May 17, 2005
Oooooh. Yeah. Right there....
by Lorraine Berry
And now for something completely different from the depressing news. The logic of the female (gasp!) ORGASM. Ahem.
The New York Times
May 17, 2005
A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm
By DINITIA SMITH
Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.
But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant - doing their part for the perpetuation of the species - without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?
More below the (labial) fold.
Trying to figure out the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm is a worthy science project, I think. In fact, I've done my share to try to contribute to this research, and here's a few things I've come up with.
1. As a friend of mine says, "The female capacity for multiple orgasm is nature's attempt to make it up to us for labor and delivery."
Let's face it. Labor and delivery, short of torture, is the most painful thing a human being can endure. (I know you guys think kidney stones are bad, but try passing an 8 pound stone.)
I don't want to spoil the rest of the NYT article for you, which is a doozy, with a bunch of scientists arguing over whether the female orgasm is an evolutionary trait, or whether it's vestigial--like men's nipples--and serves no other purpose than "fun."
Hah!
Male orgasms are necessary for pregnancy. But female orgasms, which are not necessary for pregnancy (ask James Dobson's wife) seem to serve no evolutionary purpose.
As neurologist Alice Flaherty notes in The Midnight Disease:
The right temporal lobe does seem to be critical for orgasm, at least in women...Despite the literary prominence of the male orgasm....its brain source has been harder to pin down than that of the female orgasm. One case study points to an evolutionarily more, well, primitive location that the temporal cortex, in the hypothalmus.
Male orgasm seems to originate in the reptilian part of the brain; women's in the creative part. Hmmmm.
So, here are my reasons why women get to have orgasms, other than making it up to us for childbirth:
- Nothing like a good round of multi-orgasmic sex for stimulating creativity. I get some of my best writing done in that after-sex haze. Men, of course, pass out and go to sleep, thus losing those hours of productivity.
- Female multiple orgasms remind us that our bodies are amazing, can be intense sources of pleasure, and it doesn't matter whether we can fit into that size 2 dress.
- Female orgasm is a political act; given how much space is devoted in western philosophy debating the sexuality of women, it's apparent that our capacity for pleasure scares the shit out of a lot of people.
- Female orgasm is metaphorical for the cyclic nature of life. Whereas male orgasm is a trajectory with an end, female orgasm is both an apex of pleasure and the building up toward another peak. Perhaps female experiences of sexuality offer an alternative view of the universe--although I'm loathe to engage in essentialist debate.
- 10-20 percent of women never experience orgasm, which I consider a tragedy. My hope for these women is that life has supplied them with equally more satisfying routes to pleasure.
Let the discussion begin.
Posted by in Bio-Power, Body, Civil Rights, Feminism, Gender, Life, Sex, Sexual Politics
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Say it loud, say it proud!
Certainly no dominionist reconstructionist type christian god would ever have created a brain that can release oxidase inhibitors all on its own flooding neurotransmitters that intensify the perceptions of the experience of joy, ecstacy and pleasure such as those found in the female homo sapien. Female orgasms are critical to the study of conscious changing neuro-pharmocology, not to mention intensely stimulating for us guys, Why else would we get pleasure from faked ones, if real multiple ones were not so consensually brain altering blissful?
2
Comment by: lorraine at May 17, 2005 07:13 PM
I have never faked one, so I've never observed a lover watching me fake one. I wonder if it's different than watching a lover watch me have a real one?
3
Comment by: aqualung at May 18, 2005 11:44 AM
I haven't read the Times piece, but I do know a little about this stuff, as you already know. Thinking about it some more, I think it might be explained by sexual development during embyogenesis. Sexual phenotype is determined by the presence or absence of testosterone during a critical period of differentiation. If testosterone is there, poof, the totipotent sexual anlage becomes a penis; if not, the Wolffian ducts (I think i have these right)disappear and the Mullerian ducts form the female genitalia and organs. Thus, the female and male reproductive apparatus derive from the same cells and tissues, which are nudged into one or the other direction by a hormonal switch. The clitoris is thus the female version of the penis, and vice-versa. So, if male orgasm is conserved because it increases inclusive fitness, the female orgasm is also conserved, because the apparatus is primordially the same.
Oh, and because it feels good, women who have orgasms probably fuck more.
So both of these observations might explain the female O.
Finally, not every genetically controlled trait or characteristic needs to be adaptive to be conserved.
4
Comment by: lorraine at May 18, 2005 11:51 AM
are you giving away my secrets, Aqualung?
1
Comment by: spyder at May 17, 2005 07:07 PM