A recent study conducted by leading Australian and British sex researchers found that women who have sex with other women have a significantly improved chance of achieving orgasm. Is this good news for lesbians or does it reflect lamentable shortcomings in men's awareness of female sexuality? Croydon J Hounslow takes a deep breath and dives in...

The announcement of these findings in the Journal of Sex Research may have deeper implications for psychologists, sociologists and sexologists, but in the minds of those of us who are less well educated about such things it provokes certain inevitable reactions. My immediate and no doubt tragically male reaction to reading this was to think (and not for the first time) “Good God, I wish I was a lesbian!”, immediately followed by the slightly less whimsical “In that case, why on earth are there any straight women left?”. Now before we start, I should acknowledge that I am fully and painfully aware of just how clownishly ridiculous both of those sentiments are; but, not to put too fine a point on it, I am prone to bouts of knee-jerk idiocy. I think it's a male thing.

So, women who have sex with other women, based on the responses of 19,307 Australians regarding their most recent sexual encounter, are 7.1% more likely to achieve orgasm during sex than their exclusively heterosexual counterparts. “Hooray for boobies!” cries my mind on some cro-magnon level “simple maths: the more boobies the better the sex! Ug!”. As so often happens, I then second guess myself and realise I'm being, if you'll pardon the pun, a total tit.

I decide to look at things in a different, and frankly less appealing way; why is there such disparity in these figures? This isn't the 1950s, why aren't men doing a better job of pleasuring their female partners? Apart from the obvious cliched claim that a same sex partner is by definition a better lover as they 'know their way around the equipment', is there a lesson that straight men can learn from this? In fairness, it seems a little bit strong to start trying to draw such conclusions on the basis of a single percentage figure, a return to the survey results seems in order. Let's look at them from a slightly different angle:

Percentage of exclusively heterosexual women who said that they did not achieve orgasm during their last sexual encounter: 31.1%

Percentage of homo(and presumably bi)sexual women who said that they did not achieve orgasm during their last sexual encounter: 24%

Percentage of men (no significant difference based on sexuality) who said that they did not achieve orgasm during their last sexual encounter: 5.2%

Wow! Put it that way and suddenly it seems that straight women aren't trailing quite so badly after all, 24% of women who have same sex encounters are still going without orgasm, whereas men... Actually if we're honest about it chaps, it's hardly too surprising is it? A woman's orgasm is something achieved through subtlety, patience and not inconsiderable skill whereas most men could probably punch it repeatedly for long enough and eventually get there!

So what conclusions can we draw from this? This is clearly an area in which one must tread with care, so let me firstly state that if a woman wants an orgasm during sex, she should get one, and for a partner of any gender to fail to help her achieve this without a damn good excuse smacks of laziness and insensitivity. Now I have hopefully protected myself from allegations of unreconstructed male boorishness, I can tell you my theory.

It's no great intellectual breakthrough to state that men and women have their differences. We prioritise different things, have differing emotional makeup and do have very different expectations of certain things in life, even if we're not from different planets or locked in a perpetual battle as some writers have proposed. Now as a man and only an amateur sexologist (hur! hur! hur! what a great t-shirt that'd make!) I'm only partly qualified to comment on women's sexuality, but one of my responses to those statistics (and do remember please what I said earlier about knee-jerk idiocy) is that perhaps women don't necessarily see orgasm as the defining aspect of a sexual encounter in the same way that men do. I'm pretty sure one would be hard pushed to find a man anywhere, gay or straight, who would see a sexual encounter as satisfactory or fulfilling if it didn't culminate in an orgasm. If the same was true of women, would two women who understood first hand the female sex drive leave either partner unfulfilled in such a high proportion of encounters? Maybe men aren't doing so badly after all at fulfilling women. I suspect that, were we to compare these data with the same survey conducted in the 1950s we might find some much more depressing results.