The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution
Book Review
Chapter-by-Chapter Summary:
Greater fitness through adaptation is described in Chapter One. This is also called natural selection. Sickle cell trait is one of the major examples of this type of adaptation. MHC genes are also an example of how adaptations function. The smell of men with different MHC genes than women has been shown to determine whether they are more likely to produce offspring with their mate. The ability to produce viable offspring refers to either the initial selection of the mate which, when tested, shows that women prefer men with different MHC genes than them. Also, the ability to produce viable offspring refers to the rate of spontaneous abortion which has been found to be higher in partners with similar MHC genes. Despite these interesting examples of how adaptations function, not all extant phenotypes can be explained by adaptive mechanisms. One of the most important theories as to how these phenotypes arise is the theory of “correlation of characters” which states that some traits come into being by their association to other traits that are directly selected. It is also possible that traits come into being not because of adaptive selection but because of the way that animals grow. Another example of this is males getting nipples because embryos do not develop differently between women and men with respect to them both receiving the genes encoding for nipples. Selection pressures in women lead to the gene for nipples being preserved and the embryological development dictates that they must both develop nipples. This is a good base and foreshadows what is to come in the argument against adaptationism.
In Chapter 2, evidence is presented that when looking at a sample size of orgasms caused by either masturbation or intercourse, the vast majority of a women’s orgasms are reached through masturbation. The results she focuses on within the book, particularly the results from Stanley and Laumann, lead us to believe that a majority of women do not orgasm from intercourse. It is also unclear how these findings relate to non-American and European cultures because the findings were of European and American Women.
In Chapter 3, sexologist Morris’ theory that there is an adaptationist basis for women to experience orgasm is debunked. Morris postulates that women will only have an orgasm when they are copulating with a male sexual partner. This is untrue, and especially false given that a woman’s orgasm doesn’t end her sexual excitement (Lloyd, 56). The fact that a woman’s orgasm doesn’t end her sexual excitement was included in a previous chapter, it was discovered in a study by Masters and Johnson. If women’s orgasms were tied to copulation with a male partner, they may seek out more partners because a woman’s orgasm does not end her sexual excitement. This lends a wary point of view to the idea that females have orgasms to strengthen the pair bond between themselves and their mate. Another major point is made by many other sex researchers that female copulation is associated with the time at which a woman is in the proverbial heat or at certain points during her ovulation cycle. Also, women who are more likely to seek out orgasm during sex are therefore less likely to stay in a pair, according to the principle that orgasm doesn’t end her sexual excitement. This sheds further disbelief on the hypothesis that the female orgasm serves to increase the pair bond.
Allen and Lemmon’s account of the female orgasm in Chapter 4, incorporates the idea that the female orgasm must come from the necessity of producing male ejaculation and furthermore that it correlates with vaginal contractions. They also take an anti-feminist stance that women should be orgasming through intercourse. There appears a similar trend of illogicality in Bernd’s and Barash’s account of the female orgasm which states that orgasm causes spontaneous abortion.
Female orgasm also states to men that the female is satisfied or that there has been a possible abortion, according to Alexander and Noonan. Women who pretend to have orgasms are presumed better off in this account. Women who are orgasmic are also seen to be more loyal by Alexander and Noonan.
Intermittent reinforcement only works if the women studied are sometimes orgasmic with intercourse, yet they are sometimes not, proving to be a hole in Diamond and Hrdy’s hypothesis.
Hardy thinks of the orgasm-intercourse discrepancy as adaptive because it encourages females to be promiscuous. This is problematic because in the sexological literature there is no precedent for thinking that increased intromission time leads to higher rates of orgasm. The ends of the bell curve which are women who never rarely or always have orgasm from intercourse are not included in this account of the female orgasm. One of the problems with this approach is that it assumes that the clitoris must be relevant while Elizabeth Lloyd has the idea that the clitoris is an outdated evolutionary vestige analogous to a penis. By relevant I mean that the Hrdy evolutionary account assumes meaning through needing to have the clitoris serve the meaning of transmitting pleasurable feelings to females leading to orgasm. Elizabeth Lloyd argues that the existence of orgasm cannot be explained solely by the evolutionary importance of the clitoris. Elizabeth Lloyd also says of Hrdy's account that it denies the existence of female-female coalitions and cooperative behavior.
In conclusion Elizabeth Lloyd wraps up her summary of current views of the evolutionary development of the female orgasm by saying that it is not dependent on hormones or that female sexual response is similar to male sexual response.
