I'm a 24-year-old gay woman living in a large midwestern city. My 26-year-old girlfriend and I have been together for a year and a half, and we just got a house together a few months ago. Believe it or not, things are going great! Even though our sex drives are vastly different, we enjoy a loving, satisfying level of physical intimacy.

However, it took us a while to get to this point. Her sex drive is much lower than mine, so I've had to step up in our relationship and become the primary initiator—something I definitely wasn't used to since I previously only dated/slept with men. I'm more than happy to be the one who gets things going most of the time, because even though my drive is leagues above hers she's usually game once I put on the moves.

Lately, I've expressed an interest in changing things up a bit. Instead of super-long, super-hot lady sex sessions, I've tried to make things a little more one-sided. Rather than tit-for-tat sex, sometimes I just want to go down on her or rail her a strap-on without receiving anything in return. She STRONGLY opposes this. She says that me giving to her makes her want to give to me, which is fair. I'd feel the same way in that situation. But I also believe that in a long-term relationship things aren't always going to be reciprocal. I'm into that. I'm a squirter, and sometimes we just don't have time for the prep and cleanup that's required.

Obviously, I don't want to force her into having a kind of sexual experience she doesn't want to have! But what am I supposed to do about my fantasies of surprising her with an oral quickie on my way out the door in the morning?

Giving Is Getting

Your girlfriend is hung up on the idea of reciprocity—she's probably internalized the so-totally-worthy-of-internalizing message that sexual pleasure should be mutual and that both parties should get off and that if one person is getting off and the other isn't, GIG, the Got Off did wrong by the Not Got Off. And she's right to be concerned! People should be invested in their partner's pleasure! The Orgasm Gap is a real thing and it's a gendered thing:

In 2009, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) asked 1,931 U.S. adults ages 18 to 59 about their most recent sexual experience. The topline findings show that men are more likely to orgasm than women—91 percent of men said they climaxed during their last sexual encounter, compared with 64 percent of women. But there seems to be a perception gap, too — at least among men. Eighty-five percent of men said their partners in that recent sexual encounter had reached climax, far higher than the percentage of women who said they orgasmed.

But as Peggy Orenstein notes in Girls & Sex, the orgasm gap doesn't exist for women in same-sex relationships. From Orenstein's TedTalk...

Here's something, though. Girls' investment in their partner's pleasure remains regardless of the gender of the partner. So in same-sex encounters, the orgasm gap disappears. And young women climax at the same rate as men. Lesbian and bisexual girls would tell me that they felt liberated to get off the script—free to create an encounter that worked for them.

Your girlfriend is invested in your pleasure, GIG, which is great thing. You just need to convince her that you take your pleasure your pleasure in increments. Tell your girlfriend that you enjoy delayed gratification—that delayed gratification actually gets you off and, therefore, delayed gratification is reciprocal. Since you enjoy having blue ovaries, GIG, the best way for her to reciprocate is to not reciprocate right away. You get her off in the morning on the way out the door, you feel erotically charged all day long, and then you come home and she gets off that night—that's not a "no-recip" scene, that's not the orgasm gap creeping into your same-sex relationship, and it's not evidence that your girlfriend is selfish, neglectful, failing to meet your needs, or—god forbid—acting like some sort dude. She is reciprocating... just very, very slowly.


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