Women's Techniques For Making Vaginal Penetration More Pleasurable

Survey development

The design of survey items for the second OMGYES Pleasure Report began with a large scale, exploratory qualitative study (2014–2015; IRBs # 2003603806 and 2004356627) to broadly generate information about women’s discoveries and experiences with genital stimulation and sexual pleasure. We conducted a series of initial, broad, online surveys of 4270 adult (18+) women from around the world, recruited through social media advertisements. Potential participants clicked on a link to the survey in the advertisement and responded in text boxes to open-ended questions such as “What discovery have you made that really made vaginal penetration more pleasurable for you?” A subset of approximately 1000 women participated in follow-up interviews conducted via video chat. These secondary, semi-structured interviews were focused on eliciting more detail about the specific strategies, insights, and techniques respondents had found pivotal to increasing their sexual pleasure. Interviews ranging between 15 and 60 minutes in length, were conducted and recorded by OMGyes researchers. Data from these interviews were analyzed by OMGyes research staff and consultants using an inductive constructivist thematic analysis framework to identify where and/or how similarities emerged in the ways in which women enjoy specific aspects of sexual touch and vaginal stimulation [60]. This approach of identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns/themes is particularly suitable for nuanced exploratory work in understudied areas [61] Numerous techniques that women use to enhance their pleasure during penetration emerged—most under described in the current literature; the present analysis focuses on four of these techniques. We searched existing scientific and popular sexual pleasure literature for established terms that described those four technique forms, and we were unable to find such existing language. Therefore, we gave each form a descriptive name—Angling, Rocking, Shallowing, and Pairing. Definitions and sexually explicit line drawing illustrations of these four techniques are provided in S1 Table. Images contained in this table are visually graphic.

In the next stage of development, and the focus of the current study, was the development of a quantitative survey to investigate the population level prevalence of women who report using the Angling, Rocking, Shallowing and Pairing and their sub-forms. The description of all items on our survey is presented in the next section. All items are original to this study—as informed by our exploratory qualitative work—and have not been yet examined in the peer-reviewed literature.