Another finished draft I inexplicably neglected to post earlier this year provides a timely opportunity to link to Emily Nagoski. —fl

Going back to that goofy idea proposed most recently by g-spot denier Tim Spector that women have “evolved” orgasmic (difficulty during intercourse only, natch) in order to “test” the reproductive worthiness of their male partners.

That notion’s first screeching collision with reality, as Holly Pervocracy and I’m sure others pointed out, would be where waiting for orgasms during intercourse would seem to be a bit late in proto-women’s mate-selection process.

The second obvious collision with reality would be the part about where roughly a third of all women report they never have orgasms from intercourse.

A third obvious collision would be that there’s no evidence whatsoever that women who have fewer orgasms from intercourse reproductively “penalize” their partners by having fewer children than women who do. (A corollary would be that there’s no evidence that childless women are any less, or more, orgasmic than their childbearing counterparts.)

There’s a completely non-obvious collision.

It’s non-obvious because it’s not particularly related to orgasms.

Which makes it almost completely non-obvious because if you’re reading this in English you’ve almost certainly been indoctrinated with the idea that sex is all about orgasms. Or, in the slightly more sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men, and all about the promise that they might “give” women orgasms on the way to having their own. Or in the slightly less sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men and economic security for women and “their” babies.

The non-obvious part is that even men and women who never have orgasms at all, let alone orgasms with partners, let alone orgasms during intercourse still desire sex.

Intensely.

Sometimes achingly.

If you wanted to claim humans were evolved to desire sex, meaning sex just about any way you care to define it, I’d have to agree. No problem. If you wanted to claim humans evolved to have orgasms I’m probably quibble that they’re more of a side effect than directly selected for. If you were going to claim, though, that one sex evolved not to have orgasms in order to “test” the fitness of the other sex? I’d have to pat you on the head as if you were a simpleton and write long posts about it.

In fact, protestations of armchair evolutionary psychologists notwithstanding there’s no evidence that women or men really need to have orgasms to reproduce. That doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy them thoroughly, just that there’s no evidence that they’re needed to encourage other organisms to reproduce, nor is there evidence that we need them either.