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So how long does it take for a woman to achieve her orgasm? That is the time between sexual arousal and orgasm. The answer is official – and it’s very specific: 13.46 minutes of sexual activity, apparently. So set your timers…
A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine took a look at how long it took heterosexual women in long-term relationships (they kept it to this group as orgasm rates vary quite a bit between women only having sex with men and those having sex with other women) to reach orgasm. Over the course of eight weeks, 645 women with an average age of 30 used a stopwatch to measure how long it took to go from the start of sexual activity to having an orgasm.
The times ranged between 12.76 minutes to 14.06 minutes, (though other studies have found a much wider range – going from around 5 minutes to over 20 minutes). It also has to be said that 17% of the women studied never experienced an orgasm at all. As anyone experienced in these matters might expect, regular penetrative sex didn’t turn out to be the most effective path to a female climax. Only 31.4% of the women who took part orgasmed due just to having penetration sex alone. Oral and other forms of clitoral stimulation were far more significant in relation to the women getting off.
How best to experience female orgasm
People ask, ‘How to make a woman orgasm?’ Bring it back to mutuality and love – and no-one’s making anyone do anything. That said, 69% of women in the study reported that intercourse alone was not sufficient to lead to orgasm, which tells us that it’s very common for women to need other activities or forms of stimulation in order to climax. Most women also reported that, when it came to intercourse, they orgasmed faster and had longer-lasting orgasms when they were on top of their partner (likely because this position also offers more consistent clitoral stimulation).
As an aside, the study also demonstrated that if someone is moaning and writhing around only 30 seconds into penetration, you might want to consider it’s their acting skills that are Oscar worthy, not the man’s sexual prowess.
The researchers defined the starting moment of sexual arousal as feeling “an intense desire for sex in the presence of erotic stimuli, which were provided by the partner, audiovisual methods or both”.
Male versus female orgasm
The study does, however, fail to mention a crucial fact: the orgasm gap. According to research from 2009, the average time for men to orgasm is under six minutes. Last year, another study found that men were also way off in estimating how often their wives experienced orgasm, with 43 per cent getting it wrong. That research, involving 1,683 newlywed couples, found than 87 per cent of husbands consistently experienced orgasm, but just 49 per cent of the women did.
Again, there are a lot of limitations of these data, not the least of which is that only heterosexual adults were studied and, further, all participants were currently in relationships. Clearly, more research is needed on diverse populations and different sexual practices. However, based on the available data, there does appear to be a pretty sizeable difference between heterosexual men and women in time to reach orgasm, which is clearly important to attend to in male-female sexual encounters in the interest of promoting mutual pleasure and closing the orgasm gap.