Dear Dr. H,

I recently experienced my first one night stand. This is something that I’m not used to and I had a problem with not being able to orgasm. How often do you think this is a problem and do you have any ways to fix it?

Unfortunately, not everyone has an orgasm each and every time they have sex. Women generally report greater difficulty in having consistent orgasms with their male partners; so if you’re a woman and weren’t able to climax the first time having sex with someone new, you’re not alone in that. This isn’t to say that it’s not a “problem,” but it is to say that it’s a fairly common experience.

Regardless of your gender, however, having sex with someone for the first time- especially in a one-night-stand situation- when you might not really know the person or have any prior sexually intimate experience with that person, having an orgasm might be a bit challenging. Without clear communication of what gives you pleasure, this person likely has no idea. So did you communicate clearly to this person what will bring you to orgasm? If not, it is not surprising that you didn’t get there. Whether we’re with a long-time partner or a first-time, never-again partner, having an enjoyable experience is going to be influenced by our ability to communicate our needs to this person and their ability to ask for direction and/or respond to those desires.

If you’re someone who never has any difficulty in having an orgasm with a partner, then maybe this was just a fluke because you were with someone new. You mentioned that this was your first one-night-stand experience, so with a change in the context for sex, sometimes our experience of the sex changes, too. Were you drinking alcohol before this encounter? Were you especially nervous about it or didn’t feel quite comfortable? Were you distracted by the football game playing in the background or bummed out about a particularly bad exam score? All of these things can influence our ability to have an orgasm. I wouldn’t stress too much about it, as that kind of pressure can hamper the experience, too.

Dear Dr H.,

Is watching porn bad?

When it comes to porn, people are pretty divisive on the issue. I steer clear of judgements like “bad” or “good” and more toward a question of what’s healthy. Indeed, I think watching porn or reading erotica can be healthy. People enjoy porn alone or with partners and with the advent of more online porn, it’s just easier to access it. Here’s what is potentially harmful about porn: it’s made mostly by straight men for straight men. Yes, there is queer porn out there, but my personal beef with porn – which is many others’ beef as well – is that the sex and sexuality that often dominates porn is women exclusively pleased by pleasing their male partners, with little or no reciprocity. It perpetuates the objectification of women and presents a one-dimensional, one-sided sexual experience. Because younger and younger people are watching porn, in the absence of radically comprehensive sex education, it is problematic for porn to be the exclusive education tool on sex. That said, if you treat the people you have sex with respectfully and you’re into pleasing your partner just as much as you’re into them pleasing you, then I would say watching porn could very much be a part of a healthy sexuality.

Ask yourself: How does watching porn make me feel? Guilty? Ashamed? Embarrassed? If yes, it could be due to our cultural perspective that demonizes porn or it could be because you may have an unhealthy relationship with porn. If you’re getting online or on your phone throughout the day, if you want to stop watching it but cannot seem to stop, if it feels compulsive and you don’t like it, then I suggest talking to someone about it. It’s much less about the porn, specifically, and more about having a compulsive behavior that you don’t feel good about.