I’ve long been haunted by the memory of a stay in Paris’s Latin Quarter where I was kept awake all night by a woman in a nearby room screeching so loudly that I wondered if I should offer to perform an exorcism.
When I mentioned the ‘miaulement’ (the delectable French word for caterwauling) to the receptionist the next morning, she rolled her eyes and declared the woman an ‘actrice’, or sex worker.
Now, according to this new study from the ever-liberal Swedes, it all makes scientific sense. It confirms what most women know and all men dread – the louder the cry of ecstasy, the greater the chance the orgasm is being faked. In other words, you can’t measure passion in terms of decibels: there’s sex as performance art, and sex as genuine intimacy. And when a woman is genuinely aroused, trusts her partner and is not fearing for a fragile male ego, she’s far more likely to gently sigh and moan than shriek like the rabid super-vixen in my Parisian hotel.
In my days editing The Erotic Review magazine, female contributors regularly confessed to faking orgasms. It was generally on an occasional basis, they’d explain, so they could make their partner feel happy, while conserving their energy for other tasks in hand. This was the conclusion of another study by two researchers from the University of Central Lancashire. They declared that erotic decibels were all about manners and ‘manipulation’, and that women were prone to what they described as ‘copulatory vocalisation’ in order to encourage their partners over the finishing line, so to speak.
A new study confirms the louder the cry of ecstasy, the greater the chance the orgasm is being faked (Stock Image
It was like saying: ‘I’m enjoying this, but can you get a bloomin’ move on.’ Sound familiar, ladies?
The only other reason to screech like a demented hyena is if your sex education comes from porn, where loud always equals better.
As a woman from Sunderland said in 2014 after neighbours complained that her sexual yowling drowned out their TVs: ‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s what you should be doing.’
Well, only if you want to attract a certain kind of attention.
In their book, Sex At Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha concluded the most likely reason women were noisy during sex – based on observation of our nearest primate cousins – was to alert nearby males that they were fertile and keen to copulate.
If you’re a sex worker, I can understand the need to advertise. But if you’re not, then men should take heed: the best sex may just be the quietest.
