The OC darling and podcaster Rachel Bilson has spoken up about her sex life, revealing that she didn't have an orgasm from intercourse with a man until she was aged 38.
During an episode of her Broad Ideas podcast, Rachel shared her story with comedian and fellow podcaster Whitney Cummings, who also opened up about her difficulty achieving orgasm after coming off birth control.
'I could do it with my hands whenever,' Whitney said, to which Rachel replied: 'Of course, yeah. But not from, like, d**k inside.'
Rachelwent on to say, 'Isn’t that crazy?.' Well, no actually, unfortunately it isn’t – in the sense that it’s very common. The fact that a healthy young woman didn’t orgasm during sex with a (presumably male) partner until approximately 20 years into being sexually active merely proves how pervasive and normalised the gender orgasm gap is.
According to research by Durex, sexually active women are having up to four times fewer orgasms on average than sexually active men, a truly tragic state of affairs for those having heterosexual sex. Just 5% of women say that they always orgasm during a sexual encounter, in comparison to 20% of men.
In terms of how this made women feel, 22% reported feeling disappointed, while 20% said they felt frustrated. What’s most concerning, though, is the 11% of women who said they felt nothing about not being able to reach orgasm with a partner, as they’d grown used to it.
Many of us, Rachel included, may become accustomed to a lack of orgasm during sex – which inevitably leads to us expecting less in an important area of our lives, additional to the gaps in pay and health that women are also subjected to everyday.
Being made to feel apathy towards this part of our sex lives is yet another way in which women go without.
According to Grace Wetzel, a sexuality researcher and TEDx speaker on orgasm equality, lowering our expectations in this way will only perpetuate the problem, calling the gender orgasm gap 'a gender equality issue'.
'Our expectations are shaped by our experiences, so when women orgasm less, they will desire and expect to orgasm less,' she says. 'If women do lower their expectations in this way, the more orgasm inequality may perpetuate in relationships.'
So, what can we do to improve both our expectations and experiences when it comes to the possibility of orgasm? As well as improvements to sex education and challenging heterosexual men to work on any gendered attitudes towards orgasm, it can begin with simple communication – with both our sexual partners and each other.
After all, 20% of sexually active women are uncomfortable talking to their partner about what they like and need to achieve an orgasm, with 6% saying they would never talk about it. But without conversation, things will never change.
Though we shouldn't be the only ones pushing for change, all the time we’re not asking for what we want from a partner, or at least discussing it and lamenting what we’re missing with a friend in the pub, we’re suffering the big O gap in silence.
So not only should we congratulate Rachel on her orgasm, we should be commending her for talking about it. For shining a light on the length of time she went without, so a conversation about this normalised inequality can continue.