LAUSR

Findings from our recent article in Sexualities, entitled ‘Faking to finish: Women’s accounts of feigning sexual pleasure to end unwanted sex’ (Thomas et al., 2017) were first presented in July 2016 at the annual conference of British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Section on Women and Psychology (Thomas et al., 2016). The BPS issued a press release highlighting the findings of the research, which sparked a flurry of media attention, and resulted in multiple interview requests and over 100 print, online, and radio pieces across 20 countries including Canada, India, Italy, Nigeria, the UK and the USA. In this commentary, we reflect on these experiences with media engagement, including the opportunities and challenges they presented as sites of discursive resistance. The initial focus of our qualitative research was on women’s accounts of feigning sexual pleasure. Despite being recruited to talk about consensual sex, we were struck by the degree to which participants connected negative sexual experiences to the practice of faking orgasm. For this analysis, we focused on all instances in Sexualities 2018, Vol. 21(4) 692–696 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363460717708148 journals.sagepub.com/home/sex