Given my own experience, I wasn’t surprised to learn that a common reason women cite for faking orgasms is to provide an excuse to get out.

One study even found that women were faking orgasms to speed up sex that wasn’t consensual.

Nobody wants to have to fake an orgasm in this situation. But the decision is understandable: Given that these women’s partners didn’t care if they consented in the first place, why would they care if they wanted to stop?

Any means justify getting out of a sexual assault, so how can we judge this one?

Whether or not someone views a negative sexual experience as an assault, the desire to get out of plain old bad sex is also understandable.

We don’t live in a culture where everyone will accept “I’m not into it anymore” – or where that’s easy to say.

We’re not taught to communicate during sex, and we’re sometimes even taught it’s undesirable to speak up. When women sense that saying something isn’t an option, they use the options available to them to end the sex.

And if faking an orgasm is the only feasible choice left on the table, we can’t fault women for that. We need to fault those who taught them there was no other escape route.

Women get taught from a young age that their pleasure is for other people. In this regard, we learn our orgasms serve a dual function: as a turn-on and an ego-booster.

While women who sleep with all a/genders will feel this, it’s particularly present for women who sleep with men, since it’s so tied up with their sense of masculinity and with the male gaze.

A recent study found that when men were asked to imagine a sexual encounter, they felt more masculine and had higher self-esteem if the woman in it orgasmed.

That’s a lot to put on women who sleep with men. It means we enter the bedroom knowing that if we don’t orgasm, our partners may have a diminished sense of self-worth and masculinity.

When we’re sleeping with men like this, faking an orgasm can be an act of mercy. And it’s yet another way women are expected to perform emotional labor for men’s sake.

Then there’s the idea that watching, hearing, or feeling a woman orgasm is the ultimate source of pleasure."