiment. Participants read hypothetical romantic scenarios that varied in two specific ways regarding their sexual history. The story describes a woman who had a history of frequent or infrequent orgasms in the past, as well as either frequent or infrequent orgasms with a new current partner.
After reading their assigned stories, the women rated how important they thought they would feel to have an orgasm in that particular situation. They also answered detailed questions about their perceived level of sexual desire, overall sexual satisfaction, and commitment to new relationships. Finally, participants rated whether they blamed themselves or their partner for the lack of orgasm.
Scientists found that women valued orgasms least when they imagined a history of rare orgasms combined with rare orgasms in their current relationship. In this particular scenario, women were more likely to blame themselves rather than their hypothetical partner. This suggests that women viewed the lack of physical pleasure as a personal flaw, prompting them to lower their expectations to protect their self-esteem.
When women imagined having frequent orgasms but not with a new partner, they especially reported lower relationship commitment and lower sexual satisfaction. Participants primarily blamed the new partner in this scenario and viewed the physical rupture as a threat to the survival of the relationship. However, women who mentally downplayed the importance of orgasm in these disappointing scenarios reported better emotional outcomes than those who continued to keep their expectations extremely high.
The researchers then conducted a second experiment with 278 women to measure the exact change in attitudes over time. First, participants reported their basic feelings about how important climax is in a typical romantic relationship. One week later, the women read the same hypothetical scenario from the first experiment and rated their emotions again.
The results replicated the first experiment and provided evidence that mindsets had indeed changed. Women actively lowered their personal ratings of the importance of orgasm compared to their original baseline only when they imagined a consistent lack of orgasm between past and current partners. For these women, lowering expectations was associated with higher levels of imagined desire and satisfaction compared to women who maintained their original standards.
“The takeaway here is that if many women go on without experiencing orgasm, they actually end up giving it less importance,” Wetzel told SciPost. “At the individual level, this is likely an adaptive response to protect self-esteem, sexual satisfaction, relationships, and interest in sex. However, at the sociocultural level, the orgasm gap is likely to persist over time as women no longer expect or strive for orgasm.”
A third experiment investigated how men view this issue and whether they adjust their expectations similarly. Researchers recruited 278 straight and bisexual men and had them read similar stories about hypothetical female partners. The men rated how much they valued their partner experiencing orgasm in a given situation.
Men responded in exactly the same pattern as women. They rated their partner’s physical pleasure lowest when their partner stated in the story that he had rarely experienced it in the past and rarely experienced it in the present. The men also correctly guessed that under these specific conditions, the hypothetical woman would not care much about her physical peak.
A man’s feelings about the relationship were also hurt when the orgasm disappeared from the bedroom. Men reported that their commitment to a relationship decreased when they imagined that their female partner had climaxed frequently in her past relationships but was unable to reach climax in her current relationship. The researchers noted that men were more likely to view this particular situation as a sign of serious inadequacy and blame themselves for the failure.
“We were surprised that men responded to the scenario in the same way as women. They also downplayed their hypothetical female partner’s orgasm under the same conditions and in the same way, with similar consequences for their imagined relationship,” Wetzel said.
The researchers stress that their findings should not be interpreted as a mandate for orgasm to be the only goal of intimacy.
“We want to avoid promoting the idea that orgasm is the sole or ultimate goal of every sexual encounter,” Wetzel explained. “Sex can be very satisfying and meaningful without orgasm, but putting pressure on orgasm can actually make it less satisfying and make sex less likely to occur. What we want to emphasize is that women’s pleasure is often a culturally low priority. Couples should strive to prioritize pleasure equally in each relationship.”
The main limitation of this project is its reliance on fictional scenarios rather than actual romantic experiences. Imaginary stories do not fully capture the complex motivations and emotions that exist in the real bedroom. Furthermore, most of the online participants were white and not fully representative of the diverse general population of the United States.
Future research will aim to examine women’s actual sexual histories and see if these mental adjustments occur outside of controlled experiments as well. The researchers hope to follow couples over time to see if lowering expectations leads to long-term resentment.
“These scenarios were hypothetical to give us some control over the experiment,” Wetzel said. “The next step is to examine the history of the female orgasm and its significance, and to replicate these findings using women’s lived experiences.”
The study, “Devaluing the Female Orgasm: An Experimental Investigation of If, When, and How Women and Men Reduce the Importance of the Female Orgasm,” was authored by Grace Marie Wetzel, Hayley Svensson, Shana Cole, and Diana T Sanchez.
