Secrets of the Female Orgasm – Available on demand, Channel 4 | First shown: Thu 31 Aug 2023 | 47 mins
Yewande Biala, scientist and former Love Island contestant, is 26 years old and has never had an orgasm. In this brutally honest Channel 4 documentary, she explores why this is and whether there is anything she can do about it. Secrets of the Female Orgasm is described as a ‘personal journey’, a stale old cliché, but let’s face it, aptly applied here. You don’t get much more personal than your vagina.
Biala isn’t a virgin but has never experienced a climax, either with a partner or alone. In fact, she says that until she was 20, she didn’t even know that women could climax. So, there’s a lot to unpick here. And Biala bravely goes about unpicking it.
It may be a metaphysical journey, but it’s also a physical one as Biala travels the country, meeting a diverse range of people who might be able to shed some light on orgasms in general and helping Biala achieve one in particular.
She starts by attending a workshop run by Lacey Haines, a sex and pleasure coach. The session seems largely to comprise a roomful of women sitting in a circle with blankets over their knees, looking at their vaginas in hand-held mirrors.
This is probably a good start, as Biala says that she has never looked at her vulva before. She’s also unimpressed with what she sees. This made me wonder, have I ever done this? I feel like I must have done this. I have a vague memory of doing this in my teens and a more recent memory of employing my make-up mirror to check on a rash down there. But I’ve never contemplated my foof in the empowering meditative way that Haines is encouraging.
Biala’s next stop is to visit Claire Bailey, a consultant gynaecologist and doctor of psycho-sexual medicine. Having done the self-examination workshop, she describes her vulva as looking like “squashed lettuce” so the first thing she wants to do is check if it’s normal. Bailey assures her that it is.
Biala and Bailey briefly discuss anorgasmia, a type of sexual dysfunction in which a person cannot achieve orgasm. But Bailey puts her finger on what she suspects the actual problem is. Biala has never masturbated. And let’s face it, that right there is going to be a stumbling block in achieving the big O.
I’m a generation older than Biala. And like her, I had sex with a male partner before I’d ever masturbated on my own. It’s such a topsy-turvy way of doing things that I always want to extol the virtues of masturbation to young women. I didn’t even know how to do it. My early attempts involved sticking a finger up my vagina and thrusting it in and out like a tiny dick. I didn’t even know where my clit was.
I didn’t discover the awesome powers of my clit until my boyfriend basically introduced us. After that, I embraced wanking wholeheartedly, but I wish I’d have been more comfortable exploring my own body as a teenager. I don’t regret losing my virginity at 16, but you know, if I’d been proficient at masturbation, maybe I wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to do it.
But this was all back in 1990. Biala is my daughter’s age. She grew up with the internet. Surely she’s more switched on than my teenage self?
Bailey gives Biala homework before their next meeting: go off and have a wank. Ever the vigilant student, Biala takes to the OMGYES website and reads up on masturbation techniques. They even have videos, and Biala was quite surprised to encounter a woman masturbating on camera when she clicked on one.
OMGYES looks like an interesting website, focusing on women’s pleasure in a matter-of-fact and friendly way. It does cost money to access, though so I haven’t properly checked it out. I’m not sure I’m committed enough to fork out £57 to access the content just yet.
Sadly, Biala’s ‘Figure of 8’ exploratory wanking session doesn’t go well. Maybe it’s because she has a film crew on the other side of the door? That can’t help, surely? It’s like she’s having to go from masturbation virgin to soft-core porn star in one fell swoop.
It’s very brave of such a young, beautiful woman to be open about her mental discomfort in talking about these things. I’ve never seen Love Island – but I’ve always assumed it was all about the contestants being sexy sex fiends.
To further her wanking prospects, Biala goes to a sex shop with sex educator Reed Amber to look at sex toys and comes away with a ‘womanizer’ and a wand in her shopping basket. Her experiments with the wand don’t go well either. “It hurt,” said Biala. “It felt like my clit was going to fall off.”
By this point in the proceedings, Biala does seem genuinely concerned that there is something ‘wrong’ with her, and her visit to Gerulf Rieger, an expert on female arousal and professor at the University of Essex, really doesn’t help matters.
She participates in a study that involves being shown porn clips while having a probe inserted up her vag. Biala isn’t turned on by the clinical settings and porn compilation, which comes as no surprise to any of the audience because there is absolutely nothing that we’ve learnt about her by this stage that suggests that she would be.
Looking at her vag-probe-graphs, Rieger tells Biala that she is a ‘bit of a puzzle’ and suggests that she might be asexual, which doesn’t seem to fit with Biala’s view of herself, so she leaves that encounter looking a bit deflated.
I really don’t think she’s having a lot of fun here. The search for an orgasm sounds like it should be all fun and games, but the whole process becomes something of a chore. You get the impression that a high achiever like Biala, who has accomplished everything else she set her mind to, is not comfortable when she can’t do something.
Her time with Anna Lee, mechanical engineer and ‘orgasm influencer’ seems much more enjoyable for Biala. Lee is the founder of Lioness, who produce a vibrator that measures your pleasure and puts it into a satisfying graph for you. Users share their stats and the company now has the world’s largest data set of female physiology during orgasm. Here, Biala gets to indulge her geeky science-nerd side. She expresses relief at being able to consider the issue as a ‘science problem’ rather than a ‘me problem’.
And after that, she’s back to Lacey Haines, who we met at the beginning of the programme. Biala asks Haines to demonstrate getting herself off, and she is happy to oblige. Biala is obviously a bit embarrassed about asking her. “It seems daft,” she says, “but it is how we learn everything else.”
And yes, this is a startling truth about wanking (especially for women) that is so ingrained that we never really think about it. Everything else in life, from social cues to table manners to operating a fork-lift truck, we learn at least in part from watching other people do it. It’s just in the areas of sex we’re supposed to wing it. At least with sex, you can have some sex with someone who’s done it before. (I didn’t. Neither of us really knew what we were doing. And this was before porn was easy to get hold of. Where did my boyfriend learn about the clitoris? I presume he read it in a book.)
Haines is open and lovely, and she really wants to help Biala masturbate, but Biala is still not getting it. But – I really can’t stress enough how important I think this may be to everything here – Biala is still trying to wank while being filmed by a bloody camera crew.
When it comes to achieving orgasm, women in same-sex relationships fare better than those in heterosexual relationships. 65% of straight women regularly achieve orgasm compared to 86% of lesbians.
Biala decides to investigate this further by going to a women-only sex club. She doesn’t get any sexy orgasmic action here either, but she chats to an interesting bunch of thoughtful, open women about her issues around orgasming. Biala discusses unresolved attitudes towards sex passed on from her mum based on her Catholicism, upbringing and culture.
This has come up a few times before during Biala’s journey, so she decides to have a frank chat with her mum. On camera, of course, because that’s how she’s doing this. But really, I can’t think of a worse time to have a camera crew pointing their attention at you than when you’re trying to talk to your mum about sex. It’s even worse than them hovering outside the door when you’re trying to wank.
Nothing gets resolved by the end of the documentary. Biala still hasn’t climaxed. She says she feels better about it than she used to and that she’s gained some valuable insights. But then she kind of has to say that, doesn’t she? There needs to be some conclusion to the previous 45 minutes. I hope Biala continued with her sex journey after filming this documentary.
It would be sad if she stuck the whole ‘female pleasure’ thing in a metaphorical drawer and didn’t revisit it. For my money, I reckon her best bet would be to carry on doing the sort of things she has been doing for the documentary. Only this time, maybe try not having a camera crew following you around recording your every move.