Is a Woman’s Orgasm Worth the Effort?

A viral podcast clip recently claimed that pleasuring a woman during sex has “not much ROI” and that using a vibrator would make him feel “cucked.” Reducing a woman’s orgasm to a business calculation may sound extreme, but the belief underneath it is far more common. Female pleasure is treated as extra, optional, or only worth pursuing when it happens easily.

Sex education often skips the clitoris, pornography turns performance into instruction, and penetration is still treated as the main event. That means most of us were never taught how female pleasure actually works. When that becomes the script, a woman’s pleasure is easier to ignore, and the orgasm gap becomes far less surprising.

In this episode of The RISE to Intimacy Podcast, I break down the anatomy behind female pleasure and what the research says about how women reach orgasm during partnered sex. I explain what the orgasm gap reveals, why women’s pleasure can disappear from the sexual equation, and how that pattern affects desire, trust, and connection over time. I also share what helps couples create a sex life where both partners feel seen, informed, and genuinely invested in each other’s experience.

0:53 – What one viral podcast remark about "ROI" reveals about a much bigger cultural blind spot around female pleasure
3:14 – The real anatomy of the clitoris and why most people (including many women) only know a fraction of it

6:08 – Why incuriosity is the real issue for some men here, not simply being unaware of where the clitoris is or how to stimulate a female partner
7:54 – How long it takes a woman to orgasm (and why the range matters more than the average)
9:36 – Why lesbian women orgasm at significantly higher rates than heterosexual women (and what it reveals about where the "problem" really lives)
11:03 – How women adapt to consistently absent orgasms and the coping mechanism most don’t even realize they’re using
11:47 – Why faking orgasms starts as self-protection and can lead to a sexless relationship

14:09 – The three-part process used in couples therapy to help a woman reconnect to her own pleasure and openly communicate it to her partner

15:07 – What separates the men who make real progress in this work from the ones who stay stuck

17:53 – Why this matters beyond a single podcast clip

18:47 – What happens when both partners commit to closing the orgasm gap

Mentioned In Is a Woman’s Orgasm Worth the Effort?

“Pleasure-producing human clitoris has more than 10,000 nerve fibers” | Oregon Health & Science University

“How long does it take for a woman to reach orgasm?” | International Society for Sexual Medicine

“Devaluing Women’s Orgasm: An Experimental Investigation of Whether, When, and to What Effect Women and Men Reduce the Importance of Women’s Orgasm” | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Why You Can Orgasm Alone But Not With Your Partner

Why Women Struggle With Desire and Knowing What They Want

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Transcript

Valerie McDonnell: Welcome to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. I'm your host, Valerie McDonnell. And for over a decade, I've worked as a sex and couples therapist because intimacy used to feel really overwhelming for me. I felt a lot of pressure to perform. I was disconnected from my body. And I often felt like desire was out of reach for me But through my own trauma work, I stopped checking out of my body and started feeling connected to it again. I learned what it's like to experience intimacy without fear, without shutting down and without numbing out. Now, I'm on a mission to help you do the same thing. This podcast exists because trauma doesn't get the last word. You can learn how to calm your body, change the story you've been carrying and rebuild real connection first with yourself and then with the people you love. Let's begin.

Today's episode was inspired by something I came across recently that has now gone viral and I genuinely could not stop thinking about it. A clip started circulating from a podcast featuring a guest who goes by Clavicular. His real name is Braden Peters. And during the podcast, one of the hosts asked him how important it was for him to pleasure a woman during sex. His answer, not important. Because the amount of extra effort required doesn't have much ROI, meaning return on investment.

So he literally applied a business metric to a woman's sexual pleasure. And then he said that those 15 minutes could be spent doing something with a bigger return. When one of the other hosts suggested using a vibrator as a solution, clavicular said that was kind of cucked, meaning it made him feel like less of a man or like a cuckold. So let's sit with that for a minute. A woman's orgasm, not worth the ROI. A vibrator, a threat to his masculinity. And this guy has an enormous following of mostly young men who are listening to this and absorbing it as truth. And what he said absolutely deserves to be called out. But unfortunately, these ideas weren't just created by him. He is reflecting a set of beliefs that have been quietly normalized and now perpetuated in our culture for a very long time. And those beliefs show up in my therapy room every single week. They show up in the women who have been faking orgasms for years.