Elizabeth Lloyd agrees with data showing that the penis and clitoris develop from the same evolutionary organs depending on the respective hormones introduced in vitro. Prepubescent boys masturbating and men engaging in tantric sexual practices show marked difference from ejaculatory males. This difference can be interpreted as evidence of an evolutionary correlation between female and male anatomy as seen in the evolutionary correlation between the development of the penis and the clitoris. She also cites female ejaculatory orgasm as another way of tracing evolutionary correlation between the development of the penis and the development of the clitoris.
Another crucial piece of information provided by Elizabeth Lloyd is that information collected from other cultures about the female orgasm is inconclusive because it is scant and mostly self-reported by sexological researchers.
Chevalier-Skolnikoff’s presentation is also unlikely because the mountees in heterosexual coitus with stump-tailed macaques do not exhibit any of the characteristic behaviors associated with female orgasm.
The incidence of repeated contractions in the Stumptown macaques uterus in homosexual encounters makes the conclusion that orgasm is also reached by heterosexual intercourse unlikely given that uterine contractions occur rhythmically in homosexual encounters and not in heterosexual encounters.
In males where there is a highly developed sexual response the females also have a higher level of sexual response. This has to do with the correlation between male and female orgasm explanations in an evolutionary sense. In species in which the male sexual response is highly selected for, highly sexual and orgasmic females would be expected.
The high directional selection supposed in adaptationist accounts of the female orgasm would comprise directional selection on the variability of the female orgasm. We can see that female orgasm is not selected on directionally providing a reason why it is not an adaptation.
Importantly Elizabeth Lloyd does not deny the fact that there may be selection pressures that have shaped the details of the female orgasm, but she does deny the adaptationist account of the development of the female orgasm.
To paraphrase Elizabeth Lloyd’s words, the current utility of any, in this case bodily, phenomena does not imply that it has an evolutionary role in the fitness of an organism. In a popular definition of adaptation, traits must be shown to be produced by evolutionary selection for that trait. This is in contrast to Clinton Brock and Harvey who say that adaptations increase the fitness of an organism, currently, irregardless of historical selection. Elizabeth Lloyd argues that the true issue is whether current fitness implies a particular historical evolutionary background. Elizabeth Lloyd also argues that any claims made about the historical environment in which particular phenomena developed are inferential at best. Also, variations within traits cannot be traced to differences in reproductive success.
As Elizabeth Lloyd states, ardent adaptationists believe that byproduct explanations should not be accepted because they could detract from further adaptationist research in the evolution of the female orgasm. Although Fox and colleagues documented a pressure drop in the uterus following orgasm, Grafenberg and Masters and Johnson perform studies in which they did not find movement of a faux seminal fluid into the uterus.
Elizabeth Lloyd argues that in order for an adaptationist account of a female orgasm to be true, there needs to be evidence linking orgasm to the fertility of a female, and a connection between increased fertility and reproductive success. For uterine upsuck to be the missing link, it needs to be tied to increased fertility and fertility tied to reproductive success.
Elizabeth Lloyd continues to argue that adaptationist accounts the female orgasm are incorrect. One such example of how these adaptationist accounts are false, is the adaptationist account of Smith. Smith argues for the upsuck hypothesis that female orgasm is designed to promote movement of sperm into the uterus. Baker and Bellis’ conclusions are erroneous because they use normal statistics without a large sample size and their tests for uterine upsuck are biased. Their test for uterine upsuck is selectively biased because they chose certain groups of women from the samples of women, seemingly at random, or worse, to skew the data in favor of their hypothesis. Baker and Bellis also claim that sperm retention is the same, at various levels, with no orgasm at all, thus contradicting their conclusion that the female orgasm is an evolutionary adaptation. Thornhill and colleagues also make generalizations from studying monogamous couples to facultative polyandry. Facultative polyandry is the argument that a tendency of a woman to have multiple mates increases her evolutionary fitness.
Another great point made by Elizabeth Lloyd, is that the Symon’s account of the female orgasm effectively separates this biological mechanism from ties to women's reproduction. Thus making it a more feminist account of the female orgasm. A scientific realist would say that that the cherry on top of Symon's account is that it is morally sound and can be interpreted in a feminist manner. Feminism itself cannot lead us to the truth in science, but a benefit of this Theory is that it is supported by evidence, chiefly, and the cherry on top is that it can be interpreted in a feminist manner.
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