Oh! Oh yes! Yes! Mmm! Oh yes! Oh, so obvious!

As I discussed in this Salon article, there's clearly a value in studying female sexuality. It's so different from male sexuality, which has been studied and marketed to exhaustion, and so there's no way to really help women without devoting some research dollars exclusively to them. Case in point was yesterday's research results on the female orgasm, which showed "parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking." That gives some concrete scientific insight into the psychological problems that prohibit some women's orgasms, and that can hopefully contribute to their therapy.

But this significance seems to have been lost on the copy editors of the world, who apparently were stunned by a more obvious conclusion: Real orgasms are different from fake ones! Here are the kind of headlines they wrote:

Machine that spots fake orgasms -This is London

Scan spots women faking orgasm -BBC

No faking female orgasm in scientific research -Reuters AlertNet

Faking it: how a brain scan can demonstrate whether a woman's orgasm is the real thing -The Independent

Study Shows Women Not Really Faking It -All Headline News

No faking female orgasm in scientific research -San Diego Union-Tribune

Don't these read like the products of bitter men who have fallen for fake orgasms before? I can just see them, smugly pecking away at the keyboard and thinking, "Finally, she'll be exposed!" But even worse, just imagine the kind of person who has an ah-hah moment after reading one of those headlines. Sheesh.

Posted by Jason Feifer at June 21, 2005 12:36 AM