They show up when men can't figure out why their female partner stopped wanting sex. And these messages show up when men feel confused and rejected with no idea that their partner checked out long ago because her experience was never part of the equation. So today I'm going to talk about all that, the anatomy, the research, what I see in my practice and what it actually takes to close the orgasm gap. And if any of this resonates with you before we get into it, know that this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients in my six month program. So if you're interested in working with me, head over to risetointimacy.com and book a consultation today. So before anything else, I want to start with biology because part of what makes Clavicular’s comments so telling is that they expose a significant lack of understanding about how female anatomy actually works. And he is far from alone in this. Our sex education has failed almost everyone when it comes to female pleasure. But ignorance stops being innocent when you have a large platform and no curiosity about what you don't know.

So I'm going to quickly do a little recap on the clitoris because for an organ that exists solely for the purpose of sexual pleasure, it is one of the most misunderstood structures in the human body. Most people, including many women, picture the clitoris as a small external nub, but that's actually just the tip of a much larger internal structure. And most people only know the tip, but the full clitoris extends deep inside the body. It's a wishbone shaped structure that wraps around the vaginal canal on both sides. And the entire structure is made of erectile tissue. It becomes engorged with blood during arousal, exactly like a penis. So it's not a small, simple organ. It is a complex internal structure whose sole biological function is pleasure. And to me, that's magical.

Research from Oregon Health and Science University found that the clitoris contains over 10,000 nerve fibers. The clitoris is extraordinarily dense with sensation. Now here is where this becomes directly relevant to what Clavicular said. As I've mentioned in a previous episode, research consistently shows that between 70% and 80% of women require direct or indirect clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm. Vaginal penetration alone does not do it for most women. And it means that the way most people have defined sex, centered almost entirely on penetration, was designed around the anatomy and pleasure of men, not women.

So when Clavicular says that making a woman orgasm requires too much extra effort, what he's really revealing is that he is defining effort as anything beyond what he needs to obtain his own pleasure. And this is certainly not going to lead to his female partner having an exciting and enjoyable sexual experience with him. So that's not extra effort.

That is a fundamental gap in understanding how a woman's body works. And beyond that, it's deciding that putting effort into anything besides what benefits him is too much work. Clearly he never learned how to be a team player, much less a good lover. Now I want to pause here for a moment because I don't want this to land as an attack on every man who doesn't know where the clitoris is or how their partner likes to be stimulated. And if that's you, I want you to understand that not knowing is not a character flaw. But choosing to not put any effort into learning this will not benefit you if you're interested in having a woman want to have sex with you more than just one time.

For most men, it is the direct result of sex education that never taught you and pornography that gave you a completely unrealistic picture of how women's bodies work and what actually feels good to them. Porn is not a how-to guide. It is a performance. And generations of men have walked into sexual relationships with that as their only reference point. But that is a failure of education, not a reflection of who you are. What matters is what you do with that information now. And if you're a man who wants to understand this better, whether for the relationship you're in or for future ones, that is the work I help men with too. And it's some of the most impactful work I do. And the difference it makes in a couple's intimacy is undeniable.

Where Clavicular lost me is not in his ignorance. It's in his choice to not care enough to be informed. Because calling something unimportant is often just a more confident way of saying you don't know how to do it well. And deciding it's not worth learning keeps you in the same place with the same results for the rest of your life. So for the sake of your partners and for your own growth, I hope that's not a price you're willing to pay. Now let me address something else.

The claim that 15 minutes could be better spent doing something else. Multiple studies put the average time it takes a woman to reach orgasm during partner sex at around 13 to 14 minutes. And one large study of over 2300 women found that the average time it takes a woman to orgasm was 14 minutes once genital stimulation began. So by his own math, Clavicular is describing opting out of something that, on average, takes about as long as the window he said he'd rather use for something with a better ROI. But remember, that 13 to 14 minutes is an average. And averages don't tell the whole story. I mean, some women orgasm in five minutes, while others might take 20 or more. Some women need extensive warm up before genital stimulation even begins. The range in the research spans from under six minutes to over 21. And that variability isn't a problem. It's just how human bodies work. A partner who understands that and is willing to stay present for it is not being inconvenienced.

