Yoshie:
Charles Brown claims that female orgasm was selected for because it promoted reproductive success by compensating for costs of pregnancy and labor pains; and Bill Bartlett asserts that female orgasm was an evolutionary advantage because it promoted reproductive success by fostering pair bonding. What would make Charles' theory convincing? Evidence that women who have more orgasms during copulation tend to have more children than those who have fewer or none during it.
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^^^^^^ CB: Yes, this evidence would tend to support the proposition. However, the issue is the origin of this trait ( capacity to have orgasm during intercourse). The circumstances of the origin of the capacity to have orgasm during intercourse are in the very remote past, and it is not clear that any present day experiments or studies can sufficiently duplicate that past. Modern humans are in drastically different situations from those of early humans 200,000 to 1 million years ago. The selection pressures on modern humans as compared with ancient humans are likely to be very different, and no simple experiment or study today is likely to duplicate the survival and fertility matrix of that time.
Also, the origin of the trait is a different development than the process of comparing women who develop the trait and then are circumcised with women who are not circumcised.
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Why reject both Charles' and Bill's theories? Because both fail to offer any empirical evidence to support them, nor do they consider evidence that puts their theories into question.
^^^^^ CB: Well, there is evidence from women as witnesses that pregnancy and child birth are very painful. I urge the court to take judicial notice of these witnesses statements.
There is evidence that people who get pleasure at doing something are more likely to do it than people who don't get pleasure at doing it.
And there is evidence that women who have sex more often are more likely to get pregnant than those who have it less.
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Consider female genital cutting, which either diminishes or eliminates the capacity for female orgasm depending on the types of cutting.
^^^^^ CB: But wouldn't a woman who has a clitoris removed be more dependent upon orgasm from vaginal stimulation for orgasm ? And wouldn't such a woman be more likely to seek orgasm from vaginal sex because she didn't have the capacity to have orgasm from clitoral stimulation ? So, we might predict the result below - that women with their clitoris's removed have more children. Why ? Because they seek more vaginal sex than women with clitorises intact, because vaginally stimulated orgasm is the only source of orgasm for women with clitorises removed.
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You would expect that cut women have fewer children than uncut women, if female orgasm were in any way linked to reproductive success, but such is not the case: "To date, no study has found an association between reproductive capability and FGC. While the Jones et al. study in Burkina Faso found that women who have been cut are more likely to experience obstetric complications, a 1998-1999 NHRC study found that women who were circumcised married earlier than uncircumcised women, and that circumcised women had greater total fertility than uncircumcised women (Reason 2004). Another study based on DHS surveys in the Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, and Tanzania found that, when controlling for confounding socioeconomic, demographic and cultural variables, circumcised women, grouped by age at circumcision, did not have significantly different odds of infertility nor of childbearing than uncut women (Larsen and Yan, 2000)" (Elizabeth F. Jackson, Philip B. Adongo, Ayaga A. Bawah, Ellie Feinglass, and James F. Phillips, "The Relationship between Female Genital Cutting and Fertility in Kassena-Nankana District of Northern Ghana," Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, <http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51579>, March 31-April 2, 2005, p. 4). If anything, diminishing or eliminating the capacity for female orgasm appears to make females more reproductively successful than leaving it intact.
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CB: This would be diminishing or eliminating the capacity for orgasm _by clitoral stimulation_. But this would mean that said women can only get orgasms from vaginal stimulation, and make them more likely to seek vaginal stimulation than those women with clitorises intact, maybe.
In seeking more vaginal stimulation, they end up having more children.
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Elizabeth A. Lloyd (cf. <http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LLOCAS.html>), in contrast to Charles and Bill, presents much evidence from such relevant fields of inquiry as embryology, primatology, and sexology. You may examine her argument and evidence in her conference paper "All About Eve: Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Women's Sexuality" (Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000853/00/chapter_2.pdf>, March 23-24 2001).
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CB: I'll look at this.
