Orgasmic Selection: The Secrecy of the Female Orgasm

Orgasmic Selection: The Secrecy of the Female Orgasm

Orgasmic Selection: The Secrecy of the Female Orgasm

Some females claim that chocolate covered cherries, banana flavored ice cream, vanilla pudding, Hawaiian salad, buying sexy shoes, pickle chips, or even a new kitten is better than sex…but my question to you is…if these items, actions, and delicious delights are better than intercourse…what kind of sex are you having?!

In the past, females’ needs have been neglected. Sex was not a choice between both parties, but a demand from the male. Whether a woman reached orgasm or was satisfied under the sheets was not a concern of the self-interest-seeking man. But as times changed, females became more particular in their choice of males making men more conscious of their appearance in attire, hair style, and sexual appeal...and…pleasing a female in the bedroom.

For years, scientists have been disputing the purpose of female orgasm. Psychology Today states “The male orgasm is no great mystery. It's little more than a physiologically simple ejaculation that is accompanied by a nearly addictive incentive to seek out further sexual encounters.” The male abides by the simple rules of biology, “[t]he greater the number of inseminations a male achieves, the better his chances of being genetically represented in future generations.”

Compared with the frequent and effortlessly achieved orgasms that males experience, a females’ sexual climax has remained secrecy. “Darwinian theorists who made premature attempts to address the female orgasm proposed that orgasm keeps a woman lying down after sex, passively retaining sperm and increasing her probability of conception. Others suggested that it evolved to create a stronger pair bond between lovers, inspiring in women feelings of intimacy and trust toward mates. Some reasoned that orgasm communicates a woman's sexual satisfaction and devotion to a lover,” says Psychology Today: The Orgasm Wars and “[m]ost recently, evolutionary psychologists have been exploring the proposition that female orgasm is a sophisticated adaptation that allows women to manipulate--even without their own awareness--which of their lovers will be allowed to fertilize their eggs.”

Psychologists including Harvard evolutionist Stephen lay Gould, insist that female orgasm doesn’t have a role in reproduction. Gould argues that the female orgasm is accidental, caused by “an anatomical peculiarity of embryonic development.” In embryos, the undifferentiated organ that later becomes the penis in males becomes the clitoris in females. Anti-adaptationists like Gould--whose thinking uncannily parallels Freud's belief that women spend their life in penis envy--hold that the clitoris is, biologically speaking, an underdeveloped penis; it can let women mimic male orgasm, but it has no functional relevance or evolutionary history of its own.

“By the late 1960s, The British Medical Journal gained a clue for a reasonable adaptation hypothesis when they published an exchange of letters about the muscular contractions and uterine suction associated with women's orgasm. In one letter, a doctor reported that a patient's uterine and vaginal contractions during sex with a sailor had pulled off his condom. Upon inspection, the condom was found in her cervical canal! The doctor concluded that female orgasms pull sperm closer to the egg as well.”

Researchers Baker and Bellis formed an experiment that sought to learn just how female orgasms might affect which lover's sperm is used to fertilize a female’s eggs. Baker and Bellis “asked volunteers to keep track of the timing of their orgasms during sex, and, after copulation, to collect male ejaculates from vaginal flowback--a technical term denoting a distinct form of material that emerges from the vagina several hours after sex (scientists have devised a way to collect it). The team counted sperm from over 300 instances of human copulation.”

Baker and Bellis discovered that when a female climaxes between a minute before to 45 minutes after her lover ejaculates, she retains drastically more sperm than she does after non-orgasmic sex. When her orgasm precedes her male's by more than a minute, or when she does not have an orgasm, little sperm is retained. Just as the doctors' letters suggested decades earlier, the team's results indicated that muscular contractions associated with orgasm pull sperm from the vagina to the cervix, where it's in better position to reach an egg.

Therefore, Baker and Bellis proposed that by manipulating the occurrence and timing of orgasm--via subconscious processes--women influence the probability of conception. So while a man worries about a woman's satisfaction with him as a lover out of fear she will stray, orgasmic females may be up to something far more clever--deciding which partner will sire her children.