Science Embarrasses Itself Over Female Orgasm…Again

I believe I’ve mentioned before that one of my all time favorite books is “The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution” by Elisabeth Lloyd. I’d recommend everyone check it out at some point, not only for the implications it carries for the evolutionary biology of female orgasm but also as a wonderful case study of how our cultural assumptions bias even the most stringent-seeming scientists. After all, even scientists are human.

Oooo! Ooo! I think I see an emotion!

I think this book should be required reading for everyone, but especially for those who want to go into the field of studying why the female orgasm might have evolved. If this were the case, we would be able to avoid nonsensical revisits to the same meaningless concepts, such as this new study, published a mere TWO months ago. It would be sad if it weren’t so funny.

To be fair, I don’t have access to the full text articles of the journal “Evolution,” so I’m basing my criticisms on the abstract alone. I think, however, that the amount of criticism one can generate based solely on the abstract is quite telling.

The premise of this study is once again to try to prove that human female orgasm developed to facilitate mating with high quality males. Women would somehow orgasm more with genetically “better” males, and this would lead to them bearing more of these better offspring. This hypothesis has even birthed a theory that says that female orgasm developed to allow women to cheat on their genetically average mates with hot genetic studs, using orgasm to increase the chances that they’d retain the hunky sperm they desired and make their mate into a perpetual cuckhold. Thanks, science! Love that one.

Anyway, what these anthropologists did (yeah, I just saw that they’re anthropologists. I love anthropology but this partially explains the non-scientific methodology) was obtain ratings of the masculinity, facial symmetry, dominance and attractiveness of males. They then asked the female partners of these males to self-report how often they had orgasms. Lo and behold, females with more attractive and dominant mates reported higher rates of orgasm during or after male ejaculation as compared to their unfortunate compatriots mated to less attractive men. One interesting note is that the correlation did not hold true when comparing rates of orgasm during masturbation or non-coital partnered sexual activity. Their conclusion? “Overall, these results appear to support a role for female orgasm in sire choice.”

Sigh.

All this would be well and good, maybe even interesting, if anyone, at any point in history, had bothered to correlate female orgasm with fertility!! I’m sorry I got mad there – but seriously. Okay, so maybe partners of socially-deemed attractive men have more orgasms during coitus. Maybe their partners have more practice. Maybe their partner turns them on so much their orgasms are easier to achieve. Regardless, what’s missing is evidence for this assumption that somehow achieving orgasm has anything to do with fertility. You DON’T need to have an orgasm to get pregnant, ask just about any teenage mom (that’s mean, but I stand behind it). This postulation also assumes that these measurements of facial attractiveness also translate into more viable offspring, which has also never been proven. In fact, though this study was done in fish, in some cases mating with the most attractive males has been demonstrated to result in lessened survival of offspring.

There’s this assumption among scientists (and now apparently anthropologists too) that is so beautifully critiqued in Lloyd’s book. This is that female orgasm is inherently related to fertility, and that better genes lead to better orgasms. In reality, the female orgasm is generally unrelated to penetrative sex for a good seventy-five percent of women. They are perfectly capable of having and enjoying penetrative vaginal sex (and, in fact, getting pregnant) without having an orgasm. Why would a trait like that evolve if it actually had something to do with reproduction? Why wouldn’t the clitoris have evolved to be inside the vagina if orgasm is so important for “sire choice?” Huh? HUH?

The lesson here is that the enigmatic female orgasm will forever attract academic attention and that sometimes this attention will come at the expense of ignoring good scientific principles. If you can’t prove that orgasm increases fertility, then what are you doing trying to prove that “more attractive” men give women more orgasms because of evolution? I’ll tell you what you’re trying to do. Piss me off. Well it worked, you anthropologists. It worked.