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We've already established the fact that "It is crucial to note that the penis and the clitoris are the 'same' organ in men and women; there is an organ in the primordial, undifferentiated embryo that turns into a penis if it receives a dose of hormones, otherwise it matures into a clitoris. In other words, the penis and the clitoris have the same embryological origins and are thus called 'homologous' organs" (Lloyd, "All About Eve," p. 22).
^^^^^ CB: How does this logically impact the issue at hand ? The primate species that existed before humans reproduced sexually, and thereby fully formed adults are differentiated physiologically in the fundamental way that only members of the opposite sex can produce viable offspring, with the penis as a necessary organ as a conduit of male reproductive cells.
That males and females are differentiated out of an original unity in form doesn't impact the question of the origin of female orgasm.
Our current discussion is on the _origin_ female orgasm. This presumes that there was a time when some precursor species did not have this capacity , and that the trait for this capacity arose at some point. The issue is explaining why the possession of this trait came to predominate over lack of possession of this trait.
A Darwinian approach seeks to explain the replacement of one trait by another, or the origin of a trait, by selective advantage logic.
In this case, an obvious candidate explanation is that vaginal orgasm by penal stimulation tends to increase the amount of penal stimulation that the female seeks and has, and thereby gives an advantage in differential fertility as compared with females who are incapable of orgasm by penal stimulation of vagina.
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Based on primate research, Lloyd demonstrates that female orgasm among nonhuman primates is rare
^^^^^^ CB: Yes, the speculation is that it arises with the species human, and now we speculate on the cause of the establishment of this trait in humans
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and that "the best evidence for female orgasm" in species among whom it is observed, such as stumptail macaques, "arose in homosexual mounts" during which the mounting female exhibited "all of the physical features of the orgasmic response in the males," rather than copulation during which such features were absent (Lloyd, pp. 26, 34). That being the case, the earliest human females, much like primates, must have discovered the joy of orgasm during masturbation or homosexual plays or both, rather than copulation -- unless the earliest human males were more solicitous of female pleasure than today's males, which is rather unlikely.
^^^^^ CB: It wouldn't be much like primates if , as stated above, female orgasm in primates is rare.
More to the point, that early women might have_discovered_ the joy of orgasm in masturbation or homosexual intercourse does not foreclose their _exercising_ that capacity in heterosexual intercourse.
Also, as to whether the earliest human males were more solicitous of female pleasure than today's male's is an open question. For one thing, those males were not in a male supremacist society. Neither female nor male was sexually repressed by Civilization and its Discontents :>0.
Given that the first humans seem to have been more socialistic than modern humans, the males very well may have been more solicitous of female plearsure than modern males. For more mutually satisfactory sexual intercourse between females and males may very well have been a key factor in the great leap in sociality which is the essence of the revolution founding the human species.
^^^^^^ Even today, Lloyd's review of sexological literature shows that "the numbers for orgasm all of the time with unassisted intercourse generally fall around the 15-35% range (Terman 1938; Chesser 1956; Tavris and Sadd 1977; Hite 1976; Fisher 1973), while the reported percentages of women who reliably have orgasm with intercourse, _both_ assisted and unassisted, range from 38-53%." (p. 25).
In short, women discovered and developed their capacity for orgasm on their own, for their own pleasure rather than reproduction, in spite of men who either have neglected it or sought to curtail or destroy it (as in the case of female genital cutting).
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CB: I wouldn't be too sanguine about the typicality of these samples from a very particular population of modern Americans or Europeans for populations from 200,000 to millions of years ago, or even outside of the U.S. today. The rational kernel of Freud's work is to uncover the repressed nature of sexual consciousnesses of many modern Europeans.
Again, what is the point of origin of the trait (capacity to have orgasms) ? Why did the trait originate (seemingly) with humans ? Why didn't it originate in earlier primates ? The idea of human women being the first to make a connection between sex and pregnancy offers an explanation for it orgasmic capacity being exclusive to humans.
So, even 15% ( assuming for sake of argument that it is a valid figure) is more often than 0% ( which presumably the pre-orgasmic missinglink females had).