Letting My Clitoris Down: Why We Need to Talk About Orgasm Anxiety

Movies show us men who complain about ‘performance anxiety’; why don’t we see women discussing orgasm anxiety?

“I’m not sure. What does it feel like?”

I’d just asked my cousin if she orgasmed enough with the guy she’d been dating for over three years now. We’d covered a whole gamut of conversation – in between piles of French fries dressed in ranch dressing, and we’d established the fact that the duo were, in fact, happy. Sex, she informed me, happened on a steady level, “probably once a week”, but she wasn’t sure if she ever had an orgasm.

“I think I have,” she finally replied, after a series of staccato pauses, “But I wouldn’t know unless I spoke to other women who were more certain.”

Turns out, not a lot of us are.

My cousin’s problem is that of sexual inequality, plain and simple. We can beat about the bush (no pun intended) and call it a lack of communication – or, as many men have told me, “not a big deal”. “She should simply come and say what she wants,” an ex-boyfriend once insisted.

But it’s not that simple.

I’d Orgasm Later, Or Never...

Orgasm anxiety manifests itself in many women in many ways. The first time I knew for sure that I had let my clitoris down was during a particularly awful relationship, when the boy I was dating refused to go down on me. This while he insisted on a “little bit of pleasure” from me, every now and then, in the midst of movie marathon sessions, gently – often abrasively – guiding a stray hand or my sleepy head further down his expectant belly.

The hand fascinated me at the time – its ability to negotiate and insist on pleasure for itself, while dismissing any possibility of reciprocation. The few times he did attempt to run his reluctant fingers across my body, he’d stop after the first few minutes, letting me know it was “too hard”, and it probably wouldn’t happen.

What this effectively did to my sexual confidence was to let it know it could never survive a race with a man. I’d orgasm later, or never, or on my own time. If I had sex, I had to reconcile myself to the fact that the action stopped once the man was done, irrespective of my own urgencies at the time.

While the tangible experience of the relationship didn’t take long to get over, it took years and two relationships to overcome the sexual scarring and orgasm anxiety. Future boyfriends were haunted by the ghosts of my sexual past – which exhibited itself in hurriedly pushing their hands away if they got too close to pleasuring me and insisting the sex was great, when they were insightful enough to understand that it wasn’t. It took a series of helpful conversations with lovers who understood and women who empathised for the scar to mute itself.

I soon realised I wasn’t alone. Girlfriends over the years have shared stories of the few lovers that remain reluctant to please them, scarring them for the few that do. There are rare retellings of nights that went “both ways” or that one orgasm, five years into a marriage, felt like a surprise.

One friend, back in college, would tell me of the many times she’d grit her teeth and shake her head in an attempt to dismiss the pesky worries that would flit into her head, “at that exact time” as she attempted to find her Holy Grail.

Of Male Performance Anxiety and Female Orgasm Anxiety

The ability to verbalise what you want in bed is NOT something that comes easily to all women – contrary to what vigorous sex scenes in the movies, playing out on conveniently located bar rooms atop sweaty pubs, will tell you. Rarely do men and women, at the beginning of a sustained sexual relationship, come together in a cataclysmic, orgasmic frenzy. Are you thinking of two exhausted bodies falling next to each other, looking like they’ve been hit with a giant tranquilliser gun? Sorry, that’s rare as hell.

Think of the countless movies you’ve seen where two ‘bros’ are whispering out in the bathroom as one slips the other a condom for a lucky night, whilst the newly-condom-gained guy moans about it having been a while. Or the scenes where a bunch of men backslap a pal and tell him to “shake it off – it happens to all of us!” Male performance anxiety is often spoofed, often dealt with seriously, in the TV and movie world – but it is, at least, talked about. Where are the very real depictions of the very real women discussing their orgasm anxieties before sex?

When it comes to the big O, women are battling far harder than they’re given credit for. Can the lovers be feminist enough to win it with them?