Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid Orgasm, gender, and responses to heterosexual casual sex Jennifer L. Piemonte ⁎ , Terri D. Conley, Staci Gusakova University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States of America ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Casual sex Gender differences Emotional reactions Orgasm Emerging adults ABSTRACT There is a persistent gender difference in how positively young adults react to casual sex, with men reporting slightly more positive responses than women. Multiple factors have been studied as possible explanations for the gender difference, but nothing has completely accounted the variance between women and men's responses to casual sex. Although prior research identifies sexual pleasure as a primary factor associated with positive re- sponses, women and men may understand or report on this construct differently due to gendered socialization, making it difficult to compare responses across groups. One measure that is less subject to subjective inter- pretation or response bias may be whether a person orgasms during a given casual sex encounter. In the present research, we test the relationships between gender, orgasm, and reactions following most recent casual sex encounter across three samples of young adults. Results indicate that orgasm mediates the gender difference in how positively participants respond to casual sex. Specifically, men are more likely to orgasm during casual sex, and people who orgasm during casual sex are more likely to experience positive reactions afterwards. Therefore, while gender may be one way to describe the discrepancy in how positive people feel following casual sex, orgasm explains it. 1. Introduction Countless books, research, and popular press articles conclude that casual sex is incompatible with young adults' best interests and well- being, using telling titles such as Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (Stepp, 2007) and Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (Regnerus, 2017). In these works, the authors frequently express concern that young women are especially at risk of emotional distress or psychological damage from engaging in casual sex (Grossman, 2014; Kerner, 2013; Sciortino, 2015; Williams, 2005; Townsend, Kline, & Wasserman, 1995). Young women are considered particularly vulnerable to such consequences, as well as uninterested in sex outside of committed relationships or emotional intimacy (Bogle, 2008; Waite & Joyner, 2001). Despite the perceived risk facing young women, much research indicates that young adults have largely positive reactions to casual sex (Owen & Fincham, 2011; Owen, Fincham, & Moore, 2011; Stinson, 2010). Within this robust finding, however, men consistently report more positive reactions than women do (Dube, Lavoie, Blais, & Herbert, 2016; Fielder & Carey, 2010a; Glenn & Marquardt, 2001; Woerner & Abbey, 2017). Although it may be tempting to conclude that gender is intrinsically responsible for this difference, research suggests gender may be con- flated with sexual pleasure—specifically orgasm (Kennair, Bendixen, & Buss, 2016; Woerner & Abbey, 2017). Even though high levels of sexual pleasure are associated with more positive reactions to casual sex, pleasure is inconsistently defined and measured across studies (Armstrong, Hamilton, & England, 2010; Kennair et al., 2016; Mark, Garcia, & Fisher, 2015). Furthermore, orgasm has never, to our knowledge, been tested separately from measures of sexual pleasure in these studies, even though men are much more likely to orgasm during casual sex than women (Armstrong et al., 2010; Frederick, St. John, Garcia, & Lloyd, 2018). Orgasm may therefore be a specific factor that explains why individuals report different responses to casual sex. In the current research, we examine the association of orgasming during a given casual sex encounter with post-encounter reactions, above and beyond gender. 1.1. Emotional reactions to casual sex There has been an expansive field of research into emerging adults and casual sex, given that emerging adulthood is a developmental stage characterized by the opportunity for individuals to explore their iden- tities and experiment with different types of relationships (Collibee & Furman, 2016). Just as many emerging adults do not make long-term career commitments during this period, they also do not make long- term relationship commitments, opting instead to navigate less https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.06.030 Received 2 December 2018; Received in revised form 13 June 2019; Accepted 25 June 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, 530 Church St, Ann Arbor 48109, United States of America. E-mail address: piemonte@umich.edu (J.L. Piemonte). Personality and Individual Differences 151 (2019) 109487 0191-8869/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd. T