What If We Viewed Faking Orgasms as a Survival Skill?

Women are being told to stop faking orgasms and assert their needs.

In theory, I’m all for this. I don’t love when this approach comes with a “should-y” tone. I prefer a softer stance. Less “Do this!” and more “What if you did this?”

If you’re anything like me, being told what to do has little to no bearing on my behavior. Any behavior change must first be met by the essential “why.” I need an explanation. Only after I have sufficient understanding will I decide if I’m going to change my behavior.

So why should women stop faking orgasms? First, we need to understand some of the reasons that underlie why women are faking orgasms in the first place.

I remember being in my early 20s, living on my own, dating, fucking, trying to find a boyfriend, mostly unsuccessfully. I wanted so badly for someone to like me. I was the sad, social work student version of Meredith Grey. Millennials might remember that pivotal scene: “Pick me. Choose me. Love me.” I wanted to be chosen. So much so, I had no idea what I wanted, other than to be wanted.

I dated this doctor who really didn’t want to be in a relationship with me. I knew it, I fucking knew it. But it was the kind of knowing that, in the moment, you can pretend you don’t know. It’s the kind of knowing you can only face in hindsight, with a stable sense of self and some smile lines and wrinkles.

In the moment, you can convince yourself you don’t know. We’re pretty adaptable that way, us humans. Remarkable in our ability to contort our own minds into believing what we want, protecting our fragile, developing hearts and egos. It’s really quite sweet, quite adaptive. If only it didn’t get us into trouble as much as it does.

This doctor, who for the life of me, I cannot remember his name. This isn’t an essay where I’m changing the names to protect privacy and identity. I can’t remember his name. (Not the only thing I can’t remember.) He was German, and his name was German. That’s all I got.

As I was saying, this doctor was only trying to hook up. He didn’t treat me poorly; he wasn’t awful, but he didn’t want to be my boyfriend. It was clear. I’m certain that I was embarrassingly, obviously trying to make him my boyfriend, and he was cleverly trying to dodge my attempts. My parents came to visit one weekend. I invited him to dinner. He was conveniently busy. Tragic, just tragic. (And thankfully funny these many years later.)

We had sex for a little while, maybe a couple of months, nothing too long, but long enough for us to learn a thing or two about one another. But as I write this twenty years later, I have no idea if I ever had an orgasm with him. No recollection whatsoever. Which leads me to believe that I probably never did.

I’m certain I never said anything. And, you guessed it, I’m also pretty certain I faked, successfully, orgasms for as long as we were hooking up.

I’m going to operate under the assumption that my lack of memory means that although I do believe I enjoyed the sex we were having, it was never as good as it could have been. I never prioritized my own pleasure.

I was so focused on trying to get him to like me that I forgot about whether I liked myself with him.

He was cute and smart and had a real job, and that’s about all that mattered. He also lived close by, which was important to me; I did care about convenience. It was LA—dating someone across town might as well have been a long-distance relationship.

I shouldn’t have faked orgasms with him. I shouldn’t have contorted my behavior to fit whatever mold I thought he was most likely to enjoy. I shouldn’t have focused only on what he wanted and needed. I should have been myself. I should have been more confident. But that’s a lot of “shoulds” to place on my early-20s self, and I acknowledge that.

We’re now supporting women to communicate their needs, assert their right to pleasure, not fake orgasms, and claim their desire. I believe in all these tenets wholeheartedly.

I also believe the “fake orgasm” is not solely a female issue to solve. It’s an everyone issue, a structural issue.

Men should be focused on female pleasure. Culture should care about female pleasure. (Frankly, we need to start with basic healthcare and work our way up to pleasure, but for the purposes of this essay we’ll focus on pleasure.)

Not enough men care about female pleasure. Some are great. Some men (speaking about heteronormative relationships) care deeply about their female partner’s pleasure. They ask questions, they try things out, they get curious, and they invite vulnerability.

Unfortunately, too many men don’t care. You don’t have to go farther than the latest news or Reddit headlines to see yet another example of a cisgender, heterosexual man taking advantage of a woman sexually for his own benefit. I wish there were more examples of men doing the right thing, but they are hard to find. Men can behave badly, and more often than not, women are the victims of that bad behavior.

Women fake orgasms because society thinks we should not have pleasure. Some cultures go so far as to mutilate female genitals in order to remove the prospect of pleasure; other cultures mutilate minds, stopping just shy of the physical.

Women are told by society that their pleasure doesn’t matter, yet they are told on an individual, micro-level, to stop faking orgasms. I am struck by this tension of women being held individually responsible for societal-level problems.

This happens all. the. time.

One of the most dangerous things women can do across their lifespan is be in an intimate partnership with a man. That’s what the data tells us, and it rings true. Women disproportionately experience violence, abuse, and trauma at the hands of men.

So, what does this have to do with faking orgasms?

When women are engaged in sex with a male partner, it is one of the most, if not the most, vulnerable activities a woman can be engaged in, one of the most dangerous.

What if we consider the act of faking orgasms as a learned behavior based on survival? Perhaps faking orgasms is a safety valve, something we might do consciously in the moment, but that is rooted in deep unconscious survival mechanisms.

So, when we flippantly advise women to “stop faking your orgasm” and “stand up for yourself”—yes, that sounds great, fully feminist, and fully reasonable—I also think it’s too simple.

Faking orgasms to ensure the man’s ego is satisfied, to ensure the sexual encounter ends as everyone expects, to ensure safety and survival, and to account for male fragility—well, if you view the conditions from that framing, faking orgasms is stealth, clever, smart, badass, and fucking feminist.

I would still advise women not to fake orgasms. I would still advise them not to do what I did with nameless German doctor from my mid-20s. I would still advise confidence, communication, empowerment, and a woman’s right to desire.

But I would also say, if a woman slips up, gets nervous, and falls into a people-pleasing, faking-orgasm moment:

“It’s okay. I get it. We are trying to survive. It’s our superpower. We are smart. We have within us a survival mechanism passed down from women before us, gifted to us to use when we need it.”

And I would simply add the caveat that now, armed with this information—armed with the why—women get to choose when to use this superpower and when to let it rest.