Who’s better in the bedroom?

ARE you really a sex god, or could your partner be stretching the truth?

Now you can find out for sure, thanks to researchers at the Southern Cross University who are creating a new measure of satisfaction, ultimately to help bedrooms across the Gold Coast.

Southern Cross University researcher Dr Desirée Kozlowski and honours student Doug Williams have developed a world-first method that could soon replace old ways of measuring your horizontal tango skills.

Previously pleasure was calculated through things like the total number of orgasms, or frequency but Dr Kozlowski said that can be misleading – and could lead to skewed conclusions.

“If you can’t gauge sexual satisfaction accurately it makes it almost impossible to understand the science behind it,” Dr Kozlowski said.

“Normally in questionnaires on the subject, male rates of orgasm are so high when compared to female they cease to be a measure of satisfaction.”

Dr Kozlowski said determining an accurate measure of pleasure was important.

“Sexual health and sexual pleasure are fundamental aspects of our quality of life and are associated with a range of positive health, psychological, and social benefits.”

To develop a new model researchers asked over 1000 people to anonymously complete the Sexual Satisfaction Survey (SexSS) questionnaire.

It included questions on people’s lived sexual experience, their expectations, and the importance they place on each aspect of sexuality.

It has so far revealed men had higher expectations around orgasms, but there was no sex difference in overall satisfaction with orgasm.

Men also had higher expectations that they would please their partners, but women reported higher experience of pleasing their partner.

“When it came to women there was a higher importance on sexual health, power sharing during sex, and avoiding fears,” Dr Kozlowski said.

“Men placed higher importance on feeling they had performed well.”

The researchers also found evidence of the “orgasm gap”.

The orgasm gap refers to research showing men experience orgasm from heterosexual sex more often than women.

The gap disappears for women in same-sex encounters or when women masturbate, in both instances women also achieve the same rate of orgasm as men – and take about the same time to get there.

“Some have tried to explain this away with ideas that women are somehow incapable of orgasm to the same extent as men, or are just not interested, but those arguments don’t hold up,” says Dr Kozlowski.

The research also found more than 20 per cent of the sample experienced some degree of sexual dysfunction.

SEXUAL HEALTH AND SEXUAL PLEASURE ARE FUNDAMENTAL ASPECTS OF OUR QUALITY OF LIFE

DR DESIRÉE KOZLOWSKI