"The issue is usually presented like so: Male orgasms are “straightforward” and serve an obvious purpose. But female orgasms—what’s the deal with those? If they aren’t reliably sparked by a penis pumping away in the baby chute, why do they happen at all?...
Lloyd catches scientists only considering the female orgasm as an event tied to intercourse and wrongly asserting its (unestablished) relationship to fertility—including but not limited to the idea that a woman’s orgasm “induces a sucking motion of the uterus.”...
if we loop back to the original framing—orgasm obviously makes sense in men, but not in women—the root of the larger problem is painfully apparent. What assumption underlies “obviously”? Is it a conflation of ejaculation and orgasm, which are separate biological experiences? (Truly, they are, which is why they can and do occur independently, as tantric sex practitioners are often so eager to tell.)...
In conversations that treat a strong orgasm-propelled sex drive as “obviously” beneficial to the species when present in men, women are usually depicted as proportionately disincentivized to have intercourse. It won’t get them off and it might get them pregnant—which is a total bummer, resource-wise—so what’s in it for them? The same people who regard (male) orgasm as the most powerful reward known to humankind inevitably embrace that tired evopsych fantasy of reticent, selective women and indiscriminately horny men. At some point, one has to imagine, these desperate dudes would just satisfy themselves with their hands....
The fact is that orgasm, which probably occurs in most other mammals but is far from a certainty, is not a requirement for reproduction... The real question, then, is not “Why do women orgasm?” but “Why do any of us orgasm?”"
Excellent questions, fun read.
FB: " To treat a body—and inevitably, a male body—as a perfect machine in which there are no superfluous functions is to invent a “just-so” story that cannot carry scientific weight."
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