Via Discover Magazine’s DiscoBlog researchers from something called the Institute for the Study of Children have managed to get published in a journal called the Archives of Sexual Behavior an article with the following abstract:

“In attempt to identify and validate different types of orgasms which females have during sex with a partner, data collected by Mah and Binik (2002) on the dimensional phenomenology of female orgasm were subjected to a typological analysis. A total of 503 women provided adjectival descriptions of orgasms experienced either with a partner (n = 276) or while alone (n = 227). Latent-class analysis revealed four orgasm types which varied systematically in terms of pleasure and sensations engendered. Two types, collectively labelled “good-sex orgasms,” received higher pleasure and sensation ratings than solitary-masturbatory ones, whereas two other types, collectively labelled “not-as-good-sex orgasms,” received lower ratings. These two higher-order groupings differed on a number of psychological, physical and relationship factors examined for purposes of validating the typology. Evolutionary thinking regarding the function of female orgasm informed discussion of the findings. Future research directions were outlined, especially the need to examine whether the same individual experiences different types of orgasms with partners with different characteristics, as evolutionary theorizing predicts should be the case.”

Read the quote in context here.

Not to sound cynical or anything here but unless the topic is the evolution of language I’m not sure how much insight into the natural selection of human beings is going to be gained from self-descriptions of orgasms. Male or female.

It’s not that behavior can never be evolved (though see Carl Zimmer on the importance of accounting for the null hypothesis.) Instead it’s that anyone who imagines they can derive clues to evolutionary behavior from vocabulary used in a n=500 survey needs to get out more.

Let’s put it this way. I know the standards for calling one’s self an evolutionary psychologist are extraordinarily low but… do you think there are many linguists, deconstructionists, or even English majors who get a paper published in a “peer-reviewed” journal with only ~500 survey respondents? Or, as another blogger, Anthony McCarthy put it the other day, would your average parapsychology researcher have the audacity to submit, let alone a parapsychology journal with standards low enough to accept, a paper based on that quantity… let alone quality… of data?

I didn’t think so.

Actually it’s unlikely that Playboy, Cosmopolitan, or the Monster Truck Gazette would pick it up either! In fact a quick bit of searching suggests even Psychology Today hasn’t picked it up! (Ok, at least not yet.)

So does that tell us about the editorial standards of the Archive of Sexual Behavior?

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Let’s put it yet another way: Couldn’t very, very similar conclusions about solo vs partner preferences be drawn from adjectival descriptions of a) preparation and consumption of a meal, b) celebrating a wedding anniversary, c) moving large, irregularly-shaped heavy equipment? Would those descriptions provide specific hints to the evolution of human behavior? Next question: might some of those answers be different depending on the sex of the respondents? Entirely possible. But regardless of sample size almost any researcher would be roundly mocked for invoking evolved behavior for differential descriptions of moving heavy stuff by yourself vs. having someone help you. And yet so we should mock the researchers who make such proposals about descriptions of orgasms.

Final note: all four of the original researchers appear to be male. On the first page of their paper (which is paywalled, so that’s all I was able to see for free) they take it as a given that there’s no obvious variation in male orgasms. They also appear to assume the origins of male orgasms are obvious and therefore uninteresting. Bad call.