The Female Orgasm
If frank though impersonal discussions of sex make you squeamish, maybe you should skip this post.
Several years ago I read Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography. In it Angier talks about the evolutionary function of the female orgasm. Apparently scientists have determined that it serves no purpose in reproduction, but feel it must have some utility according to the principles of natural selection. Feminists have their own reasons for wanting an answer to this scientific mystery. On some level I disagree with the line of inquiry, because it's predicated on the notion that in order to have value, the female orgasm must serve some function. As far as I'm concerned, that's not much different than saying sex is only appropriate for the purpose of reproduction, and is less healthy/moral/necessary otherwise. On the other hand, it's a question I haven't been entirely able to set aside, and every now and then it pops into my consciousness again. (See, for instance, my God & Sex post regarding the mating raccoons.)
Today, two possible explanations occurred to me. The first is that since the advent of tools women haven't been quite as helpless our sisters in the animal kingdom. Therefore, man might risk death trying to mate if we weren't interested.
A second, more likely hypothesis has to do with hormones. While I hate the idea that our behavior is driven by biological chemicals we don't control, I have to accept it as fact. Not the whole truth of why we do what we do, but part of it. Like men, we have hormones that influence our level of sexual desire, and our sexual urgency tends to abate temporarily after an orgasm or three. Were we incapable of achieving that release, we would be entirely different creatures.
Of course, among women our level of desire and ability to achieve orgasm differs, but I've never heard of any woman with high desire/low ability who wasn't made unhappy by it. My mother told me that before she got married her grandmother gave her some advice about sex. Great-grandma said it wasn't entirely unpleasant if one could focus on something else during the act. To get by, she did her grocery shopping list in her head while Great-grandpa took advantage of his marital privilege. Thank the gods times have changed!
