I’ve Never Had an Orgasm While Having Sex With a Man

Welcome to Ethels Tell All, where the writers behind The Ethel newsletter share their personal stories related to the joys and challenges of aging. Come back each Wednesday for the latest piece, exclusively on AARP Members Edition.

Hard to believe, but I’ve never had an orgasm while having sex with a man, but I can give myself one in 30 seconds. I’ve also had orgasms while I was sleeping!

I can bring myself to climax even while dreaming, it would appear. The first time it happened, I thought I’d only dreamed that I’d orgasmed. But the second time I woke up to the throbbing between my legs, I realized it was happening in real-time.

Men will read this and gawk, open-mouthed, aghast at how this could possibly be. Many women will nod their heads along with me, though. If you’re in your 50s, like me, you’ve likely come to learn that for most women, achieving orgasm by intercourse alone is a rarity.

Most women need manual stimulation of the clitoris, in a precise and prolonged manner.

By happenstance, I learned how to pleasure myself around third grade. I was sitting in a chair with one leg bent, the heel of my foot tucked underneath my bum. As I fidgeted around, I noticed a nice sensation in my vagina — so I kept on with it.

I don’t remember the first time I climaxed while grinding away on my bent leg, but I can still do it today. My knees hurt though and so I’ve moved on to using my fingers to gently and quickly coax myself toward orgasm.

The moral of this story is I’m not broken. My parts — from my brain to my clitoris — work and perform normally when stimulated correctly. But the twin plot at play here is that I was broken as a young girl, and in some ways, I remain so to this day.

I was sexually abused by a male family member, from the approximate age of 5 or 6 until I was 10.

Because I was sexualized early, I was promiscuous during adolescence. And because I read Glamour magazine, what I knew about orgasms was that men gave them to women during sex. Full stop.

Not surprisingly, none of my high school boyfriends read Glamour magazine. Thus, none of them gave me an orgasm during sex. Not sure who was to blame, them or me, I let it go. I was in high school in the 1980s and ’90s; orgasms were not the point of sex for girls.

By the time I got to college and fell in love with the man I am married to today, I felt I should be having orgasms. 

But I didn’t know how to achieve one with a man during sex, so I faked them. For years. Until I grew tired of the sham and came clean.

Breaking the news to my then-boyfriend, now-husband that I’d never actually climaxed with him was a hard conversation. It left him confused, embarrassed and feeling inadequate for lacking the ability to help me achieve this simple thing, the female orgasm. What fake news! Simple in the way quantum physics is, maybe.