by Kalee Brown, March 9th, 2017

Thanks to the media and the porn industry’s portrayal of sex, many people seem to think the entire point of intercourse is the end game: the orgasm. Not only is that extremely short-sighted. since sex is just as much about connection as it is pleasure, but a lot of people don’t orgasm during intercourse, particularly women. A new study looked at the sex lives of 52,000 adults with varying sexual preferences in hopes of finding an explanation for “the orgasm gap,” or, in other words, why people seem to think that men orgasm more frequently or more easily than women.

The Study All About the Art of Orgasming

A team of researchers from Indiana University and Chapman University recently published a study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on the orgasm gap, or the notion that some groups of people, particularly men over women, orgasm more frequently during sex than others. This is often brushed off as a hoax, or another sexist statement, but their survey showed that it does hold some truth.

The team surveyed 52,000 people with different sexual preferences, including straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women between the ages of 18 and 65. The survey results indicated that 95% of heterosexual males orgasmed during sexual acts with their partners, whereas only 65% of heterosexual females did. In fact, of all the categories the team looked at, heterosexual women always reported the lowest percentage of orgasms.

Bisexual women reported they orgasmed 66% of the time, so slightly better than heterosexual, and lesbian women reported 86% — a significant increase. 88% of bisexual men surveyed said they orgasmed every time, and this number reached 89% for gay men.