The Female Orgasm: Why Bother?

A woman who has never come in her life can still become great with child, so it’s clearly not required to keep us around. Why then has female climax survived? Choose your favorite hypothesis:

(1) Orgasm is designed to encourage a woman to copulate despite her better judgment, given that she might get knocked up and spend nine months—and a lifetime—largely incapacitated. However, evolutionary biologist David Barash and clinical psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton, co-authors of How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories, note that many other animals get the job done without the promise of “an orgasmal carrot.” In fact, they appear to fuck with a sense of “bored resignation.”

(2) Orgasm encouraged early females to have sex with a variety of males in pursuit of “sustained clitoral stimulation,” suggests anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, though these days it just contributes to “pair bonding,” or bringing couples closer together emotionally. Barash and Lipton counter that female orgasms may actually promote monogamy, based on research suggesting women are more likely to climax with familiar partners.

(3) Orgasmic contractions help push the sperm toward the egg or contribute to a safe passage in other ways such as by widening the cervix and/or weakening the mucus plug blocking the entrance to the uterus. Studies by biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis suggest if a woman does not reach climax or comes more than a minute before her partner, she retains much less sperm. There’s also the commonly cited but widely challenged “uterine upsuck hypothesis,” introduced in 1970 after two trials on a single volunteer supposedly found negative pressure (i.e., a vacuum) in her vagina.

(4) Rather than helping the sperm along, orgasmic contractions aid fertilization by pulling the cervix up and away, making the journey tougher for sperm but giving them more time to undergo a chemical transformation that prepares them to merge with the egg.

(5) Orgasm has developed as an exaggerated “post-copulatory display,” including audibles, to inform other potential mates the female has made her selection and been fertilized and/or to let her partner know she’s receptive.

(6) Orgasm is an evolutionary by- product—women don’t need to come, but since the clitoris is created with the same fetal tissue as the semen-shooting penis, climax also happens to exist in females. In other words, writes anthropologist Donald Symons, who proposed this explanation in 1979, female orgasm has no adaptive function but is simply a potential. It’s still around because it’s too hard to eliminate during the sensitive process of creating an embryo, and there’s no need, since it does no harm. (Biologist Elisabeth Lloyd, who examines all these hypotheses and a number of others in The Case of the Female Orgasm, thinks Symons’s conclusion is the best one.) The analogy most often cited is the male nipple, which has no function but appears because nipples develop before sexual differentiation. Barash and Lipton note the problem with this analogy is that the clit does do something.

(7) Orgasm is a way for a woman’s body to tell her brain she’s having sex with a suitable partner, i.e., a male who is confident and unhurried enough to satisfy her, which reflects well on the quality of his genes (dominant males don’t fear competitors who might interrupt) and his potential as a long-term provider. Barash first proposed this idea in 1979 (a good year for female-orgasm hypotheses); he and Lipton suggest someone test for a correlation between a man’s skill as a lover and his skills as a father. Evolutionary psychologist Clara Jones wonders if early women who had multiple orgasms attracted better mates because only the strongest, most dedicated males could and would stick around for more than one. It could also explain why females fake orgasms, the reproductive equivalent of a director at an audition saying, “Thank you. We’ve seen enough.”

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Photos courtesy of BeautifulAgony.com,
which collects images of orgasm taken from the shoulders up