Male and Female Orgasm. Orgasm differences between men and women.

Male and Female Orgasms Not So Different?

These and other metaphors point out a common truism: that men and women are different when it comes to love and sexual response. Women like to be cuddled and men like sex. Women like to talk and men want to have sex. Most women take longer to achieve orgasm than most men. A common sexual dysfunction in women is inability to achieve orgasm, while the corresponding dysfunction in males is premature orgasm.
Here's what you may not know: The actual orgasm, for both men and women, is very similar. This is the case both for the timing and duration of pelvic muscle contractions during orgasm as well as the body sense - the felt experience - of orgasm.

Orgasm begins as a series of 6 - 15 regular contractions of high intensity occurring over about 20-30 seconds. There are individual differences (but no gender differences) in what occurs after this series of regular contractions. For some men and women, these regular contractions are the primary orgasmic experience. These Type I orgasms are the most frequent. Other men and women, however, may continue to experience irregular contractions (shown in the diagram) for another 30 - 90 seconds, so called Type II orgasms. A relatively few people have mixed patterns of regular and irregular contractions.

So, while there may be very different needs, expectations, and behaviors in males and females leading up to orgasm (Mars and Venus), the orgasmic experience is almost identical in both sexes. Orgasm is also likely to be similar in transgender and intersex individuals.
Why might males and females have this similar orgasmic response? One reason is basically physiological. The neuromotor pathways for orgasmic contractions are similar in males and females in all mammals. Nature likes economy, so why use different pathways for the same function? Another is that during the first trimester of fetal development, in all mammals, there are no gender differences in the genitalia (another example of natural economy). We are all genitally female at this early age. In the third prenatal month in humans, male fetuses begin to produce more testosterone, which signals their genes to begin creating the structures for male genitals.
The other reason why there are no significant gender differences in orgasm, and I admit to some speculation here, is the need to bring males and females together for the purpose of procreation on the one hand, and stable family formation on the other, both with the goal of creating a healthy psycho-bio-social environment in which to rear the next generation. How would similar orgasmic function promote this? For the same reason we all have similar emotional expressions like smiling and crying. Our mirror neuron system guides us to observe behavior in others that is like our own and more potently, to use that observation for shared and mutually empathic experiences that serve to bring us closer together.
Here's the bottom line. Shared experiences of emotionally intense moments enhance our own and our partner's body sense. When we observe someone crying, we feel sadness for and with them. When we observe someone else having an orgasm, regardless of gender, it enhances the desire, readiness for, and experience of our own orgasms. If orgasms were radically different in males and females, this would be much less likely to happen.
If you've followed any of my other posts in this blog, you'll realize that body sense only works its neuropsychological wonders if we cultivate our attention to it. As I wrote in a previous post, premature ejaculation in males and orgasmic dysfunction in females is related to reduced body sense awareness, suggesting that open and healthy sexual communication requires awareness of and emotional engagement with one's own, and one's partner's, body sensations.
When judgments, evaluations, and expectations are in bed with people, they will feel less of themselves and their partners' experiences. These forms of conceptual self-awareness lead to doubt, fear, and shame, effectively cutting ourselves off from our ability to fully feel our embodied experience, in bed or anywhere else. If we have a habit of drifting into these states and away from being in the present moment with our body sense, it may take a lot of practice, exercise, and even coaching to bring us back home to ourselves.
Given at least a certain level of mutual erotic attraction, feeling all the sensations of a shared partner orgasm - arousal, breathing intensity, vocal calls, mutual gazes, warmth, touch, and pleasure of feeling our own and our partner's deep pelvic muscle contractions - is likely