To add another item to the already long list of reasons why sexism is terrible and bad, a new study out of the University of Queensland in Australia found that women in heterosexual relationships who buy into sexist beliefs are less likely to orgasm.
According to Fusion, researcher Emily Harris and her colleagues based the study on two groups of women in heterosexual relationships — one group of 339 women and another group of 323. The first experiment involved measuring how much each woman believed in something called "ambivalent sexism," or a specific brand of sexism that "assumes female passivity and romanticizes the belief that women should be reliant on men."
The researchers hypothesized that women who had ambivalent sexist beliefs and who were involved in a relationship with a dominant man might believe that men have a right to be selfish in bed and would view sex just as a duty owed to a male partner instead of as a pleasurable activity. Aside from measuring levels of ambivalent sexism in each woman, researchers also measured their level of "perceived male sexual selfishness." The women were shown the statement, "Men care more about 'getting off' than whether or not their partner has an orgasm," and asked to rate how strongly they agreed.
From all this data, researchers found that women who had ambivalent sexist beliefs, or assumed female passivity, also tended to view their male partners as being selfish in bed — and that high level of "perceived male sexual selfishness" related to women being less likely to orgasm. Or in other words, the more selfish in bed the women in the research group found their male partners to be, the less likely they were to orgasm during sex with those male partners.
So! Basically, holding sexist ideas that men are dominant and women are passive and that's just the way the world works has an indirect (but not insignificant) effect on female pleasure. What a world! So good to hear that sexism can be so pervasive that it seeps into women's minds and then, by a sad turn of events, makes it more difficult for them to orgasm. You can read more about the study at Fusion.
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