Why Do Women Orgasm If They Don't Biologically Need To?
Evolution of Orgasms (ft. Brit Garner)
The Evolution Behind the Female Orgasm
At least five distinctive functions have been proposed for the female orgasm...A second adaptive function has been called the Mr. Right hypothesis, which posits that female orgasm serves as a mate selection device. As science journalist Natalie Angier notes, "female orgasm is the ultimate expression of female choice...a woman's way of controlling the terms of the underground debate." By choosing a man with whom she is orgasmic, a woman is presumed to be selecting a man who will stick around and invest in her and her children. Perhaps a man's sensitivity to a woman's desires, his ability to read her needs, and effort to ensure her sexual satisfaction auger well for his future as a good husband and a good dad. Variability in female orgasm, especially when the same woman is differentially orgasmic with different men, is indispensable for serving the hypothesized mate choice function.
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In short, the Mr. Right hypothesis receives some empirical support, but not in the form originally proposed. Female orgasm may play a role in domestic bliss, as the Mr. Right hypothesis suggests. But the absence of orgasm may motivate extramarital sex, which suggests a more sinister function.
Rather than being used to select Mr. Right for matrimonial paradise, female orgasm may have evolved, in part, as a mechanism for genetic cuckoldry - a sperm selection device for choosing which male will end up fertilizing her nutrient-rich eggs. One hint of this comes from a study of non-human primates - Japanese macaque monkeys. Alfonso Troisi and Monica Carosi studied 240 copulations among a group of 16 males and 26 females. Female orgasms, indicated by the female clutching, muscular body spasms, and vocalizations occurred in 33 percent of these copulations. As in humans, longer copulation time and a larger number of pelvic thrusts increased the probability of female orgasm. But the fascinating finding was that females proved to be more orgasmic with the socially dominant males, especially when a low-ranked female copulated with a high-ranking male.
Roughly analogous studies of humans have focused on the links between male qualities such as symmetrical features and physical attractiveness and female orgasm. Chapter 3 noted that genetic abnormalities and environmental insults can produce physical asymmetries in the body and face. Many biologists view symmetry as a marker of heritable fitness, suggesting genetic quality. In a study of 86 heterosexual couples, Randy Thornhill and his colleagues found that women with more symmetrical partners reported significantly more copulatory orgasms than women with more asymmetrical partners. An even larger study of 388 women, some residing in Germany and others in the United States, found a similar effect - women mated to more physically attractive men reported a higher likelihood of orgasm during their most recent sexual encounter. These findings provide some support for the male selection component of the Mr. Right hypothesis, in that women are more orgasmic with men of high genetic and phenotypic quality...
So what's going on? A key to this mystery appears to be the link between female orgasm and sperm retention, combined with a hidden side of female sexuality - women's sexual infidelities. Recall that Kinsey found that women were almost twice as likely to achieve more orgasms with their affair partners as with their husbands. A recent British study found that women have more frequent high-sperm-retention orgasms (those that occur within two minutes after the male orgasm) with their affair partners than with their husbands. The clincher, however, may be the timing of lunchtime romance at the No-Tell Motel: Woman who have affairs appear to time their sexual liaisons to coincide with the most fertile phase of their cycle - prior to or at ovulation. Indeed, rate of sexual intercourse with an affair partner during peak fertility is three times as high as the rate that occurs during the low-fertile post-ovulatory phase.
A solution to the mystery of female orgasm is finally beginning to emerge. Female orgasmic capacity originally may have arisen as a by-product, as Symons and Gould contended. But evolution appears to have adaptively modified female orgasm to influence when and with whom it occurs. The evidence points to the Mr. Right hypothesis, but not in the version originally formulated. Orgasm appears to function as a selection device to choose which man will end up fertilizing her eggs, a man who is not necessarily her husband. Women are more orgasmic with regular mates who have good genetic quality, as indexed by anatomical measures of symmetry and judgement of physical attractiveness. But if they are having affairs, women preferentially choose affair partners of high genetic quality and then experience more frequent sexual orgasms in the context of their liaisons. For women having affairs, orgasm may facilitate a mating strategy of getting the best of both worlds - investment from one man who provides parenting and resources for her children, and good genes from another man who provides little investment, but who increases the genetic quality of her children.
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The Science of Orgasms
A recent study of the sexual fantasies of 349 individuals found a remarkable result - 87 percent reported having vivid sexual fantasies about someone other than their regular partner within the past two months. The study also revealed a marked sex difference - 18 percent more men than women reported these extra-pair fantasies. Nonetheless, a whooping 80 percent of women reported experiencing recent sexual fantasies about someone outside of their current romantic relationship. Women also have frequent sexual fantasies about their current partner. In fact, the majority of sexual fantasies by both sexes - 64 percent of women's and 54 percent of men's - center on their current partner. Yet 34% of women's erotic daydreams focused on someone else. Why?
One hint comes from the function of sexual fantasies: "...the mind is adapted to cope with the rare, the complex, and the future...the function of the mind is to cause behavior; even if only one impulse in a thousand is consummated, the function of lust nonetheless is to motivate sexual intercourse." Fantasies provide a window into the mating mind, but they do far more than that; they motivate us to act on our desires when an opportunity arises and the moment is right.
Is there any evidence that sexual fantasies motivate affairs? Consider these statistics. Men's sexual fantasies about other women were not significantly linked to whether or not they have cheated on their partner - 54 percent of the faithful men's fantasies were about an extra-pair partner, compared with 55 percent of unfaithful men's fantasies. In contrast, whereas only 30 percent of faithful women's sexual fantasies focused on someone else, more than 53 percent of unfaithful women's fantasies centered on extra-pair partners. Direction of causality, of course, cannot be determined with certainty from these findings. Perhaps infidelity causes women to have more fantasies rather than fantasies leading to affairs. The results nonetheless are consistent with the idea that women's extra-pair sexual fantasies encourage them to seek sex in the arms of a lover.
