Mind the pleasure gap: Why are women having such a bad time in the bedroom?

If you’re a woman in 2024, you should be having an incredible sex life. Think about it: we are living in an extraordinarily sexually liberated time when nothing is off the table and you can now buy vibrators and sexaccesories in almost any high street lingerie shop.

Sex positivity feels like it is everywhere, but apparently not in our bedrooms. A new survey has shown that two in three women are doing things during sex that they don’t enjoy and, more worryingly, one in four saying they find it hard to say “stop” to a partner doing something they don’t like. 

These statistics, from a survey of 3,000 adults conducted by dating app Pure, may sound shocking, but not me. Nor would they, I suspect, surprise any of the women I know who are very aware of the pleasure gap between what is meant to be happening in the bedroom and what is actually happening in there.

Several other recent studies support these findings. The International Academy of Sex Research found that while gay and straight men climax during about 85 per cent of their sexual encounters, women having sex with men reach orgasm just 63 per cent of the time. This gap widens significantly during first-time hookups, with 80 per cent of men reaching orgasm compared with only 40 per cent of women.

Given the sheer volume of books, TV shows, and marketing campaigns that are coming out around the subject of female sexuality, you’d be forgiven for thinking the orgasm gap was something we closed a long time ago.

Evidently, that’s not the case. “I can’t remember the last time I had an amazing sexual experience with someone new,” says Yas*, 34. “You have to be patient because things do generally improve with time as you learn more about each other’s bodies. But we have to work so hard at it.”

But it’s not just men who lack the knowledge (or even care) to give us pleasure, many women also lack the sexual literacy to communicate what they want to. “I don’t feel comfortable telling new partners what I do and don’t enjoy,” says Maggie*, 29. “It’s too awkward and I’m too worried I’ll damage their ego and it might scare them off.”

This major disconnect between what we’re being told culturally and socially and what we’re actually experiencing is captured brilliantly by Katherine Rowland in her book, The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution. Her interviews with hundreds of women show just how far we have to go to achieve meaningful change.

“For women, sex is often presented as either existing in terms of reproduction, in terms of pathology, or in terms of service,” says Rowland. “And despite so many social advances and generational differences, I think women still deeply internalise this idea that they are sexual objects and their partners still expect of them the idea that they are sexual objects built for providing pleasure but not necessarily for receiving it, and that pleasure is merely something they need to perform for their partner’s benefit.”

The performative aspect is why so many heterosexual women fake orgasms with their partners. In her viral TED talk on the subject, clinical psychologist and author of Mind The Gap: The Truth About Desire and How to Futureproof Your Sex Life Dr Karen Gurney explained why there is still such a distinct gap between how we talk about sex today and how we actually have it.

“There’s been a huge move towards focus on sexual wellness in the last decade and this is very welcome,” says Dr Gurney. “Despite the surface level focus on the importance of sexual wellbeing, though, many are very much still struggling with not feeling sexually liberated, feeling oppressed and feeling restricted or unable to access sexual pleasure.”

For my friends and I, part of this boils down to how we were taught about sex at school. As stereotypical as it may sound, we were shown how to put a condom on a banana and sent on our way. That was it. And that was at a boarding school, where pupils were having so much sex on campus that teachers regularly had to patrol around at night to try and catch them. Thankfully, the sex education syllabus has been significantly updated since then and now includes mandatory units around consent, sexual exploitation, online abuse, grooming, coercion, harassment, and more. But is there still something missing?

“There needs to be sex education that is inclusive of pleasure,” says Rowland. “There is no mention of the clitoris in these textbooks, for example, and this is an organ in the body. It’s not a mysterious entity. It’s not a product of fantasy. But by excluding it, we eradicate women’s pleasure as a subject of scientific and social validity.”

The sheer volume of companies plugging “sexual wellness”, both in their advertising and on social media, can also feel overwhelming. And, in truth, a sex toy isn’t going to do much to solve the wider issue at play here. Rowland reflects: “Vibrators will probably increase the number of orgasms that women are having but it doesn’t increase the extent to which they’re able to advocate for their pleasure in different spaces.”

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Good sex isn’t just about buying the right vibrator, it’s about connecting with your partner and, more importantly, with yourself. “To close the pleasure gap we need to find the right kind of touch, stimulation or pleasure, communicate that to our partner, and to stay present in the moment rather than letting the mind wander,” says Kate Moyle, psychosexual therapist and author of The Science of Sex. “These factors become compromised when we don’t speak up to our partners, or fake orgasms, or when we start to stress about not reaching orgasm.”

We also need to change the way we talk about sex on a societal level and bring pleasure into that conversation. There is still too much shame attached to the subject – can you remember the last time you spoke to a married person about how often they have sex? While outwardly society feels like it is having loud conversations about sex, inwardly we are still a culture ill-at-ease which is prohibiting us from further progression.

“We should be able to have a non-judgemental dialogue around sex, bodies, pleasure and sexuality where pleasure rather than risk is centred,” says Dr Gurney. “Young people need to go into their first sexual experience knowing that the most likely result of this experience will be affirmation, pleasure and fun, not an overfocus on STIs, pregnancy and risk of reputational damage.”

Of all the things I wish I’d learnt about sex when I was younger, it is that sex is supposed to feel good – a message that gets drowned out by all the warnings. And we should be able to communicate when it doesn’t to our partners – male or female – without worrying about them feeling crushed. “Bringing men into this conversation is vital,” adds Rowland. “Because if women feel more comfortable in their own skin, more entitled to their pleasure and more fluent in what sexual experiences can be, everybody is going to benefit from that.”