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The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution

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Science is the way we have of finding out how the components of the universe work. Science works very well, in general; our increase in understanding of everything from galaxies to quarks is really quite admirable. Nothing humans do is perfect, and the world's scientific effort, for all its successes, has a history that also includes some missteps, prejudices, and erroneous conclusions. It is somehow not surprising that in investigating sexuality, which is still for some people a controversial endeavor, there have been consequential mistakes. This is probably because the subject is both vitally important to us all and also private and covert. Compound this with particular investigation of female sexuality, and all sorts of prejudices might be expected to occur. In _The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution_ (Harvard University Press), Elisabeth A. Lloyd has examined how scientists have tried to understand how female orgasms evolved. "Female orgasm is a source of fascination for groups ranging from sex researchers to the lay public, and evolutionists are no exception," she writes. Unfortunately, Lloyd shows that the evolutionists' fascination has borne erroneous explanations. This is a tiny area of evolutionary science, but it has been explored and written about by many, often in opposing camps, and Lloyd has given a detailed and serious refutation of all explanations but one, the one she championed in a paper twenty years ago. Others might find this a tempest in a teapot, but Lloyd's serious tone and exhaustive analysis of the flaws in other researchers' ideas, and the causes of those flaws, make this a fascinating book of scientific advocacy.

Females don't have to have orgasms to bring forth children, so why do they have orgasms? Lloyd has tried to find every explanation that evolutionists have proposed, and has come up with twenty-one of them. Almost all have found the female orgasm to be an adaptation, meaning that it is a trait that has evolved to promote fitness in some way, but over and over again, she shows how the proposals of the "adaptationists" are flawed. Lloyd is adamant: "There is no plausible evidence that links orgasm to reproductive success." Her arguments against this proposal are many, among them that the number of women who always orgasm with coitus is a minority, about 20%; one would think that if orgasms were an important adaptation that led to successful reproduction, they would be far more common and far easier to get by coitus, rather than, say, masturbation. A particularly attractive explanation, one which has even been spotted on the Discovery Channel, is charmingly called "The Upsuck Hypothesis". It says that during orgasm, the uterus has a drop in pressure, becoming a sort of vacuum cleaner to suck up any sperm deposited by the male. This would be a reproductive advantage, but even Masters and Johnson found no evidence that upsuck happens.

Lloyd finds plausible one explanation of female orgasm, the one that does not insist that it is an adaptation. Donald Symons in 1979 proposed the "byproduct account". Female orgasm is a potential based on anatomy, a potential activated only in some females of some few species. The anatomical foundation is similar to the nipple in the male. Operating female nipples are strongly selected for, since they supply nutrition, and are present in the embryo, even before the embryo differentiates sexually. Thus, inoperative male nipples are a byproduct of selection operating on the female. In the same fashion, orgasm and ejaculation are strongly selected for in the male because of sperm delivery. The hardware involved in such actions is there in the embryo that might turn male or might turn female, and females get the erectile, highly-enervated clitoris because the analogous penis in the male is so important. (This also offers an explanation for the puzzling fact that the key point of sexual stimulation for females is not in the vagina which receives the sexual organ of the male, but on the connected tissue of the clitoris.) There are feminist objections to this idea, because a female orgasm is derivative from the male one, but this is putting ideology before science: "Its historical genesis does not dictate our cultural attitudes toward female orgasm." Lloyd has looked widely at this explanation and all the others, and has taken pains to list evidence and arguments pro and con. She has also given a broader critique to show how androcentrism or illusory concepts of human uniqueness have caused the mistakes in reasoning of the adaptationists. This is a far from titillating volume; surely there are not even fetishists who could get off on so many pages of deconstruction of one arcane theory after another. As an account of competing scientific ideas and how preconceptions form them, however, it is a uniquely valuable account.

