The bigger you are, the harder you fall, and the bigger you cum, the harder she cums, too. That’s according to a new study that has found the answer to a shockingly never-before-asked question: How important is male ejaculation, in volume and intensity, to female sexual pleasure? The answer: a lot, apparently!
Turns out, women have very specific preferences about your jizz, and they aren’t all related to the taste and texture. Researcher Andrea Burri of the European Institute for Sexual Health realized women have a lot of opinions about semen in her clinical work and decided to investigate some of them. (The study was recently published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.)
“I am not speaking about the clinical criteria that most research usually focuses on, such as intravaginal ejaculation latency time or how long the man can control or prolong his ejaculation,” Burri tells PsyPost. “Here, we are talking about other ‘non-clinically relevant’ aspects, such as how much ejaculate he expels or how loudly he moans, etc. I noticed that many women find it very distressing when their male partner suffers from delayed ejaculation or the inability to ejaculate — mostly because it gives them the feeling of not being desired or attractive.”
In other words, science already knows that premature ejaculation (or sex that lasts under a minute) dampens the sexual experience for women and can injure their ego (it’s obviously not so great for men, either). What wasn’t known — because, again, no one thought to ask before — is how women feel about the moment of launch itself, and how it affects their own sexual experience.
While orgasm opinions are obviously subjective and individual, many women do use some basic, universal metrics to assess how good any sexual interaction was, and how you cum and how much you cum make the list.
We’ve gone over this before, at least in terms of how men should correctly receive a blowjob. If a woman is going to the trouble of doing any sex-related thing to you, we definitely want to know that it feels good, and we measure this feedback by two criteria: whether you make pleasurable sounds that show you are liking it, and of course, whether you cum. (Also helpful: letting us know verbally that you are, in fact, gonna get there.)
Look, we know these things happen. Our bodies sometimes act weird and do uncontrollable things. If you didn’t cum, or if you did cum and we couldn’t tell, or if you did cum and we could tell but there wasn’t very much in the barrel, we know not to take it personally — but we might wonder if we were all that good, or if your supposed orgasm really happened at all. And on the flip side, if you seem like you’re having the ride of your life, we’re gonna feel damn proud.
So Burri put this idea to the test. She recruited 245 heterosexual women between the ages of 20 and 75 who had been sexually active and didn’t have any sort of sex-related pain disorder (women who experience painful contractions during sex, or vaginismus, are more likely to also be disgusted by semen). They asked them a few dozen questions about their ejaculation-related preferences, and the results were noteworthy.
The higher a woman’s orgasmic ability, the more she valued a man ejaculating during a sexual experience. If a woman was less likely to get off easily, she didn’t rank her male partner’s orgasm as highly, either. The higher-orgasmic-ability women — the easy cummers — were happier with their sex lives if they were fucking men who had fewer problems getting off. A full 56.6 percent of the women reported more intense orgasms when their male partner came.
Some 60 percent of women also said the intensity of their own orgasm was directly related to how intense his orgasm was, both in terms of “strong thrusting” and “loud moaning.” That was regardless of whether the sex act was intercourse or something else. (This is just as applicable to blowjobs, as we argued before.)
While roughly 30 percent of the women said they never focused on semen volume, and 65 percent said volume did not affect their own orgasm intensity, the remaining 35 percent did cum better and harder when there was more semen on the table (or the ass, or the ceiling, as the case may be).
Of course, there are some caveats. What is “a lot” of cum to these women? The researchers make clear they’re relying entirely on the women’s self-reported evaluations of what felt like a massive load, without any estimations or measurement of its exact amount. They did not step in and collect semen samples to try to ascertain how big a load we’re talking about. Perception became fact here: If it felt like a Big One, she liked it.
We also know the average volume of a single ejaculation is about a teaspoon. And anecdotally at least, we also know that women describe getting cummed in as pleasurable, too — like liquid sunshine, kryptonite, geysers, a super-soaker and the satisfaction of a job well done. And that’s what the research found, too. “Quite a lot of women indicated that they themselves experienced more intense orgasms when their partner ejaculated, or when they had the feeling that the partner’s ejaculation was more intense, and/or when he expelled a greater ejaculate quantity (subjectively felt),” Burri said.
Other interesting findings from the study? How important this all was to the woman also depended on how important sex was to her, and how important her getting off was, too. Burri notes that not all women indicated that orgasms were their reason for getting it on in the first place. Obviously, women more interested in the intimacy aspect weren’t as concerned with who came, when, or how. Another fun fact: Just over 53 percent of the women had no preference about whether they came first or last, but beyond those women, a larger percent (30 percent) did want to get off first.
So what is to be done? Must men now live under the tyrannical knowledge that their cum volume (or their ability to reach orgasm in the first place — not easy for everyone!) is yet another data point up for scrutiny?
Not necessarily. If I have one bit of sex advice, it’s this: Make sure she gets off, and do so first. Then, off the confidence and pleasure of having pleased her, keep up the momentum by finishing big yourself.
And that doesn’t have to mean taking supplements in order to cum like a Brazzers firehose. Just make it feel big for her. Even if you can’t produce the sort of volume that shoots all over the place, you can still look alive. Or, for your partner’s sake, fake a great one, even if it feels only pretty good.
Listen, this all should not really be cause for alarm. In fact, the news here is ultimately reassuring: Women do want to please you, and pleasing you increases their pleasure. So cum like you mean it. Enthusiasm goes an incredibly long way, even when your ejaculate doesn’t.
Your Hardest Questions About Dicks, Answered
- What is an average flaccid penis? Here’s the truth about “grower vs. shower.”
- How do you wear a cock ring?
- A historical look at Milton Berle’s supposedly giant penis.
- Is “summer penis” real?
- Read our guide to more intense orgasms for people with penises.
- Men fear saggy balls. But can they be prevented?
- Do you get your penis size from your mom or your dad?
- Can’t urinate? Here’s how to make yourself pee if you have a shy bladder.
- Inside Jackinworld, the internet’s first masturbation forum.
- Kegel influencers on Reddit won’t rest until you kegel-exercise your way to better sex.
- Yes, some guys still don’t wash their hands after they pee.
- To many people, penis girth matters more than penis size.
- What’s in delay spray for premature ejaculation?
- What does a Penuma implant look like? Penis surgery, explained.
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
