30% Is A Stat About Female Orgasm, But It's Not What You Think...probably, unless you read my blog a lot...

30% of Women Orgasm from Intercourse??? 

No. They don’t, but it’s complicated to explain because a lot of surveys, and sexperts using those surveys, would say they do.

I have been recently using a set of pages in a book to cite the numbers I use in regards to how many women claim to orgasm from intercourse alone. I use the stat of 'around 30%.' The book is "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Study of Evolution" by Elisabeth Lloyd (Harvard University Press 2005), and the pages are the first 22 pages after the introduction, actually the whole first chapter titled 'The Basics of Female Orgasm' (p21-43). 

So that 30% number. It, or numbers close to it, are thrown around quite a bit as the stat on how many women vaginally orgasm. It seems like it's a real number that is scientifically backed up, but as they say - it doesn't mean what you think it means. 

The truth is that there is no number out there that realistically reflects the percentage of women that orgasm “from intercourse “ - aka from stimualtion inside the vagina, with no additional external clitoral stimulation.

In actuality that 30% number is based on a variety of studies that reflects not how many women vaginally orgasm, but how many women claim to orgasm during intercourse. There are well-known and uncontroversial biases in all of these studies that cause almost certain over inflation of that number. There are also more complicated, slightly more controversial problems and biases that likely cause even further inflation of that number. I'll get into all that in detail below, but first I want to break this down a bit. There are mainly 3 categories that these numbers get related to. They are very different, but these important differences are rarely acknowledged and get jumbled up together in the conversation causing unnecessary confusion and misinformation. I'll separate them out and for fun give you my best prediction of what the percentages on those questions actually are.

The 3 types of stimulation-to-orgasm that could be included int he 30%

‘Vaginal’ Orgasmers (orgasm from come type of penis or dildo stimulating something inside or through their vaginal canal…might include G-spot stimulation or stimulation of inner parts of the clitoris through the vaginal wall or of the vaginal barrel itself or of the cervix)
If you ask me, the % of women that orgasm from this type of stimulation is most likely, well, about zero. But, that's just like, my opinion, man. It's not a willy nilly opinion, and I have plenty of arsenal I use to back it up (for instance an orgasm caused by this type of stimualtion has literally never been observed in all of scientific literature), but also, the surveys people use to assert the existance of these orgasmers, largely don’t even ask the right questions to sensibly get that result. So, anyone that says they know, even vaguely, what that % is, well, they are either ill educated on the subject or lying. 

Hands-free Intercourse Orgasmsers
The % of women that can and/or do orgasm during intercourse with no hands and/or no vibrator, is also truly unknown because, again, the questions asked in surveys about this stuff are generally thoughtless, uninformed, and unfocused, so the results are shitty and don't allow for the distinctions needed to get real answers. 

My guess is it's somewhere under that 30% - closer to the 20-24% in the Hite and Fischer studies below. However, to me, the thing to remember here is there's no reason to assume this % reflects some sort of innate ability some women have and some women don't.

A person with a clit and vagina can absolutely have hands-free orgasms as a result of something other than the stimualtion inside the vagina. It’s called external clitoral stimulation, and it’s been reliably causing lady-gasms in labs since at least the 1950’s; orgasms that have been verified through physical recording of the rhythmic contraction of the pelvic muscles, something universally understood as a marker of orgasm in both males and females.

So, a clear possibility among this group of orgasmsers is simply grinding the clit against a partner’s body or against bedding during the intercourse. This happens and there are certainly an amount of women actually do orgasm in this way amongst the 30%, but it’s just not something that is specifically asked about in surveys almost ever. The ‘vaginal’ orgasms above would be included in this group too, if they exist, but like I discussed above, I think there’s somewher close to zero of those.

Orgasming During Intercourse
The % for women that can and/or do orgasm during intercourse would include the grinders above, but also include those that stimulate the external clit with a hand or vibrator. These are clearly orgasmsers that are coming from external clit stimualtion - not from intercourse, but it’s incredibly likely some of these women are included in this 30% becuase the questions on these surveys are so incredibly terrible at asking good questions. Only very few surveys either discern between hands-free vs. manual stimulation intercourse orgasm or acknowledge that additional manual stimulation during intercourse is even a thing. I would guess that the numbers could be a bit higher than the 30%, like the 50%ish  Kinsey's study showed. Kinsey's team actually assumed manual stimulation was a normal way to orgasm during intercourse and so those numbers are intentionally included but not discerned from their overall intercourse orgasm numbers.  

