No, women don’t masturbate after sex because they’re just ‘so aroused’ by men

Come on.

If you haven't been on Twitter over the past day or so, let us fill you in. The Guardian recently shared a relationship column featuring a question from a reader who asked: "My girlfriend masturbates after we have sex. Why?" The man said that after sex, his girlfriend often asks him to shower first so she can masturbate without him. He worried that she was 'insatiable" and asked what he should do. Understandably, a lot of people on Twitter had a fair idea as to why this woman was deciding to masturbate after sex and they had an even better idea as to what exactly this guy should do. However, psychotherapist Pamela Stephenson Connolly, who responded to the reader's query, had a different answer: she told him to do nothing. She argued that this man should simply leave his girlfriend to her own devices after sex because although she may achieve orgasm during sex with him, "she just happens to want that extra one." Stephenson Connolly also added that this man's girlfriend was "lucky" to be "so aroused by you" and that the reader might "consider the possibility that she is truly multi-orgasmic." Right. Now, we're not going to go ahead and presume that all women who masturbate after sex do so because they have had unfulfiling sex. After all, we don't speak for all women and there may very well be people out there who orgasm before, during, and after sex, just because they want to and fair play to them, the more orgasms the better, etc. However, the problem here is that, in general, straight women are not experiencing as many orgasms as straight men, and for some strange reason, a lot of straight men are unaware of this fact. The orgasm gap exists and it is, unfortunately, widening every day. A study conducted by the Kinsey Institute showed that while straight and gay men orgasm about 85 percent of the time during sex, women who have sex with men only come 63 percent of the time. Compare this to the amount women who have sex with women orgasm (75 percent) and the disparity here becomes fairly clear - women are coming less often, but more specifically so when they're going to bed with partners who are men. There are a lot of reasons as to why this happening (can you point to the exact location of the clitoris on a diagram?), but one of the main offenders seems to be that men think they're pleasuring women to the point of orgasm... but a lot of the time they're not. There's a few things we can do to combat this problem - stop faking orgasms is one of them - but another is just a bit of simple education. It's one thing to never teach a man where the clitoris is, but it's a whole other kettle of fish to pretend that they're giving you the sexual experience of your life if they're, basically, just not. Everybody ripped the piss out of the Guardian piece on Twitter, and rightly so, but the advice issued beneath it was just as damning than the question itself, if not more so. A saving grace existed in the final paragraph of the piece, where Stephenson Connolly said that the guy needed to ask his girlfriend what she wanted him to do for her after he climaxed. Admittedly, this came after she told him that it was totally normal for her to masturbate alone after he had come, but at least the sentiment was there, we suppose. And at the end of the day, every sexual relationship is different. We can't know exactly what goes on behind closed doors, what people are into, and whether or not their partners are proficient enough in bed to make them come. But one thing is for certain - if a lad asks for advice on how to pleasure his girlfriend, don't fill his head with fantasies about him being so much of a ride that women can hardly bear to look at him without needing to knock another one out. Just tell him the truth, he'll thank you for it later.