The ‘Act’ of Orgasm
I’ve had a rich and varied career of faked orgasms.
Not right away, though. It never occurred to me to deceive my first boyfriend. We were on a mutual path of sexual self-discovery.
Our explorations in my high school bedroom were genuine, tender, enthusiastic, and eventually we figured out a means by which I could climax during intercourse It wasn’t quick or simple, but it did the trick.
One night, I let out an urgent “Oh my God” and then whispered it again and again, each time convinced that an orgasm was right around the corner.
After a while, a muffled laugh emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I started thinking about counting how many times you’d say ‘Oh my God,’ and I couldn’t help but laugh.”
Who could blame him? Even I was distracted by what sounded like my desperate prayer to some deity of female pleasure.
It was after that relationship ended that my fakery really got going. While navigating the hookups of my early twenties, I didn’t dare risk the humiliation or vulnerability that might attend articulating to a new partner the nuances of my needs—first you X, then a little Y, then some Z.
That suggests I knew exactly what worked. I didn’t, despite my successes with my first boyfriend. I had no faith in my orgasmic acumen, yet I also believed that said acumen was essential to hot sex for my male partner.
Post-college, I became a full-time orgasm faker. I had strong feminist political inclinations, but I was also deeply afraid of male rejection. My intellectual ideals clashed with my personal insecurities. What if I didn’t orgasm and was labeled as frigid or repressed?
My instruction via Internet porn had taught me that sexy, desirable women orgasm at the drop of a thong, and I wanted to be a temptress—aggressive, insatiable, and uninhibited.
Ironically, in attempting to avoid the stereotype of passive female desire, I chose performed enthusiasm over more authentic sexual experience.
But it felt powerful to become a mistress of the “faux” petite mort. Like a skilled conductor, I’d raise the volume and drama of my erotic operatics to an explosive climax, followed by a sweet whimper of a resolution.
It left my audience of one awestruck. “You come so hard, I love it,” one guy raved. Another gushed, “With you, I feel like I’m a teenager discovering Playboy for the first time.”
Most of my partners had been raised on web porn as I had. I endeavored to fulfill their (and my) every smutty expectation.
No man seemed dubious about the intensity and efficiency of my reactions. No man ever asked whether I might be over-egging the pudding.
