I’ve heard that there is a disproportionate amount of guy versus girl orgasms during hookups. But I can’t use rumors as fact. So when in doubt, do a survey about orgasms.

Full disclosure: I conducted this survey on the Internet, using a site called SurveyMonkey. It is in no way scientific. Only one response was allowed per computer, and all respondents were anonymous. Five hundred and eighty-five people in total took the survey, but I discarded a response if a question was skipped or if the respondent answered “No” to the question: “Are you between the ages of 18-25?” This was to keep the demographic between the ages of 18 and 25. After I discarded invalid responses, I was left with a total of 567 respondents, which is the number I calculated these statistics from.

Now that I’ve gotten the boring formalities out of the way, let’s see what people had to say about orgasms.

There were four questions on my survey: “Are you a guy or a girl?”; “Do you think a sexual experience should be over when you orgasm, or when both of you do?”; “During your last sexual experience, did you have an orgasm?”; and “During that same sexual experience, did your partner have an orgasm?”

Of the 567 respondents, 237 responded as guys and 330 as girls. And as one would expect, the guys’ responses were very different from the girls’.

Overall, 90 percent of respondents said that a sexual experience should be over when both parties orgasm. But when I analyzed the guys’ responses, I found that 18.6 percent of guys believed a sexual experience should be over when they (as in guys) orgasm. In comparison, only 4 percent of girls believed the same thing.

Part of me expected this number to be a lot higher, and the other part of me hoped it would be close to zero. I know; I should be happy it wasn’t 50 percent. And it’s sort of like, 81.4 percent of guys care about their partner’s orgasm too! But, close to 20 percent of guys that took this survey don’t think their partner’s orgasm matters. This statistic probably wouldn’t bother me that much, except for the fact that 52.4 percent of people who said they were a girl also said “No” to the question: “During your last sexual experience, did you have an orgasm?”

More than half of the girls who took this survey said they did not have an orgasm during their last sexual experience, compared to 83.9 percent of men who did. What’s weird, though, is that 71.7 percent of guys said their partner had an orgasm during their last sexual experience.

Now, I’m not assuming that every single person that took this survey is straight. I did not include that in the questions I asked. But assuming that the majority of these responses were referencing male-female sexual experiences, there seems to be a gap between how many orgasms guys think they are causing, and how many orgasms girls are actually having.

The most interesting — or disturbing — thing I took away from all of this data is that even though an overwhelming majority of respondents believed in an orgasm utopia where everyone orgasms every time, there were still a lot of people that reported being left without an orgasm, even though their partner had one. So how do we fix it? How do we close the gaps the data showed?

Well, for one, if you were someone that answered “When I orgasm,” to the question “When should a sexual experience be over,” please retrain your brain to stop being so selfish. Also, please never try to hook up with me. You are the person my mother warned me about.

Second — let’s all vow never to fake another orgasm again. I’m not going to make wild claims from the data, but in my opinion, the reason the 71.7 percent of guys thought their partner had an orgasm might be inflated due to fake orgasms.

Finally, next time you hook up with someone — regardless of who they are — just go the extra mile. Don’t just hit it and then roll over to sleep. Most of us know the right thing to do is to care about both our partner’s and our own orgasms. Now, let’s try to make that idealistic 90 percent a reality.

Kate Beckman is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears every week in Pulp. You can reach her at kebeckma@syr.edu or follow her on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

Published on February 4, 2015 at 12:01 am