The human female orgasm didn’t need to exist. Being fairly certain I’ve got your attention now and that you’re up and out of your seats, angrily waving your finger at your screen, I’ll say that this statement should be a truism of human biology: that human females don’t need to reach the delights of orgasmic completion to produce offspring. But that means it didn’t have to come about, yet, it miraculously did somewhere in the course of our biological evolution and researchers have long been puzzled over the reasons why this might be the case.
It was only a matter of time before we reversed engineered the external and seemingly unrelated aspects of human sexuality with genetic fitness and the ability to produce healthy offspring.
Now that process is being undertaken, at current, and has been for quite some time. While we still don’t wholly understand the physiology of the female orgasm, orgasms being as complicated of a process as they are, we are beginning to highlight some evolutionary clues to the role of human female orgasms.
But where does the elusive female orgasm come from?
The answer is, we really don’t know, but we have a few good explanations, one of which has to do with the faces of men.
While a so-called ‘orgasm gap’ certainly does exist by all measures, the orgasm gap also doesn’t seem to be much of a hindrance on the lives of women, with one study reporting that even though 41% of the women in their cohort were at risk for sexual dysfunction, 90% reported being happy with their sex lives and emotionally connected to their partners. Nonetheless, studying the female orgasm and understanding its purposes and origins may someday close the orgasm gap and, or make for much more satisfying sex for all parties involved.
Full disclosure: the case is far from solved, though the hypotheses are quite interesting…
Evolutionary Biology and Sex
One of the rules of thumb of evolutionary sexuality, one that ended up proving an old occultist adage quite true, is the notion of as above, so below. Or we could say, as without, so within. What I mean by this is there is a premise in biology that sexed organisms use visual cues and other references to infer the biological fitness of their potential mates and their reproductive cells and genes; we see in certain types of traits on the macro level, such as facial symmetry or body type, certain indicators that help us choose if we believe a certain mate is good for us or not. We infer the fitness of sperm or egg from the fitness of the body and mannerisms of the person before us.
The process is as natural and intuitive as it gets, and what we experience is a deep and profound attraction or repulsion, but what’s really going on beneath the surface is our secret judging of our potential mate’s sex cells and their ability to produce good offspring. Our external traits are indicators of genetic quality.
Theories of Orgasms
In the 1990s, researchers began building on prior research that put forth theories ranging from the idea that the female orgasm evolved to solidify pair-bonds (Morris 1967) by providing more enjoyable sex with both partners and helping to facilitate bilateral, mutual pleasure and relationship commitment; to the idea that the female orgasm facilitated pleasurable sex to incentivize mating with a particularly good male throughout the entirety of the ovulation cycle (Rancour-Laferriere, D. 1983).
One such theory is that female orgasm facilitates a physical mechanism of sperm retention, therefore, aiding in sperm retention (sperm backflow), possibly leading to a competitive advantage for men who could produce orgasms in females which could, in turn, displace the other men who couldn’t in cases of competing male mates. (King, Dempsey, Valentine 2016)
Though research on this hypothesis is scant, there was a small to medium effect in those studied, and just a general and unscientific observation of how much men pride themselves on their ability to pleasure women and produce orgasms is a cue that the hypothesis may be onto something.
Men often feel devastated in the wake of not being able to sexually please a woman, therefore, there may be a biological imperative at work through which the men sense on a deep, subconscious level that their own potency and fecundity are in question.
Four Adaptive Aspects of Female Orgasm
In 1983, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere proposed the latter, as well as three other hypotheses in what he called Four Adaptive Aspects of Female Orgasm (Rancour-Leferriere, D. 1983), which were:
The Hedonic Function is thought to incentivize mating throughout the ovulation cycle to better ensure successful reproduction.
The Potency Function is thought to placate the “delicate male ego”, keeping it intact and adding an extra layer of security so the male can remain emotionally invested for the long haul.
The Paternal Confidence Function is thought to send the male a signal as to how confident he might be that any offspring produced are genetically his.
The Domestic Bliss function is quite simple, it’s thought to produce a healthy, happy home for all parties in which to raise a family, by signaling to the female which male partner is most likely to benefit her and her offspring.
Fluctuating Asymmetry & Female Orgasm
This all came to a head in an interesting hypothesis in 1995 that ties all these things together, a hypothesis that was put forth in a paper titled Human Female Orgasm and Mate Fluctuating Asymmetry. The idea was to issue a questionnaire to women to see how their partners stacked up in two important ways.
Facial symmetry or asymmetry (otherwise known as fluctuating asymmetry).
How often they achieved orgasm during sex.
Along with a symmetrical bilateral body, facial symmetry is a hallmark of great genes, one transcultural sex symbol that’s recognized all over the world. The hypothesis was simple, that perhaps women are much more in tune with their biology than we think and that their bodies used orgasm as a signal that they’re with a man who’s genetically fit to pair with them. From the study:
If heritable differences in male viability existed in the evolutionary past, selection could have favoured female adaptations (e.g. orgasm) that biased sperm competition in favour of males possessing heritable fitness indicators. Accumulating evidence suggests that low fluctuating asymmetry is a sexually selected male feature in a variety of species, including humans, possibly because it is a marker of genetic quality. Based on these notions, the proportion of a woman’s copulations associated with orgasm is predicted to be associated with her partner’s fluctuating asymmetry. A questionnaire study of 86 sexually active heterosexual couples supported this prediction. Women with partners possessing low fluctuating asymmetry and their partners reported significantly more copulatory female orgasms than were reported by women with partners possessing high fluctuating asymmetry and their partners, even with many potential confounding variables controlled.
In short, the female orgasm is the way for the body to make clear in the mind the fact that a man has genetic fitness on the level of his sperm, seeing as it’s been theorized that a symmetrical body and face are the hallmarks of healthy physical development in vertebrates. (Hallgrímsson et al., 2003)
Many conversations about the orgasm gap have surrounded the concept of performance and performative issues, but so often we find that the biological is overlooked. Sometimes the explanation is as simple as good old fashion chemistry, and it’s very possible that we find this to be the case, here.
Could it be possible that women have orgasms in relation to the quality of the sperm men have or the overall genetic fitness of the man as a match for themselves, using things like facial symmetry or asymmetry as a guide to orgasm, which in turn becomes a guide for whom the best mates are?
It’s possible, but much work remains to be done.
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to not draw conclusions from all of this. At current, while all this research is suggestive of possible explanations, it all begs for more research to be done, if anything, due to small sample sizes and scarce research, but the potential is there for some groundbreaking findings. I can’t wait to see what the future brings us.
Unfortunately, facial symmetry isn’t something we can just change overnight. But understanding ourselves and how we operate might help us to start having better conversations and healthier sex in the long run.
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