I want to clearly note here, that any woman that masturbates can do this. Ya just do what you do to masturbate but with a dick up your junk. There is absolutely no element of innate ability that some women have and others don't. It's open to any woman. Of course easier said than done. It's clearly not something that is modeled much and it unfortunately feels to a lot of people like a cheat, or an ego punch to the partner. It's something we consider and do in our culture much, much too seldom. 

But also, why are we so worried about having a dick in us when we orgasm?
And on that note, let me end my number best-guesses here by pulling out (pun intende) a bit and asking this. Why do we give so much of a shit about orgasming during intercourse at all, much less hands-free during intercourse? I mean, I get why Lloyd does. Her book is about the evolution of the female orgasm so she was specifically investigating how often lady-gasms arise form nothing but the reproductive act. But, most of us aren't writing Philosophy of Science books. We're just trying to have a good time fucking, and the truth is orgasms arise from penis and clit stimulation, not penis and vagina stimulation. 

The fact that we as a sexual culture are obsessed with women back-bending themselves into orgasming during a sex act that is shit for their orgasm just so their orgasm doesn't inconvenience anyone by needing something other than the very male-orgasm-centric act of intercourse - is kinda sad. God forbid the sex act include the kind of intentional focused stimulation to the clit that we almost always, under any circumstance, afford penises in a sexual situation. 

I mean, if you have figured out a great way to reliably get orgasms during intercourse, fab. But also, like…fuck intercourse (so to speak). We should be less focused on intercourse when talking of female orgasm and exponentially more on external clit stimulation...because it's literally as important to lady-gasm as penises are to male orgasm. 

Back to the 30%

Why it's important to understand correctly
What is Lloyd saying and doing in those pages? Why is she doing it, and why do I choose to use those pages over everything else out there as my citation on the lady-gasm during intercourse stats?

So, I'm doing this post because I was reminded about the importance of that 30% stat recently by my incredibly Dedicated-To-Orgasm-Equality webfriend who keeps me honest, supplied with resources, and filled with thoughtful reflection. She quite rightly worries about how other people, and in fact Lloyd herself in later work and interviews, uses the orgasm-from-intercourse stats from this book. 

Specifically, these stats are often (I'd actually say mostly) incorrectly used as an indication of how many women do/can orgasm vaginally However, they should only really be used as a loose and likely overinflated indication of how many women claim to orgasm during intercourse. This difference is important because without that discernment, and without having a full background understanding of the significant biases in the studies from which these numbers come, it gives the impression that about 1/3 of women have some quality that other women don't - an ability to orgasm from nothing more than a penis moving in and out of the vagina intercourse-style, when that is almost certainly not the case at all. 

But why even use the number at all
That said, these very imperfect, often misleading stats are all we currently have, and I refer to this chapter because the starting point from which I must begin many of my arguments is that stats seem to show, and lots of people believe, that there is a percentage of females that can and do orgasm from nothing more than stimulation inside the vagina. Those stats don't actually mean that, but I can't ignore that there are numbers out there, numbers like the ones we're discussing, that people (everyone really) use to make that argument. 

What I can do is begin by pointing out the questions needed to understand the reality behind those numbers:

• What do studies really suggest is the % of women that claim vaginal orgasm?

• What exactly are the studies behind these stats, and what story are the numbers really telling? 

• Why does claiming a vaginal orgasm not strongly indicate that the person actually had a vaginal orgasm?

Lloyd's overview of these studies and those stats are the best out there for actually getting an idea of what women claim.

Referring people toLloyd's chapter has been a shorthand for me to reflect the complexity and the flaws in these stats without having to detail it all out like I'm doing here. But...I'm probably going to start sending people to this page instead of her chapter, given that someone randomly reading my blog on the internet can find this page, but probably won't go buy Lloyd's book and read the first chapter unless they are REALLY into this stuff...

Process for More Clearly Understanding the 30% Number

So to dive into these numbers we have to go through a few levels (listed below). I'll hit on each and how Lloyd's chapter and I deal with them.

