How Faking An Orgasm Could Damage Your Relationship

As the adage goes, honesty is always the best policy. And as it turns out, the theory applies to sexual relationships.

In a HuffPost Live conversation on Thursday, Talia Baurer, a sex columnist for the Wesleyan Argus, discussed how she believes faking an orgasm may actually hurt a relationship, even if there is a well-intentioned reason behind it.

“It is damaging. When you orgasm, when you fake orgasm, you’re communicating very clearly to you partner that what they’re doing is right,” Baurer said. “If it's not working for you and it's not giving you an orgasm and that's what you want, then it’s really not fair.”

While some lie about achieving orgasms to help their partners “feel good about themselves,” Baurer said the time could be better spent in another way.

“If they know they’re not going to have an orgasm right now through this activity, they want to get it over with without saying to their partner, 'You know what? I'm not going to have an orgasm. We can do something else right now,'" she said.

Katherine Marrone, a sex columnist for the Oregon Daily Emerald, agreed that staying honest could help fix the “gender inequity” present in the way that orgasms are distributed between the sexes. According to one study, men are twice as likely as women to orgasm during a hookup.

“It definitely is important for us to look at the reasons why so many fewer women have orgasms than men,” Marrone said. “And I think it's a symptom of sexism in our culture and viewing women’s bodies as objects of desire rather than agents of desire of their own sexuality.”

Watch the full On Campus HuffPost Live conversation about sex and relationships here.

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