Halle Berry has detailed the one thing she refuses to do in the bedroom nowadays as she opens up on how her attitude towards sex has changed following her perimenopause diagnosis.
The actor started dating Hunt when she was 54, and in June last year, Hunt announced he’d popped the question to Berry, but she took a while to give him a response.
The Catwoman star has been candid about her personal life, including a misdiagnosed sexually transmitted disease (STD) scare after she reported pain during sexual intercourse.
Sharing details at the A Day of Unreasonable Conversation summit in 2024, Berry said: “I feel like I have razor blades in my vagina. I run to my gynecologist and I say, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ It was terrible. [My doctor] said, ‘You have the worst case of herpes I’ve ever seen.’ I’m like, ‘Herpes? I don’t have herpes!'”
Both Hunt and Berry later received negative herpes tests, with the 59-year-old being told she had been experiencing a symptom of perimenopause, which affects two million women in the US each year.
Halle Berry and Van Hunt previously had an STD scare (XNY/Star Max/GC Images)
Speaking during a recent episode of the Sex With Emily podcast, she revealed that this experience had kick-started her journey into raising awareness around perimenopause, as well as changing her attitude around sex.
She said that while their sex life was ‘back on and popping’, she is more vocal about what feels good and what doesn’t, meaning that she no longer fakes an orgasm.
Pointing out to the audience, Berry went on to say that ‘everybody has faked it because you just want it to be done’, adding: “Sometimes you just want the pounding to stop.”
She continued: “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.
“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?'”
Berry revealed why she no longer faked orgasms (LISA O’CONNOR/AFP via Getty Images)
As for how prevalent orgasm faking is, a 2021 study examined the phenomenon across three different relationships, including heterosexual romantic relationships, and discovered that factors such as frequency of masturbation and self-rated importance of sex contributed to women faking pleasure.
Host Emily Morse and Berry both mention that sex is sometimes taught to be more catered towards the man’s pleasure, with Emily adding that twenty years ago, she found it ‘very performative’ as it could be based on ‘what we see in porn’, to which the actor said she also gets to tell her partner ‘don’t do what you see in porn’.
While chatting on The Drew Barrymore Show earlier this month, the Die Another Day star said the misdiagnosis had her and Hunt spending the ‘next 72 hours kind of doing the blame game’ before finding out neither of them had herpes.
“He said, ‘You do not have herpes’. And I was like, ‘OK then, what is it?’ And this was the defining moment for me, he said, ‘I don’t know, that’s what it looked like,” she said.
“And that sent me on my own reconnaissance and my own researching, and that’s when I came up with Dry Vagina Syndrome, that women have when they are in perimenopause. And I had all the symptoms of what that felt like.”
