Holly of Self-Portrait as tracked down the answer to a question that was bothering me earlier. (I didn’t mention it in this post but I nearly snarked that however solid the research it couldn’t have been done by sociobiologists evolutionary psychologists because they did the research on men.)

But what REALLY irritated me was this statement:

The female orgasm is the focus of much research because it appears to have no reproductive purpose. Women can become pregnant whatever their pleasure levels
Yeah, well, ejaculation and orgasm are typically linked in men, but they don’t have to be. When there’s orgasm but no ejaculation, it’s called a “dry orgasm.” When there’s ejaculation but no orgasm, it’s called ejaculatory anhedonia. Google the terms if you don’t believe me.

And ejaculation could have evolved so that it felt every bit as good as emptying one’s bladder or sneezing forcefully or smoothly moving one’s bowels—but no better.

Seriously. Why is there this sense that men’s pleasure is completely appropriate and natural and biologically wise, but women’s pleasure is mysterious, weird and superfluous?

Read the quote in context here.

First of all while I mostly agree I think that “focus of so much research” business is bullshit. They study women’s orgasms for the same reason they buy heterosexual porn — it’s an excuse to get closer to women’s pee-pees, which, despite being a feature of roughly 51% of the population is nevertheless an elusive holy grail to those guys. But second of all I think it’s because, like way too many other people (but clearly not Holly) they see men as the sex-class side of the no-sex class paradigm and just take men’s orgasms as inevitable, uninteresting, and assumed.

And Holly’s right. Male behavior in quite a few other species, even mammalian species (see, for instance, ungulates), seem to be a lot more like an urgent itch than anticipation of an eyeball-rolling orgasm. Which eyeball-rolling distraction, for prey species like, say, antelope, would be an invitation to dinner with the nearest lion anyway. Therefore just assuming the only way to get men to mate is to dangle the kind of orgasms we… and actually only a handful of other species… have is biologically problematic.

One of the fun things about sociobiology/ev-psych, though, is that the state of research is such that you can make up all sorts of stories without worrying about fear of contradiction.

My own favorite pulled-out-of-my-hat explanation of big orgasms in the human male, by the way, also resolves the alleged mystery of women’s orgasms in a reproductively significant but not sexually significant way: as infant head size in humans grew to the point it significantly affected the survival of both infants and women contingent evolution seized randomly on materials at hand… which happened to be the already malliable-due-to-dimorphism tissue of the internal clitoris… and grew it so it would better pad the urethra from crushing as the baby’s head passes through the birth canal. Survival-driven evolution often being a lot less exact than commonly thought, making the inner clitoris bigger would make connecting nerves bigger as well. And given that so much of basic fetal genital male architecture is derived from shared genes rather than genes on the male-only Y-chromosome, any increase in women’s enervation would tend to be picked up in male genitals as well. Bottom line? Women because women needed bigger clitorises in order to survive labor and delivery they incidentally got bonus orgasm and… even more incidentally men got them too. Mystery solved…

Or solved at least as solidly as the average cultural-assumption-reinforcing, heterocentric ev-psych explanation. Hey, where’s my grant?

Oh yeah, and with the mystery now being solved maybe we can pull some seduction-community subscribers Ev-Psych researcher’s hands out of their pants and start doing a little more basic research?

Sheesh!