It's not been uncommon to wonder why women have an orgasm - a reflex devoted to pleasure with no apparent further purpose, including procreational. Naturally, lay people and scientists alike have wondered whether it has some hidden, evolutionary purpose. And so, apparently, there have been 21 theories on the subject since the mid 20th century, all speculating on the purpose of the female orgasm. And according to professor Lloyd, with one honourable exception, they have all been just that - speculation - for in this book Lloyd conducts a meticulous piece by piece deconstruction, and ultimately demolition, of these attempts to crack the conundrum.

Much of the 20-odd conclusions are based, among other things, on surveys, and Lloyd's first salvo comprehensively points to the holes in these surveys. They fail even to achieve a proper definition of the female orgasm, and then go on, on the say-so of unreliable witnesses and dodgy surveys, to build a picture of the experience of womankind in this area. Anatomically speaking they by and large even neglect the crucial matter of the varying proximity of clitoris to vagina. In my observation, in terms of the general survey of the phenomenon, they also seem to neglect the importance in pre-orgasmic arousal of the panoply of mental issues involved. At some point in the evolving literature, investigators did come to differentiate between 'assisted and unassisted orgasm with intercourse', but I suspect they don't really understand what they're talking about here either, given the great variability of practices that the term 'assisted' might cover here.

I was pleased to see that Lloyd, when considering the supposedly differing post-orgasmic refractory periods between men and women, unusually, does at least give a one line acknowledgement of the practice of male 'retention' and what may be learnt from it.

Cutting to the chase, the one theory that Lloyd is sympathetic to, is the 'byproduct' theory, developed by Donald Symons in the 70's. Evolutionary biologists distinguish between adaptations and traits, more broadly speaking. An adaptation is a development which contributes to reproductive success (hominids standing up on their hind legs), while a trait, although genetic and inherited, may or may not (like our differing eye colours.) Writers in this field have displayed an inclination, tantamount to an assumption, that the female orgasm is an adaptation. Unpalatable as it may be, especially to a certain section of feminists, all the evidence for female orgasm being an adaptation proves to be paper thin. The trait/byproduct theory, on the other hand, runs thus. The human embryo lies sexually undifferentiated for the first 8 weeks of life; it has a genital tubercule, and it also has nipples. Then the embryo becomes either male or female. The female develops nipples capable of delivering milk, while the male nipples, with no need so to do, remain, a spinoff of the primordial nipples, with no reproductive (or essentially other) function. Similarly, while the genital tubercule in males goes on to become the penis as we know it, the female equivalent emerges as the (already sexually sensitised) clitoris.

It is argued that female orgasm is an adaptation only if in ancestral populations orgasmic females enjoyed greater average reproductive success than nonorgasmic females. Naturally, it is rather difficult to discover very much about the sexual experience of our female ancestors. Given that on any public scale, the clitoris and female orgasm have only even become known to a small section of humanity for a small section of history, I would suggest that they may have lain dormant, undiscovered, and totally useless and unused for the majority of humankind, for the majority of our time on earth so far.

One of the threads in the book looks at research into female orgasm in the animal world. There are greater and lesser supporters for the notion that females in the wild have orgasms. I would suggest that the relevant issue is not whether or not they actually have orgasm, but the degrees to which they are potentially capable of orgasm - and this is a stronger possibility. Some monkeys and apes are capable of learning to take advantage of the orgasmic possibility for their own pleasure - possibly, just like women have done!

The book is subtitled 'Bias in the science of evolution.' The 'case' in the main title is both specific and general. Specifically, about investigating the female orgasm, and generally, about the pitfalls of scientists' own prejudices creeping into their research. Towards the end Lloyd summarises this thread of the book with a list of eight assumptions she identifies as having been made by the scientists under scrutiny here. Having said all that, she does make the point that although unpersuaded so far, she remains open to the case for the adaptive orgasm, should further evidence be forthcoming.

There was just one book, (The Sex Contract, by anthropologist Helen Fisher) which, in her own admission (personal communication), the author confessed she had overlooked in her research, and has resolved to review soon. I suspect that this one too will fall under her analysis. I find her argument persuasive. (So did the late Stephen Jay Gould.) I leave the final judgement to her scientific peers. As a lay person (!), I welcome any further demystification, demythologising and de-media-fying of this glorious territory. The truth will set us free - in the boudoir, as elsewhere.

