WHEN actress Meg Ryan noisily acted out her interpretation of an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally, she was simply doing what many other women do in real life: faking it.
Hard facts and figures are difficult to come by, but when research by the American Association of Sex Education and Counselling shows 15 per cent of sexually-active women in the United States have never experienced an orgasm, a significant number are clearly in need of a few basic lessons.
And so to Orgasm School, a concept that seemed to pass Hong Kong by when dissatisfied women all over the world lined up to enrol in climax classes in the early 1990s.
But now, locally-based psychologist and family therapist Rebecca Dnistran is so convinced of the need for this kind of instruction in the territory she is offering her services as a trained sex educationalist and counsellor to teach the ABCs of sexual intercourse: Attitude, Behaviour and Communication.
'Part of the reason that I wanted to get into sex counselling is that I would often see couples who would not talk about their sexual interaction unless they were asked the right questions,' Dnistran says.
'Usually they present communication or a problem with a child as the issue, and they leave the sexual component sort of hanging on the backburner. But now, after training, I just ask them directly how satisfied they are with the sexual part of their marriage.' Dnistran believes there are certain characteristics shared by women who are rarely orgasmic: they do not talk about sex; sex is done to them; they rarely initiate sex; and the focus is on the partner's needs, not their own.
To change these one-sided attitudes, Dnistran offers a weekly class of an hour and a half for seven weeks to encourage a group of 'pre-orgasmic' women to speak about and dispel a few myths which surround women and their sex lives.