Summary: It’s commonly assumed men’s orgasms make evolutionary sense but women’s don’t. I propose a counter hypothesis that’s at least as testable as the average evolutionary psychologists’... and makes men’s orgasms a byproduct.

Echidne Echidne of the Snakes asks one of the most relevant questions in contemporary pop science:

Is it the researchers of evolution who seem to be almost totally interested in only one topic: women’s bodies and how women walk or don’t walk and which types of women men might want to mate with? Or is it the popularizers who do this?

I’m not a zoologist, but the focus on women’s properties suggests that these researchers think men are the sex which does the choosing. Yet in most of the evolutionary psychology literature I’ve read the argument is that prehistoric women did the picking. Or is it whatever is most convenient?

Echidne’s permalinks are slow and I’ve nicked the whole post but if you’re patient you can read it in context here.

One obvious answer is that nobody studies men because men’s sexuality is supposedly a) almost universally believed to be “normal” against which women’s sexuality is supposedly “other,” b) that men’s sexuality is utterly uncomplicated, and c) that except maybe for premature ejaculation early on, impotence later in life, and a bizarre attraction to evolutionary-psychology that repels potential female partners men’s sexuality is utterly reliable. (That this isn’t actually true despite that near-universal agreement is a fascinating story in and of itself.) Thus, men aren’t studied because people assume they already have all the answers.

A second possibility: I studied a lot of history and philosophy of science in college with an emphasis on controversies in science and public perceptions of science. One short answer is that, sort of like natural selection itself, there are tens of thousands of papers, articles, and books published a year… and only the “interesting” ones tend to get picked up and passed along.

For what its worth they don’t even have to be current — if they’re nice and juicy they just keep coming back, sometimes year after year. In fact they don’t even have to be true! Last February, for instance, a bunch of concerned bloggers revisited a 2003 hoax report linking fellatio to reduced breast cancer risk.

The point being that we tend not to hear about good human ev-psych (assuming there is any!) because it’s almost guaranteed not to be “interesting.” Where interesting means “sexy,” or, even better, “controversial.”

Note: Bad or controversial memes (which is probably a more appropriate term) actually benefit from twice as much distribution — first from people titillated by it, then by those who deplore it… and, come to think of it, once again by those who debunk it!

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As with Ev-Psych the science in Science Fiction is often total junk science but it’s great social-theory fodder. Hannah Arendt made the interesting proposition that Science Fiction has merit for serious thinkers because it acts as a sort of “futures market” for what people believe they can look forward to. Sadly EvPsych is of somewhat less interest because it reveals only what people have believed for generations.

On the other hand, like other forms of fiction it’s a fun genre to play around with. And since I, no less than you, are just as qualified as any popular “authority” I enjoy making up my own theories that fit my own pet biases.

For instance: DrDick mentioned issues with large infant heads and birth canals. Someone else mentioned that real evolutionary behaviorists study animal models. In conversation with one (female) biologist I learned that in quite a few of the species associated with male iconography (bulls, stallions, elk, for instance, and also lions, dogs, and cats) male orgasm isn’t as big a deal, at all, as it is in humans. Instead the urge to copulate for both males and females is more like an itch and ejaculation more like a sneeze. If we anthropomorphize to animals we assume male moose “risk all” for the same mind-blowing orgasms men can experience… but! If other organisms are any indication male orgasms are completely unnecessary.

So! Assuming human male sexuality is the baseline not just for all humans but all male animals… is dead wrong. And if it’s dead wrong then you can ask well, so if whopper male orgasms aren’t necessary for reproduction (340,000,000 wildebeest can’t be wrong) then where do they come from?!?!

Now remember this is all might-as-well-be-conspiracy-theory speculation (just like “real” EvPsych theorizing) but! Back to those big heads and birth canals: when a baby’s head comes pounding through the pelvis the urethra is easily crushed against the underside of the pubic bone. Crushed urethra means serious risk of postpartum bladder rupture, which in turn means no survival to reproduce again. Turns out the large interior of the clitoris wraps around the urethra in just the right spot though.

Coincidence? Maybe. Sort of. Since evolution is not a plan but simply about what one survives, it’s possible that women with larger clitoral tissue right there didn’t have better sex for it but did have better postpartum survival. Boom. Selective pressure out and, considering survival rates, pretty intense selective pressure. The trick? Again, evolution isn’t a plan, and since genital tissue isn’t really specified by anything on the X chromosomes both female and male tissue might be bolstered. Now. One last time, evolution is not a plan.

Clitorises, like penises, are complex systems of nerve and erectile tissue. Genetically speaking the easiest way to grow more padding around the urethra would be to grow the whole shebang and that would include nerves… and nerve paths to the brain. With me so far? Here’s where the speculation game gets really fun: the clitoris gets bigger to mitigate damage by an infant’s skull but all that extra nervous tissue, along with pathways to the brain, might account for why men (who share that tissue) have such whopping, why-bother-it’s-so-obvious orgasm. And why women, unlike most other female mammals, can have bell-ringing orgasms as well. Yes, the capacity for gigantic orgasms could be selected for; no, the selection pressure could have nothing to do with sexual or mate selection. At all!

And yet… for reasons speculated upon in your post and other comments to it, that line of inquiry, which I propose lightly but not at all frivolously, will not be pursued by evolutionary psychologists because, unlike the genre of EvPsych as a whole, it does not buttress all the dominant paradigms about male class, privilege, dominance, and centrality.

Or in news items about them.

[Note: I previously speculation that men’s and women’s orgasms could be a side-effect of an entirely different kind of selective pressure in this post. Again I’m not saying it’s true but it does nicely illustrate the way real evolution with all its contingencies and expediencies work compared to the sort of deterministic/plan-for-everything way we tend to imagine. —fl]