So, Bill Hader fucks. We should have guessed that by his general vibe, but now we have official confirmation from his ex-girlfriend, Rachel Bilson. Yesterday on her podcast, Bilson shared with guest Whitney Cummings and listeners that she did not achieve orgasm from penetration during intercourse alone until she was 38. With some basic math, sleuths estimated this was right around the time she was seeing Hader. Now, it rocks that Bilson is having orgasms during sex, and it rocks that Hader may have helped deliver them. Maybe all of her prior partners were just bad in bed! But this story is missing something crucial about women, sex, and orgasms: that, unfortunately, the majority of women aren’t orgasming during sex at all, regardless of how cool and hot and Bill Hader-y their partner is. On the pod, called Broad Ideas, Bilson and Cummings each discussed being able to achieve vaginal orgasm only recently. Cummings initiated the conversation by saying it happened to her at 41 after getting off hormonal birth control. “I could do it with my hands whenever,” said Cummings, to which Bilson replied, “Of course, yeah. But not from, like, dick inside.” “Isn’t that crazy?” Bilson added. No, Rachel. It is not crazy! It is tragically normal and not a failure of any party involved. According to a 2017 study of 1,055 women aged 18 to 94 across the United States, only 18.4 percent of women could reach orgasm through intercourse alone. If we include women who reach orgasm during intercourse with clitoral stimulation involved, that figure jumps to 37 percent. Other research suggests that between 50 to 60 percent of women will never have an orgasm during intercourse. Fewer women will cum during penis-in-vagina sex in their lifetime than those who won’t, making Rachel among the luckier minority. The reasons for this can have nothing to do with the “quality” of the sex or the specific partner. Bilson has stated publicly before that Hader has a big dick. Good for him. But the reality is that the size of a guy’s dick and how exactly he uses it can have little impact on whether a woman reaches orgasm. There is some thinking that it’s more likely to occur when the right penis shape meets the right vaginal canal—as Cummings mentioned, her first vaginal orgasm happened when a straight penis met her “tilted” uterus. Cummings also speculated on the pod that women are more likely to orgasm after sex if they’ve given birth, as Bilson has. Moreover, Alfred Kinsey was among the first to speculate that women begin to orgasm more frequently in their 30s, a theory that has since been supported by data today. Maybe Bilson had indeed gone most of her adult life having truly unpleasurable sex with partners who didn’t know how to satisfy her, maybe her body changed with time, maybe it took practice, maybe it’s all a mystery. Doctors don’t even know why some women orgasm from penetration and others don’t. One of the more plausible theories is that some people have different genitals than others and that women with a shorter distance between their clitoris and vaginal opening might have an easier go at it due simply to friction—but even so, one might still classify orgasms of that variety differently from those that Bilson seems to be describing.It would be great if everyone could have all sorts of orgasms. Still, the reality is that some people will never achieve a vaginal orgasm through penetration alone, regardless of where orgasms come from or how skilled a partner is. And that can still be a-okay because, as it turns out… sex isn’t just about penetration! Great sex often doesn’t even involve penetration; penetration can still be great without resulting in an orgasm. A vaginal orgasm might sound more exciting in its elusiveness, but let’s not forget that there are a number of tried and true techniques for something just as fun: good ole clitoral stimulation.
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