Elisabeth's A. Lloyd's book is a comprehensive survey of the theories and conjectures that try to explain the evolutional basis for the female orgasm. It is extremely well argued, and convincely rips into the biases of those who have proposed various adaptational (versus exaptational) accounts. Lloyd shows how theorists have misconstrued and ignored research into human female orgasm and primate female orgasm when drawing their conclusions, and makes a convincing case that many theorists started out with an a-priori notion that human female orgasm has to be adaptive. This book is great documentation in one area on how biased scientists can be, how undisciplined their reasoning can be, and how much this invalidates their conclusions. And the upshot is, if scientists are biased on this subject, how many more areas of research are they biased about?

Professor Lloyd has the advantage of being a historian and philosopher of science, as well as being a biologist. Thus, this book succeeds on several levels. Firstly it provides a well-organised review of the numerous theories advanced to account for the evolution of female orgasm. The most credible theory is due to Symons, who posited that orgasm in women represents a homologue of the male orgasmic response. As such it is an epiphenomenon....much like the nipples, or the vestigial uterus masculinus are functionless homologues in males.

The bizarre theories of evolutionary psychologists, such as Baker and Bellis are reviewed fairly, critically and at some length in this book. Hopefully this will help to put to rest ideas that are still cited in the literature, concerning the existence of "sperm retention" orgasms in humans, and other absurdities. The second value of the book is thus its detailed analysis of the flawed methods and poor reasoning applied in various studies of female orgasm. The third perspective it provides is historical, tracing how such theories developed and how they came to be widely cited by authors who were at several removes from the experimental reports and (presumably) failed to check original sources. Professor Lloyd clearly checked her sources, and has written a wonderful book.For there was bias in this field, and it needed exposure.

In her compelling book The Case of The Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd examines whether or not the female orgasm is an evolutionary adaptation resulting from the process of natural selection, or rather an evolutional by-product of natural selection in the male and, hence, a function of the embryologic relationship between the penis and the clitoris. In short, does the female orgasm have its own evolutionary raison d'etre, or is it a happy accident? To elaborate: for the female orgasm to be a true adaptation, it would need to contribute directly to reproductive success (like the male orgasm).

Ms. Lloyd examines twenty-one theories that seek to promote the female orgasm as an adaptation -- from the role of orgasm in helping to facilitate the pair-bonding process to upsucking and sperm-competition -- and finds each and every one of them lacking. One of her main arguments is that it's been well documented that the vast majority of women do not experience orgasm as a result of intercourse alone, or do so inconsistently, and that clitoral stimulation is not a consistent feature of intercourse. She refers to this as the orgasm/intercourse discrepancy (and it's one that far too many women are all too familiar with).

Thus, if orgasm fails to occur via intercourse in a significant percentage of the female population, or if it only occurs haphazardly, as every major sexology study/survey on the subject indicates, then it stands to reason that that female orgasm does not play a pivotal role in reproductive success. Since women can conceive without experiencing orgasm, it cannot be considered an adaptation.
But does this theory goes against the grain of survival of the fittest? If mutual pleasuring and long-term sexual fulfillment are understood as an aspect of the natural selection process, then it can be argued that the female orgasm is an inherent screening device, and that couples who are more attuned to each other and more sexually fit (mutually orgasmic) are more likely to stay together and have more babies than their sexually unfulfilled counterparts. Yes, conception can occur without female orgasm, but natural selection favors the survival of the sexually fittest.

Another explanation for the origin of the female orgasm is based on what is known as the "by-product" theory, which holds that orgasm is a trait that is heavily selected in males (reproduction wouldn't happen without it). As men and women are embryologically undifferentiated during the first eight weeks of gestation, the clitoris is homologous to the penis, and thereby retains the male capacity for orgasm. Penises grow out, clitorises grow in, but they share the same organic structure and tissue.

