Photo: weheartit
What the heck, dudes???
By Shannon Ullman — Written on Apr 03, 2017
Scoring a guy that loves to give you an orgasm is supposed to be a good thing, right? Apparently, we can’t even get excited about this boyfriend trait anymore as it’s not as admirable as we thought it was.
Instead of just letting us ladies feel like our guys genuinely want to give pleasure, science had to go and ruin it for us.
According to a study published in the Journal of Sex Research, men get masculine pleasure from making their partners orgasm. The keyword here being masculine. According to researchers Sari van Anders and Sara Chadwick, the phenomenon is called “masculinity achievement.”
Tumblr
A study was done that required 810 men to read a story in which they and an attractive woman had sex. They were asked to picture the scenario where the women had an orgasm and a scenario in which she didn’t.
According to each scenario, the men were asked to rate their feelings of self-esteem and their feelings of masculinity. The results were pretty predictable as men had higher self-esteem and feelings of masculinity when the female partner had an orgasm.
"These results suggest that women's orgasms do function — at least in part — as a masculinity achievement for men," the researchers said.
Sure, it’s nice that men want their female partners to feel pleasure, but it poses a bit of a problem when that pleasure is associated more with a man’s accomplishments than a woman’s right to enjoy sex.
Researchers pointed out that "Despite increasing focus on women's orgasms, research indicated that the increased attention to women's orgasms may also serve men's sexuality, complicating conceptualizations of women's orgasms as women-centric."
Chadwick and van Anders go on to point out why this phenomenon is such a bad thing.
Tenor
"One reason is that it might pressure some heterosexual men to feel like they have to 'give' women orgasms, as if orgasm is something men pulled out of a hat and presented to women," they said. "This ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them."
Another reason to worry about this is that it causes women to feel the pressure to fake orgasm. Since many women don’t want to hurt the feelings of their man, they will be more likely to fake orgasms, something that is already happening in the beds of heterosexual couples all over the country.
When concluding their study, researchers found their findings to be worrisome overall. With a masculinity achievement tied to the female orgasm, this vital moment of pleasure is becoming less and less about the sexual liberation of females.
They sum it up by saying, "These men, therefore, were more likely to view women's orgasms as a notch on the bedpost of their manliness."
Ending the explanation of the study results, the researchers still encourage all men to give their female partners orgasms and not worry about how it makes them feel as a man, whether they achieve that or not.
