Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Gabrielle Berbey, with editing by Katherine Wells. This week on The Experiment: A personal quest for sexual fulfillment reveals centuries of mythmaking about female pleasure.įurther reading: The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complexīe part of The Experiment. And it’s almost always to the benefit of men.” “The metaphor that came to me is that it’s kind of like a Rorschach test, where it’s this abstraction that all of these doctors and scientists are projecting their own worldview upon. So she embarked on a quest-diving deep into an industry designed to solve her problem, searching for a feeling that’s been a fixation of science, pseudoscience, politics, and philosophy for centuries.
This fact didn’t worry her very much until her 30s, when a divorce and a series of dates with frustrated men made her think she might never find love again. Katharine Smyth is 39 years old and has never, to her knowledge, had an orgasm.