By Brian Alexander

 
In college, I lived next door to an agonizingly
pretty cocktail waitress. Late at night, after
she’d come home from work, her boyfriend —
he drove a Porsche, naturally — would arrive
for his nightly booty call. The walls were thin.
Soon, like clockwork, her voice would pierce
the drywall like a steam locomotive’s whistle:
“hehehehehe” followed by “yesyesyes!” and
then an explosion of high-pitched
“ohmigodohmigodohmigod!”

While I was envious at the time, now it seems
 
that all her ecstatic vocals might have been
just the female equivalent of “Your butt looks
great in those jeans, Babe. Honest.” A study
released last month in the Archives of Sexual
Behavior shows that those seemingly
uncontrollable “ohmigods” during apparent
orgasm are often play-acting meant to
“manipulate” men.

The scientists, Gayle Brewer of the University
of Central Lancashire and Colin Hendrie of the
University of Leeds, asked 71 women between
the ages of 18 and 48 a series of questions.
They broke down the vocalizations into
categories that included “silence,”
“moan/groan,” “scream/shriek/squeal,”
“words” (such as “Yes!” or the partner’s name,
and “instructional commands” like “more.”
Other questions asked why the women made

Sorry, guys: Up to 80 percent of women admit faking it
Wild noises help boost his ego and speed things up, new sex study finds
 
the vocalizations and at what point they
themselves had an orgasm, if they had an
orgasm at all, and, if not, why they were doing
all that shouting.

Well, it turned out that “women were making
conscious vocalizations in order to influence
their partner rather than as a direct
expression of sexual arousal,” Brewer told me.

Women seek to speed things up
In the paper revealing these results, Brewer
and Hendrie use the phrase “manipulate male
behavior to [the women’s] advantage” which
sounds like the women were trying to wrangle
a pair of diamond earrings out of the guy.

But that’s not really what they meant. For
example, “women reported using these
vocalizations to ‘speed up’ their partner’s
ejaculation due to boredom, fatigue,
discomfort, time limitations,” Brewer said.

In other words, the sounds the women
emitted were not because they were out-of-
control excited. Indeed, when they were most
excited, say during oral sex when they were
more likely to have an orgasm, they didn’t do
much of the old scream-n-shout.

Rather, it was a tactic they used to induce their
man to do something, like get it over with. In
most cases, they were also trying to be nice.
“Importantly, 92 percent of participants felt
very strongly that these vocalizations boosted
their partner’s self-esteem,” the paper stated,
“and 87 percent reported using them for this
purpose,” like the hilarious scene from the
 
1975 movie “The Stepford Wives”: “You’re the
king, Frank!”

Vote: Does loud mean faking it?

Of course, as Meg Ryan proved in another
movie, “When Harry Met Sally,” women can use
their voices to fake an orgasm, too. In Brewer’
s survey, more than 25 percent of women
routinely used vocalization to fake it. They did
it about 90 percent of the time they realized
they would not climax. About 80 percent faked
using vocalizations about half the time they
were unable to have an orgasm.

Women do this because their men are so goal-
directed they won’t stop until a woman
climaxes, the authors say.

That does not surprise Charlene Muehlenhard,
professor of clinical psychology at the
University of Kansas in Lawrence. In a 2009
study she co-authored in the Journal of Sex
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Research, called “Men’s and Women’s Reports
of Pretending Orgasm,” she explored the idea
that men and women tend to follow scripted
roles. Men are supposed to give a woman an
orgasm “and her orgasm proves the quality of
his work,” she said. Because women do not
ejaculate, men have to rely on some other
outward sign, like a woman singing “Oh Sweet
Mystery of Life!” (“Young Frankenstein”) to
know we’ve done our job.

So women vocalize as a way of saying
“attaboy” even if they weren’t all that excited.
As one woman told Muehlenhard, “I pretended
to have an orgasm so that my partner would
[finish]. He couldn’t [finish] until I orgasmed.”

Even men fake it, though not as much
(Men fake, too, though we do it much less
frequently. In Muehlenhard’s study, 36
percent of men who did fake it at least once
used “vocal acting” whereas 61 percent of
women who faked it at least once used vocal
acting.)

This behavior could have deep evolutionary
roots. “We are biological creatures,”
Muehlenhard said. “The biological origins of
making noise during sex, though it is hard to
study, can be explored by looking at animals.”

For example, a 2008 study published in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society found that
female macaques “influence the likelihood of
ejaculation by calling versus remaining silent
and by adjusting the timing of call onset.”

Male macaques thrust at a higher rate when
 
females vocalized in certain ways. It was not
the thrusting that induced the calling, it was
the calling that induced the thrusting.

The females controlled the males with their
voices. When the females did not issue the
right kind of vocal calls, males tended not to
ejaculate. The human take-away message? If
you want a man to have his own climax, say
the right things.

Of course, as Muehlenhard explained, “our
culture lays on top of our biology. There is a
lot of evidence that biology and socialization
and culture work together to influence” our
behaviors, especially the way we have sex.

Sadly, culture and socialization do not
necessarily teach us accurate lessons. Studies
consistently show that men and women think
they know just what the other gender desires,
but that we are often wrong. So we end up
trying to outguess each other. That’s why
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Muehlenhard thinks there could be a
downside to the kind of manipulation Brewer
found.

There's a downside to all that noise
“It seems problematic to make arousal noises
when one is actually bored or in pain,” she
said. “That would be likely to convey
misinformation to one’s partner, who is likely
to think that this sexual activity is pleasing and
should be repeated next time. I think that in
general, honesty is the best policy.”

Which is not to say that giving our lovers a
little dash of confidence with some extra
“hehehehe” and “ohmigoohmigodohmigod”
(or, as one woman I know described her
husband’s recent outburst: “Duuuude!”) even
if you aren’t really feeling it is always a bad
thing. “People think that it’s O.K. to do things
to arouse their sexual partners and to make
them feel good,” Muehlenhard said. “If making
noise arouses one’s partner, that might be O.
K.”

But just so you know, your butt really does lo-
ok great in those jeans.

Brian Alexander is the author of the book “Am-
erica Unzipped: In Search of Sex and
Satisfaction," now in paperback.

 
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