research used to mark when orgasm happened, particularly contractions of the pelvic floor muscle at the entrance of the vagina.
Yeah. It’s not that simple.
Remember nonconcordance from chapter 6—what your genitals are doing doesn’t necessarily match what you’re experiencing? There’s evidence that this is true for orgasm as well—at least among women who are able to orgasm in a laboratory while their genital response is being measured.
For example, in one study, research participants were asked to masturbate to orgasm in the lab and then “grade” their orgasm on a scale of 2 1 (“weak or poor”) to 5 (“most powerful or excellent”).Result? There was no relationship between the grades women gave their orgasms and the genital responses traditionally treated as “markers” of orgasm, such as number of contractions of the pelvic floor muscle.
Those rhythmic, involuntary contractions are perhaps the most nearly universal physiological marker of orgasm—but even that can’t be relied on all the time. In one study, two out of eleven women exhibited no vaginal 3 muscle contractions at orgasm.And in another study, some women 4exhibited the muscle contractions without orgasm.
In other words, genital physiological markers of orgasm are not always predictive of a woman’s subjective experience of orgasm. Which makes perfect sense if you recognize that orgasm—like arousal—isn’t about what 5happens in your genitals, it’s about what happens in your brain.
no two alike Which brings us to the second thing orgasm isn’t: “a pinnacle of pleasure.”
Orgasm is a lot like being tickled. Sometimes it can be fun, other times it’s annoying, and sometimes it feels like almost nothing. Pleasure is a perception of a sensation, and perception is context dependent. That’s just as true for orgasm as it is for tickling. But no one ever asks me, “Why is it that a lot of the time when my partner tickles me it feels fun and pleasurable, but then other times it really doesn’t?” We all know intuitively that the perception of tickling sensations is context dependent. There’s a time and a place for tickling.
And yet people ask me all the time, “How come sometimes my orgasms are great and other times they’re really not?” It’s as if we believe that