On Sun, 3 Oct 1999, Sam Pawlett wrote:
> The question is finding a physiological purpose for a physiological
> phenomenon. Some, like Donald Symons, even argue that the female orgasm
> itself is non-adaptive because most female mammals do not experiece
> orgasm in ordinary copulation. They only experiece orgasm through
> clitoral stimulation.
I must admit a fondness for the theories on the subject put forth by Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book _The Descent of Women_. She had many interesting speculations on the subject. But her first line of argument was that there was not a shred of evidence that human females were the only ones to have orgasms. Has modern research established differently?
<quote>
The current assumption concerning subhuman females is that they experience nothing corresponding to the orgasm as we know it. Two main reasons are advanced for believing this . . . . the first is that the mechanism in women is so deplorably defective that it must be a recent innovation that hasn't had time to perfect itself by the processes of natural selection.. . . The second is based on the fact that your average female quadruped after copulation strolls away as if nothing had happened, thus plainly indicating that [the pleasures of orgasm] are a closed book to her. . . .
As for the sangfroid of the quadrupeds, may be not attribute this to the fact that they make far less fuss about everything than we do? If we merely vomit, we are liable to make a fair amount of noise over it, and then sit pale and damp and panting on the edge of the bathtub for five or ten minutes before our metabolism returns to normal; whereas many animals can disgorge almost as silently and neatly as they eat, and immediately "walk away as if nothing had happened." We only know something has happened because there is as it were an end product. In the same way, everyone appears to believe that male animals experience orgasm because in that case too there is an end product; but if we expected a male chimp to register his sensations by demonstrations of rapture, or exhaustion, or even post coital tristesse, we should wait a long very long time, and perhaps mistakenly conclude that in man too this behavioral reward was only just beginning to evolve. . . . .
Suppose, then, we scrap all this supposition and begin at the beginning with a really daring hypothesis. Suppose we get right away from the androcentric concept that sees a world where male animals are created with sexual needs and desires, the attainment of which is attended with sexual pleasure, and female animals are created to serve their needs and facilitate their pleasures and bear their young.
Let us try to imagine a more democratic sort of universe, where nature or God or evolution or what have you looks at the thing a little more impartially, instead of regarding the females as second-class citizens.
The problem was a fairly simple one: how to induce animal A and animal B to get together for purposes of procreation. The answer would seem to be simple, too: Let them enjoy getting together. What conceivable evolutionary purpose would be served by going only halfway to this solution, by making animal A desirous and pleasure-seeking and rewarded with pleasureable sensations, and animal B merely meek, and submissive and programmed to put up with it?
Every piece of circumstantial evidence we possess concerning animal behavior points to the conclusion that the sexual drive is a mutual affair -- that both sexes feel a need, both are compelled to satisfy it, and both experience copulation as a consummatory act. Sarel Eimerl and Irven de Vore point out:
"People do not eat because they need food to survive, nor do they practice sex because copulation is essential for the preservation of the species. Nor does a human mother hold and fondle her infant because if deprived of her attentions it would die. We eat, we copulate, and if we are mothers we look after our babies because such activities are pleasurable."
It is, of course, theoretically possible to regard sex not as a cooperative social bond, but rather as a specialized nonlethal form of predation, and to point out that when a cat eats a mouse, as long as the cat enjoys it, it is not necessary for the mouse to get a kick out of it, too.
Indeed, to judge by their terminology, the predatory parallel haunts men's minds with a curious persistence. In most languages there is some variation on the metaphor that regards a man in pursuit of a female as a wolf, and the girl as something edible -- a swell dish, a chick or a peach.
In the animal world, however, the parallel won't hold up for a moment. The mouse gets eaten against his will; but in no mammal species, with the sole exception of Homo sapiens, does a female in the wild ever get mated against her will. . . . . [various confirmations of this, followed by various examples of female mammals displaying sexual initiative] . . . All I am asking you to deduce from this is that long before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, female mammals were conducting themselves as though sex was to them, as much as to their mates, a desirable and pleasureable experience; that there is no reason to believe, if the males obtained a behavioral reward, the females did not receive an equal behavioral reward.
<unquote>
For Morgan, the question is not Why was female orgasm suddenly invented with humans? but rather Why is human female orgasm so much less straightforwardly connected to copulation than it is in subhuman females? For which she also has a number of interesting speculations, most of which have to do with the travails of standing upright. In a nutshell, she believes the pleasure-providing cells were originally in the front of the vagina, as they are in most other mammals, where they are effortlessly stimulated by rear entry. But when evolution made the angle ever worse, and then made frontal entry possible -- a position that didn't stimulate those cells much at all -- the disaster of human sexual response was set in motion. Since then, the female pleasure-giving system has somewhat reorganized itself; in the course of a relatively short time on the evolutionary scale, what were originally secondary pleasure-giving cells have become more sensitive; and clever humans have learned how to get even more out of them by paying explicit attention to them. This is for her the origin of the importance of the clitoris, which she thinks plays very little role in female orgasm in other mammals, who are as straightforwardedly organized as their male counterparts to come through mere friction. (Morgan goes on to speculate that the terrible time during which things were being reorganized -- when for humans alone among the mammals it was possible for pleasure to be all on one side during copulation -- did a lot to screw up the deep structure of human sexual relations in ways that yet plague us today.)
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com