The Great Orgasm Gap: When Objectification and Emotional Labor Collide
Friday, March 14, 2025.
Heterosexual relationships, like so many aspects of modern civilization, are riddled with curious inefficiencies.
One of the more persistent ones is the orgasm gap—a statistically significant phenomenon in which men reach climax far more frequently than women during partnered sex.
For decades, biologists speculated about anatomical justifications for this inequity, but social scientists, armed with the formidable power of objectification theory, have arrived at a new and troubling possibility:
Women, when treated more like aesthetic objects than sentient beings, have a harder time enjoying themselves.
A new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships lays out the grim mechanics of this dynamic.
It turns out that when women perceive their male partners as objectifying them—valuing them primarily for their sexual utility rather than their full humanity—their orgasm rates decline.
Meanwhile, their workload in the realm of sexual emotional labor increases. This includes such taxing activities as pretending to have an orgasm, feigning desire, and enduring discomfort with the stoicism of a Victorian governess.
A Scientific Deep Dive into Objectification and Orgasm
This study, spearheaded by researchers Katie Read and Verena Klein of the University of Southampton, recruited 160 heterosexual couples in long-term relationships (nearly 14 years on average, suggesting many had spent more time selecting a Netflix show together than engaging in physical intimacy). Each partner answered questions about objectification:
Women reported on self-objectification (how much they saw themselves through the eyes of others),
Their perception of their partner’s objectification of them,
Their orgasm frequency (or tragic lack thereof), and
Their level of sexual emotional labor (which, in a just world, would come with hazard pay).
Men, for their part, self-reported their tendency to objectify their partner.
The results painted a bleak but familiar picture:
Women who reported higher self-objectification were more likely to engage in sexual emotional labor—engaging in all sorts of performative nonsense to make the experience more enjoyable for their partner while sacrificing their own pleasure.
But self-objectification alone wasn’t what caused lower orgasm rates. Instead, the real culprit was perceived partner objectification—the more women felt objectified by their partner, the less frequently they experienced orgasm.
Men’s self-reported levels of objectification, curiously, did not align neatly with their partners' reports of feeling objectified.
This suggests one of two possibilities: either men aren’t very self-aware, or women—having spent a lifetime marinating in objectifying cultural messages—have developed an enhanced capacity for detecting even the subtlest signals of dehumanization.
The Perception Gap: Do Men Even Know They’re Doing It?
One of the study’s more darkly comic revelations is that men’s self-reported levels of objectifying their partners were only weakly correlated with their partner’s perceptions.
Some women felt profoundly objectified despite their partners reporting little such behavior, while others felt less objectified despite partners self-reporting moderate to high levels of objectification.
This suggests that women’s perceptions of objectification might be shaped not just by their individual partners but by broader societal messages that define women’s worth through a lens of desirability.
If the entire world has been training you since adolescence to monitor your looks like a beleaguered mall security guard, your partner’s stray glance at a passing stranger may land like an emotional grenade.
Adding to the confusion, previous research has shown that men tend to underestimate gendered inequalities in relationships, whether in orgasm frequency, sexual coercion, or the sheer drudgery of emotional labor.
The orgasm gap itself is often invisible to men, whose enjoyment of sex does not require the elaborate internal calculus of pleasure, performativity, and patriarchy that many women navigate.
Why This Matters: Beyond the Bedroom
The implications of this study go far beyond individual relationships.
If women’s perception of being objectified is a key driver of sexual dissatisfaction, then addressing the orgasm gap means not just tweaking technique but fundamentally shifting how men engage with women as people.
The authors suggest that future research should expand beyond this study’s relatively homogenous sample (mostly white, heterosexual, cisgender couples) to explore whether these dynamics hold across different ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities.
Moreover, a more experimental study design could clarify whether objectification perception is the cause of orgasmic difficulties or merely correlated with them.
In the meantime, a simple, actionable takeaway for men: If you would like your partner to have a more fulfilling sexual experience, consider treating her like a full human being rather than an interactive display at a car show. Science, once again, has spoken.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Read, K., Kılıç, D., Kahalon, R., & Klein, V. (2024). The dual lens of objectification: Perceived objectification, male partners’ reported objectification, and women’s detrimental sexual outcomes. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.