Highlights From The 2026 SPSP Sexuality Pre-Conference

Last month, we gathered in Chicago for the thirteenth annual SPSP Sexuality Pre-Conference. This year’s theme, The State of Sex, asked presenters to consider how rapidly changing cultural, technological, and geopolitical factors all affect how we experience sex, intimacy, love, and relationships today. 

We had a jam-packed session featuring nearly forty presentations! One of the topics we learned a lot about was how people experience orgasm during partnered sex. In this blog, we’re highlighting presentations on the topic from Joel Anderson, Carly Wolfer, and Grace Wetzel.  

Why do people fake orgasms? 

We know from prior research that a hefty percentage of women fake orgasms during partnered sex. So why is that? Utilizing a sample of 137 adult women in Australia, Joel Anderson told us about five common motivations for faking orgasms. 

One reason women fake orgasms is to preserve their relationship or manage their person’s emotions. This may be especially true for women who are trying to avoid conflict. Although some women expressed the sentiment of “I’m happy if they’re happy,” deprioritizing one’s own pleasure in the interest of conflict avoidance or for the sake of a partner’s ego may have negative consequences on sexual satisfaction long-term. 

In early-stage relationships, women reported faking orgasm in order to impress their partners and to feel desirable. By engaging in “performative sexuality”—playing into stereotypes about women’s sexuality and pleasure—they could also give their partner’s ego a boost, especially on a special occasion like a birthday or anniversary. 

Another reason women reported faking orgasm was to “get it over with,” which may be due to time constraints or wanting to terminate sexual activity because they were bored or no longer interested. Here, faking orgasm can serve as a way for women to stop having sex when they realize an actual orgasm isn’t possible or the sex isn’t meeting their needs. 

Anderson emphasized that some women reported refusing to fake orgasms during partnered sex. Refusing to fake orgasm serves as a resistance mechanism to societal pressures about performing sexuality and putting one’s own pleasure on the back-burner for the sake of someone else. Women who described faking orgasms reflected on the importance of open, honest, communication in their relationships, which faking orgasms did not necessarily align with.  

Are people always concerned about their partner’s orgasm? 

When we think about orgasm faking, a question arises as to whether it’s necessary to fake an orgasm if your partner is as committed to your orgasm as they are to their own. Carly Wolfer presented some data that speaks to this question, asking whether relationship commitment influences the extent to which people are invested in their sexual partner reaching orgasm.   

As it turns out, the orgasm gap is more severe for people engaging in casual sex than for people who are in relationships. That is, the disparity between men’s and women’s orgasm rates is much wider for non-committed sexual partners. 

Through a sample of 111 sexually-active undergraduate students, Wolfer assessed the difference between individuals’ ideal sexual experiences and their actual sexual experiences in terms of whether a partner helps them achieve orgasm. For those in a relationship, the difference between ideal and actual sexual experiences seemed to be virtually nonexistent. For singles, however, the gap was much wider. Although singles would ideally like their partner to help them pursue orgasm, it happened much less than they would like. 

What this means is it’s important for people to be mutually invested in one another’s sexual pleasure, especially when it comes to people who are having sex for the first time. Prioritizing your partner’s orgasm might even be an effective strategy for experiencing greater sexual pleasure yourself, too. 

How can people better help their partner to experience orgasm? 

As we just discussed, it’s important for partners to be engaged in one another’s orgasm experience, but how does that actually happen? Grace Wetzel gave a presentation about how adapting couples’ sexual scripts might be a way for women to orgasm more reliably during partnered sex. 

Heterosexual men’s most reliable path to orgasm is usually through penetrative intercourse. For women, though, the most reliable routes to orgasm include clitoral stimulation alone or alongside penetrative intercourse, oral sex, and the use of a sex toy to enhance pleasure. Wetzel points out that the ways women reach orgasm during partnered sex tend to be more varied than they are for men. However, it’s important to highlight that the top four ways all include some kind of clitoral stimulation. 

What Wetzel found was that couples who had more accurate knowledge about their own and their partner’s most reliable pathways to orgasm implemented those specific acts during sexual frequency more often. Doing so increased the extent to which women experienced orgasm, helping to lessen the orgasm gap. 

Join us next year!

We had a lot of fabulous presentations at this year’s SPSP Sexuality Pre-Conference, and the research highlighted in this blog is just a small snapshot of what some people are working on. If you’re interested in joining us next year in Philadelphia, stay tuned for the call for abstracts in September. Submissions are usually due in late October, but all information will be announced here and will be on the SPSP website.

Lastly, thank you to our sponsors for the 2026 event. Thanks to them, all of our attendees were able to take home some product samples and enter into a raffle to win some fun prizes. Special shoutout to Lovehoney, LUWI Lube, and plusOne for their support!

If you have a sex question of your own, record a voicemail at speakpipe.com/sexandpsychology to have it answered on the blog or the podcast. 

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