Intercourse Orgasm Consistency, Concordance of Women's Genital and Subjective Sexual Arousal, and Erotic Stimulus Presentation Sequence

Abstract

Many studies report discordance between women's genital (vaginal pulse amplitude) and subjective sexual arousal responses to erotica. Consistent with our previous research, I hypothesized that the association between physiological and subjective domains would be greater for women with greater orgasmic consistency (OC) during penile-vaginal intercourse but not for OC during masturbation or noncoital partnered sexual activities. I confirmed this specific hypothesis in a sample of young Dutch women (N = 27, mean age 20, all with current partners), replicating our earlier psychophysiological findings with postmenopausal women. Also replicated were the findings that intercourse OC (40% of the women had an orgasm from 90–100% of intercourse events, 44% from 9–89% of intercourse events) was not less than for other sexual activity and that OC during intercourse was uncorrelated with OC during masturbation. We observed the association of intercourse consistency with genital-subjective concordance when visual erotica was presented in a sequence of increasing intensity (analogous to typical real sexual encounters) but not when presented in decreasing, random, or fixed-intensity sequence. I discuss the results in terms of the unique nature of penile-vaginal intercourse and the study's implications for sex therapy and sex research.

I am grateful to Ellen Laan, who provided the data. Portions of this study were presented at the 45th meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, Lisbon, in September 2005.