Humans are remarkably good at convincing themselves they didn’t want the thing they couldn’t have. For women, a new study suggests, orgasms are no exception.
Research out of Rutgers University, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that women rated orgasm as less important to their sexual satisfaction under one very specific set of circumstances: when they imagined having rarely experienced orgasm throughout their sexual history and weren’t experiencing it with a current partner either. In every other scenario, women valued orgasm just as highly as anyone else. That finding alone should put to rest the tired cultural assumption that women simply care less about orgasm than men do. They don’t. They just stop prioritizing something that starts to feel like it was never really on the table.
Researchers ran three experiments through the online platform Prolific, recruiting U.S. adults with an average age of around 40. Participants were placed into one of four conditions based on two variables: whether their imagined orgasm history across past partners was high or low, and whether their current frequency with a new partner was high or low. Two separate studies confirmed the pattern in women. A third study, with men, confirmed something equally worth noting.
Men, for their part, did the exact same thing. When asked to imagine a female partner with a low orgasm history who also wasn’t finishing with them, men valued her orgasm less and assumed she did too, and were least likely to blame themselves for it. Which, combined with the women’s findings, paints a pretty grim picture. She’s decided it doesn’t matter. He’s decided it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s talking about it, and nothing changes.
The researchers call it a self-protection move, which is a generous way of putting it. When something feels permanently out of reach, the brain pulls the oldest trick it has — decides the thing wasn’t worth wanting anyway. It works, technically. Women who downgraded orgasm’s importance felt better about sex when it wasn’t happening. But feeling okay about a problem isn’t the same as solving one.
The orgasm gap—the well-documented disparity in how often women versus men finish during partnered sex—doesn’t close because everyone has made peace with it. If anything, that peace might be exactly what’s keeping it open.
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