Orgasm Is Something You Can Learn: What Research Says About Orgasmic Learning

From tantra and hypnosis to cannabis, LSD, masturbation training, and pelvic-floor practice, decades of evidence suggest that orgasmic capacity may be more learnable than we once assumed.

For many women, there is a surprisingly powerful assumption about female orgasm: either you can orgasm naturally, or something is wrong.

But can you learn to orgasm?

What if orgasmic capacity is not entirely fixed? Perhaps the nervous system can learn new ways of accessing orgasm, strengthen pathways that already work, and eventually expand the conditions under which orgasm becomes possible.

This question is at the center of Orgasmic Learning.

When we look across decades of case reports, first-person accounts, controlled treatment studies, body-based training, and contemporary research, an interesting pattern begins to emerge:

Orgasmic capacity may be learned, strengthened, and expanded.

The evidence is not all the same. Some of the earliest examples come from individual case reports and books, while later studies use controlled designs, larger samples, and systematic reviews. Nevertheless, together they raise an important question about female orgasm:

If the same woman can have dramatically different access to orgasm under different conditions or internal states, what can we learn from the state in which orgasm becomes accessible?

Tantra and Learning New Pathways to Orgasm

One of the most striking modern examples comes from a 2022 case report by James Pfaus and Karolin Tsarski.

The woman described in the report had experienced vaginismus and pain with penetration. Over approximately a decade of yoga and tantric training, she practiced breathing, meditation, body postures, pelvic-floor exercises, muscular locks, relaxation, and other mind-body techniques.

Over time, something remarkable happened.

She not only overcame vaginismus. She developed the ability to experience whole-body orgasms without direct genital stimulation and eventually learned to enter and sustain prolonged orgasmic states.

The researchers also measured physiological changes associated with her orgasms, including increases in prolactin following the experiences.

This was not simply a woman discovering the “right” kind of stimulation.

She developed an orgasmic response through repeated training.

The body and brain had learned something new.

That is a powerful place to begin thinking about Orgasmic Learning.

Hypnosis: Can the Brain Learn Another Route Into Orgasm?

The idea that orgasmic access can change is not limited to tantra.

Decades earlier, hypnosis was being used in the treatment of sexual difficulties.

In a 1974 clinical report, hypnosis-assisted psychotherapy was used with a woman who had been unable to orgasm. Treatment included efforts to reduce conscious interference and performance-oriented thinking while changing how she experienced sexual response.

Following treatment, she reported experiencing her first orgasm. At follow-up, she reported becoming orgasmic much more consistently.

Again, the interesting question is larger than whether hypnosis itself “works.”

It is this:

How could a woman who previously could not access orgasm begin accessing it after her mental state and attentional processes changed?

Hypnosis provides a very different pathway from tantra, yet both suggest that orgasmic response can change when the conditions surrounding it change.

Attention matters here, but that is different from claiming that mindfulness itself teaches orgasm. A woman’s capacity to become absorbed in sensation rather than remain caught in monitoring, evaluation, or performance concerns may be one part of the transition into orgasm.

Cannabis and Orgasmic Learning: What Women Reported 50 Years Ago

This brings us to one of the historical sources I find especially fascinating.

In Barbara Lewis’s 1970 book, The Sexual Power of Marijuana, women described significant changes in their sexual experiences associated with cannabis.

Among the accounts were women who described learning to orgasm while using marijuana.

What makes some of these accounts especially important to the concept of Orgasmic Learning is what happened afterward.

Some women reported that once orgasm had become accessible, marijuana was no longer necessary.

Think about what that suggests.

Cannabis may initially have changed the conditions under which orgasm became possible. But after repeated experience, the orgasmic response appeared to become accessible without the original state-changing aid.

That begins to look less like a temporary drug effect and more like learning.

Perhaps cannabis provided access to a state in which the nervous system could experience orgasm, become familiar with that response, and eventually reproduce it under other conditions.

More than five decades later, contemporary research is allowing us to investigate these observations scientifically.

LSD and the Forgotten History of Female Orgasm

Cannabis was not the only altered state being discussed in connection with female sexual response.

In 1962, a woman writing under the name Constance A. Newland published My Self and I, an account of her experience undergoing LSD-assisted psychotherapy.

Her real name was Thelma Schnee Moss.

Moss was an actress and writer who later became a psychologist and taught at UCLA.

In My Self and I, she described undergoing LSD-assisted psychotherapy for what was then called “frigidity,” including longstanding difficulty with orgasm.

Her account became part of an early literature suggesting that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could profoundly alter sexual experience and sexual functioning.

Researchers and clinicians including Ling and Buckman also wrote about LSD-assisted psychotherapy during this period in connection with psychiatric and sexual problems.

These historical accounts do not provide the level of evidence we would demand from a modern randomized trial. But they belong in the history of Orgasmic Learning because they point to something clinicians and women themselves have been observing for decades:

Changing consciousness can sometimes change access to sexual response.

Different intervention. Different era. Same underlying question.

What changed inside the woman when orgasm became possible?

Directed Masturbation: Can Women Learn to Orgasm?

We do not have to rely entirely on unusual cases or historical accounts.

By the late 1970s, researchers were studying orgasm acquisition much more systematically.

Riley and Riley’s 1978 controlled study evaluated directed masturbation for women experiencing primary orgasmic failure.

The results were striking.

Approximately 90% of women receiving directed masturbation acquired orgasmic capacity, compared with approximately 53% in the comparison treatment.

