These are the 6 prominent themes that they identified among women's responses, along with explanations of each:
1. Women are responsible for psychologically preparing themselves for orgasm. According to the focus group members, men are responsible for the physical stimulation, but women need to get their gameface on in order to achieve orgasm. Whether it’s better to carry the physical vs. the psychological burden is a debatable question. However, because it’s their responsibility to get in the right frame of mind (focused attention, receptive to the man’s actions), if women don’t achieve orgasm, it can be seen as a lack of emotional commitment not to be swept away by their partner's adroit moves.
2. Female orgasm isn’t necessary for a woman to be sexually satisfied during sex. For a sexual encounter between a man and woman to end “successfully,” so the participants thought, it’s only the man who needs to achieve orgasm. It’s a “bonus” if the woman does as well. According to one participant, “An orgasm would be the icing on the cake” (p. 621).
3. Women need to boost the male’s ego during sex . Paradoxically, though orgasm would clearly be pleasurable for the woman, these participants believed that the man benefits more from the woman’s achieving climax during sex than she does herself. If a woman doesn’t have an orgasm, so the thinking goes, her male partner’s ego is hurt. Women, instead of focusing on their own pleasure, then, are wondering if they’re going to be able to satisfy their partners by showing the “right” response. As one woman stated: “Sometimes you have to [fake orgasm] because you’re going to upset the person.”
4. Women assume they’re being judged by the man, but rarely communicate this concern. Saddled with their beliefs that they are psychologically responsible for orgasm, don’t need it to experience pleasure, and have to fake it to please their partners, it’s natural for women to assume that their partners are judging them on how well they contribute to a positive outcome. Too embarrassed or unsure of themselves, women avoid letting their male partners know he’s “failed.” Interestingly, the men their own focus groups reported that communicating about the sexual experience was important to them, though only in committed (vs. casual) relationships. Women may be surprised, then, to learn that the man they care about also cares about their sexual pleasure.
5. Women place more value on the man’s pleasure than their own. Because they don’t want to bruise their partner’s ego, women are inhibited from acting on their own desires to be stimulated to orgasm in ways other than intercourse. We may see this as a function of their age and relative inexperience, but at least for the women in this sample of undergraduates, the request to follow up sexual intercourse with manual stimulation seems to have the potential to be “devastating to a man’s self-esteem” (p. 622).
6. It’s more acceptable to fake orgasm in a casual encounter. Women, like men, value communication about sexuality in a committed vs. casual relationship. Faking orgasm, they believed, was not acceptable in a committed relationship. However, women still find it difficult to communicate their concerns to their close male partners.
In summary, a woman fakes an orgasm to preserve her partner’s feelings and, quite possibly, the relationship. However, the study suggests that the path to preserving the feelings of both partners, and the relationship, lies not in faking but in establishing honest and open communication. Given the added meanings we impute to sexuality, such communication may be difficult, but in the long run will promote lasting emotional as well as sexual fulfillment.
