The importance of owning pleasure
Achieving sexual satisfaction is an ongoing process.
If Daphne Bridgerton can orgasm on command (and on camera), then so can everyone, right?
Last month, in an interview with Glamour magazine, Phoebe Dynevor revealed that, when she performed her solo sex scene in the third episode of the rompy “Bridgerton,” she wasn’t faking. Even before we found out it was real, though, Daphne’s masturbation scene had caught the attention of feminists and pop culture critics, who noted that, thanks to the way it was shot and performed, Daphne owned it.
That’s rare onscreen and, it would seem, in real life, too, given the increasingly well-known “orgasm gap.” Just like with wages, women get fewer rewards during sex, even though they’re doing the same work. Unlike with the wage gap, it’s a little hard to quantify how big it is but, according to one study, the widest gap is between heterosexual men and women, and it’s a whopping 30 per cent.
As such, we are registering no surprise that there are a lot of pricey therapies on the market, many of which are held in low regard among sex researchers and doctors. One that’s getting some attention lately is the “O-Shot,” a procedure that sees platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injected around the clitoris and the vaginal walls to “rejuvenate” lady parts, reduce pain and help women achieve orgasm more easily.
If true, this is huge. Also hugely expensive. One Toronto clinic charges $1,400 for the first shot and $1,200 for followups, should you need them.
Largely used in sports medicine, PRP has been called a promising, but unproven, treatment for a range of problems including tendinitis and certain types of osteoarthritis. It involves drawing blood from a patient, increasing the concentration of platelets by filtering out red blood cells and then injecting it back into the patient. As always, though, the big question is: Does it work?
“It doesn’t totally make sense as to why it would work,” says Dr. Amanda Selk, a Toronto ObGyn. “I don’t think that there’s anything I’ve ever seen supporting that it’s a safe or unsafe procedure. I’ve tried to look for them, but I’ve never seen any studies about it so it doesn’t look like they’ve actually done any big safety data for it, like they would an officially approved, wellknown procedure.”
At this point, there have been no incidents connected with the O-Shot that we’re aware of, but one of the concerns that some in the medical community have is that the doctors who administer the treatment generally aren’t specialists in sexual and reproductive health. The O-Shot is generally offered in “medi-spas” as part of a roster of cosmetic treatments.
“Any time cells are injected from one part of the body into another, you run the risk of infection and trauma,” says Dr. Dustin Costescu, associate professor at McMaster University’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “We’ve seen unexpected tumours form at injection sites from procedures that use a similar treatment. And with areas like the labia and clitoris, which are complex and have thousands of nerve endings, injury could have serious consequences, so it’s important to know what you’re doing. And just because we haven’t seen any safety incidents doesn’t make it safe.”
Neither Selk nor Costescu reported an abundance of patients asking about the procedure. Selk, in fact, said, she got more queries from media than in her practice.
As Costescu points out, though: “We don’t see who we don’t see.”
The fact that multiple spas in Toronto are offering this service (or very similar ones) suggests there’s a market for it, one that may be arising from a number of factors, including wait times and backlogged services, as well as the ageold stigma around women’s sexuality that’s partly responsible for the orgasm gap in the first place.
“The thing about female orgasms is that, in 50 years, we’ve gone from thinking they weren’t important to understanding that they are,” says Costescu.
“Fifty years before that, women’s orgasms were considered pathological. Now it is mandatory for women to be highly orgasmic and anything less is pathological.”
In the space of a century, we’ve also begun to think of women’s orgasms as an important part of our overall wellbeing. Well, some of us have. Given the shame still associated with female sexuality, it would be hard to say that we’ve come a long way (baby) with a totally straight face.
“I think a lot of it is really about women grappling with their sexuality in the midst of some of the negative messages, both explicit and implicit, that they’ve been given their whole life,” says Natalie Rosen, a registered clinical psychologist who provides sex therapy at her practice in Halifax.
“I believe quite firmly that’s a huge factor in why rates of inability to orgasm persist and why women have difficulty communicating their sexual needs or prioritizing their own sexual pleasure. That’s one reason why we still have that orgasm gap.”
What can be done? All three of the people we spoke to strongly recommended seeking out help from a qualified sex therapist and doing independent research (ideally without the help of Google) by reading books such as Dr. Jen Gunter’s “The Vagina Bible” and/or “Come as You Are” by Emily Nagoski. And while we rarely have a lot of great things to say about “Goop Lab,” the orgasm episode, “The Pleasure Is Ours,” featuring Betty Dodson and Carlin Ross, is excellent.
Much of it has to do with letting go of shame about our bodies and owning pleasure, much like Daphne Bridgerton did. She may be fictional, but she was way ahead of her time and, for that matter, ahead of a lot of real-life people walking around today.