4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Katharine Smyth is 39 years old and has never, to her knowledge, had an orgasm. This fact didn’t worry her very much until her 30s, when a divorce and a series of dates with frustrated men made her think she might never find love again. So she embarked on a quest—diving deep into an industry designed to solve her problem, searching for a feeling that’s been a fixation of science, pseudoscience, politics, and philosophy for centuries.
“The metaphor that came to me is that it’s kind of like a Rorschach test, where it’s this abstraction that all of these doctors and scientists are projecting their own worldview upon. And it’s almost always to the benefit of men.”
This week on The Experiment: A personal quest for sexual fulfillment reveals centuries of mythmaking about female pleasure.
Further reading: The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex
Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].
This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Gabrielle Berbey, with editing by Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Stef Hayes. Sound design by David Herman.
Music by infinite bisous (“Lost in Translation /2,” “Why Should I?”), r mccarthy (“Fine,” “Jyoti,” “She's a Gift Giver, She's a Giver of Gifts”), Parish Council (“Same Cake”), Safa Park (“Loose Yams”), Laundry (“Lawn Feeling”), Keyboard (“Staying In”), water feature (“a paradise”), and Nelson Bandela (“No Dummms 6860,” “Hoop Dreams”), provided by Tasty Morsels and Nelson Nance. Additional music by Brian C. Chapman (“Casual Sex”) and Claude Debussy (“Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune”). Additional audio from MGM Studios, Sweet Alice, Film&Clips, Fox News, Miramax, and VCX Classics.
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0:00.0 | Just a quick note, this week's episode is definitely P-Due 13. |
0:19.6 | You know, I do wonder sometimes I think that I maybe have had them in in dreams. |
0:26.7 | What happens in dreams? |
0:27.9 | It's such a hard thing to talk about, right? |
0:30.6 | Because it's like, how do you describe it? |
0:32.7 | It's just that feeling of like a rush and a flash and a real intense pleasure that feels like it has an end and a craft. |
0:50.0 | There's a certain kind of pleasure that Catherine's mife has never felt before. |
0:56.0 | I had always sort of enjoyed sex and really liked sex, but I had never had an orgasm. |
1:07.0 | What happens is that either the pleasure kind of really builds and builds and then |
1:13.2 | platos and dissipates without any kind of real climactic moment, |
1:18.1 | or it becomes a very painful sensation where I can't keep going because it hurts. |
1:27.1 | It's just not the rapture release that, you know, I imagine is what it must be like. |
1:36.8 | Somewhere around 5 to 10 percent of women say they've never reached climax. |
1:42.0 | It's considered a dysfunction called an orgasmia when it causes distress. |
1:48.4 | It's been linked to physical and psychological issues. |
1:52.2 | And overall, straight women, like Catherine, say they reach climax during sex less often than others. |
1:59.6 | I would talk to friends about it in the same boat. |
2:02.1 | One friend who's like, is there a chance that we actually have and we just don't realize it? |
2:06.8 | Maybe orgasms aren't that great. |
2:08.9 | I just don't think that could be it. |
2:14.1 | At first, I didn't really feel to her like a problem. |
2:17.8 | At my early 20s, men didn't really seem to care or notice. |
... |
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