How much screaming is an orgasm: the problem with coding female climax

ABSTRACT

Building on the feminist ‘sex wars’ debate, content studies of pornography interpret orgasms in pornography to argue for sexual objectification, sexual agency, and unequal power distribution among men and women in porn. While male orgasms are easily coded, female orgasms pose a particularly tricky obstacle due to their ‘invisibility’. I investigated peer-reviewed studies of the content of pornography published in the last 20 years to explore the different coding practices of female orgasms. I assessed the different approaches to measurement, authenticity, and theoretical assumptions connected to the number of orgasms. The analysis shows that methodologies are not always transparent and that researchers do not acknowledge the possible effects of methodologies on their results. This is especially alarming when taking into consideration that most of the studies argue with orgasms for inequality of men and women in pornography. Based on the analysis I offer a ‘best practice’ approach to coding orgasms.

KEYWORDS:

• Female orgasm
• sexual agency
• sexual objectification
• content analysis
• authenticity

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Kateřina Lišková for providing guidance throughout the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Mainstream pornography often reduces male orgasms to ejaculation, but as research of sexual dysfunctions and trans men suggests, there is variety in male climax too (Alwaal, Breyer and Lue 2015; Edelman 2015). However, it is beyond the scope of this article to problematize coding of these variations, and I suggest that future research investigates this variety.

Additional information

Funding

This article resulted from the project ‘Sexuality: Attitudes and Behaviour across Generations’ [number MUNI/A/1158/2019] supported by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic as part of its scheme advancing research at universities.