In interviews, women reported they most frequently had orgasms when they were with a caring sexual partner: he was concerned with her pleasure, willing to take time and perform the practices that worked, and she could communicate about what felt good. In describing good sexual partners, women often emphasized attentiveness:
I know that he wants to make me happy. I know that he wants me to orgasm. I know that, and like just me knowing that we are connected and like we’re going for the same thing and that like he cares.
Women often also highlighted good partners’ willingness to perform oral ***. One woman explained, “And I didn’t come during *** but I did come from oral ***. . . . So he made sure I came before he came. And he was like okay with having *** and then going down on me, so I came, and then going back to having *** and then he came. . . . It was great.” Another said, “He was always very . . . considerate and conscious of my side. . . . I didn’t have an orgasm from intercourse but from . . . like oral or touching.” As one woman eloquently explained, caring facilitated the communication key to learning to sexually please a partner:
I think it’s because when you actually care about the other person, you’re also more in tune with what they want and so you can be more comfortable communicating and more knowledgeable and intuitive about their body and really work together, passing the awkward steps or any obstacles.
These conditions were much more likely to be met in relationships than in hookups. In all the cases quoted, women were referring to boyfriends rather than hookup partners. With a few exceptions, women told us that relationship *** was better than hookup ***. Although our quantitative data show that women who said they were likely to want to marry this partner had higher rates of orgasm and enjoyment, women we interviewed did not attribute their greater enjoyment of relationship *** to commitment or a future, but rather to affection and caring.
Part of why good *** is more likely in relationships is probably gender-neutral. For example, a number of women talked about the “awkwardness” of *** with a new partner, frequently contrasting it with the “comfort” of *** with an established partner. One woman said:
No one who has *** with someone for the first time is gonna say that it wasn’t an awkward experience. Like body parts, not sure what the other person wants, it’s hard what to say, you know, and all that. So as you get more comfortable, you . . . do stop thinking . . . about the way you look when he’s looking down at you.
Another woman explained:
I think with any relationship over time, they just learn how to please you and you learn how to please them and you work with each other. So I guess the benefit of a relationship is that you can tweak your skills.
These reports suggest that *** improves for both men and women with partner-specific experience, as partners become familiar with each others’ bodies and sexual tastes.
Although the evidence is indirect, qualitative data also support the version of the gender inequality perspective that posits that the new sexual double standard reduces the quality of hookup *** for women. Women reported hookups characterized by their partners’ complete disregard for their pleasure. For example, one woman said, “When I . . . meet somebody and I’m gonna have a random hookup . . . from what I have seen, they’re not even trying to, you know, make it a mutual thing.” Another woman complained, “I just was with some stupid guy at a frat party and we were in his room and I gave head. And I was kind of waiting and he fell asleep. And I was like, ‘**** this,’ and I just left. It’s degrading.” Moreover, women did not always trust that their sexual boundaries would be respected. For example, one woman attributed the better *** she had with a boyfriend to the fact that she could tell him when to stop and that he would stop: “I felt comfortable with him, to tell him you know, what to do, what not to do, when to stop.” That she explicitly mentioned this suggests this was not the case with all partners.
Men, too, reported that they were frequently sexually inconsiderate with hookup partners. Even when interviewed by women, men’s reports of how they treated women in hookups were consistent with women’s reports of how they were treated by men.20 For example, one man said:
If it’s just a random hookup, I don’t think [her orgasm] matters as much to the guy. Say they meet a girl at a party and it’s a one night thing, I don’t think it’s gonna matter to them as much. . . . But if you’re with somebody for more than just that one night, I think guys, it is important for guys. I think guys feel that they should make sure that a girl has an orgasm. And I think if you’re in a long-term relationship, I know I feel personally responsible. I think it’s essential that she has an orgasm during sexual activity.
Another male respondent, when asked how important his partner’s orgasm was to him, noted that it was “more important if it’s in a real relationship than if it’s a one night stand.” Still another said he would care more “if it’s somebody I care about.” Another man explained that in a “onetime hookup thing” he would not be concerned about his partner’s orgasm because “I guess it’s more of a selfish thing.”
