Relationships | Sexuality
Faking It Till You Make It: Truth, Lies, and Learning to Love the Big O
Between Sunday School and Sex Clubs…
Last month — almost a month ago, to be precise — May More 💜 Tales wrote about her complicated relationship with orgasms, and the perennial question of whether or not to fake it. I believe the topic first came up with Posy Churchgate - Writes & Edits Fiction and her candid ‘faking it’ article all the way back in 2020. The week before last, Evie Dawn wrote another wonderful response article about this question, and tagged me for a response too. I promised to write one, and so here we are.
And so here we are…
Okay, so first, in the same spirit of immediate candor as Evie, I’ll say no, I’ve never faked an orgasm. The reason for that is a bit complicated, though, and it isn’t some high-minded “honesty is always the best policy” outlook that I’ve held to through thick and thin (these idioms are not supposed to be sex puns, I swear!). That’s the approach I have now, but it’s a bit like the Aesop about the fox without a tail: I can talk all day about the advantages of not having one, but it didn’t start off as a choice.
The Lowest of the Low
A core tenet of my religious upbringing was that sex is bad. Sex was some vague transgression that men and women gave into (the prospect of any non-heterosexual pairing wasn’t even considered), the road to perdition, and, for girls in particular, a mortal sin that renders us unfit for Heaven. Yes, that’s all horrible, and no, I don’t believe that one bit these days. But I believed it at the time. To even consider the act in detail was to have sinned already because, as the Bible says (and the pastor so readily reminded us), “anyone who stares at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” There was no escaping the taint of original sin and lust within ourselves, but if we closed our eyes, covered our ears, and hummed our hymns loudly enough, then perhaps we could place ourselves beyond the reach of more substantial depravities.
That was never a sustainable position, not with puberty and high school looming on the horizon. And once the sexual abuse began, it became a moot point. I was beyond salvation now; I was ruined.
In that context, an orgasm — insofar as I understood it — was the lowest depth of the infernal pit, the Cocytus of my sexual underworld. To be damned was one thing, but to actually delight in that fallen state was something far worse. To have an orgasm was a spiritual degradation beyond description, the Devil’s ultimate victory over goodness.
Fake it? I might as well have faked a murder confession!
That situation came and went, and healthier relationships took its place. But sex remained adversarial for me, if only metaphorically, and an orgasm still meant defeat. Perhaps there could be a willing surrender, my erotic imagination conceded, but a fake surrender still made no sense. And so, from that highly dysfunctional vantage point, I began to puzzle over the phenomenon of fake orgasms among my friends, and that infamous scene from When Harry Met Sally, and all the questions surrounding it.
For one thing, did people really scream during orgasms? I’d hardly ever made a sound at all, because I was too busy, well, having one to do much of anything else. And I’d caught up with enough sex education now to realize that an orgasm is, in many ways, a brief epileptic seizure, a blissful frenzy that lights up the brain’s neurons like a Christmas tree until there’s no room left in it for coherent thought. Which is wonderful and all, but not very conducive to groaning, shrieking, and banging fists on tables.
Still, I’d been teaching myself to hide them from the start. Surely that made my experience the outlier, not Meg Ryan’s diner scene. Except that scene wasn’t about having an orgasm, it was about faking an orgasm. So we’re in agreement that climaxing isn’t quite like that? Do men understand that too? Surely their orgasms feel much the same as ours. And if theirs don’t involve wailing like angry banshees, shouldn’t they realize ours don’t either?
That was an early clue that men — or, at least, too many men — don’t really understand how women work, and will completely overlook the simple answer that we’re human too in favor of willful ignorance. And that there are a lot of voices out there on every level, from impatient lovers to porn movie directors, who are quite happy to play to that ignorance.
So at this point, I could start sounding like that tailless fox from the fable who boasted about all the advantages of not having a tail. Not faking orgasms means more honest communication in the bedroom and not reinforcing our lovers’ bad habits. It means owning our desires and being willing to advocate for them. It means respecting each other as equals in sex rather than obstacles to overcome, and so on. But, like the fox, I didn’t arrive at that perspective by choice. It just happened to evolve that way. I do believe open communication with our partners is for the best, but it isn’t like I’m making a concerted effort to uphold that principle.
