Elisabeth Lloyd, who recently published The Case of the Female Orgasm : Bias in the Science of Evolution, is blogging on the heritability of female orgasms:
The gist of her statement is that surveys and other studies haven?t shown any evolutionary basis for human female orgasm, and that in fact the evidence they have all points away from female orgasm being an adaptive trait.
In this post she criticizes a study by Tim Spector that concludes women?s ability to have orgasms during intercourse, and the ease and speed of those orgasms, is inherited. Lloyd?s cheerful ranting builds up a great head of steam. Nobly, she refrains from making fun of anything other than their faulty understanding of statistics and heritability. I?m not noble. I?m giggling madly picturing the Scientific Study of ?sperm upsuck? and time-to-orgasm of the Doublemint Twins.
to help beat the crap out of Spector et al:
??not only is female orgasm supposedly entirely genetic, it’s also a means of mate selection, and something you can blame your mother for.? Dr. Petra points out that , with no evidence cited, Spector and his fellow orgasm survey analyzers think that female capacity for orgasm is ?probably inherited from the mother.? Petra also slams the Spector crowd for saying that women never or rarely having an orgasm with intercourse is ?sexual dysfunction? and that ?some women orgasm too quickly?. The implication is that if you?re slut enough to come too quickly (remember, this is with intercourse) then you aren?t going to be very good at ?mate selection? which is an evolutionary disadvantage. Er, what?
Rowan Hooper, writing for New Scientist, has a good summary of the issue. Hooper mentions three main theories to explain the evolutionary importance of female orgasm:
1) The wonderfully named ?sperm upsuck? theory: Orgasm?s motions give a shove to sperm, slurping it up closer to that mighty traveler, the ovum.
2) The man-tester theory: If the guy?s fiddly and patient enough to get his mate off, he is a better child-raising mate. This theory is mentioned often in the press but apparently there?s zero evidence for it.
3) The social bonding theory: Orgasms promote social ties and give an evolutionary advantage. I wish this were true and that we were more like bonobos, who have the best naughty housewife lesbian leg-humping child-raising co-ops ever invented.
Hooper?s article ends on a note of promising weirdness. What Spector is hoping for is to do pharmaceutical or genetic fixes so that women can have just the right number of orgasms in just the right way. Not so many as to be indiscriminatingly slutty, and not so few as to be labeled neurotic and frigid, or whatever the ?problem? is defined to be.
