Male physicians and researchers have created this 'focus' on orgasm. I remember being young and coming across the Kinsey report for that year, reading the Shere Hite 'surveys', Nancy Friday edited 'collections' (in her "Men in Love'' collection I came across the very first male fantasy that was submitted and it invovled a woman being tied up and sexually taunted, and that kind of made an imprint).. then there is Freud, the 'clitoral vs vaginal orgasm', the 'vaginal' orgasm today can be more associated to G Spot direct stimulation. Orgasm is more a physiological reaction, or has been physiologically defined? But it's not the same for every woman.

The common description I found amongst female friends as a late teen and in my early adulthood was the one where the woman was 'swept away' ( 'by waves of warm pleasure?' lol), kind of like the descriptions that were written in Romance novels. I'd have friends saying (of their first sex experiences etc) 'oh yes, I 'came''..or 'I had an orgasm!'...and I would sit there completely perplexed, because this was something that was eluding me - not in a solo sense it wasn't, I could reach the 'zenith' of sex all on my own but when it came to being with a person? No go - so for many years it wasn't a search of 'attaining' that orgasm with someone, but upon concluding sexual activity 'lying' there with the question: 'Did you feel pleasured?' as in whole body pleasure or even mental pleasure, because mind and body are closely linked.

For many years, even up to now, there are many psychologists still at loggerheads about the famous Descartes 'Mind vs Body' debate, and many 'non academics' fully realise that there usually is a link between the mind and the body, and then you might have scientists, etc stating that it's still 'under debate'.. such that women (especially) are uncertain as to what they are supposed to feel when they initially set out for the sexual journey.

So after many years, for me, sexual satisfaction can be anything. It can be associated with that sexual release that comes after male ejaculation (for some men, and this is fine), it can come from the feeling of pleasuring another.
Although I do have a problem with two things in my head.
Lately I see, or find (in my own 'thoughts') that bdsm is something that is more 'complex' in stimulation, compared to the conventional 'roll in bed' so to speak, a higher physical threshold is required, or preferred, or even a mental threshold, I can't fully explain it.
So the pleasure aspect, can't be defined within the standard 'sexual' research that takes place, or surveys.

When I was 13, I kind of stole my cousin's copy of the Cosmo report, and I'll never forget one section that asked couples what they found 'stimulating', the only option (apart from the standard, kissing, cunnilingus, fellatio, caressing etc) that wasn't 'conventional' was 'bite, slapping, pinching' - that was it. Even today, some surveys focus on the general or they don't go further in the options, or some sexual aspects are viewed as being 'distasteful'. In Friday's introduction in Men in Love, she even says that after reading the letters that were submitted to her she had an 'urge to wash' her hands.

Sometimes I think that many 'assumptions' of what sex ought to 'be' come from circles (academic usually): 'orgasm' being the perfect conclusion to sex.

But what is an 'orgasm' to one person, may be a totally different thing to another person. Orgasm is just another term for climax, the point a person reaches where they reach their physical zenith.
That's my own personal definition -it can be mental, physical(in a non 'romantic' sense), finally after many years of seeking some 'physical' definition that's been the basis of many sex books.