He's simply showing up for a sexual experience where both him and his partner have the potential to actually enjoy themselves. As a sex therapist, what clavicular's comment really tells me is that he's approaching sex as something that should be efficient. But efficiency is not a quality that leads to good sex for anyone. It is the opposite of what actually creates connection, arousal, and the kind of experience that makes someone want to come back for more. I've previously mentioned the orgasm gap in another episode, so I'm not going to go real deep into it here. But I do want to briefly name it because it is the direct outcome of exactly the kind of thinking we're discussing today. The orgasm gap is well documented. Heterosexual women consistently orgasm significantly less than heterosexual men during partnered sex. And here's a detail that makes this almost impossible to argue with. Lesbian women orgasm at rates that are significantly higher than heterosexual women. So think about that for a moment. The anatomy is the same.

The body hasn't changed. The only thing that's different is the partner. When a woman is with a partner who actually understands female anatomy, who was raised with the same body and the same relationship to pleasure, that gap closes dramatically. And honestly, that tells us everything we need to know about where the problem actually lives. It's not in women's bodies. It is not in some biological limitation that makes female orgasm inherently elusive or complicated. It is in who is being centered during sex, whose experience is treated as the goal, and whose is treated as a bonus if there's time. When a woman's pleasure is prioritized, the outcome changes. It really is that simple, y'all.

And here's what that gap produces over time, which is something I also see a lot my practice. When a woman's orgasm is consistently absent or consistently treated as optional, she begins to adapt. Research published just this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that when women repeatedly don't experience orgasm, they begin to downgrade how much they want one.

And that then becomes a coping mechanism. It protects her self-esteem and the relationship in the short term. But over time, it makes the gap worse because she stops expecting it, stops asking for it, and then stops feeling entitled to it. And this is where faking orgasms come in. Because if you're a woman who has absorbed a lifetime of messages that your pleasure is secondary, and you are in a sexual encounter with someone who is not prioritizing your experience, the path of least resistance is to perform. Is to give your male partner the signal he's looking for so the encounter can just end.

Is to make him feel successful so you don't have to have an uncomfortable conversation or risk making him feel like he failed. And I hear this a lot in my practice. Women who have been faking orgasms for years, sometimes for the entire length of a long-term relationship. And when I ask them why, the answers are almost always the same. They say it was easier, or I didn't want to hurt his feelings, or I didn't know how to explain what I needed. I wasn't even sure what I needed, and I just wanted it to be over. And that's what happens when a woman's pleasure is treated the way Clavicular described. Maybe not immediately, but over time, sex becomes something she endures rather than something she participates in. And when that happens, desire doesn't just decrease, it disappears.

One of the most common patterns I work with in couples therapy is a woman who has gradually withdrawn from sex and a partner who has no idea why. He often presents it as her having low desire or not being interested anymore. And when I start working with the female partner individually or with a couple together, what I almost always find is that her desire didn't disappear on its own.

It was slowly extinguished by years of sex that didn't feel good to her, by the discomfort of repeatedly not having an orgasm and saying nothing, and by the exhaustion of performing for someone else's pleasure while disconnecting from her own. This connection from a woman's pleasure being deprioritized to a couple ending up in a sexless relationship is one of the most consistent patterns I see in my practice. And it's not mysterious y'all, it is cause and effect.

The work I do with these women involves several things. First, we work on helping her reconnect to what her body actually wants, separate from what she thinks her partner expects. And for many women, this is genuinely unfamiliar territory. Many women have spent so long orienting towards someone else's pleasure that they've lost touch with their own. Second, we also work on communication, specifically on helping her learn to express her needs without bracing for rejection or shame. And this is harder than it sounds for most women. And the reason why goes back to the social conditioning I recently talked about in another episode in depth. Third, and this is often where couples therapy becomes essential, we work on creating the conditions between partners where a woman actually feels safe enough to be honest. Because a woman won't tell you what she needs if she doesn't trust that you can handle it. And for the men I work with in couples therapy, I'll say this, the ones who make the most progress are the ones who are genuinely curious. They don't get defensive or hurt, but they become curious. They can shift from why doesn't she want sex anymore to what do you need from me right now that will help you feel connected.

