Many social constructionists of sexuality have convincingly argued that women’s sexuality does not exist in a vacuum; the notion of “my sexuality” is impossible on an individual level unless we account for the social processes that make sexuality (Plante, 2014; Tiefer, 2004). Women’s sexualities are made and remade through a process of disavowal (“you must like what I like”), colonization (“my reality is superior”) and mirroring (“show/tell me what I want to hear”) and enter a matrix where patriarchy, misogyny, and racism construct “good,” “moral,” and “healthy” sexualities. Sexual scripting theory, developed by Gagnon and Simon (1973), posited that people construct sexual selves through intrapsychic scripting that draws on fantasies, memories, feelings of arousal, and ideas about desirable and undesirable sex. Later, Rebecca Plante (2007) argued that sexual scripts also extend widely into the realm of the social:
“The Story” is the narrative of the many. It is the way in which Western citizens make sense of the need to make sense, to develop and sustain a continuous self. There are rape stories, gay and lesbian “coming out” stories, and recovery/self help stories.
(p. 33)
Sexual scripts and sexual subjectivities come alive most poignantly in the context of women’s sexual satisfaction, a seemingly innocuous term upon which an enormous number of assumptions are built about sexuality. What is a satisfied woman? What makes a sexual encounter satisfying? Many sex researchers have assumed that sexual satisfaction for women can be measured using single-item questions that make generalizations about how satisfied women are (Barrientos & Páez, 2006; Meston & Trapnell, 2005; Sprecher, 2002), often ignoring the complexity and possible contradictions of physical and emotional satisfaction, as well as the complex ways that women gauge their satisfaction in relation to their partners. Notably, women described sexual satisfaction most often in relation to pleasing their partners and cared more about whether they have satisfied another person than whether they have themselves felt physically satisfied (McClelland, 2010, 2014), while men described sexual satisfaction as “getting off” (Bancroft, Loftus, & Long, 2003; Nicolson & Burr, 2003). Similarly, in a small study of English women, Nicolson and Burr (2003) found that partner satisfaction mattered more than personal satisfaction when women defined their sexual satisfaction. This distinction has supreme importance for understanding women’s sexual lives, as women consistently construct their notions of satisfaction around the other, caring less about their own feelings and more about the satisfaction of their partners.
This attention to emotional and physical caretaking—and the prioritization of a partner over themselves—has deep roots in traditional gender roles and socialization processes that teach women to value men’s needs over their own (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2007; Katz & Tirone, 2009). That said, sexual satisfaction is also connected to who expects to feel satisfied and who feels entitled to pleasure, as those who felt more entitled to satisfaction and pleasure reported more sexual satisfaction (Braun, Gavey, & McPhillips, 2003). Not surprisingly, sexual minority youth and all women reported lower rates of sexual satisfaction than did heterosexual youth and men in general (Diamond & Lucas, 2004; Sanchez, Kiefer, & Ybarra, 2006). Recent research has framed sexual satisfaction instead as a combination of frequency of orgasm, emotional satisfaction, emotions about sex, and physical satisfaction (Fahs & Swank, 2011) in an attempt to broaden overly narrow definitions of sexual satisfaction and capture elements of women’s satisfaction beyond partner pleasure. Further, several sexual satisfaction inventories have pushed to broaden how researchers measure sexual satisfaction in order to avoid an overly simplistic single-item assessment of something as complex as sexual satisfaction (Pinney, Gerrard, & Denney, 1987; Štulhofer, Buško, & Brouillard, 2010; Ter Kuile, van Lankwd, Kalkhown, & Egmond, 1999).
In my earlier work on women’s orgasms, I found that women also felt satisfied when their partners felt sexually successful, leading to epidemic rates of women faking orgasm (Fahs, 2011; see also Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010). Women reported that their own physical experiences of sex (e.g., having an orgasm) mattered less than what they reflected back to their partners (e.g., their partners perceiving that women had an orgasm). Certainly, the prevalence of women faking orgasms is startlingly high, with studies consistently showing that over half of women have faked orgasm (Darling & Davidson, 1986; Fahs, 2011, 2014; Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010; Opperman, Braun, Clarke, & Rogers, 2013; Wiederman, 1997), particularly with male partners while engaging in pen...