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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.
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 ofc 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.
“I’d say approximately 30% of my clients have admitted to faking orgasms at some point,” says Mangala Holland, sex coach and author of Orgasms Made Easy: The No-Nonsense Guide to Self- Pleasure, Sexual Confidence and Female Orgasms. “A lot of them struggle to orgasm and can only climax through masturbation.” Of course, we’ll never close the orgasm gap if women continue to fake it. But the solution is far from simple, particularly in a society that still stigmatizes female sexuality, even though social media sometimes likes to make us think otherwise. “I’ve faked it so many times over the years it’s hard to keep track,” says Amy*, 29. “I feel guilty about it because I should just be able to tell someone if I’ve not managed to have an orgasm. But it’s often easier to fake it and spare feelings, which is silly because I know that having discussions about it would improve it, but it’s such a catch-22. I think a lot of it is rooted in trying not to upset people at the expense of my own pleasure.”
It can feel like an impossible situation, one I’ve found myself in countless times. Whenever friends talk about having “amazing sex” with someone they just met, I’m flabbergasted, mostly because I’ve never had an orgasm with someone new right away. There’s too much pressure, expectations are too high. For me, that only dissipates after time, when I’m more comfortable with someone. And while with some partners it’s easy to be honest, with others it’s easier to play make believe. “I’m vowing to stop,” says Mel*, 31, who has faked orgasms for as long as she’s been sexually active, though it’s more frequent in casual relationships. “I’ve come to realize that no matter how hard I try, sometimes it’s just not going to happen and at times it’s just easier to pretend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m never faking it for someone who has put no effort in; they don’t deserve the ego boost.”
All this gets trickier when, like Babygirl’s Romy, you’re faking it with someone you’re in a committed relationship with. “I’m currently with a man who I really love and our sexual chemistry is amazing,” says Mel. “Whilst I do orgasm a lot of the time, there are occasions when I’m too in my own head about life to be able to. Most of the time I’ll just be honest and explain that it’s not him, it’s me. But I can only look at his crestfallen face so many times.” The trouble is that getting out of the faking-it trap requires vulnerable and frank conversations we aren’t ready to have.
It’s a problem that doesn’t just affect women, either. “I’m often faking an orgasm with my girlfriend,” confesses Matt*, 31. “We have an amazing relationship but from the beginning it was clear that she didn’t enjoy being sexually adventurous. I thought it was fine because the other stuff is so much more important.” Despite being together for two years, nothing has really changed. “Any conversation we’ve had around the subject results in her pulling away from me,” adds Matt. “So to avoid her feeling any shame, I fake it, fully aware that it puts me on the slippery slope to becoming more resentful and unsatisfied.”
Regardless of your gender, faking orgasms is not something we should characterize as a personal failure. It’s a symptom of a broken sexual culture we are clearly still very far from fixing. And while it goes without saying that people-pleasing isn’t more important than our own pleasure, snapping out of that is much easier said than done. Perhaps all we can do is talk about it and patiently hope that, over time, more of us feel sexually emboldened to be upfront with our partners. Either that, or we all need to take our cues from Babygirl and start sleeping with the hot intern. Pick your poison.
*Names have been changed
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