What I also want you to know is that I've watched couples come out the other side of this work with a sexual relationship that is genuinely mutual, where both people feel seen, where desire is sustained over years, not just months. And where sex becomes something that deepens connection rather than slowly eroding it. So that's not a fantasy. It is what becomes possible when both partners are willing to do the work. All right, so let me come back to something else Clavicular said, which is when a vibrator was offered as a solution, he called it cucked, meaning it made him feel like less of a man. As a sex therapist, this tells me everything I need to know about his actual relationship with sex.

Using a tool that would help his partner experience pleasure ends up feeling like a threat to his masculinity, which means his relationship with sex is fundamentally about his ego, not about connection. If a woman's pleasure only counts when it comes from him and the way he chooses on his timeline, then her pleasure was never actually the point. His performance and his identity were the only things that ever mattered. And I know there are men listening who have felt this way, meaning experiencing discomfort when a partner asks for something different or uses a toy or tells you what she needs. But if that's something you've experienced before, it's also worth getting curious about. Because what your partner is attempting when she communicates her needs to you is to build trust. She is offering you information. She is giving you a road map to connecting in a way that will be exciting and pleasurable for both of you. But choosing to treat that map as a personal attack is choosing your ego over her experience every single time. 

And what I've noticed in the last decade working with couples is that the men who are most confident and most connected in their intimate lives are not the ones who are defensive about what their partners need. They're the ones who are grateful for the information because it removes the guesswork. It makes connection easier. A partner who knows what she wants and can ask for it is not a difficult partner. She is a connected one. So why does this matter beyond one podcast clip? It matters because Clavicular has a massive following of mostly young men. And when someone says on a major platform that a woman's orgasm isn't worth the effort without any meaningful pushback, that message lands. It shapes how a generation thinks about sex. And it shapes the environment that women navigate every time they try to communicate what they need.

Every conversation that treats women's pleasure as normal, expected, and worth prioritizing pushes back against a culture that has been telling women the opposite their entire lives. The couples who do this work end up not only learning more about their partner and how to connect in ways that deepen both emotional and physical intimacy. They also discover more about themselves and how they want to show up in a relationship.

When two people commit to that kind of mutual understanding, something profound happens. Sex stops being something that happens to one person and starts becoming something you create together. And while these conversations can feel uncomfortable at first, a shift happens the more you practice them.

Talking openly about what you want and need stops feeling risky and starts feeling like one of the most intimate things you can do for your partner and for yourself. Over time, that openness becomes one of the defining features of your relationship. It builds the kind of trust that doesn't just improve your sex life. It changes how you navigate everything together. The couples I've watched do this work don't just report better sex. They report feeling more seen, more chosen, and more connected than they did early in their relationship.

That is what sustained intimacy actually looks like. Not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of two people who have learned how to keep coming back to each other with curiosity and a willingness to keep choosing each other while building something that continues to deepen instead of quietly fading. So if anything I said today felt familiar, the faking, the checking out, the not knowing what you want, that is okay, is not a flaw, and is not something that has to exist forever. That is simply the result of an environment that was never designed to ask that question and it can be unlearned. 

The work of unlearning, it is some of the most meaningful work I get to do with clients and the transformation I've watched women experience on the other side of it is one of the most exciting things I have ever witnessed. So if you want to do that work, I would love to help you. Head over to risetointimacy.com to book a consultation with me. Whether you are a woman ready to reclaim your relationship with pleasure or a man who wants to show up differently for his partner, my six month program was built for exactly this. Thank you so much for listening. And again, if this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/rise or on your favorite listening platform. It truly helps other people find the show. And if you know someone who needs to hear this one, please share it with them. I'll see you next week. 

Thanks for listening to The RISE to Intimacy Podcast. If today's episode resonated with you, know that healing is possible and you don't have to do it alone. If you're enjoying the show, please leave a rating and review for us at ratethispodcast.com/rise. It really helps others find us. And I'm so grateful for all your support. You can learn more about my coaching packages for individuals and couples at risetointimacy.com and remember sex therapy isn't for people who are broken. It's for people brave enough to look beneath the surface.