Babygirl opens with an orgasm. There’s moaning, hair flicking, and some seriously convincing sighs. But it’s all for show. Because seconds after having sex with her husband of 19 years, Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, is in another room, watching porn and masturbating until she actually climaxes.
Women aren’t supposed to fake it anymore. Not that we ever were, by the way; in an ideal world, we’d never need to. But for a long time, it was a truth universally acknowledged that if you had sex with men, there would be times when you’d have to perform your pleasure. Groaning on cue was simply part of the heterosexuality job description. It’s a ritual we’ve all done, though none perhaps as notably as Meg Ryan in the cult classic 1989 film When Harry Met Sally, a moment that firmly established faking it in the pop cultural canon. But that was 26 years ago. Since then, we’ve come a long way in terms of how we talk about female pleasure. Spend five minutes scrolling through social media and you’ll inevitably come across someone pontificating about the importance of sexual literacy and communicating your needs in bed. Or maybe that’s just my algorithm.
My point is that there is now so much chatter about how important it is not to fake it that it has inadvertently fostered a culture of shame if you still do. Nobody wants to feel like a bad feminist, one who’s doing a disservice to the sisterhood by enabling men to go about their daily lives thinking they’re gods of sex when, in reality, their female partners are unsatisfied. And yet, a lot of us are doing just that—myself included. “We’re bombarded with images of effortless female pleasure, creating a distorted reality where anything less feels like failure,” says psychologist Barbara Santini. “This leads to what I call ‘orgasm performance anxiety,’ where women feel they must deliver a certain outcome, regardless of their own experience.”
It isn’t always about our partners, either. “Sometimes, it’s about self-preservation,” adds Santini. “People often use it to avoid uncomfortable conversations, to sidestep vulnerability, or even to escape unwanted sexual advances.” All this needs to be examined within the context of the orgasm gap, a term used to describe the much-discussed fact that 95% of heterosexual men usually or always climax during sex, compared to just 65% of straight women. Those are the figures according to a 2017 study conducted by the International Academy of Sex Research, which essentially found that men and women shouldn’t have sex with each other. At least not if they want to have an orgasm—the figures were 89% and 88% for gay men and lesbian women, respectively.
