10th
After all this time, and all this science, scientists are still unsure of the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm. Men have orgasms so they can ejaculate and spread their seed to continue their lineage. But why do women have orgasms? And more curiously, why do so few women — 1 out of 10 — actually have them? What it comes down to is this: No one can really figure it out. The female orgasm might be just as vestigial as lactation in men, a byproduct of a bygone part of our biological makeup that shows how very similar we really are. Not that we’re complaining about our useless orgasms, but still. Sometimes it’s cool to know what’s going on behind all that excitement.
Wait.
Only 10% of women have orgasms?!
Because…. that seems incorrect.
I’m pretty fucking sure more than 10% of women masturbate, and that’s a means to orgasm. Right? RIGHT??
Okay, I’m about to go have an elusive female orgasm (or several) because I’m suddenly feeling extremely insecure about my ability to come. What if they take it away? WHAT IF??!?
There’s no fucking way. Maybe only 1 in 10 women report having orgasms during intercourse. But I HIGHLY doubt only 1 in 10 women have ever had an orgasm in her lifetime.
Plus, why are scientists still arguing about this? Female orgasms obviously have an advantage when you (male scientists!) stop implicitly assuming rape is an evolutionarily advantageous mating strategy AND if you stop projecting contemporary sexism back into prehistory.
I think it’s safe to assume that our ancient forebears had no fucking clue how reproduction actually worked. They likely understood that sex had something to do with it, but I doubt they even suspected the link between ejaculation and fertilization, especially given that human female ovulation is not obvious to the naked eye. Cavemen would have sex with cavewomen and sometimes a baby would be the result, sometimes not.
It’s likely that ancient humans thought women were the main (re)producers of life, i.e. had the most control over when they conceived. Raping women randomly might get you offspring, but it might also get you kicked the fuck out of your tribe/village/whatever.
We also know for a fact that human children are helpless for a long time after birth. A woman recovering from childbirth couldn’t go out and bring home a fucking wooly mammoth on her own. She needed a partner (or several) to help support her and her children while they were helpless. Given this (and some evidence from studying the few preindustrialized peoples left living in remote corners of the earth), it’s likely that early humans raised children communally. That would ensure evolutionary success, not just a bunch of cave dudes putting their cave dicks into unwilling cave vaginas. Ensuring your genetic material survives is not necessarily just about reproducing as many kiddies as possible—it’s also about making sure they actually survive into adulthood!
You can’t ensure your bundles of genetic material (children) survive all the rigors of a harsh primitive existence without a little help from not only your baby mamas, but your baby mamas’ mamas, papas, cousins, sisters, etc. And I doubt those necessarily tightly knit, extended family/kinship networks in early human societies would tolerate the men basically raping the women. We’re inherently social creatures and coerced sex is inherently anti-social.
OK, so winding down: female orgasms make evolutionary sense because orgasms feel fucking great! Women who feel good are more likely to stick with a particular partner (or two, or three, if you believe that ancient peoples were poly, which I do). Figuring out how female sexual pleasure works is something that comes with time and necessitates a sensitive partner…not a rapist. Given everything I’ve discussed above, it makes more sense to think that female orgasms are not merely a vestigial scrap tossed to women, but something that ensured bonding among partners, which was necessary for evolutionary success.
That’s the problem with speculation about evolution: If you start off with a bad, sexist, patriarchal, culturally-specific premise like, “female orgasms are useless”, then your theories are going to be bad. Oftentimes, shifting to a feminist perspective can answer questions that many scientists have deemed mysterious.
This right here.
I get really tired of being told that the things my body does are useless because men can’t see the evolutionary point in orgasm. Uh, ask a woman. After a man gives me an orgasm I can promise you I AM REALLY FOND OF HIM. At least for a while. Makes sense to do something that would keep mates together from an evolutionary sense, doesn’t it? Why do you think sex feels so great to begin with? Because we fucking need it and nature is smart like that.
On top of feeling good, I thought we’d already proven that orgasm in women releases a huge dose of oxytocin which bonds a woman to her mate. Oxytocin - also responsible for feelings of love.
Essentially, orgasms create love.
They can’t see why that might be useful?
And on average, how many of the world’s scientists are women again?
LORD, I’m going to start yelling about bonobos again.
Here’s the thing: many scientists consider our ancestors most closely tied to bonobos. Bonobo women are polyamorous — they mate with many different men (sometimes one right after another, THE HORRORS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY!), and their society is a communal one. (This is one of the reasons we’re tied more closely to bonobos than chimps — chimpanzees are loners, whereas bonobos and humans have always gravitated toward clusters of society.) For our ancestors, this practice would have resulted in the entire tribe taking care of the children, because many different people are invested in the child. (This could be either because the men didn’t know whose child it was, and therefore worked on the possibility that it could be theirs, or because, scientific understanding being what it was, there was a perception that all the men a woman had sex with contributed to creating the child.) This would be important in an evolutionary sense, because, if the modern concept of a family applied, the man’s death could very well result in destruction for the family. In a communal society where everyone takes care of everyone else’s children, however, this isn’t an issue.
And this is where the female orgasm makes sense on an evolutionary basis. Because why, exactly, would a woman want to have sex with multiple partners, thereby creating that tight-knit community, if she wasn’t getting any pleasure from it? She wouldn’t. And society would crash and burn.
So the tl;dr version: The female orgasm is why our species survived.
Yeah, I always thought the “we can’t explain that” approach to basic biological functions was a little strange. If you can’t explain it, the problem is probably with the way you’re looking at it.
(Insert long discussion of Sokal’s hoax, etc. as people tell me that literary feminism and science don’t mix.)