Why women seek dangerous liasons, from an evolutionary perspective, continues to confound scientists for two reasons. The first is that, compared to men, women can rarely increase their direct reproductive output by having additional sex partners. Whereas men historically could achieve direct increases in reproductive success by adding sex partners, women could not. The nine-month investment required of pregnancy prevents women from having more than one child per year, whether they have one, a dozen, or a hundred sex partners.
The second deterrent to women's wandering eyes is the avalanche of costs they incur from infidelity. If a woman has an affair, she risks being abandoned by her mate. Men frequently divorce women caught having sex with other men. Even if they are not abandoned, women risk physical and psychological abuse at the hands of jealous partners. Women damage their social reputations as a result of sexual indiscretions. They risk impairing their mate value should they need to go back out onto the mating market. They endanger the success of their children, since cuckolded men might abandon their children or curtail investment in them. They risk contracting sexually transmitted disease from affair partners. And, as if all these costs were not enough, affairs also require time, energy, and effort - precious resources that might be better allocated to other adaptive tasks. Why would women go through all the effort and risk incurring so many costs merely to obtain a few moments of sexual gratification and the presumably trivial addition of another man's superfluous sperm? What benefit could possibly so substantial that it outweighs all of the costs women might incur?
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Husbands whose wives spend more time w/ male coworkers & friends deploy more #SpermCompetition tactics during sex. http://ow.ly/wEKk305Uck9
On source of evidence supporting the "good genes" explanation for women's affairs comes from studies of the rates of genetic cuckoldry. These studies, which use either blood grouping methods or DNA fingerprinting, are diabolically difficult to conduct, and potentially explosive in outcome. Few have been published. Of those published, estimates of genetic cuckoldry range from 1 to 30 percent, with the average hovering around 10 percent. A study in Switzerland, for example, found only 1 percent genetic non-paternity, whereas a study conducted in Monterrey, Mexico, discovered a 12 person genetic non-paternity rate. A female colleague of mine who wishes to remain anonymous told me that she discovered a 10 percent genetic cuckoldry rate, using DNA fingerprinting technology, in a study she conducted on the genetics of breast cancer in the United States. So perhaps 10 percent of the readers of these pages have genetic fathers different from their putative fathers, products of their mother's clandestine infidelities. These studies while not directly supporting the good genes hypothesis, lend support to a necessary condition for it to be correct - the historical siring of children through men other than the woman's regular partner.
The good genes hypothesis has been tested in a fascinating study conducted by Steve Gangestad and Randy Thornhill. They asked this key question: What are the qualities of the men who women select as extra-pair sexual partners? They examined several variables, including sexual experience, age, socio-economic status, expected income, and attachment style. They also measured two indicators of genetic quality - physical symmetry, as measure by calipers, and physical attractiveness. Recall that symmetry is hypothesized to be a heritable marker of fitness, signaling the absence of genes that perturb development or the presence of genes that facilitate resistance to environmental insults. Symmetrical men also tend to be more muscular, vigorous, larger in size, more physically healthy, more mentally healthy, and slightly higher in tested intelligence than their less symmetrical peers. The most important finding was this: Women choose symmetrical men as affair partners more than asymmetrical men. Furthermore, these symmetrical men tended to have more sexual liasons with women already in relationships than their more lopsided peers. Women who choose symmetrical men, in essence, may be selecting partners with genes that ultimately increase the survival and reproductive success of their children.
Beyond securing good genes, the leverage to switch to alternative mates is another important benefit women can reap from affairs. The mate switching hypothesis of affairs has several variants. One is that the affair may be used as leverage to get out of an unrewarding or cumbersome relationship, perhaps by inducing the husband to break up with her, or as Donald Symons notes, "to divest herself of her present husband and acquire a better one." Second, having an affair may permit a "trial run" with another man to secure information about how compatible they are or how much he is willing to invest in her - information that may be difficult to obtain without some level of intimate involvement. Affairs might also allow a woman to evaluate how desirable she is on the mating market, although this information can usually be obtained through less costly means such as flirting or simply observing the number and desirability of the men who show signs of sexual or romantic interest.
Recent research yields promising support for the mate switching hypothesis. Heidi Greiling and I conducted four studies to explore this and other hypotheses about the benefits woman gain from affairs. In one study, we asked 58 women to evaluate the likelihood of receiving each of 28 potential benefits from affairs. The list ranged from "She would receive money, free dinners, or clothing." The top-rated item proved to be sexual gratification, possibly pointing to the centrality of orgasm in affairs. Many of the most highly rated benefits, however, centered on mate switching:
- Finding a partner more desirable than the current partner.
- Making it easier to break up with the current partner.
- Being able to replace the current partner.
- Discovering other potential partners who were interested in her.
- Clarifying the characteristics she believed to be important in a long-term marriage partner.
- Becoming better able to evaluate accurately what other potential partners thought about her.
- Feeling that she could find someone with whom she would be more compatible than her current partner.
- Meeting someone who is willing to spend a lot of time with her.
- Meeting someone who is better looking than current partner who seems interested in her.
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"CUZ I FUCCED HIS BITCH T00" - Lil C.S. Lewis
"I'm Fuckin' On YO Baby MaMa Bangin' YO Boo!" - Newport Harbor
Mystery of the female orgasm may be solved
And What Does Your Wife Have To Say About That, Mr. Novelist?
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