Whether or not we’re actually living in a time of female liberation, the female orgasm remains a mystery to many people. Men can pretty much count on an orgasm during sex (with a few exceptions), but women have no such guarantee. Enter How to Make Me Come, a blog collecting women’s essays about their experience with or frustration over orgasms — or lack thereof. Well-written and often instructional, the site feels radical because it’s so rare to see women explicitly describe, you know, how to make them come. The Cut emailed with the founder about what inspired the project, and what she hopes to achieve with it.
The creator of the blog remains anonymous, just like her writers and contributors, because she doesn’t want them linked to any kind of community. Anonymity, she says, makes it “easier to see that a woman is a woman is a woman.”
How did you come up with the idea to start this blog?
I had an experience — the details of which shall remain private to protect innocent parties — but suffice it to say, it left me thinking obsessively about female orgasm and communication. A few days later, my head still swirling with questions and rants and dreams about sex, I blurted out all my thoughts to one of my closest friends. I felt this surge of adrenaline as I began to confess every detail to her, from the thrilling to the mortifying.
By the time I left her, I was positively buzzing. Even though we’d been friends for years, even though we’d talked plenty about sex, I realized we’d never discussed it with this degree of specificity and vulnerability. If this was how it felt to be this honest about female orgasms with one woman, I wanted to have this conversation on a much larger scale. I needed more women.
Had you seen anything like this before?
Yes, there is no shortage of material related to orgasms online and off. And while I think there is a lot of value to a brief, salient article or video or infographic (don’t get me wrong, I eat that stuff up!), it’s typically written from a single perspective and leaves me hungry for more information. I wanted something more comprehensive. I wanted to see the experiences fleshed out (no pun intended) and I wanted to increase the sample size. More information from more people. It’s only through having this many essays at once that one can see the variations in experiences, and also the similarities and emerging patterns. This is something you can’t experience just by looking at one.
Why do you think it’s so important to talk about female orgasms?
I think this is worthy of discussion, not only because the female orgasm can sometimes be challenging to achieve and/or talk about, but also because I suspect that when we talk about the female orgasm, something deeper is at play. For one, there’s the societal assessment of female sexuality, the consequences of which bleed into the areas of our lives outside the bedroom.
When I first came up with this idea, I was thinking a lot about how the way we’re having sex has a sort of parallel to the social and political implications of being a woman. If you can’t voice what you want in a moment when you are excited, desired, and connecting with someone, then it’s no wonder that you can’t always voice what you want out in the world. But as I’ve gotten deeper into this project, I’ve started to contemplate the reverse. You might feel like you are confident and assertive in your daily life, and then it’s in those private sexual moments that you can feel most afraid and stuck. And it might make you feel like an impostor of sorts. “Maybe I’m not as direct and self-assured as I thought.” “Maybe I don’t actually know how to talk about how I feel.” “Maybe I’m not really that brave if I’m only brave when it’s easy or convenient for me.”
Is the intended audience for the site men, women, or both?
I truly want this to be for women and men. This is a platform for women to express themselves (and hopefully have a clarifying, therapeutic experience in the process) and I hope that both men and women can find some essays relatable and some essays eye-opening. A big part of this for the reader is to gauge your reactions to different essays, because it forces you to reflect and consider your own opinions and history.
What has the response been like?
I braced myself for the worst sort of misogynistic reactions (because I’ve been a woman on the internet for a while and a woman in real life for even longer!), but I have been pleasantly surprised to see a lot of sincere appreciation for this from women and men. So, for now, it’s been really nice. As this continues, I’m sure the haters will come out of hiding!
Do you think the blog will help demystify the female orgasm?
In a way, I almost feel like this blog might mystify the female orgasm even further — it’s showing that there are a million possible answers to the same question. But if there’s one big takeaway from this project, it’s that how to make “me” come is different from how to make “her” come. There are essays that are worlds apart in experience. There are essays that seem to contradict one another. But they all help us to see how particular both the sexual frustrations and fantasies are for each individual.
And the only way to approach the mystery of your partner’s experience is to have a deep awareness and sense of empathy for the spectrum of possibilities, and then have an open communication about what you are both going through.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
