Anyone who is familiar with orgasm will know that, despite all the fuss made about physical stimulation, this aspect of sex can be a complete red herring.

Clitoral stimulation is not everything. In other words, knowing which body part to stimulate is useful but not the whole story. After all, our enjoyment of sex ultimately depends on what happens in the brain.

“However we feel about fantasies, it is clear that sex is not, for most of us, just a rubbing together of bodies, but involves our minds … We take our minds with us into each sexual encounter.” (p81 Woman’s Experience of Sex 1983)

Women’s sexual arousal and orgasm is not automatic so when I approach masturbation, my first task is to come up with a fantasy scenario that is likely to arouse me enough to reach orgasm. If I cannot achieve the necessary sexual arousal from fantasy then it makes not a jot of difference how vigorously or for how long I stimulate my clitoris. I just give up on the whole thing as a bad job.

I already knew that women’s sexual arousal relies on sexual fantasies during masturbation. Yet when I approached sex with a partner, I never considered using erotic stories or sexual fantasies in order to generate sexual arousal.

Shere Hite compared women’s experience of masturbation with intercourse to explain why the lack of physical simulation orgasm during intercourse might cause orgasm to take longer or fail to occur. The other characteristic of masturbation that is missing when a woman has sex with a partner is fantasy; that is unless she finds a way to incorporate sexual fantasies into her sex life. Surveys indicate that many women do use fantasy to reach orgasm during sex with a partner.

Sexual arousal and orgasm result from psychological stimulation of the brain through our senses (sight, smell and touch) as well as our imagination (fantasy). It makes sense that if, say sight, is less effective in arousing women that they might make use of other means, say imagination, to substitute.

“Women fantasize more than men, and their fantasies are extremely explicit” (p177 Satisfaction Guaranteed 1996)

Equally men’s bodies (particularly in their younger years) are filled with testosterone, the hormone that boosts sex drive. It makes sense that women will need to use fantasy more than men because they are not as easily aroused by more ‘natural’ means. Even once they have discovered how to achieve it, women have to work much harder at generating sexual arousal.