orgasms are somehow different from other sensations, that they should feel a certain way, no matter the context.
All orgasms are the sudden release of sexual tension. How that release feels depends on context. Which is why some orgasms feel amazing and others . . . really, really don’t. A handful of examples: • A woman told me, red faced, that she had an orgasm during her exercise class—but she 6didn’t enjoy it—and was confused both by the orgasm and the lack of pleasure. • A friend with major depression said she could have orgasms but she didn’t experience pleasure with them. I told her that was normal, that pleasure comes from context, and her context was gray and flat. Normal for a person with depression. • An undergrad was turning paler and paler during my guest lecture about sexual assault. I had mentioned in passing that sometimes women have orgasms during rape and that that’s 7 basically just a reflex, it doesn’t mean pleasure or consent.She came up to me afterward and said I’d changed her life with that one sentence. • A woman periodically orgasmed in her sleep and would wake up midorgasm, sometimes from a dream, sometimes not, but always puzzled by the warmth and pulsing that were not 8necessarily accompanied by any particular enjoyment.
Orgasms differ from each other because the context for those orgasms differs. The quality of an orgasm is a function not of orgasm itself but of the context in which it happens.
all the same parts . . .
The third thing orgasm isn’t: hierarchical. All orgasms are different, and there is no “right” kind or “better” kind of orgasm. It’s even hard to say that there are different kinds of orgasm—because they’re all made of the same basic parts (sudden release of sexual tension) organized in different ways.
Instead of thinking about “kinds” of orgasm, we can think about different ways to have an orgasm. Here’s a small sample of the highly pleasurable orgasms women have described to me:
• Orgasm from clitoral stimulation.
• Orgasm from vaginal stimulation.
• Orgasm just from breast stimulation. • Orgasm from having her toes sucked. • Orgasm when her partner penetrated her (well-lubricated) anus with a finger, while pinning her to the bed by her hair. The most erotic sensation, she specified, was his warm palm resting gently on her butt cheeks. • Orgasm when her partner slowly and gently stroked fingertips upward along her outer labia . . . again . . . and again . . . and again. She said, “What started out as an appetizer turned into the main course.” • Orgasm without any genital stimulation, while she was giving her partner oral sex. She was so closely tuned to his arousal that when he came, she did, too.
Are these clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, breast orgasms, toe orgasms, butt cheek orgasms, labia orgasms, and oral orgasms?
Nope. Despite the painstaking efforts of women’s magazines and even researchers to identify and label the various kinds of orgasms we could be having—G-spot orgasms, blended orgasms, uterine orgasms, vulval, and all 9the rest—there can be only one. (Like The Highlander.) There’s just the sudden release of sexual tension, generated in different ways. Anatomically, physiologically, even evolutionarily, it doesn’t make much sense to talk 10about kinds of orgasms based on what body parts are stimulated.
It’s true that orgasms generated through clitoral stimulation often feel different from orgasms generated through vaginal stimulation. But it’s also true that vaginally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other, and clitorally stimulated orgasms feel different from each other. Orgasms with a partner may feel different from orgasms without a partner, and orgasms with one particular partner may feel different from orgasms with a different partner, and orgasms with one partner may feel different from sexual encounter to sexual encounter. If we were going to categorize orgasms by how they feel, we’d need a new category for every orgasm a woman has.
Just as all vulvas are normal and healthy just as they are, so all orgasms are normal and healthy, regardless of what kind of stimulation generated them or how they feel. Their value comes not from how it came to be or whether it meets some arbitrary criteria but from whether you liked it and wanted it.
Orgasms were not Laurie’s problem. Once she got going, she found orgasm pretty reliable. No, Laurie’s problem was that the stress in her life built a stone wall between her and sexual pleasure of any kind. She and Johnny were learning how to break down that wall by changing the context . . . but following their “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” success, Johnny got cocky. He pushed his luck. He started asking and pressing and chasing, which made Laurie feel more and more pressured, and soon she started to resent that he was asking, especially since he knew—he knew—that when she felt pressured, her interest evaporated. It was like he was trying to ruin it.
A perfectly normal and very tempting way for Laurie to think about this situation would have been to say, “Look, my life is out of whack, therefore my sexual interest is out of whack. So be it. No sex for me.” Plenty of women think the same thing every day and are rightly satisfied to wait until their lives improve before they try to get their sex lives back into whack. It’s a matter of priorities. And in fact, the main