Scarleteen

I'm just gonna start from the beginning. I've been masturbating since I was 5/6 years old, always with the same technique. I apply pleasure to my clitoris area THROUGH my underwear and continue doing this until orgasm. Thing is, there are a lot of problems with this.

Firstly, my orgasms are super short. I've read that other people with vulvas orgasm for 30+ seconds. I orgasm for like 5 seconds max, which is really disappointing. Talking to my friend about this, she said she orgasms for around a minute and is left literally breathless everytime. My orgasms feel no where NEAR this good, and it makes me really jealous.

Secondly, unless I'm touching my clitoris through both my underwear and my labia (I don't have a clitoral hood??) it doesn't feel good. Just touching it straight on doesn't hurt or anything, but I get 0 pleasurable sensation from it. This bothers me greatly, because I feel like if I have sex, it's going to be very disappointing for me to have no good sensations from it.

Am I just... doomed to orgasm through my undies forever? Has all of this been caused by some sort of self conditioning, considering I've been masturbating the same was for 11 years? I feel like I'm the only one with a "broken clitoris", and I want to know if anyone else has overcome the same problem.

Hi jerkinaintworkn,

It can definitely feel super-lonely when you're worried you're the only person who's dealing with genitals that don't work the "right" way or are somehow broken. The good news is, you're far from the first person to come to us with this kind of question, and what you're dealing with may be more common than you realize.

Let's start with the orgasm length worries. While some people do experience longer orgasms, on average orgasms only last a few seconds (even if it feels like longer). I wonder if some of the people you've spoken to are counting the build-up right before the orgasm as part of the orgasm itself, hence their reporting it as lasting so long. It may also help to know that the intensity of an orgasm can vary from instance to instance. So one day you can have one that does leave you breathless, and on another you can have one that leaves you going, "huh, that was nice, but I guess that was it."

As far as your worries about only being able to orgasm from a certain mode of stimulating your clit, I doubt your masturbation habits have ruined your ability to orgasm any other way. Masturbation can help us discover what feels good, but it doesn't turn off our ability to find other kinds of sexual stimulation pleasurable. And while some people do like direct stimulation to the clit, others experience what you did; that it doesn't feel as good as rubbing the clit with something between your hand and it. Too, this doesn't mean you won't have any good sensations fro partnered sex. You and your partner could include that kind of clit stimulation during sex, and it's likely that as you and a partner explore you'll find additional ways of creating sexual pleasure. Does that all make sense?