My friend Alex's "first time" story is rather typical: equal parts awkwardness and pleasure finishing with a big, faked orgasm.

"At some point I realized that as pleasant as the sensation was, this particular stroking motion from intercourse wasn't going to lead me to an orgasm," Alex explains. "So when it seemed like the right time, I grimaced, made some appropriate noises, and no one was the wiser."

What makes this story atypical is that Alex is a man.

That men reach orgasm easily and definitely whereas women work long and hard to get there (if they get there at all) is a myth, according to sex educator Carol Queen, director of San Francisco's Center for Sex and Culture.

"Some women can get turned on and come just as quickly as any man; and plenty of men take a long time to get aroused enough to go forward with direct genital contact, need extra sources of mental or physical stimulation to get that turned on, and have difficulty achieving orgasm during partnered sex," Queen says.

Sexual responsiveness between partners varies for reasons ranging from skill and technique to psychology and anatomy. I have been in sexual relationships with men in which I could readily climax through vaginal intercourse, but I also had a long-term relationship with a partner — I'll call him Eddie — whose anatomy and mine rarely conspired to bring either of us to orgasm the old fashioned way.

For women, the inability to climax during intercourse is now widely accepted as "normal," but according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychological Association's bible, my ex-boyfriend Eddie would be characterized as having a classifiable disorder known as Male Orgasmic Dysfunction, defined as an inability to climax "despite adequate sexual desire and arousal."

The manual cites the case of a man called "The Professor" as a typical example of this dysfunction: "He had no trouble in attaining and maintaining an erection and no difficulties in stimulating his partner to her orgasm, but he could never be stimulated himself to ejaculation, and would finally give up in boredom. He has always been able to reach ejaculation by masturbation, which he does about twice a week; but he has never been willing to let a partner masturbate him to orgasm."

And there, pun intended, is the rub, or rather the lack thereof. Perhaps the real dysfunction here is the shame that prevents the professor from sharing masturbation with a partner. Which is exactly how Eddie and I dealt with our poor pelvic fit. Where thrusting failed, fingers came in quite handy; we had twenty between us, after all.

To complicate matters further, Queen likes to point out the second great myth of the male orgasm: the assumption that ejaculation equals orgasm.