“Fake it” was a consistent — and sometimes pragmatic — mantra for women in a small qualitative study that asked them to discuss orgasms.
The study included 15 women, all of whom were sexually active for at least one year and between the ages of 19 and 28. The findings are being presented Friday at the British Psychological Society’s Psychology of Women annual conference in Windsor, England.
Faking orgasms is a well-known phenomenon among women and even men, though it’s typically characterized with levity. The new findings highlight a darker side to women’s experiences.
“While some women spoke about faking orgasm in positive ways, for instance, as a pleasurable experience that heightened their own arousal, many talked about feigning pleasure in the context of unwanted and unpleasurable sexual experiences,” Emily Thomas of Ryerson University in Canada, one of the study’s authors, said in a news release. “Within these accounts, we were struck by the degree to which women were connecting the practice of faking orgasm to accounts of unwanted sex.”
In the analysis, women didn’t explicitly call their experiences rape or coercion, though they could be categorized that way, according to a news release. The participants described unwanted and unpleasurable sex as “bad,” and suggested that faking the ending was the easiest option for ending the encounter.
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Why Women Are Faking Orgasms originally appeared on usnews.com
