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When I look back at pictures of myself in my early 20s,hsu, pi-ching. beyond eroticism: a historian's reading of humor in feng menglong's child's folly. I see a confident young woman who was willing to talk about anything with anyone. But behind closed doors, I was hiding a secret shame that totally contradicted my public brand. I couldn't orgasm— not with a partner, not on my own.

There had been fleeting attempts over the years to get the ol' engine rolling. I thought I could reason my way to climax: the internet, with its endless resources in the form of Reddit threads, message boards, and YouTube videos, seemed like the place to go. I turned online for information, emotional (first-person narratives from others who struggled) and practical (sex toys and tutorials). Nothing helped. In fact, all the accumulating knowledge only served to make me feel worse. For it to finally happen, at the age of 25, I had to strip everything back and take my sex drive fully offline for the first time.

Failing to climax

There's a scene in Eve Ensler's legendary play The Vagina Monologueswhen the audience hears from a woman who didn't have an orgasm until she was 72. "When she finally found her clitoris, she said she cried," the introduction goes. I remember hearing those words at the age of 18 and feeling a fluttering sense of recognition. Then came the chaser: dear god, please let me have one before I'm a septuagenarian.

At that age, the inability to orgasm wasn't something that surprised me all that much. I'd read enough teen magazines, seen enough Sex and the City,to know all about the orgasm gap, and that 61 percent of men orgasm every time they have sex compared to 30 percent of women.Multiple studieshave found that women are more likely to orgasm during masturbation than intercourse; a similarly consistent finding is that 10 percent of women never orgasm, no matter the circumstances.

Yet as I moved through my twenties and failed to rectify the problem, I realised the friends I'd once bonded over this experience with weren't struggling anymore. I felt likean anomaly.

But as a forthright young feminist on the cusp between the Gen Z and millennial generations, I was also unofficially educated under the tutelage of sex education YouTubers like Shan Boodram, Laci Green, and Hannah Witton. They taught me about the importance of people with vulvas knowing their bodies and having the confidence to tell sexual partners if they weren't getting them off. I spread their message far and wide. Female pleasure was so my brand that a close male friend once gave me a T-shirt with the words "The Future is Female (Ejaculation)" as a Secret Santa gift. I laughed, then went to the bathroom and cried, so deeply full of shame at the disconnect between my public confidence and inward inadequacy.

Theoretically speaking, I knew just about everything there was to know about the orgasm…apart from how to have one myself. Very few people, beyond a handful of friends and former partners, knew about my struggle with anorgasmia (where people struggle to climax even with the application of sexual stimulation). I was scared of speaking the words "I can't come" into reality, or of feeling like even more of a failure if they checked in on my progress in the future and I had to tell them that no, I still couldn't. 

As Emily Nagoski writes in her bestselling book Come As You Are, so much of the female orgasm is in the mind. Nagoski theorises that female sexual pleasure has dual controls — an accelerator to turn you on and a brake to turn you off — and that balance is needed to achieve orgasm. But my brake was hyper-sensitive thanks toall that fear and panic and shame, making it near impossible for me to actually have one. (Of course, that's an easy observation to make three years on the other side.)

Sex toys felt like a good starting point (god forbid I actually touch myself!), and my limited student budget meant I wanted a vibrator that gave a good bang for my buck, so to speak. I'd spend hours trawling through positive customer reviews for phrases like "can't come" or "never usually orgasm," hoping the same would happen for me if I purchased a clitoral stimulator or CBD lube. When it didn't, I felt more frustrated than ever.

What I was searching for was a sense of recognition — an "oh, I'm not alone in this" feeling that my friends, while empathetic, understandably couldn't provide. (Yet whenever I now mention to friends that I didn't have an orgasm until I was 25, similar stories are divulged.) So I looked further afield, scouring message board threads and online articles for narratives from people who'd not been able to come either. The snatched moments of understanding made me feel less alone, albeit not necessarily always better.

The next approach was more unconventional. Two friends bought me a subscription to OMGYes, the adult sex education website dedicated to facilitating female pleasure. Initially, I was embarrassed that it had come to this, but I gave it a go. A membership provided access to a library of practical (and extremely NSFW) tutorials on different masturbation techniques. I tried to follow along, but lacked perseverance and was quick to abandon the mission when things didn't happen immediately.

At every stage, my attempts to orgasm were hindered by these deeply rooted feelings of shame and inadequacy, and a fear of feeling like even more of a failure should I try and not succeed. I knew I was missing out on an integral part of the human experience, but once the terrifying words "you're going to be on your deathbed never having had an orgasm" enter the mind, they're hard to shake. 

In order to halt this nihilistic spiral, I stopped trying altogether. It wasn't all bad. The sex, with both long-term and casual partners,was often even pleasurable. Sometimes I faked orgasms, sometimes I didn't bother — the former usually when I didn't want to explain myself and give them an excuse not to try.

So the problem bubbled away beneath the surface, rectifying it as simply not a priority. As with much of life, the arrival of COVID-19 changed things. I remember turning 25 and looking down the barrel of a new year and a third lockdown in the UK. I'm officially in my mid-twenties, I thought. If not now, when? Those interconnected feelings of embarrassment and failure were clearly holding me back.

If I was going to figure out how to orgasm, that would only be achieved by removing expectation; expectation that, I realised, was coming directly from the internet aids I'd sought out for help. I needed to strip away the technological trappings and do the one very simple thing I'd been so scared to do: touch myself, and do it consistently.

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What finally helped me orgasm

I set myself a challenge. Every day, I would put my phone on the other side of the room and masturbate without sex toys.The experience felt utterly alien at first;at some point, it crossed my mind that sexual partners had touched my genitals far more than I ever had. Once I acclimatised to the sensation of taking my time and not trying to speed up the process with a buzzing pink lump of plastic, it felt good. Things started happening, although not the earth-shattering fireworks that society had led me to expect. I didn't thinkthese faint flutters were orgasms, and briefly returned to the message boards to see if others had experienced anything similar. Nobody described my exact feelings, but I kept at it.

It was a conversation with a close friend, a doctor, that made the most marked difference. I told her about my current state, where I wasn't sure whether I was experiencing an orgasm or not. "You know if you want that to count, it counts," she told me. For the first time, someone was saying that I was on the right path, and not crashing into a wall. 

Without being dramatic (although said friend still laughs about how I credit her with my first orgasm), those words triggered a switch in my brain. As soon as I stopped feeling like I was foolish for even attempting to fight what I'd always perceived to be a losing battle, orgasms — proper ones, I was sure — came. I didn't cry or rush to text the friends greatly invested in my journey. Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled, but it felt like a wholly personal achievement, and one I wanted to sit in for a while.

Mostly, the feeling was one of relief, the lifting of a huge weight from my chest and the dissipation of so much secret shame. I remember thinking that if I never had an orgasm again, I would be happy. Given how easy I was now finding it once that bridge was crossed, though, I was pretty sure that wasn't going to be the case.It would be a while until I was able to orgasm with other people, but even before I did, my partnered sex life improved dramatically. I didn't feel like I was lacking anymore.

If there's one thing I now know, it's that you can't intellectualise, let alone buy, an orgasm. Sure, products and internet resources may help, and in those most isolating moments, it was undoubtedly useful to see my experience reflected back in others. But over time, I found the accumulation of all this knowledge only added to my feelings of failure. I had to remove it all from my mind and do the thing I was most scared to — confront my own body — to make it happen. 

Given all that, I'm aware of the irony of writing my own "how I finally had an orgasm" narrative. But I know a story like mine, as long as it wasn't dwelled on too long or used as a point of comparison, would have helped my younger self. It's why I keep far less personal aspects of my life out of my work, yet have always known I wanted to write about this experience someday. There are so few narratives about a total inability to orgasm out there. If you're reading this now and see something of yourself in my story, I hope it can provide some. It can happen for you — I truly believe that — whether you're 25 or 72. You'll get there.