orgasmFrom personal experience, I can tell for sure that the intensity of orgasms can vary a lot.
Has there been any serious study to build some sort of “Orgasm intensity scale” same way we have Richter magnitude scale for earthquakes? (naturally, one for males and one for females)
Lab studies generally use a simple N point self-ranking scale, where 1 = least intense, N = most intense, and (N+1)/2 = average intensity. There's usually no effort to deal with problem of "What if my 3 is your 7?" which makes such rankings not very useful for interpersonal comparisons. However, such scales can be useful for comparing two different orgasms by the same woman.
"Orgasm in women in the laboratory--quantitative studies on duration, intensity, latency, and vaginal blood flow," the paper Lindes mentioned in a comment, is a good example of a study using a 5 point scale. Hartman and Fithian used an 11-point (0-10) scale in their monumental lab studies.
Noting the deficiency in lateral consistency, Kenneth Mah and Yitzchak Binik created an Orgasm Rating Scale, or ORS, an adjective-rich attempt at a scale for measuring the psychological characteristics of orgasm:
[W]e developed a theoretically based psychometric instrument to evaluate the subjective experience of orgasm (Mah & Binik, 2002). This adjective-ratings questionnaire, the Orgasm Rating Scale (ORS), was based on Davidson’s (1980) and Warner’s (1981) two dimensions of the orgasm experience, which we refer to as the sensory and cognitive-affective dimensions.
The sensory dimension encompasses sensations arising from the physiological events of orgasm, whereas the cognitive-affective dimension relates to the affective and evaluative experiences associated with orgasm experiences. Both dimensions also comprise empirically developed components (see Mah & Binik, 2002, for details on model development).
The conceptual model of the subjective orgasm experience thus includes two overarching dimensions (cognitive-affective, sensory), four cognitive-affective components (pleasurable satisfaction, relaxation, emotional intimacy, ecstasy), six sensory components (building sensations, flooding sensations, flushing sensations, shooting sensations, throbbing sensations, general spasms), and 28 adjectives representing their respective components.
Evaluation of this model indicated good-to-excellent model fit to data from a large sample of university students and also to data from an independent cross-validation sample of university students (Mah & Binik, 2002). Factorial invariance across gender was supported, suggesting that the two-dimensional factor structure provides an adequate model of the subjective orgasm experience for both men and women (Mah & Binik, 2002).
As we hypothesized, mean scores for the pleasurable satisfaction component were significantly higher for both genders in the sex-with-partner context than in the solitary masturbation context (Mah & Binik, 2002).
The ORS has been used by other researchers since then, so apparently it fills a useful niche.
However, what I think you really want is *The Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures, by Terri D. Fisher, Clive M. Davis, William L. Yarber, Sandra L. Davis, which includes the ORS and 200 other attempts at constructing moderately reliable ways to track subjective sexual experiences.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.