Katharine Smyth is 39 years old and has never, to her knowledge, had an orgasm. This fact didn’t worry her very much until her 30s, when a divorce and a series of dates with frustrated men made her think she might never find love again. So she embarked on a quest—diving deep into an industry designed to solve her problem, searching for a feeling that’s been a fixation of science, pseudoscience, politics, and philosophy for centuries.
“The metaphor that came to me is that it’s kind of like a Rorschach test, where it’s this abstraction that all of these doctors and scientists are projecting their own worldview upon. And it’s almost always to the benefit of men.”
This week on The Experiment: A personal quest for sexual fulfillment reveals centuries of mythmaking about female pleasure.
Further reading: The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex
Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at theexperiment@theatlantic.com.
This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Gabrielle Berbey, with editing by Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Stef Hayes. Sound design by David Herman.
Music by infinite bisous (“Lost in Translation /2,” “Why Should I?”), r mccarthy (“Fine,” “Jyoti,” “She's a Gift Giver, She's a Giver of Gifts”), Parish Council (“Same Cake”), Safa Park (“Loose Yams”), Laundry (“Lawn Feeling”), Keyboard (“Staying In”), water feature (“a paradise”), and Nelson Bandela (“No Dummms 6860,” “Hoop Dreams”), provided by Tasty Morsels and Nelson Nance. Additional music by Brian C. Chapman (“Casual Sex”) and Claude Debussy (“Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune”). Additional audio from MGM Studios, Sweet Alice, Film&Clips, Fox News, Miramax, and VCX Classics.
The Experiment Introduces More Perfect
The End of This Experiment
The Experiment Introduces: How To Start Over With Olga Khazan
The 50-Square-Mile Zone Where the Constitution Doesn't Apply
Fighting to Remember Mississippi Burning
Teenage Life After Genocide
Judge Judy’s Law
The Experiment introduces Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery
The Resurgence of the Abortion Underground
Should We Return National Parks to Native Americans?
Who Belongs in the Cherokee Nation?
The Helen Keller Exorcism
An Engineer Tries to Build His Way Out of Tragedy
One American Family’s Debt to Ukraine
Just Put Some Vicks on It
El Sueño de SPAM
Cram Your SPAM
Uncle SPAM
SPAM on the Range
In Between Pro-life and Pro-choice
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Radiolab
More Perfect
Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked
Death, Sex & Money
The New Yorker Radio Hour