And the learning did not necessarily remain confined to masturbation.

Approximately 85% of women in the directed-masturbation group later reported orgasm during intercourse on at least 75% of occasions, compared with 47% of women in the comparison group.

This gives us two important principles of Orgasmic Learning:
First, orgasmic access can be learned. Second, what is learned in one context may transfer to another.

What You Learn Alone May Transfer to Partnered Sex

More recent research supports that second idea.

In 2020, Rowland and colleagues studied 2,215 women and compared women’s sexual activities during masturbation with their activities during partnered sex.

Women whose partnered sexual experiences more closely incorporated the stimulation and activities that worked for them during masturbation tended to report:

• greater likelihood of orgasm, 
• greater orgasmic pleasure, 
• and less orgasmic difficulty. 

The lesson is wonderfully practical.

When a woman already has a pathway to orgasm, we may not need to start over.

Study what already works.

Start with the stimulation that helps you orgasm. Then consider the position, rhythm, fantasy or imagery, level of control, internal state, and environment surrounding that experience.

From there, ask how those successful ingredients might be carried into contexts where orgasm is currently more difficult.

Orgasmic Learning does not discard an existing pathway. It builds from it.

Pelvic Floor Training and Female Orgasm

The body can learn too.

Orgasmic learning may also occur through the body.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis by Jorge and colleagues examined 21 randomized controlled trials of pelvic-floor muscle training for female sexual dysfunction.

The meta-analysis found improvements in the orgasm domain of the Female Sexual Function Index, along with improvements in arousal, satisfaction, pain, and overall sexual function.

The authors appropriately cautioned that certainty of the evidence was very low because the studies and training protocols differed substantially.

Still, the findings support another important principle:

Learning can be embodied.

Repeated muscular awareness, coordination, relaxation, contraction, and sensory feedback may change sexual functioning, including orgasmic response.

Orgasmic learning does not have to occur only through conscious thought. The body itself can acquire patterns of response through practice.

How Internal State May Change Access to Orgasm

My own research with Dr. Jordan Tishler adds another piece to this picture.

In our 2024 observational study of cannabis use before partnered sex, we examined 202 women who reported difficulty achieving orgasm.

Among those women:

• 72.8% reported increased orgasm frequency with cannabis before partnered sex 
• 71% reported that orgasm became easier 
• 67% reported improved orgasm satisfaction 

The study was observational, so it cannot establish that cannabis caused those improvements. Cannabis is also not appropriate for everyone.

But the findings create a fascinating research question.

Consider what makes these findings so interesting.

The woman is the same woman.

Her anatomy has not suddenly changed, and her partner and sexual activity may also be similar. Yet her access to orgasm can be dramatically different depending upon her internal state.

So what changed?

Perhaps anxiety decreased or sensory experience intensified. Attention may have become more absorbed, while cognitive monitoring diminished. Alternatively, the nervous system may have shifted into a state more compatible with orgasm.

Whatever the mechanisms prove to be, the phenomenon itself deserves serious scientific attention.

From Trying to Orgasm to Learning How Orgasm Becomes Accessible

This is where Orgasmic Learning changes the question.

Instead of repeatedly asking:

How do I make myself orgasm?

We can begin asking:

Under what conditions does my nervous system already know how to access orgasm?

Then:

What can I learn from those conditions?

Across tantra, hypnosis, cannabis, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, directed masturbation, partnered-sex transfer, and pelvic-floor training, the methods look very different.

But several principles begin to converge.

• Access can be learned.
• Successful experiences can be repeated.
• Learning can transfer from one context to another.
• Attention may influence orgasmic access.
• The body can beThe body can develop new patterns through practice.trained.
• Internal state may change access to orgasm.

Once a successful pathway is discovered, it may become possible to strengthen it and eventually expand beyond it.

That is the central premise of Orgasmic Learning:

Orgasmic capacity can be learned, strengthened, and expanded.

Rather than treating orgasm as a fixed ability that a woman either possesses or lacks, we can begin studying orgasm as a capacity the nervous system may learn to access through multiple pathways.

Perhaps, then, the most useful question is no longer simply:

“Why can’t I orgasm?”

Instead, Orgasmic Learning invites a different question:

“When orgasm does become accessible, what is my nervous system doing differently, and how can I learn from it?”

References

Jorge, C. H., Bø, K., Catai, C. C., Brito, L. G. O., Driusso, P., & Tennfjord, M. K. (2024). Pelvic floor muscle training as treatment for female sexual dysfunction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 231(1), 51–66.e1.

Lewis, B. (1970). The Sexual Power of Marijuana.

Mulvehill, S., & Tishler, J. (2024). Assessment of the effect of cannabis use before partnered sex on women with and without orgasm difficulty. Sexual Medicine, 12, qfae023.

Newland, C. A. [Moss, T. S.]. (1962). My Self and I.

Pfaus, J. G., & Tsarski, K. (2022). A case of female orgasm without genital stimulation. Sexual Medicine, 10(2), 100496.

Riley, A. J., & Riley, E. J. (1978). A controlled study to evaluate directed masturbation in the management of primary orgasmic failure in women. British Journal of Psychiatry, 133, 404–409.

Rowland, D. L., Hevesi, K., Conway, G. R., & Kolba, T. N. (2020). Relationship between masturbation and partnered sex in women: Does the former facilitate, inhibit, or not affect the latter? The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 17(1), 37–47.