Why women need equality of orgasms

I was in a chatty roomful of women when I brought up the ‘O’ word. You could have heard a pin drop, clatter onto the floor and counted the echoes bouncing off the walls. You would have thought I was advocating something verboten by both society and law, but all I said was that I thought women needed to speak up and loud about their right to an orgasm. Every single time.

When the women quite recovered their breath, one piped up nervously, “But how to tell my husband?” Another came up to me later, took me aside and hissed into my ear like a dealer offering contraband, “I’ve never had an orgasm. And my husband doesn’t think I need to have orgasms.” I almost cried hot angry tears on her behalf.

Along with the gender gap in pay and opportunities, I would like to bring to the kind notice of all concerned another gender gap that we would do well to address urgently. The gender gap in orgasms. Given that in the sexual act (and I speak primarily for the heterosexual experience, because that’s where I come from) between a man and a woman. A man can go from zero to 160 kmph and be assured of the little death at the end of it all, while for a woman it is, more often than not, hit or miss, with the miss being all the more frequent.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan, rapper Nicki Minaj stated very clearly, “I demand that I climax. I think women should demand that.” I concur wholeheartedly, despite knowing that the female orgasm is an elusive creature. Getting into the act expecting to climax is a completely different kind of empowerment but one that becomes essential when women forget that they to deserve to climax. And interestingly, we’re really, really good at faking it because all we want to do is go to sleep, and the poor chap will feel kind of inadequate if he doesn’t make us come; or the other extreme, he doesn’t give a damn whether we have or haven’t as long as he has.

Research from the Kinsey Institute tells us that while 85 per cent of men believe that their partners have climaxed during intercourse, only 64 per cent of their partners actually had an orgasm. And this is in the US. Things could be very different here in India. The Cosmopolitan Female Orgasm survey showed that only 57 per cent of women have orgasms. And this gets more interesting: A 2014 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine showed that lesbians had an orgasm rate of almost 75 per cent. Men, irrespective of their sexuality, reported an 85 per cent orgasm rate.

We’re not even getting into the finer nuances of the clitoral orgasm versus the vaginal orgasm yet. While orgasms are a nice grand finale to sex, they might not be a main requirement. For some women, the sense of bonding and closeness during sex is good enough. Orgasms might not be the only indicator of good sex, given how different we all are, of course. Having said that, it is definitely high time women raised their hands in the bedroom and spoke up about their right to climax. That’s one gender gap that we definitely need to add to the list.

Kiran Manral is the author of six published books across genres. She is also a recovering Nutella addict

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