And a surprising number of American’s avoid one basic sex act.
We’re not ones to toot our own horn, but a new study indicates gay people are better at achieving orgasms than our heterosexual counterparts.
It’s long been known there’s an “orgasm gap” between men and women, but a report published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour broke down the findings by sexual orientation, as well as gender. (Trans, gender-nonconforming, and people who identified as other than straight, bi or gay were not included in the study.)
“We have a very large sample of gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women who were recruited in the same way as the heterosexual participants. This is very rare,” lead researcher David Frederick, a professor in Health Psychology at Chapman University, told CBS News. “This allowed us to look at whether there are multiple orgasm gaps—the gap between men and heterosexual women, but also lesbian women being less likely to orgasm than men but more likely to orgasm than heterosexual women.”
Researchers asked more than 52,000 people if they usually or always experienced orgasm during sexual intimacy: Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of straight men reported climaxing most of the time. Gay men were a close second, at 89%, followed by bi guys at 88%.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, only 65% of straight women said they orgasmed during sex. That’s a big difference compared to lesbians (86%), though pretty close to bi women (66%). Overall, gay men and women hit the target more frequently than their straight and bi counterparts.
Among the study’s other findings: Heterosexual women, lesbians, bisexual women and gay/bi men were all more likely to orgasm if they received oral sex. For straight men, there no link detected between oral sex and frequency of orgasm.
Tragically, oral sex is not on the menu for most: “Fewer than half of people usually-to-always incorporate oral sex into their sex lives,” says Frederick.
