somebody please tell me why they felt they had to do this

The BBC reports that a brain scan can reveal whether a woman is faking orgasm or not.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like researchers have been fixated on orgasm lately. Here's another recent study whose authors are suggesting that a) a woman's orgasmic capability is genetic and b) women who have a harder time orgasming are in fact just pickier about their partners, for biological selection reasons.

Yawn.

But this most recent one tickles me (excuse the pun). They had one member of each heterosexual couple (I am not, not, not going to get into why I think that part is stupid) stimulate the other to orgasm. The receiver had their head in a scanner. Then the partners would switch. When they asked women to fake orgasm, the results were different from their "real" orgasms.

Do I need to point out the problem with the methodology here?

How do we know that all of the "real" orgasms were? I mean, come on. I'm betting some of these couples had been together for a while...and the woman had gotten used to the fact that her partner wasn't really working the right spot...and had gotten into the habit of faking anyway. Sure they darkened the room and "shut out all the noise distractions", but these are still not ideal conditions for some women, socks or no socks (although that piece of the research is interesting). And I can see where a woman might be inclined to fake, if she were already in the habit and getting tired of having her head in the machine and wondering if there were enough coins in the meter and wanting to "perform" for the researchers and so on; and now would really not be the time to admit to her partner of however long that he hasn't actually been doing it right for quite some time...

I'm not saying anything against men here. Really I'm not. I'm just noting that if the numbers are right and a whopping seventy percent of all women admit to having faked at some point or another with a partner, this methodology is flawed. Better, I think, to have the women pleasuring themselves.

And what came of all this (sorry again, I can't seem to stop myself)? Professor Gert Holstege saying: "...[I]f you are fearful, it is very hard to have sex. It's very hard to let go."

How much money went into this? Haven't women been saying something rather like this for, oh, thousands of years? And now it's real because there's science behind it? Oh please.

Some advice from Professor Holstege, free: men should know that "when you want to make love to a woman, you must give her the feeling of being protected."

And here I was holding out for the feeling of having a decent breakfast rustled up for me afterwards.