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Men need women to orgasm to feel more masculine, suggests a new study that finds female orgasms function as a “masculinity achievement” for men — a finding that could have positive, and not-so-positive repercussions for women.

University of Michigan researchers who randomly assigned 810 men to read a vignette where they imagined that an attractive woman either did or did not orgasm during sex with them found (many would say unsurprisingly) that men felt more masculine, and reported higher sexual esteem when they imagined the woman climaxed.

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That was especially true for men with more fragile masculinity.

None of this is necessarily bad for women. “Certainly, many men who experience women’s orgasms as a masculinity achievement may also be genuinely invested in women’s pleasure” and thus may be motivated to attend to women “with zeal,” the researchers write in The Journal of Sex Research.