New psychology research explains why some women devalue their own orgasms

A recent study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that women and men reduce the importance they place on women experiencing climax when it happens infrequently. This psychological adjustment tends to protect a person’s self-esteem and relationship satisfaction in the short term. Over time, this mental shift likely contributes to the ongoing orgasm gap, which is the consistent difference in how often heterosexual men and women experience climax during partnered sex.

Cultural stereotypes often hint that women care less about their own physical satisfaction than men do. Past scientific research provides mixed evidence on this topic. Some studies indicate women prioritize emotional connection during intimacy, while others show women desire physical peaks just as much as men do.

The scientists conducted this study to reconcile these conflicting findings by exploring the specific conditions under which women might lower their expectations. They suspected that downgrading the importance of climax acts as a mental defense mechanism against feelings of inadequacy. When people feel they are failing at a specific goal, they often protect their self-esteem by deciding the goal simply does not matter.

“I study the orgasm gap, which is the well-established phenomenon in which men, on average, have more orgasms than women during partnered sex,” said Grace Wetzel, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Indiana University School of Public Health, who conducted the current study while at Rutgers University.

“There is conversation in the field and in popular culture about whether women simply care less about orgasm compared to men. But we know from the motivation literature that, in general, people care less about outcomes that they don’t expect to achieve. So, that led us to design an experiment to investigate whether women care less about orgasm specifically when they don’t experience it.”

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For the study, the researchers recruited 271 adult cisgender women for an online experiment. The participants read hypothetical romantic scenarios that varied in two specific ways regarding sexual history. The stories described a woman who either had a history of frequent or infrequent orgasms in the past, combined with either frequent or infrequent orgasms with a new, current partner.

After reading their assigned story, the women rated how much they would value having an orgasm in that specific situation. They also answered detailed questions about their imagined levels of sexual desire, overall sexual satisfaction, and commitment to the new relationship. Finally, the participants rated whether they would blame themselves or their partner for a lack of orgasms.

The scientists found that women valued orgasms the least when they imagined a history of rare orgasms combined with rare orgasms in their current relationship. In this specific scenario, the women tended to blame themselves rather than the hypothetical partner. This suggests that the women viewed the lack of physical pleasure as a personal flaw, prompting them to lower their expectations to protect their feelings of self-worth.

When women imagined having a history of frequent orgasms but a lack of orgasms with the new partner, they reported especially low relationship commitment and lower sexual satisfaction. The participants largely blamed the new partner in this scenario, viewing the physical disconnect as a threat to the relationship’s viability. However, women who mentally downgraded the importance of orgasms in these disappointing scenarios reported better emotional outcomes than those who kept their expectations extremely high.

The researchers then conducted a second experiment with 278 women to measure exact changes in attitude over time. First, the participants reported their baseline feelings about how important it is to climax in a general romantic relationship. One week later, the women read the same hypothetical scenarios from the first experiment and rated their feelings a second time.

The findings replicated the first experiment and provided evidence of an actual shift in mindset. Women actively decreased their personal rating of orgasm importance compared to their original baseline only when they imagined a consistent lack of orgasms across past and present partners. For these women, lowering their expectations was linked to higher levels of imagined desire and satisfaction compared to women who maintained their original standards.

“The takeaway is that many women actually reduce the importance they place on orgasm when they consistently don’t experience it,” Wetzel told PsyPost. “On the individual level, this is likely an adaptive response which protects their self-esteem, their sexual satisfaction, their relationships, and their interest in sex. But on a sociocultural level, this likely perpetuates the orgasm gap over time as women stop expecting orgasms and stop trying to have them.”

A third experiment explored how men view this issue and whether they adjust their expectations similarly. The researchers recruited 278 heterosexual and bisexual men to read similar stories about a hypothetical female partner. The men rated how much they would value their partner experiencing an orgasm in the given situation.

The men responded in the exact same pattern as the women did. They placed the lowest value on their partner’s physical pleasure when the story described her as rarely experiencing it in the past and rarely experiencing it currently. The men also accurately guessed that the hypothetical woman would care less about her own physical peak under these specific conditions.

The men’s feelings about the relationship also suffered when orgasms disappeared from the bedroom. The men reported lower relationship commitment when they imagined their female partner used to climax often with past lovers but could not do so in their current romance. The researchers noted that men likely view this specific situation as a sign of deep incompatibility and blame themselves for the failure.

“We were surprised that men responded to the scenarios the same way that women did: they also devalued a hypothetical female partner’s orgasm in the same way under the same conditions, with similar consequences for their imagined relationships,” Wetzel said.

The researchers emphasize that their findings should not be interpreted as a mandate to make orgasms the sole goal of intimacy.

“We want to avoid promoting the idea that an orgasm is the only or ultimate goal of all sexual encounters,” Wetzel explained. “Sex can be very satisfying and meaningful without an orgasm, and putting pressure on orgasm can actually make it less satisfying and less likely to happen. What we do want to emphasize is that women’s pleasure is often culturally de-prioritized, and couples should work towards an equal prioritization of pleasure, whatever that looks like for each relationship.”

A main limitation of this project is the reliance on fictional scenarios rather than real romantic experiences. Imagined stories do not fully capture the complex motivations and emotions present in real bedrooms. Additionally, the online participant pools were mostly white and not entirely representative of the diverse general population of the United States.

Future research will aim to study women’s real sexual histories to see if these mental adjustments happen similarly outside of a controlled experiment. The scientists hope to track couples over time to see if lowering expectations leads to long-term resentment.

“These scenarios were hypothetical so that we could have a certain level of control over the experiment,” Wetzel said. “The next step is to replicate these findings using women’s real experiences, by looking at women’s orgasm histories and their orgasm importance.”

The study, “Devaluing Women’s Orgasm: An Experimental Investigation of Whether, When, and to What Effect Women and Men Reduce the Importance of Women’s Orgasm,” was authored by Grace Marie Wetzel, Hayley Svensson, Shana Cole, and Diana T Sanchez.