When Feminists Met Sally

Researchers studying the so-called orgasm gap find yet another reason for female grievance

An iconic moment in modern movie history is the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), when Sally stuns an incredulous Harry with her rendition of a convincing orgasm. Her bravura performance causes shocked silence in the restaurant until one woman, sitting nearby, says admiringly (or enviously), “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The scene and the woman’s amused reaction told of a simple reality with wit and without judgement: some portion of women—perhaps many—are convincing fakers, and even a sexually experienced man will find it hard to be sure.

Many women in the movie audience laughed in recognition, and many men likely scratched their heads, wondering why anyone would need to fake sexual enjoyment. Some men may have remembered times when they faked it too. In the romantic-comedic world of the movie, the scene symbolized one of the differences between the average woman and the average man that only a generous and committed love could bridge.

A few years ago, When Harry Met Sally turned 30 years old, and its anniversary prompted a number of reflection pieces, some turning a harsh feminist lens on the film’s gender politics. In “‘I’ll have what she’s having’: How that scene from When Harry Met Sally changed the way we talk about sex,” Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post found in the fake climax scene a salutary revelation of male sexual arrogance. For Bonos, Harry is a typical macho man, someone who doesn’t care about a woman’s pleasure. The fact that the whole point of his conversation with Sally had been his confidence that he was giving women pleasure simply confirmed his emetic masculinity.

According to Bonos, the fact that some women fake orgasm supposedly reveals that women’s sexual pleasure is “not prioritized” in heterosexual relationships, and Sally’s performance gave sobering evidence of a gendered pleasure gap. It was implicitly the man’s fault that his partner felt the need to lie to him about her sexual satisfaction, and his desire for her to orgasm proved his typically male ego. Bonos’s analysis was an egregious violation of the spirit of the movie but was eminently faithful to the feminist perspective. The politics of grievance had come a long way in three decades.

Right on cue, studies in human psycho-sexuality are now taking up the same theme, alleging a culturally imposed “orgasm gap” between men and women in which men outpace women in the frequency with which they report orgasm during sexual intercourse (86% for men vs. 62% for women, according to one national survey).

Remembering how consistently feminist pundits have expressed outrage at male incels’ (alleged) sense of “entitlement” to sex, I cannot help but find it ironic how unapologetically researchers assume a female entitlement to orgasm. Apparently, the whole society is to be concerned if women fail to climax every time they have sex, while no one has compassion for young men who face a lifetime of sexlessness. The prime exhibit is “Orgasm Equality: Scientific Findings and Societal Implications,” a paper published in 2020 by three female researchers at the University of Florida. The paper not only surveys the literature on the subject but also makes recommendations for “a world of orgasm equality.”

According to the researchers, the gap between men’s and women’s reported orgasm frequency should not be explained with straightforward “anatomical or biological explanations,” and certainly not with any appeal to the allegedly “complicated and elusive” nature of the female orgasm. The explanation must be cultural: our societies devalue women’s sexual pleasure and overprioritize the male orgasm and intercourse (don’t even think about all the obvious evolutionary reasons why this might be so!).

Any research seeming to demonstrate precisely this “complicated and elusive” nature—such as abundant studies, which the authors note, showing that women report distractedness as a problem interfering with their ability to relax into sex—must be subsumed into the sociocultural. It is the world, apparently, that makes it difficult for women to concentrate on their pleasure, not anything in female nature itself, and certainly not the simple fact, never mentioned in the article, that the male sex drive is much stronger than the female.  

Like much research today, the article has an obvious agenda and marshals its evidence to promote it. It states more than once that lesbians are sexually more satisfied than women in heterosexual relationships (“women in same-sex relationship reported more frequent orgasms”), conveniently neglecting to mention that lesbians are the least sexual of couples and that they “experience a faster and steeper decline in sexual frequency than other couple dyads.” One study found that after three years, over half of lesbian couples reported sex only once per month or less. So much for orgasm equality.

The article brandishes the fact that women more reliably reach orgasm through masturbation than in partnered sex, with the clear implication that there is something very wrong with a male partner who can’t do what his partner can do for herself; the authors neglect to mention the rather obvious point that most women who masturbate do so for only one (sad) reason while sexual intercourse has many far more significant motivations such as fun, comfort, loyalty, reconciliation, and love. Such factors are never mentioned at all by the article authors. They also don’t mention that sometimes all the attentive stimulation in the world will do nothing for a woman who, even against her best intentions, is simply not in the mood.

Overall, the article adheres to the standard feminist model that sees the woman as disempowered by heteropatriarchal assumptions and the man blind to his privilege. In the specific scenarios discussed, the man is either embarrassingly convinced that “lasting long and thrusting hard” are the only routes to happy sex, or he is so ego-wounded and anxious at the thought that his partner might not have an orgasm that the poor woman retreats into faking. One might almost think that the main purpose of the article is to induce a self-conscious sense of inadequacy in any man unlucky enough to read it.

So emphatic is the article’s commitment to the view that vast societal prejudices (as well as male incompetence) are the primary issues to be addressed that even studies showing that “many women report feeling sexual satisfaction even when they do not orgasm” merely confirm the researchers’ belief that these women have been conned out of their rightful pleasure. They continue to assert that women’s lesser likelihood of orgasm—whether women themselves report being bothered or not—is a “societal issue to be addressed.”

How can it be addressed? The researchers’ answer is more oral sex, more clitoral stimulation, and less focus on intercourse. That some women and men prefer intercourse to oral sex for a variety of reasons—because it feels more loving and more natural, because some women are embarrassed by oral sex, because some men don’t like it—is not mentioned by the researchers. In their paradigm, intercourse is a mere cultural artifact easily discarded if it does not serve the primary goal of centering (their definition of) female sexual pleasure.

They propose that we should all “acknowledge that broad claims about women’s biological capacity for orgasm are facile” (not sure what that means exactly) and engage in “societal-level advocacy work aimed at women and men promoting clitoral knowledge and the equal valuing of women’s and men’s most reliable routes to orgasm.” One woman’s orgasm, apparently, is the whole society’s urgent business. They conclude in fine feminist style that “If the orgasm gap is a consequence of our social construction of sexuality, we have the power to deconstruct it and create a world of orgasm equality.”

For women, that is. It’s highly doubtful that equality is of any interest in cases where the man finds his desire insufficiently satisfied by a partner who has turned off sex. Claims of female orgasmic injustice are simply part of the immensely trendy modern project of manufacturing female resentment, even when the triviality and irrationality of the claims beggar belief.

We never do see Harry and Sally having sex. In the world of the movie, sex is ultimately a lot less important than seeing the world sympathetically through the other’s eyes.