Short-changed in our salaries and in our bedrooms

Lisa Nunn / Associate Professor of Sociology / The USD Vista

A few weeks ago I wrote an OpEd about gender inequality. I told you that male graduates of USD earn on average $19,200 more a year than female graduates. I explained how it was part of the larger picture of the unfair world we live in where parents pay boys more for household chores than girls and where women with bachelors degrees get called for job interviews half as often as equally qualified men. I told you I am outraged about it.

But I didn’t tell you the whole story.

Gender inequality is not just in our paychecks and job descriptions, it’s also in our bedrooms. Research on college students and heterosexual hookup culture shows that women get less than men in the realm of sexual pleasure. Scholar Lisa Wade calls it the “orgasm gap.” It’s like the gender wage gap, but a lot more personal. We aren’t even talking about women and men of all ages. Among college students alone—the group that holds the strongest gender egalitarian attitudes in our nation—in heterosexual hookups, men’s orgasms outnumber women’s 3 to 1. I’ll pause for a moment to let that tragedy sink in.

Part of the problem is that college women and men both believe myths that women’s bodies are “more difficult” to bring to climax and that they “take longer.” Biologically, this is simply false. Research shows that “4 efficient minutes” of activity is all that is required for men or for women, on average. So what is going on?

Wade and other scholars argue that couples prioritize men’s climax in their sexual activity. They also tend to prioritize men’s desires. In heterosexual hookup culture, men are much more likely to have women perform fellatio on them than they are to perform cunnilingus on their partners, for example, regardless of whether or not anyone climaxes.

Here’s some good news: for college women in relationships, the sex is better. The orgasm gap shrinks by half. In a relationship, she has a partner who is invested in her. But mind, I didn’t say the orgasm gap is eliminated in relationships, it is still alive and well, just smaller. In fact, men in relationships report more orgasms overall too, so both partners benefit from relationship sex.

Here’s some more good news: lesbian women report two to three times as many orgasms as heterosexual women. Yep, if you are keeping count, that means that lesbians find their way to climax as often as heterosexual men.

You see, it’s a matter of priorities, not biology.

The same can be said for childhood chores, job interviews, and Supreme Court Justices. It’s a matter of priorities, not biology.

Let me end by reminding you that not everyone participates in hookup culture. Not everyone is having sex, be it in relationships or otherwise. About 40 percent of hookups involve intercourse. The other 60 percent don’t. And if the research tells us anything consistently, it is that all of us think that other people are having more sexual activity than they actually are. About 34 percent of college students in Wade’s study opted out of the hookup scene entirely. Another national study found a full 20 percent of college seniors are virgins. It turns out that on average, a senior has gone out on 7-8 dates and has had about the same number of hookups over their four years in college. An average senior has also been in 1-2 relationships that lasted 6 months or more.

So if you are wondering whom all these orgasms are happening to, don’t worry. A sex-free and hookup-free college experience is a perfectly good one.