After all, there’s one sexual lie I’ve been more than willing to tell…
I Didn’t Want an Orgasm Anyway
Last year’s introduction to the story “Behind the Blindfold” shared a few of my adventures in a sex club, and it mentioned offhand that my college sex life had been a string of unsatisfying hookups. That’s true, but there are some standout memories here and there. One of them has to be counted among the most intensely erotic experiences in my whole life.
It was a hookup, but this guy was no frat boy. It was an evening of golden chandeliers and sequin dresses, of champagne glasses and lavish suites. And then a kiss, and the back of my dress unzipped, and then…
We had sex almost the whole night, until very close to dawn, and he was one of the most attentive, sensual lovers I’ve ever had. He was fascinated with my body. He explored me with soft kisses and strokes of his fingers, and then the deeper workings of his lips and tongue. My toes curled and I tangled my fingers through his hair, pulling him so close that I must have practically smothered him. He came into me, and I covered his face with kisses, and we talked about our lives for a while. And he began to kiss my body again, and I whispered his name, tears in my eyes, and…
And I never came once that night.
That doesn’t mean how I felt or what we shared wasn’t real. I was taking an antidepressant that made it difficult to climax, and, as wonderful a lover as he was, I was still very nervous about spending a night alone and naked with this more-or-less stranger, and, apart from all that, I still had a very screwed-up view of orgasms. Deep down, they were something to be taken from me, something that the remnants of my religious upbringing refused to give up without a fight. But none of that was his fault.
Coasting on a sexual plateau for hours on end, lost in a hazy warmth of boundless pleasure as he came again and again, and finally letting the sun rise while I drifted back to earth in his arms was amazing. There was no sense of release, no fireworks explosion, but the ebb and flow of ecstasy was still there, so slow that I hardly noticed it. The world sank away into a lusty euphoria that faded away with the morning mist. I have no regrets at all about what happened — except that, despite all my assurances, he felt like he’d left me unsatisfied. We never slept together again. And that’s when I realized why faking it might not be a bad idea sometimes.
That was the first time I told someone I didn’t mind not having an orgasm, the first of many times. It was also the only time I really meant it.
In most cases, that well-practiced line came along as an excuse to put a quick end to things, a way of writing off the performance of a guy who hadn’t put in much effort for my sake but, for some reason, still wanted a passing grade from me. It became the half-hearted closing line to the worst night of sex in my life. But there were other times when the problem really was me and not them. Orgasms still meant a moral defeat to me. They were something that I could only give up after a desperate struggle. I’d started therapy by this point — it’s no exaggeration to say it saved my life — but this particular angle was a little personal even for those sessions.
That’s where the sex club and BDSM came into the picture, not for the whips or straps in themselves so much as a chance to try and recreate that struggle and adrenaline tension in a healthier, consensual way.
When that first article recounted my meeting with “Adam,” I kept things vague for the sake of the prose: it said we talked in soft whispers beneath the music, but didn’t reveal much about the conversation. Much of it involved reassuring each other that our fantasies weren’t crazy, and some of it was an almost innocent, school-playground sort of flirtation, but there was also a lot of embarrassingly frank talk about safewords and hard limits. Slaps are okay but punches are out. Incidental scratching is fine but not deliberate ones like a cat swipe. The b-word’s allowed but not the c-word, and bruises have to be confined to places where I can hide them.
“You have to hold my wrists down,” I whispered to him. “That’s important. And don’t stop if I start crying. That means you’re doing it right…”
Okay, so typing it out here, that sounds really fucked up.
But it worked. That first session was rough, bruising, and so brutal that some random person wandering into the room would’ve surely gotten the wrong idea. There was certainly nothing to lie about: I came several times, more than I think he realized. And once it was over, I could do something that would’ve been impossible with those early, awful experiences: I could smile and cup his face with my hands, tell him that was incredible, and curl up beside him with a perfect sense of safety and intimate trust.
And that’s the story of why I’ve never faked an orgasm.
Thank you so much for reading this article, and I’d love to hear your thoughts! Be sure to follow if you’d like to keep up with the weekly erotica stories, and you can find links to all my Medium stories in this handy compendium…
And now there’s a Dreadful Desires novel! The five-part supernatural romance The Fallen Sky is available in an omnibus edition that contains the complete erotic fantasy adventure. You can find it on Kindle and Smashwords!
