Dear Esther,

Over the years I have seen it asserted in a number of places such as Playboy and Maxim magazines and more recently in a YouTube video put out by a self-styled sex coach, Caitlin V that women need about twenty minutes of sexual stimulation in order to build to orgasm. The final straw for me in this debate came when one of my girlfriends asserted that women were more complex than men when it comes to sex. This is rubbish! And I decided to prove it.

I conducted my own private survey to ascertain what is realistic in terms of women’s sexual response. Over the last several years I have been able to time, using a stopwatch, twenty women ranging in age from 23 to 63. Three in their 20’s, Seven in their 30’s, Four in their 40’s, Three in their 50’s and Three in their 60’s. These were all either friends of mine or friends of friends that agreed to participate in the study. The way that it worked was to perform oral without any foreplay to start with. This was key to the exercise, no foreplay. Oral was followed by intercourse and that was followed by a pocket rocket.

Here are my results: The average time for the women involved to come was 2:35 minutes from oral, 1:47 from intercourse and 1:24 from a pocket rocket. So nowhere near 20–30 minutes. The longest that it took for any woman in my survey to come was 5:48 from oral and the shortest was 0:07. As I said, that is from initial contact to orgasm without foreplay of any kind (other than of course mental preparation which is the best foreplay). You can see my whole article on this elsewhere on Medium.

I agree with your analysis that all orgasms experienced by women are clitoral. I'm pretty sure that the so-called g spot on the anterior wall of the vagina stimulates that part of the clitoris where it forks, so also a clitoral orgasm. I did have one girlfriend that could only come from penetration and could not climax from direct stimulus of the glans of the clitoris. That was certainly unusual, but she would climax within about 45 seconds from the insertion of either a finger or a penis and then continue to have one orgasm after another until she passed out from the pleasure, or I couldn't continue any longer.

I would also have to agree with you that the couple of times that a woman I was with didn't climax was when I didn't do it properly or hadn't spent the time to adjust to her response patterns. So, the male's fault. If 35% of women have trouble orgasming with a partner it'll be because both of them don't really know what they're doing and not a function of some physiological problem on the woman's part.

Here's what it says about anorgasmia on Wikipedia for what it's worth.

Anorgasmia is a type of sexual dysfunction in which a person cannot achieve orgasm despite adequate stimulation. Anorgasmia is far more common in females (4.6 percent) than in males and is especially rare in younger men. The problem is greater in women who are post-menopause. In males, it is most closely associated with delayed ejaculation. Anorgasmia can often cause sexual frustration.

I have no idea if this information is accurate or not. But among the women that participated in my study it was the post-menopausal women in their 50s and 60s who were the quickest to climax and the 20 somethings who took the longest