DANIELLE POPE
CUP Western Bureau Chief

VICTORIA (CUP) — I’ve faked an orgasm before — more than once, actually.

The first time, he’d been trying for so long I felt bad and finally gave him what I knew he was expecting. The second time, I was trying to keep up with the expectations I’d accidentally set. The third time, I was trapped in a vicious cycle of pleasure lying. And the fourth time, well, you get the drift.

I’d had plenty of orgasms before, and considered myself a pro at delivering for myself. But whether it was the pressure of a new relationship, or unrealistic expectations, it just wasn’t, er, clicking. It went on like this until I — or my vagina — couldn’t take it anymore. And so one night, when he queried me about why this time was taking so long, I finally set the record straight.

I remember my partner’s reaction when I broke the news.

“You’ve faked it?” he said with a look of horror on his face. “How many times?”

“Oh, once or twice.”

“Why?”

“I felt bad?”

“But I’ve given plenty of girls plenty of orgasms before. You must be different than all the rest.”

“I’m not.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you know you’ve given other orgasms?”

“I just do; they told me.”

“Mmmhmm”¦ like I told you?”

He fell silent. And he admitted that someone else had told him they’d faked it once before too.

It was then I realized that not only had I temporarily damned myself to a sex life without the satisfaction, I had damned my partner to becoming yet another blissfully pleasure-ignorant person, incapable of delivering on the complex needs of his partner, or even knowing what those needs really are.

Worst of all, I’m not alone.

A recent study by the University of Indiana found that a lot of women have lied about their climactic moments. In the study, researchers found that 85 per cent of men believed that their partners climaxed during their most recent sexual tryst, yet only 64 per cent of those women said they actually did reach orgasm.

It’s a gap of over 20 percentage points. What’s with the lying, ladies?

Debby Herbinick, the study’s co-author, told media that communication breakdown in the bedroom is largely to blame “either by women faking it, or by men not asking or noticing if their partner climaxed.”

The report involved 6,000 participants between the ages of 14 and 94, and is considered to be the largest national sex survey the U.S. has undertaken. This is also the most recent survey on the subject in almost 20 years.

Steve Garlick, a human sexuality professor at the University of Victoria, says that while the study itself claims a trend he believes is questionable, the more interesting question is what does the continued popularity of this idea say about gender and sexual relations today?

“Given the centrality of sexual ”˜performance’ to the social norms of masculinity, an explanation that is at least plausible is that men have difficulty admitting that their partners were not ”˜satisfied,’ ” Garlick said. “This is not to say that the phenomenon of ”˜faking orgasms’ does not exist. To the extent that it does exist, it can be seen as illustrating the influence of perceived gender norms on heterosexual relations.”

Garlick says that such norms allude to women’s orgasms being seen as the direct result of men’s technique, stamina and work — thus, it makes sense that men could feel a bit defeated if they aren’t the ones able to deliver.

“This reflects longstanding associations of masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity,” he said. “The phenomenon of faked orgasms derives from the need for evidence that a man has ”˜performed’ adequately, that his work has value. If women do elect to fake orgasms, this can often be because it is easier than having to confront the ways in which socially constructed gender identities are intertwined.”

Garlick also points out that, indeed, media and society have likely given us all a misconception about what an orgasm looks like.

“Media representations of women’s orgasms tend to reflect men’s anxieties around this issue. The demand for noisy displays as evidence that orgasm has indeed occurred illustrates both the fact that heterosexual intercourse is a vehicle for the affirmation of masculinity, and that it is inherently a site in which men are always in danger of failing to live up to masculine ideals,” said Garlick.

Garlick adds that such ideals ignore the diversity of real sexual response that actually characterizes people’s lives.

“[Even] mainstream heterosexual porn reinforces the expectation that it is women’s responsibility to continually express sexual pleasure in a loud and evident fashion, and it’s possible that the increasing popularity of pornography may be a contributing factor to the continued prevalence of faking orgasms,” Garlick said.

Garlick says that he actually rejects the notion that women are more complex than men when it comes to sexuality.

“Sexuality is, in general, a complex phenomenon that derives from an intertwining of biological, sociological and cultural elements. Men’s sexualities are also complex — it’s just that this fact is less well recognized because the social construction of masculinity makes it difficult to acknowledge,” he said. “At the same time, it may also be the case that the cultural norms that contribute to women faking orgasms reflect an understanding of women’s sexual pleasure on an implicitly masculine model.”

It didn’t take me long to learn that faked pleasure was a two-way losing streak. So the next time when my partner asked, I told him: “Oh, yeah, baby”¦ that’s not quite it.”

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image: Roland Harvey