As she approaches 60, Halle Berry is embracing a more confident, self-assured approach to intimacy, explaining that she’s no longer letting cultural expectations determine what happens in the bedroom.
The 59-year-old Oscar-winning actor discussed a persistent imbalance in heterosexual sex while speaking openly on the Sex with Emily podcast, making it clear she’s done going along with dynamics that don’t serve women.
At the center of the conversation was the so-called “orgasm gap” — the widely discussed reality that men are far more likely to orgasm during partnered sex, while many women don’t, and often feel pressured to pretend they did to wrap things up quickly.
As Berry bluntly told host Emily Morse, ‘everybody has faked it because you just want it to be done’. Research frequently backs up the idea that faking orgasms is common across age groups, with many women saying they’ve done it at least once.
She acknowledged that sometimes it’s about sparing a partner’s ego, but she also highlighted a more straightforward reason some women fake it: ‘sometimes you just want the pounding to stop.’
Psychology Today has reported that 59 percent of heterosexual women say they’ve faked an orgasm at least once with a partner, attributing the behavior to a mix of unrealistic expectations and misunderstandings about what typically leads to pleasure for women.
Berry also pointed to how porn can shape what people think sex “should” look like. In many porn scenarios, orgasms appear quick, frequent, and effortless — a depiction that doesn’t match most real-life experiences, yet can still influence expectations during intercourse.
On the podcast, she said she had previously played into that pressure because of ‘what we see in porn’, describing how sex could become ‘very performative’ rather than focused on genuine connection and mutual enjoyment.
She said: “I don’t do that anymore. We had to get there so that he felt good about bringing us to orgasm. We had to say that we did it so that he would feel good about himself. Because what is that doing?
“That’s putting his needs before our own.”
It’s understandable to not want to embarrass a partner, but consistently pretending things are working can keep couples stuck in the same unsatisfying patterns. Honest feedback can be uncomfortable in the moment, yet it’s often what helps a relationship develop better intimacy and sex that actually feels good for both people.
The takeaway is that bedroom communication should revolve around what partners truly enjoy, not what they think they’re supposed to enjoy. And despite how often it’s portrayed otherwise, orgasming from penetration alone isn’t the standard experience for many women.
Berry added: “I’m like, ‘No, I come first like you come first to you.’
“We both deserve to have this be a mutually enjoyable experience, so we both can roll over and go to sleep because we feel good—not one snoring and the other one looking at the ceiling, going, ‘What the hell?'”