• Understanding what stats are out there that speak to % vaginal orgasm among us ladies

• Understanding the % of women that we can fairly assume orgasm during intercourse given the existing data

• Digging deeper into the study assumptions from which these numbers came

• Critiquing how these numbers are used

Understanding what stats are out there that speak to % vaginal orgasm among us ladies
There are lots and they give a variety of numbers. Lloyd's all over this. Her review is comprehensive and touches on 32 major studies. The only really big one I know of that she doesn't include is Master's and Johnson's groundbreaking study, but that study was focused on the physiological investigation of orgasm as oppose to getting the % of vaginal orgasmers in a random (or at least somewhat random) population. However, if she had included it, it would not be counter to either Lloyd's argument or mine.  

Understanding  the % of women that we can fairly assume orgasm during intercourse given the existing data
This can only happen, of course, after taking into account widely understood weaknesses of these many studies and how they negate and/or confirm each other, but also taking them generally at face value because they are all we have so far and any argument that outright ignores these stats would hold no water in a scientific argument. 

Lloyd nails this. She's goes through the studies and discusses how they relate to each other along with their strengths and weaknesses. It is a comprehensive review of these 32 studies, and in the end she doesn't come out with an exact % of women. She takes the pulse of all these studies and gets to a general scientifically conservative (meaning the reality is probably much lower) estimate of around 1/3 of women could be expected to claim orgasm during intercourse with no additional manual clitoral stimulation. She uses this number with full understanding of the huge problems with the studies from which these numbers arise. I usually say about 30%, and use this whole chapter as a reference for why that's a solid conservative number to start out with. What I'm saying is that there is no one number. The 30% I use and the 1/3 Lloyd uses are just best estimates. It's complex, but we have to start somewhere that scientists can agree on based on existing scientific data.   

Now here's some of the main points in her review. If you are interested, though I do recommend reading this chapter.

Important studies in Lloyd's review
There are two studies I, and I'd say she as well, take with more weight because of how they discern the questioning. Hite (1976) and Fischer (1973) both discern orgasm from additional manual stimulation during intercourse from orgasm during intercourse without additional manual stimulation (those who say they don't need any manual stimulation at all - Hite 24%, Fischer 20% - Hite's number is only among respondents who have ever orgasmed under any circumstance and who have had intercourse). 

Kinsey (1953) and Gebhard (1966) did not make that discernment in their numbers, although they acknowledged that they did not. Their numbers for orgasms during intercourse intentionally include women that used additional manual clitoral stimulation to orgasm and don't discern them from the overall total, so if you are looking to find percentages of women that orgasmed without additional manual stimulation of the clit, these aren't it. They are certainly and admittedly inflated if looking for vaginally orgasming women, but to what degree, we don't know (Gebhard 35-59% always or almost always depending on how happily married the women said she was) (Kinsey 50-62% anywhere from always to regularly).

No other studies Lloyd looks at make this discernment in their stats nor do they acknowledge that they don't. So, that alone would indicate to me that none of those other stats about intercourse orgasms give any kind of clear indication about how many women can orgasm from merely a dick moving in and out of her vagina without manual stimulation of the clit.

Biases and problems to consider
On top of all that messiness, Lloyd points out a variety of other problems with comparing data from different studies about women's claims of orgasm during intercourse. First, she notes the populations the studies used. Many were quite small, some were only gynecological patients, some only college educated people, and they were all from Europe or the US. These all may have a biased impact on the resulting stats.

Also, they all use different, and sometimes non-quantifiable ranges for their categories of how often the women claim to orgasm during intercourse. Some studies break it down to Always, Sometimes, Never. Others break it down by % of times. Others have a Always/Almost always category or a Sometime/Never category. It's almost impossible to really compare. 

And if I might be so bold, I have an additional problem with this, because...what does 'sometimes' mean to someone?  I have talked to a few women who when we first discussed it said that yeah, they do orgasm sometimes from intercourse. Then later in the conversation, it adjusts to that they have orgasmed once or twice, they think. Eventually, and usually not in that same conversation, they tell me that they probably have never orgasmed during intercourse. I bring this up not as a fact, but as something to think on. People can convince themselves of things when they want to, and doesn't it sound nicer to say 'sometimes' you do something rather than you 'seldom' or 'never' do something that you believe you should always be able to do. It's a way of hedging your bets without really feeling like you're lying. But this is really a personal sidetrack to the larger, and well-known problem in science of inaccuracy in all self-reporting studies, and Lloyd does indeed bring this up as another problem with all these numbers. Also, she very rightly says the following:

"Furthermore, the fact that all of the survey results reviewed earlier in this chapter are based on self-reporting, either through interviews or through questionnaires, probably biases the results towards reports of orgasm higher than those experienced. Ever since Freud, there has been a heavily normative equation drawn between a woman having orgasms with intercourse and her true womanliness and femininity, thus producing great pressure to have orgasm with intercourse. Given this enormous social pressure, the surveys are most likely to yield higher rates of orgasm than actually exist."