The man who expressed feeling “responsible” for his girlfriend’s orgasm was not alone. A number of men expressed pride in their ability to evoke orgasms in their girlfriends. For example, one man explained, “I feel like it’s important to have her satisfied, too, otherwise I’d feel I didn’t get the job done. Like I know that I would not be maximizing my potential.” His comments, and those of other men, indicated that men believed that sexually satisfying their girlfriends reflected on their masculinity.21 They did not, however, feel obliged to care about the sexual satisfaction of hookup partners. For example, another man told us, “I’m all about just making her orgasm,” but when asked if he meant “the general her or like the specific her?” he replied, “Girlfriend her. In a hookup her, I don’t give a ****.” Another man noted that his girlfriend’s orgasms were important because “you have a certain stake in your own manhood,” but when asked directly about whether the investment applied to a more casual context, he clearly stated “definitely you feel less investment.” While a few men reported being equally invested in their partners’ orgasms in both hookups and relationships, they were in the minority. Most men operated with different understandings of their sexual obligations to girlfriends and hookup partners.22
One might suspect that men’s differential regard for hookup and relationship partners is a simple reflection of the casual context. Neither men nor women typically have great affection for a hookup partner, and perhaps it takes affection to care about a partner’s pleasure. If this was the case, we would expect women to report a level of disregard for their hookup partners’ pleasure similar to that reported by men. But this was not the case. Women often reported concern about hookup partners’ pleasure. For example, one woman explained, “I will do everything in my power to, like whoever I’m with, to get them off. Just because it makes me feel like I’m good at *** . . . because in a hookup, that’s really all you have.” Similarly, another woman described herself as “a giver”: “I don’t feel like I’ve had a sexual experience if the guy doesn’t come. . . . I don’t think that we hooked up if the other person hasn’t.” Another woman, who hooked up a lot, reported that sometimes she just decided to “focus completely on giving them an orgasm” instead of worrying about whether she was going to orgasm. Except in a few cases, women did not seem to view boyfriends and hookup partners as owed categorically different levels of consideration.
Respondents’ comments led us to see this gender difference in sexual regard as resulting from gender inequality. Men and women both implied that sexual equality is expected in relationships but not in hookups. For example, one woman, implicitly contrasting relationships with hookups, pointed to the more egalitarian nature of relationship ***:
I think also just because in a relationship, there’s much more expected as far as like equality-wise, like give and take sexually. If you’re gonna be in a relationship, it’s expected, like more equality.
This woman suggests equality is not expected in hookups. Another woman explained that she cared a lot more about her own orgasms in relationships than in hookups. She viewed having orgasms in relationships “as an issue of balance. It is an issue of equality. You do have to learn how and work on it, work on it together.” Because she did not expect hookups to be “balanced,” she did not expect orgasms in hookups. A man explained that “with my partner now, now that I’m in a relationship, I think [her orgasms are] actually pretty important. More important than I think the hookup because you have more invested in that person. You know, when you have ***, it’s more a reciprocal thing” (emphasis added). This man implied that relationship *** is expected to be reciprocal while hookup *** is not.
Men seemed to take their entitlement to pleasure in hookups for granted, while women sometimes expressed uncertainty about whether it was acceptable to want their sexual desires met. For example, when the man above unapologetically described hookups as “selfish,” he revealed a sense of entitlement to his own sexual pleasure in hookups. By contrast, one woman explained that, for her, “being able to communicate” about what she wanted was important for good ***, but, she added, “I feel like when it’s just a hookup, I just feel like I almost like don’t have the right. Or not that I don’t have the right but it’s just not comfortable enough to be like, ‘You know, hey, this isn’t doing it for me.’” Another woman said,
I didn’t feel comfortable I guess. I don’t know. I think I felt kind of guilty almost, like I felt like I was kind of subjecting people to something they didn’t want to do and I felt bad about it. So I think that was partly it. But probably I just got so much encouragement from giving . . . but I didn’t even really like it, to be honest. I like . . . making someone feel good.
This woman expressed guilt about having her sexual desires met in a hookup, but at the same time she performed sexual acts that she did not “really like” in service of her partner’s pleasure.
Neither men nor women explicitly stated that women are only entitled to pleasure in relationships but men are also entitled to pleasure in hookups. This double standard can, however, be inferred from women’s complaints of lack of mutuality and uncertainty about whether they had the right to expect pleasure in hookups, men’s descriptions of their own behavior in hookup *** as “selfish,” and women and men both describing relationship *** as more equal. The OCSLS survey data offer further support for this explanation. Asked Have you ever hooked up with someone and afterward had the feeling that the person respected you less because you hooked up with him/her, 54 percent of heterosexual women but only 22 percent of heterosexual men said yes (results not shown). We surmise that the greater gender inequality in hookups than relationships flows, at least in part, from today’s version of the double standard—both women and men are seen to deserve pleasure in relationships, but women’s entitlement in hookups is not fully accepted.
honestly a great point.
