Sex study details ‘orgasm gap’ on campus

We’ve all heard that women in the workforce make only 75 cents for every dollar earned by men. This factoid, long a rallying cry for women’s rights activists, may be trumped by a statistic uncovered by new research out of Stanford University’s sociology department: In the college hookup scene, men are having orgasms at two and a half times the rate of their female partners.

“The orgasm gap is worse than the sex gap in pay,” says Sociology Prof. Paula England, who teaches the popular class “Sex and Love in Modern Society.”

England conducted an extensive online sex survey of over 4000 undergraduates at Stanford, the University of Arizona, Indiana University, UC-Santa Barbara and SUNY-Stony Brook. When male and female college students hook up, she found, 44 percent of men orgasm — compared to only 19 percent of their female partners.

What’s behind the orgasm gap?

In the survey, students reported on their last hookup — anything from kissing to oral and manual sex to intercourse. The three kinds of activities were about equally likely. But when it came to purely oral sex — about 16 percent of the time — women were much more likely to dish it out than receive it.

Read the full article >>