It looks, on your smartphone screen, like the face of a furry brown alien, something out of vintage Star Trek, whose wrinkled expressions can change as you swirl your finger across it. It’s mesmerising, the kind of sensory-touch screen app that my children found quite relaxing when they were toddlers.
It is in fact an interactive game based on real women’s vaginas: real, crinkly clitorises that respond to the user’s touch. The idea is to combine two of the things that men like to treat themselves to online — gaming and porn — into a competition. For once, female, not male, orgasm is the prize.
This work of genius feminist subterfuge is part of an American internet site called OMGYes, founded by, of course, a frustrated woman and her male friend. “So, it’s a little strange touching a virtual vagina at first,” says the instructional video, as if, soon enough, touching our virtual vagina will become a normal part of 21st-century life and not just, as I predict, the most snigger-inducing party game for drunk teenage boys saying: “Woah, now it looks like Seth Rogen’s sideburns!”
In my brief affair with it, I found it certainly changes your relationship . . . with your phone. I worry I have not been sufficiently attentive to its needs. It had, I reflect sadly, all been about what my grubby little fingers want from my phone, it not occurring to me that it might need some satisfaction of its own. Now when I see men jabbing impatiently at their touch screens on the Tube I can’t help but feel a stab of sympathy. As for phones, as for women. What this website attempts to do — at £19 a pop — is nothing less than the next wave of an unfinished sexual revolution.
For it’s Emma Watson at it again. The British actress’s speech to the United Nations on gender inequality two years ago changed the conversation about sexism by emphasising that it hurt men and women equally. Her “he for she” campaign urged men to stop thinking that feminism was a women’s thing because “men don’t have the benefits of equality either”. And now, in an extension of her humanitarian work, Watson is bringing her attentions to the female orgasm. Which is about the most political act of the human body.
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Watson, talking in London last week to the feminist writer Gloria Steinem, said she had been told about OMGYes by a female friend. As Watson explained to their audience, it offers highly detailed videos on achieving the female orgasm on a site used by equal numbers of men and women. “I wish it had been around longer,” she said. “Definitely check it out. It’s an expensive subscription, but,” and here she paused languidly and to much knowing laughter, “it’s worth it.”
This doesn’t just bring up troubling retrospective thoughts of Hermione’s difficult adolescence behind the curtains of her four-poster bed in the girls’ dorm or Gryffindor Tower. I mean, Hermione would have been OK, right? She had a wand.
Yet it also shows that interest in the female orgasm waxes and wanes according to political agendas beyond the bed. There was a surge of interest in female desire in the 1970s, with graphic educational publications such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden on female sexual fantasy and a generation of women holding long-handled mirrors to their undercarriage as if checking for terrorist bombs, which were an increasing threat at the time. Since the 1990s all that has gone away. The co-founder of OMGYes, Rob Perkins, the digital strategist, tells me: “It may seem like we’re living in an ‘open and sexualised age’ [but] the truth is this topic is still very much in the shadows.”
“Men and women ask, why can’t I do it like they do in the movies
What was left in its place was a cultural myth about the female orgasm that dates from the Freud era and beyond. It is this that agitators such as Watson and OMGYes say has to change, and it is as political as anything that goes on at the United Nations. Hardly any women (8 per cent according to the latest research) can reliably achieve an orgasm from “unassisted” heterosexual intercourse alone. Unassisted is technical jargon for “hands-free” — you know, just like your phone.
This discovery doesn’t make much biological sense. The human female orgasm is as evolutionarily mysterious as the male nipple, but only if the male nipple caused men and women bouts of crippling self-doubt and inadequacy that had both sexes thinking it looked better in Poldark. Battles are still being fought in academia over whether it’s there by accident or design, but the most dominant theory is that the male orgasm evolved first; the female was the “buy one get one free” bonus.
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Since the clitoris is made from the same foetal tissue as the penis, it can’t help but precipitate orgasms too. Or, in other words, the female orgasm is a by-product of the male, as the American anthropologist Donald Symons put it in his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality, but is not designed to work in concert with it. That’s not to say it doesn’t have value, but that the hydraulics between men and women do not work for the female orgasm the way we think they obviously should.
This also explains what researchers call the “orgasm gap”, the large differential between male and female orgasm through intercourse, and also the difference in reporting of those events — far more men think their partner has had a good time than their female partner admits (see the iconic When Harry Met Sally diner scene, et al).
Before Jonathan Margolis, the science writer, began his book O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, he wondered why he could never get it on with women like the ones he saw on screen. “Little boys nowadays see people banging away in internet porn, and they come together all the time,” he says. “But it’s Hollywood that started this most egregious misrepresentation, well before the internet. Realistic portrayal of sex in a Hollywood movie is as rare as the Hollywood version happening in real life. So there is some symmetry there. I wouldn’t say it ruined people’s lives, but it ruined a corner of people’s lives. Billions of people think that they are doing it wrong.”
Almost never do we see screen sex in which the woman is “struggling on, left a bit, up a bit”, Margolis says. It wouldn’t be that dramatically satisfying, he says, but then he reflects and says: “Actually it probably would be a great scene.” We think we know all there is to know about sex, he says, but we’re blind to this reality. “It’s been a moral rather than a practical victory.” This leaves most men like characters in the seminal episode of Seinfeld in which the men battle over copyright of a series of complicated sexual operations called “the move”. Designed to please women, it involves a “counter-clockwise swirl” that they have to write in crib notes on their hands.
Elisabeth Lloyd is a professor of biology at Indiana University with a specialist interest in evolution and sex. Her book The Case of the Female Orgasm sounds more like a Sherlock Holmes mystery than it should given its erudite pages, but perhaps that’s appropriate. Lloyd says that after nearly every talk she gave she had both men and women coming up to her and saying, “What’s wrong with me? Why I can’t do it like in the movies?”
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She tells them that research has shown consistently over the past century that only 6-8 per cent of women can achieve orgasm through “hands-free” heterosexual intercourse. “But that’s shown as effortless in Hollywood and porn alike. Which is appalling, really: both men and women get a nasty shock when they have sex for the first time. The numbers don’t change: what’s grim is that the expectations of women have.”
In fact, says Lloyd, the latest research shows that it’s probably an anatomical anomaly — the siting of the clitoris — that accounts for the rare women who can have Hollywood sex. For the rest, it’s back to the OMGYes website and the like. For all our supposed knowledge about sex this remains ignored in our culture.
“It is harder for women now than women in the 1970s,” says Lloyd. “All that enlightening work has been lost. I get young college women now saying the same things to me every time, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me’, misinformed by what they see on screen. For 94 per cent of women what they see universally on screen is false, and that is kind of tragic.”
Is there, I ask Lloyd, a problem caused by an emphasis on equality in other walks of life? The desire to treat men and women equally has perhaps been erroneously and confusingly transferred into the bedroom, where difference is key. “Yes,” says Lloyd. “Our research indicates that lesbians have a lot more orgasms, a third again, as heterosexual women. There is a big gap there, which shows something lacking maybe for heterosexual women.”
There is an evolution still to come, so to speak, in our sexual relations? “Yes, I agree.”