He moaned like he was being exorcised. She moaned like she was trying to speed-run the experience. Neither of them meant it.
“Yes! YES! OH YESS……..” (Calm down. He just put on the condom.)
Welcome to modern sex: one part performance, one part confusion, and entirely too loud for how mediocre it was. And why? Sex has succumbed to being one of the few things in life where we’d instead commit to an elaborate lie than address the awkward reality.
To fake moan or not to fake moan – that is the question! If you do, you’re enabling delusion and setting yourself up for a lifetime of starfish sex. If you don’t, you risk bruising an ego so fragile it could dissolve on contact with honesty. Either way, you’re fucked. (not in the satisfying, legs-shaking, playlist-on-repeat kind of way, but in the emotional-labor-in-lingerie sort of way.)
The politics of fake moaning is interlaced with ego, expectations, and the fact that sometimes it’s just easier to scream “Oh my God!” than to say, “That thing you just did felt like an aggressive handshake.”
Let’s not lie to ourselves, people. The world is built on performance. And nowhere is the acting more Academy Award-winning than in the bedroom. And women? We’ve been performing the role of a sexually satisfied woman, serving Best Actress in a Leading Lie since forever. From Cleopatra probably faking it with Julius Caesar (sorry, Jules) to your bestie last weekend with that guy who thought foreplay meant turning off the lights and grunting -fake moaning has become an ancient art form.
According to various studies (and by various, I mean the very official Google search I did in the middle of writing this sentence), 82% of straight men report always orgasming during sex. Meanwhile, only 32% of women say the same. That’s a 50% gap, folks. Which makes the orgasm gap worse than the wage gap!
This is not a gap. This is a ravine. And guess who’s expected to build a bridge across it while moaning like they’re possessed by the ghost of a horny opera singer? Yeah. Us.
Like imagine, if she ever actually said, “Yeah… that wasn’t fun,” the room would go silent like someone just dropped a wine glass at a funeral. Because in that moment, she wouldn’t be critiquing a performance, she’d be shattering an illusion. One minute he thought he was a porn star, the next he was told he is more of an average community theatre actor. Like, mate, that’s what happens when you try to poke like you were resetting a modem.
Psychologist Dr. Laurie Mintz (who wrote Becoming Cliterate—yes, that’s the title) says fake moaning is often about avoiding awkwardness or ending unsatisfying sex quickly. In simpler terms: it’s emotional crowd control. Think of it as the universal “skip intro” button of sex. It’s what you press when you just want to fast-forward to the part where it’s over and you can rehydrate and pretend to fall asleep. It’s conflict resolution. It’s the diplomatic immunity of intimacy. It’s the customer service voice of sex: “Thank you for trying, your pleasure attempt has been noted and logged.” You fake it to keep the peace, to dodge the feelings talk, and to avoid turning a hookup into a self-help seminar.
But here’s my 2 cents you need: every time you fake it, you teach someone what they’re doing works, reinforcing the exact thing you didn’t enjoy. That’s how you end up three months deep into a situationship with someone who still thinks dry-humping. your thigh is foreplay.
So, what’s the alternative? Honesty. Not a brutal takedown, but collaborative honesty. You don’t have to give a Ted Talk, but you can say, “Hey, I like when you do [insert good thing here], maybe more of that?” Encourage the green flags. Use words. Use moans that mean something. Don’t give out standing ovations for free. If your partner (hookup, situationship, FWB, boyfriend, husband, or that guy who keeps his mattress on the floor) doesn’t want to listen, that’s a neon sign flashing, “Exit Here, Girlypop.”
If they can’t handle a gentle nudge in the direction of your clitoris, they are not emotionally equipped to be inside your body. Full stop.
If you’re with someone who can’t take feedback, doesn’t ask what you like, or treats your pleasure like an optional side quest? That’s not your problem to fix. That’s just vital information. Use it. Adjust accordingly. Archive him like an expired email. And take your moans where they’ll be appreciated.
And guys, listen up. If you want to be good at this, ask questions. Get curious. The female body isn’t a locked door, it’s more like a high-tech fridge. If you listen carefully, it hums when you’re doing something right. Most of us don’t need fireworks. We just need attention. Pay attention to breath, to tension, to rhythm. Bodies talk. We just need more people who know how to read the subtitles.
