The Origins of Orgasmic Moaning

On average, women are louder than men during sex. And it’s not because they’re getting more pleasure.

By Tess Barker

Before I saw sex, and certainly before I had it, I heard it. In friends’ basements late at night we would turn on the TV and flip to the higher-numbered channels — the ones that were blurry probably because we weren’t supposed to be watching them. Although we could see only distorted purple splotches on the screen, we could clearly hear the melodic and taboo sounds of what I then described as a woman “humping.”

“Yes! Yes! Oh! Oh!”

Throughout my adult life, I would hear that breath-filled aria countless times. A neighbor in my college apartment building once wailed so urgently that the first time I heard her I called the cops. A woman at a Las Vegas hotel taught me that a) the cheaper the rate, the thinner the walls; and b) it’s good to have at least some alcohol in your system before you try to fall asleep on The Strip. But for the most part I heard it from myself.

I like being loud during sex. Or, I like sex, which makes me loud. In either case, I’ve always considered my humping noises — what scientists call female copulatory vocalizations, or FCVs — to be fairly involuntary.

McComb and Semple found that male Barbary macaques respond stronger to female sex noises made closer to ovulation/ Courtesy of Zil via Wikimedia Commons

Some studies suggest there is an evolutionary basis for FCVs. In examining communities of primates, psychologists Karen McComb and Stuart Semple found that female mating calls varied according to things like proximity to ovulation and the status of their partner. These calls attracted male primates to sexually receptive females and created “sperm competition.”

Does this mean, then, that the moans often associated with human female orgasm are in fact innate, a primal tool for successfully mating? Was Meg Ryan wrong when she claimed that “all women fake it?”

Not so fast.

“Human behavior is so much wider and more elastic [than that of nonhuman animals],” cautions psychotherapist and sexuality counselor Ian Kerner. “In general, I don’t look at studies with animals as a great way to study human sexuality.” In Kerner’s view, a particular study of human females, published in 2010, more accurately shows the correlation between vocalization and achieving orgasm, or the lack thereof. In the study, researchers found that women were most likely to orgasm during foreplay. Yet, their most prominent moans did not correlate with that moment of bliss. They generally became loudest during their male partner’s climax.

“If a woman feels compelled to moan in order to indicate to her partner that she’s enjoying sex, the very act of moaning might take her out of that ability to get into that trancelike state and actually have an orgasm” – Ian Kerner

“I’ve encountered scores of women who moan as part of faking an orgasm,” said Kerner, who also suggested that FCVs around a man’s climax may be a means of boosting a partner’s ego or avoiding discussion about one’s own lack of an orgasm. This focus on appearing aroused creates a roadblock to many women’s own enjoyment, Kerner said. “During sex, as women get closer to orgasm, parts of the brain that are associated with stress and activity and high emotion actually start to deactivate, and women often go into kind of a trancelike state…If a woman feels compelled to moan in order to indicate to her partner that she’s enjoying sex, the very act of moaning might take her out of that ability to get into that trancelike state and actually have an orgasm.”

Still, the notion that women feign pleasure because they are actually dissatisfied, has always, well, rubbed me the wrong way. Here, couched in what appears to be a plea to appeal to a woman’s actual desires is, yet again, the subtle accusation that women are not to be trusted. It also doesn’t explain the many instances in which my girlfriends have bragged about receiving complaints from neighbors, landlords, and college-dorm R.A.’s over their O noises. Or the fact that my transgender friend told me she’d noticed a difference in the sounds she made during sex since beginning hormone therapy. Or the noises my lesbian friends report making with each other when there is no man present whose orgasm must be hastened. Still, for all the reflexive moaning that I, too, have engaged in, one fact is undeniable: When I’m dancing with myself, it’s a much quieter party. None of my showerheads or vibrators — which have all given me better orgasms than any good bartender with a bad tattoo — have ever been sung the same praises.

Adult performer and director Jessica Drake told me that before she made a career out of having orgasms on camera, pleasure was a muted affair for her. “In the beginning of having adult relationships, masturbation was always something I hid from my partner,” she said. “So it was a very quiet thing for me.”

Jessica Drake in the pornographic movie Starmaker/ Courtesy of Jessica Drake’s Instagram

Drake explained that porn — which, according to Kerner, is a major influence on the unrealistic sexual expectations placed on women — was, at its onset, “strictly done for male enjoyment.” She believes that prototypical mainstream porn, which harks back to the early 70s, features nonrepresentative behavior such as “to-the-rafters” moaning and “women squirting like geysers and having really easy sex” because these theatrical markers incite confidence and pleasure in straight men.

Writers John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, in their essay “Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound,” theorize that the representation of female orgasm in modern pornographic films and videos was created to address the problem of women not naturally producing a visual “money shot,” rather than an attempt to capture sounds that men would be turned on by.