Says Lloyd, "It is crucial to note that the penis and the clitoris are the "same" organ in men and women ... [T]he nervous and erectile tissues involved in orgasm in both sexes arose from a common embryological source... These tissues are what the sexual organs are built from, especially the penis in males and the clitoris in females."

On the subject of genital similarity and orgasmic potential, Lloyd continues, "A concert of interactions is involved in producing orgasm in males - these interactions are present in both mature and immature males - and does seem to be paralleled in females."

But from an evolutionary vantage, we recognize that the female and male orgasm are fundamentally different, in that the male orgasm is essential to reproduction whereas the female orgasm is not. The same principle also explains the origin of male nipples. Accordingly, the biological necessity of nursing our young makes the nipple so highly selected that males develop embryologically immature structures as an evolutionary by-product.

Similar to the clitoris, the male nipple contains highly sensitive tissue that contributes to male sexual arousal and pleasure. So perhaps this facility for non-procreative arousal does have a purpose after all, in that it contributes to greater sexual pleasure and, hence, higher rates of conception. Couples that best stimulate each other sexually in a variety of ways are less likely to grow bored, more likely to stay together and, therefore, naturally selected to produce more young.
So why does this rarefied debate of adaptation versus by-product matter to the average person who just wants to enjoy orgasms? Because we tend to believe what is "natural" or biologically determined/selected is what is correct. Our sexual scripts derive from a paradigm of procreative necessity.

The dominant ideology of sex valorizes coital penetration above all else. But I heartily maintain that our ability to sustain sexual interest and pleasure each other outside of procreative purpose in a variety of ways naturally selects the endurance of healthy "pair-bonds." It inscribes a Darwinian ethos that favors the survival and reproduction of the sexually fittest.

As a sex therapist I receive emails daily from women who are unable to achieve orgasm via intercourse and wonder, "what can I do to change this? What's wrong with me?" Well if we stop thinking of female and male orgasms as something that "naturally" should result from intercourse, we can liberate both men and women from the oppressive intercourse-discourse (a belief that there's a right way to have orgasms, and simultaneous ones at that).

Understanding and respecting the vital importance of mutual sexual pleasure ensures the health and success of our long-term relationships. By finding new and varied ways to pleasure each other, we can abate the cultural compulsion to get bored, break up, and search for new partners. The role of the female orgasm, which I celebrated in She Comes First, is an essential starting point for liberating ourselves from the hegemony of sexual normalcy based on biological determinism.

Much thanks to Dr. Lloyd for providing such fine intellectual fodder.

Elisabeth A Lloyd uses an analysis of a number of theories about the adaptational significance of the female orgasm to criticize adaptationism, male bias, and the assimilation of the human female with her procreative role. Unlike Lloyd, women have previously highlighted and attacked male bias because it viewed evolution as acting primarily on the human male with women only evolving on the coat-tails of the male (even bipedalism and intelligence have been mostly viewed as substandard by-products in females having been selected for in males). But, ironically, here Lloyd has grabbed the by-product/coat-tail view of the female orgasm for her attack on male bias and as a way to disconnect female sexuality from reproduction and men.

Lloyd is not saying that the female orgasm is unnecessary or unimportant today. She is also not saying that the clitoris, female sexual tissue, and female arousal are not an adaptation that has been selected for in females. This is what she fails to explain clearly and is the major fault of her argument. Lloyd repeatedly states that it is only the orgasm, not the clitoris/sexual tissue/sexual arousal, that is the by-product - but as it is the clitoris that is normally taken to only exist because of the selection for the penis, and she does not challenge this, her argument remains confusing. She states that females have the capacity for orgasm because orgasm is strongly selected for in males - yet if female sexual tissue has been selected for independently in females, and the capacity for orgasm exists in this female sexual tissue, then surely orgasm has been selected for in females or, at least, orgasm is a by-product of the selection for sexual arousal in females themselves.

