After years of faking, finally a happy ending

I was a teenager the first time I faked an orgasm. It was during cybersex in an early-’90s AOL chat room and went something like this: “Omigosh, yes! Oh, oh, mmm, yesss!” Anonymous online sex was my pubescent rebellion, raised as I was by a pair of pot-smoking hippies who were the opposite of the parental stereotype: They jumped at any opportunity to talk about sex—always as the most loving, spiritual act imaginable. And my dad routinely railed against excessive makeup, crippling high heels, or any other sacrifice for superficial, unnatural desirability. But contradictory messages abounded—and I actively sought them out. Like HBO’s late-night series Real Sex; I vividly remember being wowed by a stripper shaking her big breasts in the face of a dumbfounded man. Their interaction was anything but “loving.” My suspicion that my parents weren’t telling me the whole truth about sex was further confirmed when I snooped on my dad’s computer and found photos of beautiful naked women who looked suspiciously like the corrupt ideal that he so often scorned. I didn’t know it then, but my chat-room performance was the beginning of what would be a rich and varied career of faked orgasms—the live, in-person kind. Not right away, though. It never occurred to me to deceive my first boyfriend; we were on a mutual path of sexual self-discovery. Our explorations in my high school bedroom were genuine, tender, enthusiastic, and eventually we figured out a means by which I could orgasm during “sex sex.” It wasn’t quick or simple, but it did the trick. The other option was, of course, oral activity. One night, I let out an urgent “Oh my God”—and then whispered it again and again, each time convinced that an orgasm was right around the corner. After a while, a muffled laugh emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I started thinking about counting how many times you’d say ‘Oh my God,’ and I couldn’t help but laugh.” Who could blame him? Even I was distracted by what sounded like my desperate prayer to some deity of female pleasure. I often struggled to clear my mind, and then to stop thinking so much about needing to clear my mind. If I wasn’t worrying about him having an orgasm too soon for my purposes, I was worrying that I wasn’t keeping him excited. Of course what I had to do was stop thinking and just feel; afterward, I’d collapse on top of my boyfriend, sweaty and laughing. It was a team effort, and he seemed to enjoy my orgasm as much as I did—his jaw would go slack with amazement at my paroxysms—so it would’ve felt cruel to fake. Besides, how could I pretend until I’d experienced the real thing? I was a method actor in that sense, I guess. It was after that relationship ended that my fakery really got going. While navigating the hookups of my early twenties, I didn’t dare risk the humiliation or vulnerability that might attend articulating to a new partner the nuances of my needs—first you X, then a little Y, then some Z. Ugh. And that suggests I knew exactly what worked. I didn’t, despite my successes with my first boyfriend. I had no faith in my orgasmic acumen, yet I also believed that said acumen was essential to hot sex for my male partner. The first time I fabricated was with a beautiful, all-American frat boy I met in college; he looked as though he belonged in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog (or at least worked in one of the stores). We almost literally fell into his bed in the middle of a strained conversation about our creative writing class. Midway, I could feel him losing momentum, and I hurried myself to a phony climax hoping to arrest his, shall we say, deterioration. To no avail. When my pseudoecstasy was complete, he rolled off me. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said. A tingle rose from my throat to behind my eyes, like I might burst into tears then and there. No, I didn’t feel sad for him. To the contrary. Here was a man who to me represented male power, privilege, and approval—and he was recoiling from me, or at least that’s the way I interpreted it. Postcollege, I became a full-time reporter, blogger—and orgasm faker. I had strong feminist political inclinations, but I was also deeply afraid of male rejection; my intellectual ideals clashed with my personal insecurities. What if I didn’t orgasm and was labeled as frigid or repressed? My instruction via Internet porn had taught me that sexy, desirable women orgasm at the drop of a thong, and I wanted to be a temptress—aggressive, insatiable, and uninhibited. Ironically, in attempting to avoid the stereotype of passive female desire, I chose performed enthusiasm over more authentic sexual experience. (Hey, it’s true, even if I do sound like a women’s studies prof.) One time, a twentysomething writer touched me so avidly that it started to hurt. Instead of asking him to be more gentle, I moaned right through it, figuring that simulation was a quicker way to end the pain than asking him to ease up. Later, I noticed flecks of blood on his crisp white sheets—but even this graphic representation of sexual miscommunication failed to convince me that I had to find another way. In fact, in the years that followed, I moved on to faking multiple orgasms. Around this time, I wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Casual Sex,” about how hookups had helped me explore my sexuality—and they had. But it was exploration through the eyes of men: I was focused on how my partners saw me. I didn’t mention that I’d faked it during nearly all of my dalliances. It seemed embarrassing to admit, and personally inconsequential. I just figured that I was one of those women for whom orgasms are extremely difficult, but even without them sex was a physical rush. Which is not to mention what a blast it was to date or become otherwise involved with a rainbow array of men—from a Muay Thai kickboxer to a big-deal lawyer. y