Climaxing doesn’t mean one has enjoyed sex
There is such a thing as a bad orgasm and an unwanted climax can make people feel guilty or ashamed, according to scientists.
A study questioning more than 700 sexually active people found a surprisingly wide variety of reasons people hadn't enjoyed orgasms.
Scientists said their research flies in the face of the common idea that sex which involves “the big O” is automatically good.
The feeling is a physical reaction, they explained, and does not always reflect someone's mental state or level of enjoyment.
Partners who are coerced into sex, have consensual but unwanted relations, or felt pressured to orgasm may not enjoy it all, they found.
“There seems to be a widespread assumption that orgasms during consensual sex are always positive,” University of Michigan psychologist Sara Chadwick told Psypost.
“But research had never explored the possibility that they might be negative or non-positive under some circumstances. We got interested in exploring whether ‘bad’ orgasms could exist, since we've found in other research that orgasm can be a lot more complex than people tend to think.”
Along with professor Sari van Anders, from Queen's University in
Canada, Ms Chadwick surveyed a total of 726 people about their sex lives.
A further 289 of those who said they'd had negative orgasms were quizzed in more depth about what made them bad.
Some said they had felt pressured to climax, which had taken the fun out of it, while others said it made them feel detached from their real feelings about a sexual experience.
People uncomfortable with, or acting against, their sexual orientation or gender identity, may have found sex unpleasant.
Religious people suggested they felt betrayed by their body or ashamed after it had happened.
And one bisexual man said he had a non-pleasurable orgasm after pressure was put on him socially by a woman.
He said: “I wasn't really attracted to her, but I was in a dry spell and she came onto me. She made me feel pressured because she eventually started crying.”