Dear Sasha, I’m a 35 year-old woman who has never had an orgasm. When I masturbate with a vibrator (rarely, as I have little to no libido), I can sort of come; I experience a feeling of climax and slight contractions, and my clit becomes too sensitive to touch, but the feeling is insignificant. I don’t get increased blood flow to my vulva, and my nipples don’t become erect. I’ve tried therapy, vibrators, porn, aphrodisiacs, naturopathy, I’ve been on and off anti-depressants, and nothing works.
It’s a strange problem: I don’t really need to come, since I almost never get horny, but I’d like to know what I’m missing. And needless to say, this makes relationships difficult, so I tend to avoid them. Though my doctor suggests that more therapy is the answer, I believe the problem might be neurological. I have read that the autonomic nervous system affects arousal, and I wish there was some way I could be examined to see if the problem is physiological.
-Uncomfortably Numb
Dear Numb,
“I wish there were more people studying orgasms in general,” says Dr. Jim Pfaus, who teaches the neurobiology of sexual behaviour at Concordia University. “I think they’re among the most fascinating things we do.”
Pfaus believes you are correct in wondering about your autonomic arousal. “It sounds like it’s blunted,” he says. “She needs good parasympathetic outflow to get her vulva/vagina/clitoris/nipples engorged with blood—and to keep it there—and good sympathetic outflow to the genitals to allow her to experience orgasm. She has learned to ‘live’ without it, but clearly she wants to experience it.”
It’s not unusual that so many of your symptoms point to a physiological issue and yet your doctor (your medical doctor presumably, therefore someone who has studied physiology) prescribes more therapy; a swift, pharmaceutically based solution has not yet been found because if it was, he or she might instead be shaking a bottle of pills in your face and sending you on your soon-to-be merry little way. Female orgasm is currently the billion-dollar question, but the bottom line is that studying sex, and specifically orgasm, is still considered an ignoble pursuit. Pfaus puts it well: “Imagine something that we do with statistical regularity as a species, like swallowing and digesting food, is just not studied! It boggles the mind.”
Delightfully though, and despite big pharma enlisting doctors and scientists to promote inflated, misleading statistics around the issue to add to the urgency of finding a miracle drug, one answer might just be found in Freddie Mercury’s enduring words, “Get on your bikes and ride.”
Cindy Meston is a sex researcher (and a former undergrad at UBC when Pfaus was a grad student) and Pfaus describes her as having “a tantalizing finding. She had a group of women with and without delayed orgasm ride a stationary bike for 20 minutes, after which they masturbated to orgasm using whatever method they normally would employ to do so, or, in the case of some of the orgasmically challenged, any mechanism that looked interesting and erotic. After stimulating sympathetic outflow by riding the bike, the non-disordered were able to stimulate themselves to several orgasms each and most of the women with orgasm disorder were able to stimulate themselves to at least one orgasm. She still had some who seemed to have an orgasm physiologically but really didn’t know to call it that, which would indicate a lack of awareness of their own bodily reactions.”
Dr. Pfaus says that Meston treats many women with orgasm disorder using the stationary bike and she has had pretty good and long lasting results. To try it out at home, he advises, priming yourself with whatever gets you horny. “Porn, naughty situations, someone watching, semipublic place...just think about it and want it but not touch herself. She should do this maybe with someone, talk about sex, the tastes, the sweat, the moans, the anticipation, maybe also do this while on a stationary bike or during some other physical activity that increases her sympathetic outflow. Then when she’s really horny, unleash the hounds. Masturbate alone or with someone watching, or masturbate while having sex with that person, and not “try” to come, but just let it come naturally. In such a highly charged sympathetic state, she will hopefully find it comes in droves.”
You can download some of Pfaus’s own studies here: http://psychology.concordia.ca/Faculty/pfaus.html.
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