kind of desire because that’s how men experience desire, and culture sanctions concordant arousal as the expected kind of arousal because that’s how men experience arousal . . . but if women’s expected kind of orgasm is whatever men experience, then that should be clitoral stimulation, since anatomically the clitoris is the homologue of the penis. To say that women should have orgasms from vaginal penetration is anatomically equivalent to saying that men should have orgasms from prostate or perineal stimulation.
15 Certainly many men can orgasm from that kind of stimulation,but we don’t judge them if they don’t, and they don’t usually wonder if they’re broken if they don’t.
So apparently, according to cultural myth, women should be just like men—with concordant arousal and spontaneous desire—right up until we actually start having intercourse, and then we’re supposed to function in an exclusively female way, orgasming from a behavior that also happens to get men off very reliably. Men’s pleasure is the default pleasure.
But it’s not just men-as-default—if it were only about male pleasure, then women might be expected to orgasm while giving a male partner a hand job or oral sex, as much as we’re expected to orgasm during intercourse. No, there’s a specific, special expectation around orgasm with
intercourse. the evolution of the fantastic bonus So why, apart from men-as-default, is orgasm from intercourse the expected kind? And, while we’re at it, why do women vary so much in what kind of stimulation gives them orgasms?
The answer to both questions is, for different reasons . . . evolution!
Throw your mind way back to chapter 1, where I described our tendency to metaphorize biology—like how anatomists called a woman’s genitals “shameful” because you can’t see them when she stands up.
Nowhere in science is this metaphorization tendency more pervasive, more insidious, or more misleading than in the science of the evolution of women’s sexuality. Boy howdy, do we get it wrong—not so much because the science is wrong (though it has been!), but because we tend to interpret the science through cultural lenses, from the point of view of what we already expect, want, or like from women’s sexuality.
And what a men-as-default, puritanical culture expects, wants, and likes is pleasure for men and babies for women. For centuries, scientists assumed that if orgasm during vaginal intercourse is how men make babies, then
orgasm during vaginal intercourse must be how women make babies, too.
As I mentioned in chapter 6, women’s orgasm was even believed to be a sign of conception.
So that’s why orgasm during intercourse is such a big deal: women’s
sexuality as Men’s Sexuality Lite.
But.
In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, a book perhaps best described as “relentlessly precise,” feminist philosopher of science Elisabeth Lloyd analyzed forty years of research and more than 16 twenty theories about why women have orgasms.She concluded that the theory best supported by the available evidence is that women’s orgasm is not an evolutionary adaptation. Women’s orgasm has no relationship to reproductive success, it doesn’t promote egg fertilization or prevent miscarriage, it doesn’t even “suck” sperm into the uterus—in fact, it turns out sperm is transported most efficiently through a completely unstimulated 17uterus!
Instead, women’s orgasms exist as a byproduct—a result of the fact that male and female genitals develop homologously (remember from chapter 1?). Male ejaculation, with its close tie to orgasm, is crucial to reproduction, so orgasm is embedded in male sexual hardware in the brain and genitals.
As a result, orgasm is embedded in female sexual hardware, too, because: homology.
Women’s orgasms are, in this way, rather like the hymen. We make a really big deal out of them, culturally—both pro and con—but evolutionarily they’re more or less an afterthought. Both orgasms and hymens are all different from each other because the variety doesn’t affect reproductive success.
In other words, women can have orgasms for the same reason men have nipples.
My students often hate this idea. They are not intuitively comfortable with the idea that men’s orgasms are evolutionarily crucial and women’s orgasms are just a side effect. It feels Adam’s rib-y, as if the hypothesis is saying women’s orgasms aren’t important. And there are deep historical realities behind that feeling; somewhere in the three hundred years between figuring out that female orgasm isn’t necessary for conception and figuring out female orgasm isn’t an evolutionary adaptation, scientists began saying 18things about how female orgasm and the clitoris were “of no utility.”
Vestigial, like the appendix. So if the phrase “not an adaptation” sounds to you like “not important,” well . . . yeah. That could easily be what science used to think.
What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid.
Fortunately, the scientific method is specifically designed to help us overcome our stupid! And so science is moving forward, and the rest of us should move with it. In the twenty-first century, only some kind of woman- hating asshat would think that just because it doesn’t help make babies, women’s orgasm isn’t important. Lloyd, only half kidding, suggests we call the byproduct hypothesis the “fantastic bonus” account of women’s orgasm.
As in, you don’t have to have orgasms. You may, if you like—they are available to most every woman—but you get to choose! You can have orgasms if you want! Because: pleasure! Hooray!
Women’s orgasms are important because women’s sexual wellbeing is important, and orgasm is part of that for a lot of women. Not everyone is passionate about them, and that’s cool, too. Women vary, and we’re all normal.
Camilla, with her relatively insensitive sexual accelerator, had always been slow to orgasm and wasn’t all that interested in having more of them. They were a lot of work most of the time, and not rewarding enough to bother. She had masturbated very rarely in her life, and then more out of curiosity than desire. And she often wasn’t too interested in having an orgasm when she had sex with Henry.
Henry, gentleman that he was, had a hard time with this.
“If you don’t have an orgasm, how can I tell that I satisfied you?” he would ask.
“You can tell because I say that I’m satisfied! If I eat less pizza than you and say that I’m full, do you doubt me? If I have two glasses of wine and feel as tipsy as I want to feel, am I supposed to try to increase my tolerance? If I read a novel but don’t feel compelled to read the sequel, is there something wrong with that?”
“Of course not,” was the answer to all three questions.
“So why,” Camilla said, “do you need me to experience some physiological reflex in order to feel like I’ve had an awesome time?”
“Because that reflex is how I know you were satisfied!”
It was one of those disagreements where each person’s point of view is so obvious to themselves but so foreign to the other person that