What’s drunk as a skunk, dry as the desert and can’t feel a thing? A vag on too much booze—also known as “whiskey clit,” the phenomenon where a woman who has had too much to drink can’t feel anything downstairs, and as a result, can’t get off.
Urban Dictionary calls whiskey clit a “state of clitoral dysfunction…induced by mass consumption of alcohol” and claims the experience has three stages:
- Delayed orgasm with sex or masturbation lasting for hours
- No orgasm
- Stimulation not possible
While that isn’t totally scientific, it’s also 100 percent a thing women say happens to them, and there are a number of other names people kick around for the phenomenon, such as liquored labia, vodka vag, tequila twat, and marriage. There’s not a lot of literature on the phenomenon — in the Girls Ask Guys forum, someone asks what it is, and is told by at least one person it’s not a real thing — but there’s some solid science behind why drinking makes it harder for women to get off.
Ultimately, drinking lowers female sexual response, according to an explainer at Cosmopolitan by Anna Breslaw. Breslaw spoke to a clinical sexologist who told her that alcohol both decreases the swelling of vaginal tissues and dries up lubrication. (Compare this to whiskey dick, which MEL writer C. Brian Smith found out isn’t real, or rather, should really be called “whiskey brain,” because booze fucks with the signal from the brain to the penis, not anything in the penis itself.)
More personal accounts of the whiskey clit experience show up on Reddit in the “crippling alcoholism” subreddit, which for some bizarre reason is written entirely in Comic Sans. There, one woman confesses to the following account, suggesting it’s a regular occurrence for very heavy drinkers:
Ok, so a female ca’er here… idk about you other gals out there, but when I get drunk I can’t come. I guess I have whiskey clit, am I alone in this horrible phenomenon? And I’m not just talking about coming during sex… I mean can’t come at all (and I put the master in masturbate)…. which can be quite disappointing considering I drink every day…. ahh well, fuck that shit, cheers ya fuckers!
One respondent concurs. “Yeah,” she writes. “That happens to me at times when I’m really jackhammered. (I’m a ‘lady’.) I just keep on adding things until I cum. Like a dildo, a butt-plug, maybe some nipple clamps. If that shit doesn’t get me there, I just give up. Maybe get up and drink a little more. Maybe go to sleep and wake up with lots of things in me. Best of luck!”
While it’s worth noting that the rest of the thread is nearly completely hijacked by men crying over their whiskey dicks, there’s this little gem buried deep in the thread: “I’m a lesbian and can’t do anything sexual when I have been drinking, so I coined the term ‘whiskey fingers’ between my friends and I.”
Another woman theorized that she believes whiskey clit is actually her body acting in a defensive measure against dehydration. “I have this problem sometimes when I’m very intoxicated,” she writes. “It’s not like I don’t enjoy what is happening. I just feel that my body lacks hydration so it can’t afford to secrete any unneeded fluids. I figure it’s my body’s way of not killing me. Thanks body!”
It’s hard to say how often this happens to women or exactly how much you need to drink to find yourself numb in Whiskey Clitville, but one commenter said for her, too much booze gave her about a “50/50 chance of drying up like the Sahara.”
But here’s the thing: Whiskey dick doesn’t mean, per se, that the man can’t get hard; it may just mean he can’t get off. So presumably, it doesn’t necessarily impede a woman and man from having intercourse anyway if they’re both rarin’ to go. But it’s hard to know how often whiskey dick and whiskey clit meet cute on the same hookup. One commenter said that he and his lady partner both get whiskey genitals at the same time and their solution is to “just bang till we fall asleep.”
Still, it’s more complicated for women because it’s already hard enough for us to get off as it is. So, for some women, it’s likely that whiskey clit isn’t that different than any other sexual encounter, just less frustrating. Further complicating matters, most people like to drink to pregame getting laid because it loosens everything up and gets the juices flowing. So it’s extra irritating when the social lube becomes anti-lube for your hooch.
As with all drugs, though, at some point there are diminishing returns. When you combine this with the pressure some men place on giving you an orgasm, you also have a perfect storm of needing to fake it to get the whole thing over with.
But hey, maybe that’s easier on a lotta booze.
Either way, what’s a guy to do when he’s with a woman getting a bout of whiskey clit? Part of being a good lover is knowing just as much what to do and when as it is knowing what not to do and when. In the case of whiskey clit, if a woman says she’s got it, believe her. And if she says she wants to have sex anyway but she just won’t be able to come, believe that, too. You don’t have to hook her up to jumper cables and go all night. But maybe, at the very least, have some lube around. Not the booze kind. The real stuff.
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.
