Why Are Women Still Faking Orgasms? Part 1

I was recently killing time on Youtube, cycling through the algorithm’s suggestions from some of my favorite drag queens, when I came across an episode of Vice’s “Trixie & Katya” (with Bob the Drag Queen filling in for Katya) about lying. Toward the end of the episode, some of Drag Race’s other contestants take part in a (wo)man-on-the-street style interview segment, in which their first question to the women they stopped was whether or not they had ever faked an orgasm. The first woman answered “all the time”, and the second responded with an emphatic “1000% yes”. The third was a little more measured in her response: “Yeah, I have. It was just quite boring, and what can you do?” She followed up with an admission, to the interviewing drag queen’s horror, that she had stayed with the culprit for six months.

I grew up, as many ’90s children did, with the women-faking-orgasms comedy trope front and center in pop culture. Probably the most famous example of this, at least when I was young, was from the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally, when Sally, played by Meg Ryan, fakes an orgasm in a diner to prove to Harry (Billy Crystal) that he had no way of knowing whether or not he had really satisfied all of the women he’s been with, pointing out, of course, that most women have faked it at least once, “so you do the math.”