Why scientists should start taking orgasm seriously

Orgasms are big business, but there's surprising little scientific research being done into how they actually work. There are urgent reasons to fix this

As a DPhil student on a four-year funded programme, I had the rare luxury of a year to decide on the major focus of my research. After reading around, I got interested in the science of orgasm and anorgasmia (difficulty or inability to orgasm). It seemed like an ideal research topic - it has social value, it's a young field with lots of progress ready to be made, and it wouldn't leave people at parties yawning when they asked what I did.

Unfortunately, it didn't come to fruition - partly because almost nobody is doing research on it, and I couldn't find an appropriate supervisor.