Ask most people what drives their health and you get things like weight, blood pressure, food, movement. Nobody says sex. Or more specifically – sexual pleasure.

And yes, there is a difference.

Orgasms are good for your health.

Three studies covering 30,645 people found that wellbeing climbs with sexual frequency up to about once a week, then stops. Past weekly, more sex predicted no additional happiness at all. The effect showed up only for people in relationships, and it ran through relationship satisfaction rather than around it.

The second used NHANES data on 17,243 American adults and followed them for a median of nearly nine years, counting deaths instead of survey answers.

Cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality both traced a U. Highest risk sat with people having sex fewer than twelve times a year. Risk fell as frequency rose, bottomed out somewhere between once and twice a week, and then began climbing again.

I’d be curious how much the reverse effect was playing into this data – the impacts of loneliness.

This matters because nearly two out of three American adults call themselves Christian. You don’t have to be Christian to appreciate the following data – it impacts folks with no religion too – keep reading.

I realize not all identify as evangelical but here’s some fascinating data:

95% of evangelical husbands reach orgasm all or almost all of the time.

48% percent of their wives do.

12% of those wives answered almost never or never.

Among the husbands, that number was two-tenths of one percent.

That is a 47-point gap, and it comes from a survey of 20,000 married evangelical women, followed later by 3,000 evangelical men.

Just under 33% of the women reported sexual pain at some point in their marriage. For 7 percent, penetration was impossible. Christian women report vaginismus at roughly twice the rate of the general population, and about one in five reported a condition that made penetration painful.

These are not the outliers in the sample.

As someone who experienced a dogmatic religious phase of my life, it pains me to think of the wake of devastation in marriages of friends that many ended in my opinion because of dogmatic controlling men and if I’m a betting man a lack of joyful pleasure in the bedroom by their wives.

I had my own season where I thought it was my job to tell my wife how to dress and that my pleasure was more important than hers. It’s only a testament to how amazing she is that she stuck around.

The group posting those numbers I shared above often espouse how much they love the Bible but ignore a section of it which is an entire book of erotic poetry. In that book there is a command of sexual obligation that runs in both directions, and a law that Judaism has read for two thousand years as setting a wife free if her husband neglects her in bed.

In other words, the source material is not the problem here.

It’s not just a Christian issue.

Data out of mostly non-religious Finland - one of the most gender-equal countries on earth, in a random sample of the population showed the same.

Women rated their partner's orgasm as more important than their own.

Women placing their own pleasure second is not something the church invented.

What the church did was give the pattern a theological justification. I think that is worse because then some women think God is not in favor of their own pleasure. Think about that. Many of these same women believe God designed the only organ – the clitoris - made for pleasure – and that in reality, He does not want a woman to derive pleasure from it. That is confusing at best and cruel at its worst.

And to anyone who wants to argue that the most common explanation for the orgasm gap is that women are simply built to have a harder time. The data and physiology kills that theory.

Finland has been asking its citizens about their sex lives since 1971, in five national surveys drawn at random from the population register. Random sampling, four decades, thousands of women each wave. It is the cleanest data anyone has on this.

The factors that predicted whether a woman reached orgasm were not physical. In order of strength:

All four held at high statistical confidence.

The single strongest predictor of whether a woman orgasms is whether she believes her orgasm matters.

The relationship numbers in that same study make the point from the other side. Women who were very happy in their relationship and considered sex important to that happiness reached orgasm 76 percent of the time at their most recent sexual experience. Among women in unhappy relationships who did not rate sex as important, the figure was 29 percent.

Researchers surveyed 483 women in New Zealand about orgasm and relationship satisfaction. Orgasm consistency was the strongest predictor in the study. Women who reported frequent orgasms were roughly twelve times (1200%) more likely to be satisfied with their sexual relationship than women who rarely had them.

Paul writes to a church in a bustling metropolis the following:

"The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.”(1 Corinthians 7:3-4) - NLT

Please read all the above again.

Many have ignorantly read the above with some assumption that women don’t crave sexual pleasure – that men want sex and women don’t.

Most of us were handed the first part and told the second was a bonus clause. In the Greek it is the same construction twice, aimed in opposite directions. The King James renders the duty as "due benevolence," which is a lovely phrase we managed to turn into some debt women owe men in marriage.

The Hebrew Scriptures built the case long before Paul.

Exodus 21:10 lists three things a husband owes a wife: food, clothing, and onah. Withhold any of the three and the next verse says she goes free.

Scholars still argue about that third word. Some read it as lodging, some as oil. The rabbis read it as conjugal frequency and built centuries of law on top of that reading. The Mishnah works out a schedule by a man's occupation, and the schools of Hillel and Shammai disagree over whether he may go one week or two. They are arguing about how long a man may leave his wife unsatisfied before she has a legal claim against him.

How backwards is modern thinking on this concept?!

Then there is the Song of Solomon, eight chapters of love and erotic poetry that never once names children as the point of any of it. The woman does most of the talking. One Old Testament scholar, Richard Hess, put it this way: the female voice dominates the Song more than in any comparable text in the Bible. She opens the book and she closes it. She describes his body. She initiates.

Proverbs, giving a father's advice to a son, does not say be grateful or be patient. It says let her satisfy you always, and be ravished with her love.

And in Genesis 4:1, Adam knew his wife. The Hebrew is yada. It is the ordinary verb for knowing, and it is the same word David reaches for when he asks God to search him and know his heart. Whoever chose that word for sex was not being coy. He was describing what the act is supposed to accomplish – an intimate knowledge of each other.

Because other centered love includes the bedroom. In most of religion today - true love – the self-sacrificing kind - has been replaced with something else.

Sheila Wray Gregoire's team did something most marriage books never bother with. They measured what a specific teaching does to the people who believe it.

The teaching: that a wife is obligated to give her husband sex whenever he wants it.

Women who carried that belief into marriage were 37 percent more likely to have primary sexual pain and 29 percent more likely not to reliably orgasm. Gregoire reports that the belief's effect on sexual pain came out statistically close to the effect of prior sexual abuse.

A message delivered from a pulpit, tracking alongside real trauma!

Husbands who believed the obligation message were 115 percent more likely not to make their wife's pleasure a priority, and 31% more likely to report that their wife does not reliably orgasm.

Nobody wins under that teaching.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual’s medical condition.

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