Getty
It’s common knowledge that men have more orgasms than the women they’re sleeping with.
It’s also known that lesbian women have orgasms at a rate similar to men.
While this information proves that the orgasm gap doesn’t have anything to do with biology, there hasn’t been any concrete evidence to understand why it exists in the first place.
Is it simply because women understand other women’s bodies better than men do?
Well a new study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, might have the answers.
The study found that the orgasm gap is more to do with sexual scripts than gender—in other words, what we expect sex to be like because of what we’ve seen in movies, television and pornography. Even more interestingly, the research showed that women’s expectations for sex and orgasms varies depending on the gender of their partner.
The study asked a group of heterosexual women, bisexual women, lesbian women about their sexual expectations, finding that lesbian women reported more orgasm expectations, greater orgasm pursuit, more clitoral stimulation and more orgasms than heterosexual women.
However, the study also found that orgasms are just as important to heterosexual women as they are to lesbian women.
A key understanding came from the answers of bisexual women, who had the same orgasm pursuit and importance regardless of the gender of their partner.
However, bisexual women who were with a female partner reported higher expectations for clitoral stimulation and orgasms than those partnered with men.
The research notes that heterosexual sex script prioritising the male orgasm, with the average script being going foreplay to vaginal intercourse until the man orgasms and the sex ends.
Women sleeping with women are not as likely to follow this script, while also being much more likely to engage in nonpenetrative sex.
Considering that intercourse offers the lowest orgasm frequency, it’s not hard to understand why lesbian women are having more orgasms than straight women.
It might be time for heterosexual couples to take gendered sex expectations off the table as well.
