In these times in which we aspire to take extreme measures to protect women from sexual violence, we cannot give arguments to those who position themselves against it . Or at least, we must aspire for their arguments to be solid, convincing, to get us out of the error (if we are).
Therefore, it is important to affirm that involuntary orgasms, during a violation, can occur , and that this does not mean at all that the woman is feeling pleasure, or that she has not resisted enough, or that some kind of fantasy is being fulfilled. consisting of transgressing some taboo.
Forced stimulation
To study the extent to which involuntary orgasms during rape were prevalent, one of the UK’s leading experts on the physiology of sexuality, Roy Levin , published in 2004 the largest review of the scientific literature on sexual arousal and orgasms in cases of stimulation. forced or non-consensual.
This is how he explains some of the conclusions of the Pere Estupinyà review in his book S = EX2 :
After a review of medical examinations of sexually assaulted women, they found that many actually lubricate, increase blood flow in the genitals, acknowledge having experienced physical pleasure against their will, moan with pleasure, and between 4-5 percent of cases reach have an orgasm.
The existence of orgasms during forced sex of a woman or a girl are a reality. As also the erection and orgasm in men or boys who are raped .
But these automatisms should not make victims feel guilty or regretful. We are talking about involuntary reactions of the body. This occurs because sexual stimulation can also occur through a simple physical process:
This first spontaneous excitation responds to an autonomous mechanism at the subcortical level, which our sophisticated cerebral cortex can then decide to inhibit or enhance. However, there are situations in which the inhibition system can be completely blocked, such as during alcohol intoxication, drug use or states of deep shock such as that produced by rape.
An orgasm, then, does not mean anything. It can be something like a yawn. For this reason, spontaneous orgasms can occur during sleep, or while we practice certain physical exercises .
Something similar also happens with lubrication, since the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) has an important role in it:
Laboratory studies have shown that stress, fear, pain or repulsion tend to decrease sexual response, but that they rarely interfere with the SNS and have the opposite effect: they increase blood flow to the genitals and, therefore, lubrication. In these cases, the stress of the rape would not only not be an impediment for the genitals to react, but could even be an aid triggered by a totally involuntary automatic reaction.