It is as if brain mechanisms for language were selected for in both sexes but only males actually needed to speak to reproduce. Females would only speak with difficulty. All the words that built up inside women's heads would be essential in order to interact with males and hear males but the actual climax of speech is not really necessary for women. Women selected to be bursting with words but not to actually speak! How frustrating!!!

If the orgasm is a potential in females that exists because of the selection for sexual tissues (and, one would imagine, some sort of sexual satiation) in females then there is surely no need for orgasm to actually come about first in males for it to then appear (even haphazardly) in females.

There are numerous other problems with Lloyd's argument. She does not attempt to look at the origins of orgasm itself nor whether it really needs to exist at all or does in fact exist in non-human males. Just as she decides that females of some mammals are experiencing uterine contractions that are not orgasms then it should also be considered that males of other species are experiencing ejaculatory contractions that are not orgasms. We know that males of most species manage to transfer sperm to females without any need for orgasm. And anyone who has seen mating in most mammals cannot presume from their behavior that even the males are experiencing anything like the human experience of orgasm.

Lloyd also dismisses any relevance for the influence of social attitudes towards female sexuality. In a world of contolled female sexuality, arranged marriages, forced monogamy, purdah, honor killings, female genital mutilation etc etc it is surely impossible to believe that none of this influences the female sexual response and behavior. Female desire itself, which Lloyd says HAS been selected, mostly has no consequence in human female reproductive success never mind orgasm. Females don't even have to be sexually aroused to conceive.

But ultimately if female orgasm is not necessary for conception can it possibly be an adaptation? While trying to challenge male bias Lloyd never mentions how different females are from males in cyclic fertility (ie ovulation, and therefore the potential to become pregnant, is relatively very rare) nor how greater discrimination in mate choice would be expected to influence the female sexual response and behavior. It has been observed in chacma baboons and talapoin monkeys that females at the height of their sexual swellings, and therefore fertility, can experience orgasm while urinating and defecating. Lloyd is too quick to dismiss the cyclic connection in females, not only how female sexual desire varies throughout the cycle but how the ease of reaching orgasm varies. She does not consider the evolution of the female's ability to desire and enjoy sex outside of the hormonally motivated sexual period of estrus - something the males never needed to do.

Though Lloyd has produced an interesting criticism of theories so far, her attempt to avoid male bias has not taken her far enough into the female side of things. Male sexuality has remained relatively simple through time but mammalian female sexuality has gone through much more evolution in terms of mate choice and the massive work of mothering, and it can only be expected to be far more complex than that of the male. Only when we concentrate on this complexity will we get a better understanding - and there is certainly a lot of room in this for an important selected place for the female orgasm, probably connected to the hormones, muscles and various mechanisms of arousal, pregnancy, birth, lactation and mother-offspring bonding.

Surprisingly, Lloyd ends with the statement that the case is still open! This comes across as inconsistent as the book very much seems in favor of closing the case. Lloyd's own agenda is the main focus of the book, ie to undermine adaptationism and especially to distance female sexuality from heterosexual sex and reproduction. The main fault is the difficult dichotomy she has resorted to - that the clitoris etc has been selected for in females but not the orgasm this very tissue enables, the enabling only coming indirectly through selection on the male - and because of this her whole argument is based on a shaky, though cleverly hidden, foundation.

Elisabeth Lloyd and others love to cite the infrequency and unreliability of female orgasm as support for the hypothesis that female orgasm can have no evolutionary or biological importance, yet they don't seriously address the question of how constant their numbers are across cultures. Lloyd bases her arguments on studies from the U.K. and U.S. -- two of the most sexually-repressed cultures to have existed on this planet. This is a huge gap in the argument.

Given what we know about how context-dependent female orgasm and female sexual response in general tend to be, to base species-wide conclusions on these two limited cultural groups is spurious. To simply state that only about 20% of women always or almost always have orgasm with coitus, as Lloyd does, without qualifying these data in terms of cultural context strikes this reader as being glaringly unscientific.

Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality