Vagina by Naomi Wolf Page B

percent of men—reported experiencing low sexual desire. An extraordinary 15 to 28 percent of women—from one woman in six to one woman in three—reports that she suffers from “orgasmic disorders.” This percentage has risen in the four decades since the height of the sexual revolution—1976—when about 25 percent of women complained of problems with desire. 5
    A 2009 study, the National Health and Social Life Survey, based at the University of Chicago under the direction of Edward O. Laumann, reported that 43 percent of women—as opposed to 31 percent of men—suffered from what was identified as a “sexual dysfunction.” 6
    J. J. Warnock, in “Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: Epidemiology, Diagnosis and Treatment,” writes that “Female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) may occur in up to one-third of adult women in the US. The essential feature of female HSDD is a deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity that causes marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.” 7
    An even newer report, released by Indiana University in 2010, reveals that only 64 percent of women participants reported reaching orgasm the last time they had had sex (which means that 36 percent, almost four in ten, didn’t), but that 85 percent of the male participants in the same study told researchers that their most recent female sex partner had reached orgasm: the data were adjusted for men having sex with men—and the adjustment did not account for the gap between the number of women whom the men thought were climaxing during sex with them, and the much smaller number of women who were actually doing so. 8
    Whether so many women having such disappointing sexual experiences is leading to many couples having very little sexual intimacy, or whether so little sexual intimacy leads to so many women reporting their low libido, sexual sadness, and frustration, the data show that one heterosexual couple in five is scarcely making love at all.
    We have to conclude from this and other studies with similar numbers that the Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
    In this liberated, postsexual revolution, postfeminist era, when women can do “whatever” they wish sexually and be “bad girls” with little stigma—when any fantasy is available at the touch of a remote control and any sex appliance available rush delivery at the click of a mouse—an astonishingly high percentage of ordinary women, from one in five to one in three, still report feeling little desire, or have trouble regularly reaching orgasm, or report being angry about something involving sexual intimacy. Now that I know more completely how connected the vagina is to female mood and consciousness, I will coin a phrase and say that between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression.
    Oddly enough, our ostensibly pro-sex culture seems very comfortable with this incredibly high rate of female sexual unhappiness. There are no campaigns calling urgent attention to this epidemic of female sexual absence and sorrow. Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt’s book The Sex Diaries (2009) sold widely in part because it addresses directly many women’s startlingly low levels of desire. Arndt reported that it is quite common, in her clinical experience, for women to want sex less often than their husbands do, and that this is the unacknowledged secret behind many divorces, and even behind many male infidelities.
    We will see that new studies show that when circumstances are supportive, virtually every woman can reach orgasm. What if so many women are suffering from low levels of desire, from frustration, and from sexual withdrawal, because—there is no way to say this but honestly— many men are taught about women in such a way that they don’t really know what they are doing ? These numbers must mean, too, that even in