So given all those problems that Lloyd openly acknowledges, she asks an important question in the final paragraphs of this chapter.  

"Given the methodological problems just discussed with the sexological literature, what should our approach be to treating it as evidence? Simply put, we must use the evidence we have but without illusions about some of the studies apparent flaws. First, no one study should be treated as representative of the population at large. We should instead look to trends in the studies taken as a whole for a more representative understanding. Second, we should be aware that face-to-face studies may artificially inflate reported rates of orgasm, especially of orgasm during intercourse. And third, we must bear in mind that almost none of the studies draw the crucial distinction between assisted and unassisted orgasm with intercourse."

 She goes on at the end of the paragraph to comment on the use of existing evidence as the professional standard in scientific arguments.

"...if a researcher is writing about the evolution of female orgasm, then he or she should use the best, most scientific description of the phenomenon being explained. The fact that "the best, most scientific description" may, in fact have faults is not a good excuse not to use it."

I agree wholeheartedly, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't also critique that evidence with all the appropriate gusto it deserves.

Digging deeper into the study assumptions from which these numbers came
Once you have a sensible starting number from existing data, what are the underlying assumptions in the creation, execution, and conclusions of these studies and how do they affect the numbers? 

Vaginal orgasms are assumed to exist, but, like, do they???
For instance: that orgasms caused by stimulation inside the vagina (vaginal orgasms) exist is an assumption that is absolutely not proven but affects everything about these studies. Seriously. There has never been a physically observed or physically recorded orgasm caused by stimulation of something in the vagina (cervix, 'g-spot', inner clit stimulated through the vaginal walls) in all of scientific literature. 

One would assume when a women says she orgasms that she knows what an orgasm is, if she's had one, and reports it accurately, but like, is that a smart assumption???
Also, it's well understood that self-reporting can be flawed and that the female orgasm is a behavior women very likely feel pressure to exhibit. Lloyd touches on the way this might inflate orgasm, particularly orgasm during intercourse, numbers when she is going through the sensibly understood weaknesses of these studies. However there's a further question of underlying assumptions that's harder to swallow: Can women accurately report whether or not they have orgasmed? Do women have the correct understanding and underlying assumptions/knowledge about female orgasm to correctly differentiate a physical orgasm from other sexual, arousing, climactic mental or physical experiences? 

The hard truth is there are very real concerns that for a variety of reasons women might say they orgasm vaginally when they don't.

Female orgasm is a very special case when it comes to self-reporting - much, much more so than male orgasm because of the quite unnecessary but nonetheless deep and ubiquitous confusion and misinformation surrounding the physical realities of female orgasm...for instance most people are misinformed that there is physical evidence of vaginal orgasms. There's not. 

The word 'orgasm,' is not clear (well, when speaking about female orgasm, but not so much when talking about male orgasm) and so why would we expect clear answers when questioning about it. Although it has a widely agreed upon physical quality in science that discerns it from other sexual experiences like arousal, ejaculation (in both men and women) or spiritual/mental climaxes, 'orgasm' is used wildly (again - for women, not so much men) both in the public and sadly also by scientific researchers and sex professionals. It is often said to mean whatever one believes it to mean. Any climactic experience can be described as orgasm without a 2nd thought. So, it is incredibly naive, in my opinion, to trust that when a woman says she orgasmed during intercourse, that she actually physically did so. The want for intercourse orgasms is so socially desirable, the discussion and depictions of female orgasm so unrealistic and convoluted, and the evidence that anyone ever in all of scientific literature has ever had a vaginal orgasm so non-existant (seriously, this is a real problem, people), that any study that's using only women's self-reporting about intercourse induced orgasms is suspect at best. 

