Answering Various Moral Questions About the Wife’s Orgasm

Overview

Learn how to avoid misuse, maintain virtue, and protect authentic marital intimacy within a Catholic moral framework.

Before getting straight into the questions, I want to make it clear that the purpose of this article is to answer moral questions about the female climax, not psychological or even pastoral questions. Save that for another day. I do however want to say emphatically that husbands and wives, despite what is and isn’t morally required,  should strive to ensure mutual climax in the marital act as often as they are able. This not only will guarantee more satisfying marital relations, it will help significantly to prevent resentment, sexual frustration, emotional isolation, and sexual disinterest. Let’s now proceed to the moral questions. 

Is it morally necessary for the wife to climax? 

• Reply: Some may wonder if, since the wife’s climax is designed by God and partially constitutes the fullness of the marital act, that intentionally excluding the wife’s climax from the marital act would deprive it of something necessary for its integrity. Furthermore, John Paul II teaches in Love and Responsibility that it is typically a result of selfishness on part of the husband that the wife is left sexually unsatisfied in marital intimacy. Therefore, if the wife’s climax pertains in some way to the full integrity of the marital act, and if it is a result of male selfishness that this is often excluded when couples perform the marital act, then it would seem to follow that failing to bring the wife to climax would be to fall short of the moral law. Now this argument is not without merit. Insofar as a failure to bring the wife to climax results from selfishness, this is indeed sinful as will be explained later. But be that as it may, the wife’s climax nevertheless still can’t be considered a strict moral obligation for each marital act, since only the male climax is strictly necessary for the marital act to be complete by itself. It is therefore up to the mutual discretion of the husband and wife and can be decided on a case by case basis, especially if the wife’s climax is difficult to bring about even after intercourse. 

If a complete sexual act is determined by orgasm, though, doesn’t that mean a wife’s climax is morally necessary to complete the marital act? 

• Reply: No, not necessarily. Just because the female orgasm derives its intelligibility from the marital act and therefore pertains to its full integrity, this does not mean it is necessary to actually complete the marital act itself. 

Can a request to bring her to climax ever be licitly rejected? 

• Reply: Generally, no. Because the wife’s climax is part of the martial act’s full integrity, it would not be morally licit for a husband to refuse to bring her to climax if this is requested either explicitly or implicitly. It remains a true part of the marital debt and so to reject this request would be gravely wrong. 

Can the wife bring herself to climax if the husband refuses? 

• Reply: Yes, if the husband for whatever reason refuses to bring the wife to climax, she is permitted to complete this herself because it is still morally united to the marital act and so cannot be categorized as masturbation. This is by far the majority opinion among pre-Vatican II moralists. 

Didn’t Alphonsus Liguori teach this was mortally sinful? 

• Reply: No. While this is a popular claim on the internet, it is simply false and stems from a misreading of his treatment on the subject in his Theologia Moralis. This unfortunately happens quite frequently given the scholastic format of his writing where he will present both sides of an argument and then proceed to provide some synthesis out of the disagreement. And so with this question, he begins by presenting the argument from those theologians which taught the practice was mortally sinful on the grounds that the female orgasm was not a necessary part of the marital act. Following this, however, he notes that the much more widely held opinion among theologians was that this practice was in fact licit, and while he doesn’t accept every argument they give, he does affirm this argument in favor of its liceity: “Hence, just as a wife can prepare herself for copulation by touch, so too can she complete the act of copulation”. [1]

So if it’s not necessarily sinful to forego the female orgasm, then it’s morally irrelevant, right? 

• Reply: Not quite! While there is no strict moral requirement for each marital act to include the wife’s orgasm, I would certainly consider it neglectful and therefore at least venially sinful to knowingly and willingly leave the wife feeling unsatisfied after sex. And if this leads to a serious wound on the relationship, it could even be mortally sinful. Just because something is not intrinsically sinful does not mean it would not be sinful in many different circumstances. As John Paul II teaches in Love and Responsibility: “In the woman this produces an aversion to intercourse, and a disgust with sex which is just as difficult or even more difficult to control than the sexual urge. It can also cause neuroses and sometimes organic desires (which comes from the fact that the engorgement of the genital organs at the time of sexual arousal results in the inflammation in the region of the so-called little pelvis, if sexual arousal is not terminated by detumescence, which in a woman is closely connected with orgasm.” [2]

References

1. Alphonsus Liguori, Theologia Moralis, Liber VI, par. 919

2.  Wojtyła, K. (2013). Love and responsibility (G. Ignatik, Trans.). Pauline Books & Media.

   (Original work published 1960)