“Sound becomes proof of female pleasure in the absence of its clear visual demonstration,” Corbett and Kapsalis wrote. “‘Pay off,’ measured in amount of ejaculate, force, distance, and stream, may, for female sexual pleasure, be represented in the quality and volume of the female vocalizations.”

Deep Throat is a landmark film about a woman who can’t orgasm until she discovers her clitoris is in her throat/ Public Domain via Wiki Commons.

During the 1970s, a period in which sexuality shifted to the forefront of popular culture, audio shorthand for female orgasm permeated mainstream porn films like Deep Throat, which would, at the time, have been a socially acceptable date-night movie. Corbett and Kapsalis argue that such audio references also became an integral part of popular music. In diametric opposition to visual porn, music is much better suited to represent the female orgasm than the man’s (which, while audible, is hardly the kind of thing I’d want to run to on the treadmill). In popular music, this codified version of female orgasm grew to represent not only a woman in ecstasy, but the concept of sex in general.

Once embedded into popular music, female orgasm, as constructed for the male gaze, became not something sought after exclusively by men for literal sexual stimulation, but the background in clothing stores, night clubs, and taxi cabs — an explicit suggestion so omnipresent that perhaps it made its way into our collective subconscious.

As an example, Corbett and Kapsalis cite Donna Summers’ 1975 hit, “Love To Love You Baby,” in which the singer spends the bulk of the song moaning, “Ahaaw,” a sound that she implies is brought on by sexual intercourse when she sings the lyrics “When you’re laying so close to me” and “Do it to me again and again.” Over subsequent decades, female orgasm became a pervasive element in pop music, from Mariah Carey’s many escalating soprano slides in her 90s hits, to Christina Aguilera’s 1999 single, “Genie in a Bottle.” Aguilera’s track begins with her moaning “Oh yeah,” and it then urges the listener to incite those sounds in her, not through intercourse, but by “Rubbing (her) the right way.”

By 2013, nearly 40 years after “Love to Love You Baby,” Beyoncé, in her single “Blow,” would use the word that traditionally described performing oral sex on a man to explain exactly how to “Get [her] humming/Keep [her] moaning,” by “Eat[ing] [her] Skittles/Pink that’s the flavor/Solve the riddle.” In “Blow,” Beyoncé is not fawning over how much she loves to love anyone. Speaking to “All the grown women out there,” she reclaims genuine female pleasure for herself first and foremost.

I sometimes refer to myself as a Bey-Sexual, meaning that I’m such a typical straight woman I would absolutely sleep with Beyoncé. She’s an iconically sensual performer with a hypnotic figure that’s matched only by her confidence. When I watch her expertly and confidently gyrate her leotard-clad rear as her perpetually fan-blown hair waves, I am really fantasizing less about having sex with Beyoncé, and more about having sex as her. What she represents is the ultimate combination of autonomy and desirability, which is so appealing to me that it’s barely distinguishable from literal attraction.

In many ways, vocalization during sex represents something closer to this fantasy for me: simultaneous control and desirability. As was suggested by the previously mentioned studies, making involuntary noise during sexual activity is extremely commonplace. What has been altered slightly by popular media is exactly how those sounds manifest. Perhaps after decades of understanding these sounds in terms of our own experiences, women have found truth in what was once an artifice. By offering the vocal sounds their partners expect only when they are actually experiencing pleasure, women become the driving agents in a heterosexual encounter, creating a positive communication feedback loop in which their partner is more satisfied — and thus, so are they, and so on.

“They say if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.” — Jessica Drake/ Courtesy of Jessica Drake’s Instagram

Jessica Drake notes that in the last five years there has been a marked increase in the amount of pornography intended for women. She attributes this to a few things, including the growth of internet porn and the increased number of female porn directors, which have allowed female consumers access to explicit materials that would otherwise have been housed in adult stores with “sticky floors and adult booths.”

Drake says that in her direction of scenes she intentionally avoids performances that feel too operatic. “I prefer people that come across a bit less polished and professional,” she said of her casting process. “I think the more progressive porn becomes, the more based it is on women’s pleasure. That definitely contributes to the shift in different vocalization.”

Perhaps with the recognition of what women actually want, the communication loop between media producers and consumers — like that between two lovers — has slowly begun to effect positive change.

It feels good to say yes — and better to mean it.

Tess Barker is a writer, comedian, and co-host of the Lady to Lady podcast. Her work has also appeared in Vice, Curbed LA, Jezebel, and MTV News.

Daniel Marin Medina is a Colombian-born, Bronx-based illustrator. He uses queer theory as inspiration for drawing bodies and portraits. Follow him on Instagram.