How To Make Love With The Coital Alignment Technique

Perhaps fewer than 10% of women achieve orgasm during intercourse. 

In the 1980s, a sex therapist named Edward Eichel decided this just wasn’t fair.  So he came up with a new sex technique for couples who were regularly having intercourse together to enjoy female orgasm during lovemaking. And he called it, as you may know, “The Coital Alignment Technique” (or CAT for short).

If the CAT can help more women achieve orgasm during lovemaking, that has to be good for everyone! But what does it mean?

The coital alignment technique is designed to ensure that a woman reaches orgasm during lovemaking without any direct stimulation of her clitoris with fingers, toys or tongue. The movements of the couple’s bodies alone can bring her to orgasm. And even better, a couple can experience simultaneous orgasm this way. Here’s how…

How A Woman Can Orgasm During Intercourse

In the normal missionary or man on top sexual position there is no contact between the penis and the clitoris during thrusting. This means the amount of clitoral stimulation a woman receives during intercourse is just not enough to bring her to orgasm. The coital alignment technique overcomes this with co-ordinated movements of the man and woman’s bodies. These movements put pressure on her clitoris and can make her orgasm – hands free!

But Does Coital Alignment Work?

Of course coming up with a great idea is one thing: whether or not it works in practice is another!

In other words, does the Coital Alignment Technique (CAT) actually help people to enjoy better sex? And most importantly of all….

Does The CAT Help Women To Reach
Orgasm During Intercourse?

Edward Eichel, who came up with the CAT, conducted a study on about 40 men and women who had been taught how to use coital alignment when making love.

Just to remind you, the idea of coital alignment is to provide continuous contact between the penis and the clitoris during intercourse, with the object of making female orgasm not only easy but probable.

The basis of the technique is to help the man and the woman to maintain synchronized and rhythmic movements during intercourse. In Eichel’s research project on these couples, he assumed that learning coital alignment would enhance their sexual pleasure and satisfaction. And he was also interested to know if a couple’s relationship improved when the woman achieved orgasm during intercourse.

Sidebar: Interestingly enough, there’s evidence that one of the key factors in relationship stability and longevity is female orgasm during intercourse. Other types of orgasm (masturbation, oral) are not correlated with relationship stability. Make of that what you will.

However, for our purposes, the main focus is knowing whether or not the adjustment of bodily position during intercourse described by Eichel in his coital alignment technique is actually going to help women reach orgasm.

And of course, one might well wonder what effect this has on sexual satisfaction, and perhaps also on relationship quality and stability.

That’s why couples involved in the research project were asked about the importance of sexual satisfaction, how that would be defined, and how it affected their relationship.

There were also questions about how sex and orgasm actually felt for couples making love in this modified missionary CAT position.

Most of all, of course, the questionnaire was designed to establish whether orgasm frequency among couples using the cat was higher than the general population.

Effect Of Aligning With The CAT

I’m guessing you won’t be surprised to learn that couples who’d been taught how to use the CAT had significantly more orgasms, and were significantly more satisfied with their sex lives there will who hadn’t been taught the CAT.

No surprise there!

Sidebar: if a man comes quickly, even the CAT might not help his partner achieve orgasm during intercourse. That’s why controlling premature ejaculation is also a good way approach to extending lovemaking, and finding a better approach to sexual intimacy.

When you look at the information gathered from the study in more detail, however, it becomes clear that the benefits of coital alignment during lovemaking are more extensive than you might at first think.

Obviously the whole objective of the technique is to provide contact with the clitoris during lovemaking to help a woman orgasm more easily.

But the angling of the penis that comes from using this technique is not the natural horizontal plane in which the penis moves during conventional intercourse. It’s angled downwards – and with the wrong movement of the man, the woman can experience some discomfort.

Now, it seems that one of the ways in which the penis can move comfortably within a woman’s vagina when a couple are using the CAT is for the couple to maintain synchronous and rhythmic movements from start to finish during sex.

That’s because, if they’re not moving together in the right way, there can be a degree of physical discomfort for the woman, because the man’s penis is angled in a way that may uncomfortably press on her rectum.

But the interesting thing for me is that when couples have mastered the coital technique, and they may are able to maintain the correct form of movement that avoids discomfort and leads to female orgasm (and, as it happens, very often simultaneous orgasm for both man and woman), there’s a sensation of complete satisfaction reported by both men and women alike.

This sensation is that of an orgasm which begins in the penis and clitoris and then radiates throughout the pelvis to the entire body – the men and women in the study reported that their orgasms were significantly more “complete and satisfying”.

It’s not entirely clear why this is, but there’s a mention in the literature of how a woman’s orgasm can be reflexively triggered by the male orgasm.

Perhaps this is an example of that?

The couples in this study certainly seem to have simultaneous orgasm much more often than you might expect from the general population, where it is rather a rare event. (And indeed, hard to achieve.)

But over and over again, the couples using the Coital Alignment technique said that their build-up to orgasm was physically connected to the build-up of their partner’s orgasm, or that their orgasm was triggered by their partner’s orgasm, and that it was easy and natural for bodily movements of the two partners to continue unbroken throughout orgasm. This could be a cure for female sexual non-orgasm.

So there’s something going on here that goes well beyond the characteristic, perhaps rather boring and maybe unsatisfying pattern of the thrusting, active male, and the passive receptive female during lovemaking.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this: that when a man and woman work together continuously through the build-up to orgasm, their orgasms really are different because they come from both partners’ equal role in intercourse and the mutual stimulation that comes from this.

In any event, coital alignment appears to be a technique well worth investigating if you happen to be in a relationship where sex is not as satisfying as it might be, or perhaps even where your relationship quality is not as good as it might be.

(Just to remind you, there’s evidence that people say their relationships are more satisfying when the woman achieves orgasm during intercourse).

One of the things about the coital alignment technique that immediately strikes me is the need for men to cooperate with their partners – women can’t use the CAT alignment alone.

Whether or not partners cooperate might depend on more than a man’s willingness to engage in this particular type of lovemaking. It depends on his desire to fully engage on every level with his partner.

Why? Because this technique connects a couple at every level – physical, emotional, and even in attitude.

This could be, perhaps, one way in which couples can “come together” both during sexual intercourse and orgasm, as well as coming together psychologically and emotionally in their relationship as a whole.