New research helps explain why lesbians report more orgasms than straight women
A new study published in Sage this month found that differences in the amount of orgasms women have could be in part due to sexual scripts.
Research over the last decade has found that lesbians have more orgasms than straight women, but questions remained as to why.
A new study published this month in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that these differences when it comes to pleasure could be in part due to sexual scripts — or what people expect to happen during sex based on what they’ve seen in movies, television or even pornography. Cisgender women’s expectations for those sexual scripts and for orgasms can vary based on the gender of their partner, the study found.
Past research has found that men have more orgasms than women, creating what researchers call the orgasm gap. Previous studies have also found that lesbians have orgasms at rates similar to men, which shows that there’s “nothing inherently biological” about the orgasm gap, according to Grace Wetzel, one of the study’s authors and a psychology doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. Wetzel said she wanted to look into the “sexual context” missing from that research, or the other psychological and social factors affecting differences in orgasm rates.
“We wanted to look into why that disparity between lesbian and heterosexual women exists so that we could get a better understanding of why the orgasm gap exists in general,” she said.
Partner gender is connected to orgasm pursuit/frequency in that women expect different sexual scripts based on their partners' gender, rather than because of their sexuality.Getty ImagesWetzel and two other researchers designed two online studies — one of heterosexual women and lesbians and another of bisexual women. The first study asked a mixed group of 476 heterosexual women and lesbians about the importance of orgasms and their expectations about climaxing during sex. It found that lesbians reported more clitoral stimulation in their sexual encounters, higher orgasm expectations, greater orgasm pursuit and having more orgasms than heterosexual women. However, orgasms were equally important to heterosexual women as they were to lesbians.
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