Rule of Thumb: Orgasms Involve Specific Body Parts

Regina Nuzzo from the Los Angeles Times gives us this story about female orgasms orgasms.

The author pulls in our interest with this helpful generalization:

During intercourse, the female orgasm orgasm without any stimulation of specific genital areas can be elusive. What frustrated woman hasn't wondered: Am I simply, um, put together differently than other women men?

 She goes on to introduce the science itself:

Kim Wallen, professor of psychology and behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University, is busy doing the math to find out. And, yes, he says, simple physiology may have a lot to do with orgasm ease whether a particular sex act is likely to lead to orgasm — specifically, how far a woman's clitoris lies from her vagina whether or not that sex act directly involves the right anatomical structures.

Some intriguing statistics are included:

Preliminary work has revealed that only about 7% up to 7% of women always have orgasms with sex alone ^[*] can reliably have orgasms even from sex acts that are not particularly well suited for that goal, he says, while 27% say they never do only have orgasms from the kind of sex acts that are well suited for it.

It should be mentioned that the interviewee does acknowledge the following:

“Personally, I don't think the inability to experience no-hands, penis-only intercourse with orgasm the need to pay attention to particular parts of the anatomy says anything about a happy sex life,” he says hopefully would have said if he'd taken five seconds to think about it. “Maybe it could allow couples the hopefully very small number of men to whom this is still not obvious to be a bit more inventive in how they have sex to realize that manipulating specific body parts is an important element of sex for their partners too.”

[ * The article does not indicate how many of these 7% might have either (i) understood “sex” to include types of sex that lead to orgasm or (ii) interpreted “sex alone” to mean “having sex WHILE alone.”  ]