And, have we talked about how grinding orgasms factor into answers about intercourse orgasms?
How might people report orgasms during intercourse without additional manual stimulation, but while specifically grinding the clit against the partner's body or against a surface like bedding or a pillow.  I imagine there are women who orgasm this way and distinctly understand it as creating additional clitoral stimulation for themselves, and there are also women who are specifically moving in ways that stimulate the clit, but internalize and express it as general movement during intercourse to get to an intercourse-induced orgasm. This is opposed to internalizing and expressing it as moving during intercourse as a means for getting the appropriate external clitoral stimulation they need for orgasm. It's a subtle but important difference and it might affect how a woman answers a survey on orgasms. I feel like it could easily be reported as a vaginal orgasm for some, but others may put it under 'orgasm during intercourse with additional clitoral stimulation' or something like that. It's really just a matter of how the person came to and internalizes that orgasm, but it can easily affect the numbers in ways researchers don't get because they simply haven't considered these possibilities and thus haven't created their research in ways that would account for issues like this.

Lloyd and I are interested in different types of intercourse orgasm discernment: An Aside
On that note, I'd like to mention that for Lloyd's argument in the book, the discernment I just made between orgasm during intercourse caused by hands-free stimulation of the external clit vs. orgasm during intercourse caused by stimulation from the penis inside the vagina are not necessarily a discernment important to her argument. Her book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, is not really about female orgasm. I mean, not really. It's a book that uses mainstream theories on the the evolutionary beginnings of human female orgasm to make important points about bias in evolutionary biology - I assume the female orgasm got chosen because it's such a fucking blatant example of the bias. Lloyd, the author, is not a sexologist or even a biologist. She is a philosopher of science, and the book is squarely a philosophy of science argument. 

Lloyd is interested in how many woman can orgasm from only the sex act that is responsible for reproduction. We know men are closer to 100% on that. But what about women, she asks? The center of her argument is that the majority of women absolutely do not orgasm from this reproductive act, no matter how you look at the relevant studies that exist out there. She elegantly and decisively fucks up all the theories about female orgasm evolution that refuse to acknowledge that very clear reality (pretty much all of them). It's a thing of Philosophy of Science* beauty, but she is not interested in quite the same thing I am. For her, it doesn't matter that grinding the clit against a partner during intercourse isn't a 'vaginal orgasm' but instead a clitoral orgasm during intercourse. Either way the point to her is about ladygasms that happen without anything more than the reproductive act - even if it's because the clitoral glans just happens to get some action in the process. It's nice to note, though, that what she finds, even with the assumed inclusion of these hands-free grinding orgasms during intercourse, is that the numbers still clearly show most women don't orgasm from just the reproductive act. 

So while Lloyd's point, when looking at female orgasm and intercourse, is related to what the existing scientific inquires can tell us about how female orgasm relates to reproduction and what that says about how female orgasm evolved, my focus on the topic is different. 

Mine is focused on the use of the existing science related to specific details of physically achieving female orgasm. I use this in order to build understanding of how female orgasm happens and what anatomical parts and types of physical stimulation are important to achieving female orgasm. From this, a base physical understanding of how lady-gasms might realistically happen during sexual interactions can be attained. Further, my activist hope from clarifying the scientific understanding of the physical female orgasm (a clarification that our culture is incredibly resistant to illuminate, by the way), is that it will lead to substantial change in how female orgasm is studied, depicted, taught, discussed, and real-life attempted in a way that eventually results in as many female orgasms during sexual interactions as male orgasms. 

In more casual terms, my point here is to use actual existing physical scientific evidence to convince people how fucking ridiculous it is to assume women will come from getting fucked. I want to make it clear that stimulation to the inside of the vagina has never in all of scientific literature been shown to physically cause an orgasm and probably isn't a way orgasms are induced and that the overall indication from the scientific literature is that the female orgasm needs stimulation of the clitoral glans and surrounding external tissue as much as the male orgasm needs stimulation of the penile glans and surrounding external tissue. And, if our culture were to understand those things, I mean truly, fully 'get' it, we'd all be appalled at how shitty and unorgasmic most sex is for porn stars, movie/TV/novel characters, and most importantly - actual women in actual relationships...particularly, but certainly not limited to cis hetero ones. 

Even without digging deeper into these underlying assumptions, Lloyd's numbers are still important
These are things I live/love to pick at. However, although these questions are not something that would have been outside the realm of what Lloyd could have delved into, these questions of the existence of vaginal orgasm or of women's capacity to accurately identify an orgasm much less specifically an orgasm caused only by stimulation to the inside of the vagina are more controversial questions and would have put her lady-gasm evolution argument on shakier ground. 

