Why women fake orgasm?
Faking orgasms has always intrigued me because it’s something I’ve never done. It’s not that it’s never been needed, it’s just that I prefer an awkward, “Um… no, that’s good” rather than an elaborate performance. Still, most women will or have faked orgasms, and I’ve always wondered why.
Last week I solicited “faking it” tales and got some pretty interesting responses. Besides a pretty unbelievable tale posted as a comment on the website, my responses were all female and all for pretty much the same reason: I just wanted the encounter to end. From one girl who faked for an entire relationship to another who wanted an awkward encounter with a good friend to end, the general sentiment was, “It wasn’t going to happen, and I didn’t know how to let him know.”
Why is it so ingrained that sex isn’t over until both parties have reached climax — even when it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen?
I found an interesting article on this very subject from a sociology journal, Body & Society, entitled “Faking like a Woman? Towards an interpretive theorization of sexual pleasure,” by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott. The article suggests that while many feminists argue that the female proclivity to “fake it” is a result of a misogynistic misunderstanding of female sexuality, in reality “the current masculine meanings associated with the ‘sexual sentence’ and orgasm itself are not given by male sexual anatomy and physiology, but are the product of culturally ordered meanings embedded in particular social practices. The meanings of orgasm derive from social, not biological contexts.”
The article explains that we are taught almost from birth that “a man’s virility is represented as control of both his own and his partner’s sexual response: ‘She’s transported to another world; he’s the pilot of the ship that takes her there.’” The female is therefore taught that her role is to reinforce his capabilities and perform accordingly. The moans, cries, facial expressions and bodily reactions we typically associate with female orgasm are, in fact, not organic bodily reactions, but a series of cues and performative techniques ingrained in our psyche as we develop an image of what sex “should” be.
We are socially taught — from before we even know what sex is — that the “natural” progression of sex is foreplay, followed by intercourse, culminating in orgasm. If a woman fails to orgasm, both she — and more importantly — her partner, have failed.
Here’s the thing, sex doesn’t begin and end in orgasm. By faking it you’re not only teaching your partner that he’s doing something right when he isn’t, you’re reinforcing the age-old fallacy that sex is only about attaining orgasm. As Jackson and Scott write, “Human sexual embodiment can neither be thought of as an abstract potentiality outside the social spaces where it is lived, nor as a mere assemblage of organs, orifices and orgasms.”
Maybe the sexual sentence needs to catch up with our postmodern age and be deconstructed. The realms of sexuality have potential to go above and beyond our current understanding, but, by faking it, women are perpetuating the current system. So stop ladies; don’t fake it and tell your partner the truth. At best, it could change your entire concept of sex; at worst, he’ll get offended — but at least you won’t have to fake it ever again.
Written by Ashley Csanady, taken from www.uwaterloo.ca
