Shameless self-promotion... and some really interesting findings regarding knowledge and frequency of orgasm in a non-random population of undergraduates. This first graph shows the percent of male and female respondents who (1) correctly located the clitoris on a map of the vulva and (2) correctly answered a series of true/false questions about the clitoris.
You'll see that there is surprising little difference between men and women (considering that women have had access to a clitoris all their lives and men have had access only recently, if at all), though you'll see that men are more likely to think most women will have an orgasm from penile-vaginal sex (most women don't) and women are more likely to think the g-spot is another name for the clitoris (it's not). These two cancelled each other out such that the average knowledge score for men and women was statistically the same. The same!
It's this next graph that's the real kicker. This graph shows the relationship between how well a woman scored on the clitoral knowledge tests (on a 0-5 scale) and how frequently she has an orgasm during masturbation and with a partner. You'll see a nice positive relationship between knowledge and orgasm in masturbation and no relationship at all between knowledge and orgasm with a partner. (For fun, notice that the average score on the clitoral knowledge measure for women who'd never had an orgasm with a partner and who always do is the same. Also notice that there are 124 women in that never category, it's not just a handful of women who are somehow "dysfunctional.")
So, for some reason (feel free to speculate), even when women know about their own bodies, they either keep it to themselves, or have partners that don't want to hear it, or both.
If you want to see the paper, here's the cite:
Wade, L., E. Kremer, & J. Brown. 2005. The Incidental Orgasm: The Presence of Clitoral Knowledge and the Absence of Orgasm for Women. Women and Health 42, 1: 117-138.
Email me at lwade@oxy.edu if you'd like a copy.
3 comments:
January 17, 2008 at 10:58 PM
interesting! i wonder what the plot will look like if you plot frequency of orgasm in masturbation and frequency of orgasm with a partner on the X and Y axles respectively...
February 11, 2008 at 4:51 PM
Hmmm... disturbingly the mean scores for those who never orgasm with a partner and those who always do are identical...
And there are less than 300 responses on the orgasm question, but close to 500 for the partner one, meaning there's a lot fo women who either don't masturbate (and presumably have MUCH lower scores), or are terribly embarrassed about it.... and have MUCH lower scores...
I would have liked the stats on non-repsonders to that question.
April 1, 2008 at 10:54 AM
hmmm...I wonder how self anatomical knowledge, and partner anatomical knowledge correlate...
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