What she did do, though, I think is still important. She showed that the data we already have in front of us indicates that most women don't orgasm at all during intercourse most of the time. That was all she needed in order to move forward on her argument from rock-solid ground, and personally, I think that's powerful in itself. That even in a quite conservative (scientifically speaking) accounting of what we know, we KNOW that intercourse is shit for lady-gasm. We KNOW it, yet it's still the most culturally beloved, go-to hetero sex act. 

The 30%ish  number that come out of her review in that chapter are powerful to me because it really highlights that even without all my uber-orgasm-equality-activist critiquing of the stats and studies, the scientific world should know better. Scientist and studies regularly ignore that reality, and it's bullshit. There's no excuse for scientists to uncritically take claims of vaginal orgasm at face value or to create studies and conclusions with underlying assumptions about a strong connection between intercourse and female orgasm. Yet they do.  Most women don't orgasm when intercourse is happening to them. Full stop.  

Lloyd's numbers are not the whole story, and clearly there is a lot more critiquing of them that is needed, but if even just these uncontroversial stats would be taken seriously, there could be some progress just from that alone. 

Critiquing how these numbers are used 
After looking deeply at the simple biases and weaknesses as well as the larger problems with the underlying assumptions, one simply cannot abide by something like a sex advisor saying that 30% of women orgasm vaginally. It's misleading and not actually backed by the studies that produced those numbers. 

1 The studies, all of them, are quite literally not giving us numbers for how many women orgasm vaginally. They, I'm saying it again, are only giving us numbers for how many women claim to orgasm from vaginal stimulation alone (if they even do that - most just give us numbers for claiming orgasm during intercourse, which might include women orgasming from a variety of clitoral stimulation options that happen during intercourse, but not necessarily because of vaginal stimulation). 

2 A vaginal orgasm isn't even a verified physical thing that has ever been known to happen, so it's a little problematic to be spouting off, without qualifying it, that 30% of women do this thing that we aren't even sure exists. 

Some may counter that there are a few studies out there where researchers assert that vaginal orgasms happened in their lab during experimentation..

These, like everything else I’ve discussed, are just claims of vaginally stimulated orgasm. Although the researchers in these studies took the time to bring these women into the lab to orgasm (which I appreciate), and they may have recorded some physical qualites, like blood pressure or heart rate during orgasm, none have ever recorded the rhythmic pelvic muscle contractions that mark orgasm in both men and women. Things like increases in heart rate and blood pressure can indicate high levels of physical arousal, but they are not aren't able to mark orgasm specifically. So yes, there are some claims of women in labs orgasming through only stimulation inside the vagina (cervix, G-spot, inner clitoral legs through the vaginal wall, whatever), but not one of those studies actually verified physically that the orgasm happened. Not one. These studies are still all claims of orgasm. (I review a lot of those studies HERE if you're interested in seeing more)

Make sure your local sexpert gets it right

So, next time you see a stat for the number of women that are able to orgasm 'vaginally' or 'from intercourse' or 'with no additional clitoral stimulation' or 'during intercourse,' I hope this helps clear up the different meanings those statements have, where those stats come from, what they indicate/don't indicate, and what kinds of problems, biases and silly underlying assumptions are at play. I hope you see, frankly, how complicated and ultimately unreliable they end up being and how casually they are thrown around. I hope you see how nobody ever seems to make sure it is known these stats are indicating women's claims of orgasm even though that is what they indicate. 

Most importantly, I hope you notice that when they are used, they reiterate the incorrect but widely, almost universally, believed assumption that there are women out there who can orgasm from a penis rubbing the inside of their vaginas and that this is a known of science. It absolutely is not, and it is harmful to women and to the sexual culture that this is believed so strongly. 

Correct the next sexpert you hear that uses these numbers incorrectly.

*Although, unlike Lloyd, my focus is not a specifically Philosophy of Science argument, I have deep love and respect for the discipline. I 100% credit my Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Biology classes in college for flipping my brain and making me think of feminism, science, and orgasm research completely differently, for allowing me to put the infant thoughts of this work together in the first place. Those classes sparked my lifelong passion and activism in the lady-gasm space - so big love from me to Philosophy of Science (Thanks Dr. Stuart Glennon).