The Biological Function of Female Orgasm
It seems science is always trying to diss the female orgasm. Everywhere you look, there is another article saying that the orgasm isn’t biologically necessary. Well, it may not be, but it’s no “bonus,” either. It’s pretty crucial.
We recently had a piece discussing the female orgasm. “Does the female orgasm, like the male orgasm, have its own evolutionary raison d’etre and contribute directly to reproductive success? Or is it just an awesome bonus?”
Their conclusion is that the female orgasm serves no real function, but because the male orgasm is so vital to life, it (like nipples on men) is something that both males and females have evolved to have. They may be right. But I still call it bullshit.
This kind of research seems to let men off the hook. But here’s a memo: Just because the male orgasm happens to make a baby (sometimes), it’s no more important than the female. Put that in your pipe, dear researchers.
Here’s the important point to always make: A female orgasm has evolutionary significance. Why? Because women want to have sex they enjoy. The more sex they have, the greater their chances of continuing to have it and falling pregnant.
There are some theories that the female orgasm does increase fertility. Let’s just say my own personal research indicates that the better the sex for the woman, the more likely she is to conceive.
If sex is like ice cream then the orgasm is the hot fudge, whipped cream, and maraschino cherry on the top. They may not be necessary, but you can’t have a sundae without them, and they make the whole thing that much more enjoyable.
Yes, the female orgasm can be elusive, but just because it’s not messy and doesn’t cause a baby doesn’t make it merely a “bonus.”
The species wouldn’t be well propagated if a woman stopped enjoying sex. And once she’shad an orgasm or two, sex without them seems nice, but not mind-blowing.
Men are far more likely to experience orgasm than women. That imbalance runs contrary to traditional explanations of female orgasm.
That it strengthens bonds between mates and thus improves the care received by their children, or that the ability to elicit orgasm indicates a male’s virility, or that underlying physiological processes somehow improve reproductive success.
If female orgasms are an important evolutionary adaptation, they should be easier to attain. Also perplexing is that many women require clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm, not penetrative action. If female orgasms were meant to encourage sex, the opposite ought to be true.
All this has led to an alternative explanation, popularized in Elisabeth Lloyd’s popular 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm.
That there’s no adaptive purpose. Women simply happen to share biology with men, for whom orgasm is important. It’s an accidental byproduct, like men’s non-lactating nipples.
But while this idea is plausible, it hasn’t yet been rigorously explored. A survey of 1,803 pairs of opposite-sex twins and 2,287 pairs of same-sex twins, asked them how often and how easily they reached orgasm.
If female orgasm is evolutionarily connected to male, opposite-sex twins should have similar orgasmic function.
But that’s not what they found. Instead, while orgasmic function was genetically shared in same-sex twins. Brother tended to share function with brother, or sister with sister.
The relationship vanished in opposite-sex twins, though both share the same amount of genetic material. The underlying genetics, and thus the underlying evolutionary pressures, thus appear to differ.
This does not support the hypothesis that female orgasm is maintained only as a byproduct of selection on the male orgasm.
This suggests female orgasm might be a byproduct after all. It might also have been evolutionarily important to humanity’s ancestors, but irrelevant now.