Would you fake an orgasm to please your partner?

In their co-written blog for The New York Times, one of their most recent entries raises the question, "Who's more likely to fake it in the bedroom?"

While Meg Ryan's character in the infamous film When Harry Met Sally says that "most women at one time or another have faked it", (yet funnily enough most men I ask claim a woman has never faked it with them), the authors cite a survey which claims that faking it might not be relegated to just the female domain. (And incase you're wondering, men do indeed fake it from time to time. Condoms can easily hide their orgasm truth while excuses range from being on anti-depressents to "it was a small one".)

According to the survey's creator, orgasm guru Hugo M. Mialon, (he did a dissertation paper on the topic called "The Economics of Faking Ecstasy"), the more "in love" a couple is, the more chance either of them will be faking it at one time or another.

Mialon writes:

"To the extent that the sender and receiver care for each other, the receiver does not like it when the sender has to incur a cost of faking, and the sender likes it when the receiver enjoys the sender's moaning. Moreover, to the extent that the sender and receiver have a demand for togetherness, the sender does not mind as much if the receiver is mistakenly confident (feeling worthy), and the receiver does not mind as much if he or she is mistakenly confident (not recoiling)."


In other words, the more a couple care about each other's feelings, the more likely they are to tell a little white lie in order to give their partner's ego a boost. And it's the women (no surprise here) who are doing most of the faking with about 72 per cent of them admitting they've recently faked it in their current or most recent relationship.

Yet all this faking might not actually be the woman's fault either. Rather, it might be her age that is to blame. Mialon says that considering women peak sexually at 30, at any other age women are more likely to need to fake it since they're not that sexually awakened. (Sorry, gents, but there goes the theory that younger girls or cougars are better in the sack!)

In order to gain a little more perspective on the subject, I decided to take an unofficial poll on the matter of the Big O.

Lucy claimed that there's no way a woman should fake it "because if your man doesn't know what he's doing, why congratulate him? What for? Better only to react with sincerity so he knows what buttons to push next time."

David says the words "fake" and "love" should never be used in the same sentence and says he knows examples of both sexes faking it "and the relationship is hollow or over".

And Brooke disses the age theory, saying that the older one gets, the less likely she is to lie about such things.

"It's better to tell a man that it doesn't happen every time but it's the act, not the end that counts." All this left me wondering: if women are faking it to make men happy, would men rather them tell the truth? And could men really handle the truth if women did?