In the movies women always scream “yes” but I think: It’s late. I’ve had five negronis. Formal language is for job interviews and exams and the only thing I’m putting to the test here is our willing suspension of disbelief. I know that you know I’m faking. I also know
Not every woman orgasms. I’d google the exact statistics but I’m wary of the algorithms. The most terrifying thing I read recently was a study by a Finnish professor who determined one of the keys to more frequent female orgasm was high sexual self-esteem.
How good am I in bed? How good am I up against the door of your apartment when I know the Uber driver is exactly one minute away? Yeah. Yeah. Oh.
Actually, the idea that orgasm might be tied to self-esteem makes sense. Masturbation is, they say, the ultimate act of self-love. And research says the first orgasm is, generally, a solo effort. It happens early, often before the age of 10. Remember that blurry, mumbly feeling of pressing hard? Nonchalantly straddling a seesaw, a bicycle crossbar, a tree branch and just — staying there?
Sometimes, in my teens, I’d wake up and wonder if I was having a seizure. It was like my whole body had held its breath and a tremendous energy was building somewhere I couldn’t put my finger on (ha!). Somewhere low and private. And then, suddenly, my body would breathe out. Like a wave receding. Like lifting the tab on a can of Coke. Rushing-Whooshing-Fizzing. Free fall.
I think that was probably an orgasm but I didn’t have the words for it and it didn’t look like anything I’d seen in a movie (it was, for example, far quieter).
You get into the groove of your adolescence and everything is a dirty joke. Are you coming? Snigger-wink-snigger. But, actually, I never did. Not then, nor under a tree in a park on the way home from the pub, nor behind a sand dune at the beach, nor in the 14-year relationship that contained lots of sex but no orgasms, and not even on my own, in the privacy of my own head.
“I can’t,” I said airily, worldly, when my conversations with girlfriends turned to matters of bodily pleasure. (We were in our early 30s. Cellphones did not yet connect to the internet; texts were restricted to 90 characters or less. We talked all the time. We talked about the sex we were having, the sex we weren’t having and the sex we hoped to have. Sometimes, I think, we had sex just so we would have something to talk about).
There was, I felt, a level of intellectual sophistication in being able to talk about something that had never happened to me. With these women, I convinced myself, I wasn’t faking it. I couldn’t orgasm and it didn’t matter. It’s not you — it’s me and that was ok.
I left that relationship and moved in with myself and a pile of magazines. Before broadband, everything I learned about sex came from Cosmopolitan. The truth was bold and, I’m willing to bet, pink-lettered: ORGASM IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK.
This is not a How To guide. But it is a story with a happy ending. If I had to summarise what I learned from those magazine pages, it was patience. I learned that what my body really required was more than 60 seconds of frantic rubbing; that if movie orgasms were filmed to reflect real-time, nobody would leave the cinema before midnight. The first time it happened, I was reading a book with one hand and had the rest of my life in the other. It felt like I was falling asleep at the same time as being more wide awake than I’d ever been before. Exhilarated. Exalted. Utterly replete — and absurdly proud of myself.
I remember the time a friend told me about her nipple piercing. She popped out of the office at lunchtime and came back to work with a secret. The best part, she said, was sitting in boring meetings with boring people knowing this thing about herself that nobody else knew. I felt like that.
I was 33 years old. I had serious ground to make up. I read about the average length of orgasms and the average number of internal contractions and made a project out of achieving maximum satisfaction by every metric known to womankind. If I held my breath, the sensations were stronger; if I role-played certain scenarios in my head, the sensations were stronger; if I almost fell asleep watching Bridget Jones Diary and kept my feet at a particular angle and . . . you think I’m joking, but I’m not. When you suddenly discover you can do something you thought you couldn’t, there is no time like all the time to do it again. And again.
The only time I couldn’t orgasm was when there was someone else in the bed. They said things like: Are you frigid? Can I slap you? This might sound weird, but would you sit on top of me and face the other way? Do you have lubricant? Condoms? A phone to call a cab home, after which I will lie about where I’ve been tonight? Look, I’m not judging any of the men who said this and much, much more. My body had been this thing that did things for other people — and there was a certain power that came with making other people happy.
And then, one night, I met somebody. We had steak for dinner and did the dishes and talked for hours and went to bed and we both had all the time in the world. I realised that I had always let people off the hook. That I’d gone with their schedule and never prioritised mine. That I’d always said “it’s not you, it’s me”.
That night, I met someone who didn’t think it wasn’t going to happen. That kind of self-esteem is contagious. A gift that is still giving.
