Can Wives Orgasm Outside of Sex? Defending the Church’s Teaching

If the female orgasm is not procreative, why can’t it take place outside of sex along with other incomplete sexual acts? This article offers a robust explanation for why the Church’s teaches against this.

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If there’s one thing that can bring both traditional Catholic moral theologians and modern sexologists into complete agreement, it’s that the female orgasm is fundamentally mysterious. Given its unique differences from the more straightforward procreative male orgasm, some of our readers have expressed puzzlement as to why it is that the Church has taught and still teaches that it is intrinsically evil for the woman to procure an orgasm outside the marriage act if the female orgasm does not pertain directly to procreation. After all, if, as our Apostolate has argued, spouses may licitly enjoy incomplete expressions of sexual love outside the conjugal act, then this would seem to indicate that sexual pleasure and enjoyment in and of itself can serve the unitive dimension of marital sexuality even if no procreative acts are taking place. It would matter only that the procreative end of marital sexuality is respected in order to bring both ends of marital sexuality into integral harmony. Therefore, if the female orgasm does not, considered in itself, serve the procreative dimension of marital sexuality, then it should be able to take place outside a formally procreative sexual act between spouses. 

In response to this objection, we should lay out a couple preliminary considerations before tackling the objection directly. For one, as Catholics, we are not only bound to submit to the infallible teachings of the Catholic Church, but also to the non-infallible authoritative teachings of the Church as well, so long as they are proposed by the authentic magisterium of the Church. We can recognize that these teachings may be subject to future revisions or modifications, but in the meantime, we owe obedience of mind and will to any teaching of the magisterium which pertains to faith or morals. Therefore, even if the Church teaches something on morality that could be perplexing to an inquiring mind, we must in the spirit of true obedience submit to the teaching even as we strive to assuage any intellectual difficulties we may have with such perplexing teachings. On this particular point, the Church is quite clear through the words of Pius XII: 

“By the force of this law of nature, the human person does not possess the right and power to the full exercise of the sexual faculty, directly intended, except when he performs the conjugal act according to the norms defined and imposed by nature itself. Outside of this natural act, it is not even given within the matrimonial right itself to enjoy this faculty fully. These are the limits to the particular right of which we are speaking and they circumscribe its use according to nature.” (Address to the Second World Congress on Fertility and Sterility, 19 May 1956)

With this in mind, we can now defend this reasoning against the objection we articulated earlier. While it is certainly true that the female orgasm is not directly procreative, it is not fundamentally the procreativity of the complete sexual act (i.e., sexual acts brought to orgasm) which accounts for why they must be reserved for the conjugal act. If this were true, then the objection would be quite right and given the opinion of St. Alphonsus on the liceity of incomplete sexual acts, it would have to be permitted for the wife to reach orgasm outside the conjugal act, even if not for the husband, whose orgasm is directly linked to procreation. 

As it happens, though, there is something even more foundational to orgasm in both men and women than the procreative dimension. It is the fact that orgasm by its very nature is what partially constitutes the marriage act itself as ordained by the Creator. For a man or a woman to experience orgasm is for a man or woman to experience the terminus or endpoint of what the sexual impulse in both of them is aimed toward in all its expressions, from the very first instant of sexual arousal, which is the mutual realization of the marriage act itself. Orgasm does not merely accompany the marriage act, it is the divinely ordained means whereby the spouses experience the full realization of spousal intimacy in both its unitive and procreative dimensions. If I may make use of a Trinitarian analogy, orgasm in spouses symbolically communicates the spiritus or final sigh which completes the active and passive exchange of love between lover and beloved. To obtain orgasm for the man or the woman outside the marriage act would, therefore, be to commit an act of grave dishonesty with the language of the body. It is to deprive the marriage act of its constitutive element and therefore to offend against the Wisdom of the Creator. To argue that the female orgasm could take place outside the context of the marriage act would therefore be to undermine the complementarity of human sexuality itself. Let us honor the gift of our bodies and sexuality as they were fashioned in the mind of the Heavenly Bridegroom Himself.