Orgasm is not everything, as the experts advise us and urge us to connect with our partner, but also with ourselves by self-indulging.
“There is so much pressure today to have orgasms, and to be offered them every time we have sex, that when it doesn’t happen, we feel terribly frustrated,” says psychosexologist and director of the Havelock Clinic in London Dr Karen Gurney, adding, “It’s a mistake to think we are having bad sex if the orgasm is absent. There are a million reasons why we choose to be sexually active: desire for intimacy, excitement, connection, boredom, self-esteem boost.
Many of these incentives can give us great pleasure without even getting close to the climax.” Laura Beltran, psychologist, sexologist and author of the book Les Femmes et leur Sexe (Women and their Sex, published by Payot) confirms,
“Orgasm as an end in itself is something that has been imposed for quite some time. It has been dominated, unfortunately, by the idea that normal sexuality cannot exist without it.”
However, by making orgasm the absolute dominant feature of our sexual map, we have lost the essence. Who is she? Sex itself. The ideal physical communication. The exploration, the stimulation, the experimentation, the total freedom, the liquid union that can happen between two or more people. Julia Pietri, the creator and manager of the feminist account Gang du Clito (“Gang of Clito”) puts a different spin on the issue of the absence of orgasm in our sex lives: “Let’s not forget that its source, the clitoris, was not analyzed as an organ before 1998, so it’s normal that we still don’t know how to satisfy it. Orgasm is a very ‘new science'”.
Emily Nagoski, author of the bestseller Come as you Are (Simon & Schuster), shows us the way: “Orgasm is not the goal. The goal is pleasure. And if we feel the pleasure, then the orgasm will come.”
