CREDIT: FSU PUBLICATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT

It is no mystery that sex is a vast and complicated topic. It is a topic that is constantly expanding due to constant research. If you have or want to have sex with someone, you probably want to get satisfied and give satisfaction at the same time, right? But what does this mean exactly?

The best way to have satisfying sex is to communicate well and be transparent. You should be preparing yourself emotionally to understand your and your partner’s needs should be a high priority. The problem comes when people do not communicate correctly or lie to themselves and their partners.

“The sex education the majority of people have is focused on how not to get pregnant or how not to get an STI. It’s not focused on pleasure or how to converse with our partner or partners about what feels good for our body and what we need,” said Fanshawe Sexual Violence Prevention Advisor Leah Marshall. “It’s essential for us to have these conversations about how you talk to your partner about what you want for your own body. Because even though we may know what feels good for us, our partner can’t read our minds.“


Sex is not a synonym for orgasms.

It is often misinterpreted that good sex only happens when we reach orgasm, which is not true. Everybody is different, and a couple’s physical interaction will be different every time. The end goal of every sex interaction should not be orgasms but satisfaction. Marshall said the questions every couple should ask themselves while having sex should be: are we feeling connected? Are we experiencing pleasure? What do we want our bodies to achieve? She said that satisfaction can come in many ways, shapes and forms, and it is not limited to having an orgasm.

“It’s important for us to close the orgasm gap by having conversations about how to ask for what we need. But sex can take many different forms, and sex doesn’t have to mean the finish line is always orgasm for it to be considered sex,” added Marshall. “Taking about the truth of sex and orgasms with your couple doesn’t always feel comfortable because we live in a really shameful society. Around sex, there’s a lot of stigma.”

Couples faking orgasms is nothing new. But recently, there have been many studies that help shed light on exactly how many people fake orgasms and why they do it. Social Psychological and Personality Science collected data from over 600 women, many of whom admitted to forsaking their own erotic pleasure in order to alleviate insecure men. According to The Journal of Sex Research, more women than men reported pretending to orgasm.

Bianca Harris, a Fanshawe College student, said she knows why women fake orgasms. She said that is usually to protect the male’s ego.

“Women feel bad if their guy did not make them cum, so they fake it,” said Harris. “Sometimes they fake it to get the sex over and done with.”

But pleasure can be felt in a lot of different ways. Marshall stated that pleasure can be felt by having a connection with someone and doing many other things that don’t necessarily mean orgasm. The wall society has created that to have pleasure, there needs to be an orgasm in between is creating more pressure on couples trying to enjoy the encounter.

“That’s not necessarily true. Sex and pleasure can take many different forms. When we start to look at it that way and give ourselves permission to do what just feels good for us and our bodies and experience pleasure in many different ways, it may also be not so shameful when we’re not checking these boxes off,” said Marshall.

She stated that people do not talk about pleasure during sex very often.

“In our society, there are a lot of really harmful gender norms,” added Harris.

“I don’t think we’re conversing enough about what pleasure means for people,” said Marshall.