For Allure, by Hayley MacMillen.
Whether or not you’ve achieved multiple orgasms in a single sex session (alone or partnered), you’re probably aware that some women have them. While male-bodied people generally require a “refractory period” to recover from climax before they can come again, female-bodied people don’t, even though prior research suggests only around 15 percent of women have actually achieved multiple orgasms. Enter a new yardstick against which to measure your sexual abilities: the so-called “super orgasm,” a term for up to 100 orgasms in a single sex session that a new documentary is trying to make happen.
As Self reports, a film from the U.K.’s Channel 4 titled The Super Orgasm charts the sex lives of five women who report experiencing these orgasms-on-steroids. An engineering student named Nathalie, for example, says she’s had more than 60 orgasms in one encounter. In the documentary, the women undergo “experiments” that show they are easily aroused, and that electrical activity and blood flow in their brains appear to be higher than in the brains of women who don’t orgasm multiple times per session.
All of this is well and good, except for the fact that these tests are less than scientific — only five women and no control groups do not rigorous research make. What’s more, it’s unclear what differentiates these women’s experiences from regular old multiple orgasms. “The main thing that is important to get across is that this isn’t scientific research,” University of Southampton sexual and reproductive health professor Cynthia Graham, PhD told Self. “While watching [the documentary], I started wondering what’s the difference between super orgasms and multiple orgasms, and the answer I got was ‘not very much.’”
If you are among the select group of women who can have an eye-popping number of orgasms in one encounter and you’d like to call this a “super orgasm,” then super. If not, then don’t feel this is something you should aspire to, or that women who can climax up to 100 times a session are your sexual superiors. Orgasms are great and multiple orgasms are great. So is one orgasm. And so is satisfying sex that doesn’t involve orgasm: Not everyone is capable of having one in the first place, which doesn’t mean they’re incapable of fulfilling sex lives. While the “super orgasm” may be a compelling title for a documentary, it seems it’s a far less convincing term for a real-life sexual experience, much less a realistic goal for your sex life.
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