The Orgasm Episode

This episode contains explicit content, so listener discretion advised. (inspiring music) Head Space Studios. Hi everyone, it's Emily Nagoski, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Head Space, and to Thursday. I'm a sex educator and researcher, and as you know, this week is all about sex. So today, we are discussing, drum roll, orgasms. Everyone wants one, but almost none of us understand them. Today, I'm going to explain the role of orgasms in our lives and how to have more of them if that's what you wanna do. Science has been wrong about orgasm in every way that it is possible to be wrong. Around the 1970s, this idea that women's orgasm is not selected for by evolution, it doesn't have a reproductive function particularly, turned into the idea that women's orgasms aren't important, as if we could measure the importance of a phenomenon by its relevance to reproduction. Even if we could accept that, like, orgasm doesn't have a reproductive role, that does not mean that it is not important or does not matter. If you want it and you like it, that matters. That's what's important. When people are struggling with orgasm, there's two directions they can go. They can't have them or it takes too long. Or on the other side, they're happening too fast. Premature ejaculation, of course, is this side of the coin. They would like to have more control over their orgasms, and there are evidence-based strategies, the primary one is called the stop-start technique, which was developed for people with penises to control ejaculation, but it can absolutely be used for people with vulvas who are interested in having control over their speed of traversing their erotic landscape. And it's very simple. You begin stimulation, you get pretty close to orgasm, and then you stop stimulation and allow your arousal to back down, and then you approach orgasm again, and then you back that down, and then you approach orgasm and you back that down. And this gives you practice getting close and pulling back so that you have that control. When people struggle to have orgasm because they feel like it's taking too long or because they don't have orgasm, first of all, it's extremely common. The researchers almost exclusively on cisgender women. So I'm basically talking about cisgender women here. Approximately 12% of cisgender women under the age of 28 have not yet hadn't orgasm to their knowledge. Also, I have been persuaded by the research that anyone who's interested enough in sex who wants to have an orgasm can have one given the right context. When people struggle with orgasm, it's very often because there's a whole bunch of noise in their head, especially if you've been trying really hard to have an orgasm. You really wanna have an orgasm and you get to a high level of arousal, and then your brain starts going, "Oh, am I having an orgasm right now? Oh no, am...