Women sometimes fake their orgasms.
It’s something of a no-brainer, and a fact that became a pop culture punchline in the 80s and 90s. Think When Harry Met Sally‘s famous diner scene, or Seinfeld’s The Mango episode.
Now a new study out of St. Thomas University in New Brunswick has found that faking it may not be the entirely lighthearted matter we’ve been led to believe.
Titled Faking To Finish: Women’s Accounts Of Feigning Sexual Pleasure To End Unwanted Sex, the paper recently published in the journal Sexualities details a concerning finding: every single study participant (there were 15) described faking an orgasm to end at least one negative or unwanted sexual experience.
“A lot of people have the reaction ‘Oh, obviously women fake,'” says study co-author Emily Thomas, an M.A. student in clinical psychology at Ryerson University. “There’s been research showing that women fake because they’re tired or bored, or to please their partners, but there’s no prior research showing they do it to get out of a coercive, painful or unwanted experience.”
The women in the study were recruited to talk about feigning pleasure during consensual sex. Thomas says this makes it all the more interesting that every single one of them eventually spoke of using faking as a way to escape a negative or painful encounter.
Although the women described these sexual experiences in negative terms, none used explicit words like “rape,” despite the fact that some of the encounters could be described that way.
“It was consensual, but I didn’t want to do it,” explained one woman in the study.
Thomas concludes from the finding that consent is not synonymous with desire. “Just because an experience isn’t labelled as sexual assault doesn’t mean it wasn’t troubling or psychologically damaging.”
While consent is the legal marker of what is acceptable, Thomas says that beyond that black-and-white definition, we don’t really have the language to talk about more nuanced experiences.
For example, the study found that women described desired sexual encounters with unskilled partners as “bad,” yet were also using the word “bad” to describe painful, coercive or unwanted experiences.
The takeaway? Our lack of more refined language could mean that painful experiences are being passed off as simply not pleasurable.
And when you think of it like that, it’s easy to see how a prime-time sitcom might joke about a woman faking it because she’s tired or bored.
The joke loses its humour, though, if that woman is faking it because it was painful, or because she didn’t want to have sex in the first place.
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