Women Can Have Multiple Orgasms: What's the Evolutionary Function?

The Enigmatic Orgasm: Female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males.

But there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per sex act.

A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential.

It used to be conventional wisdom among biologists that human beings are unique in experiencing female orgasm, but no longer.

Nonetheless, female orgasm remains both a marvelous phenomenon and a contentious, unsolved mystery among evolutionary biologists.

Given the longstanding and widespread sexual repression of women in both Western and Eastern societies, it is not surprising that only recently has anorgasmia (failure to experience orgasm) been identified and treated.

Nonetheless, the real biological mystery isn’t why some women don’t climax, but why some do....

Anthropologist-primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males.

“Based on both clinical observations and interviews with women,” writes Hrdy, “there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per copulatory bout.”

A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential.

As for why this potential exists at all, Hrdy suggests that it is ultimately driven by the fitness benefit of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, as proposed earlier for the evolution of concealed ovulation.

Thus, female orgasm and its requirement of sustained stimulation may have provided the proximate mechanism under­pinning the ultimate payoff deriving from having sex with multiple partners.

Here are Hrdy’s own words:

“It is possible that as in baboons and chimps the pleasurable sensations of sexual climax once functioned to condition females to seek sustained clitoral stimulation by mating with successive partners, one right after the other, and that orgasms have since become secondarily enlisted by humans to serve other ends (such as enhancing pair-bonds).”

Picture humanity’s mother studiously going from one sexual partner to the next, maintaining and motivated by unsatisfied sexual tension while transitioning among males, egged on in her search for “sustained clitoral stimulation” by the hope that the next guy will finish what the previous one hadn’t quite managed.

Or maybe if she had already climaxed, she might nonetheless be inspired to encounter multiple males by the simple fact that female orgasm is rekindlable (whether this is the right word for the experience is not certain, but it clearly is a bona fide phenomenon).

If so, then the ultimate motivation for such behavior would have been the fitness bonus of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, proximately motivated by the prospect of an orgasm. Or several.

Nonhuman female primates—notably macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees—do in fact mate sequentially with a number of different partners, and if stimulation from these encounters is cumulative, orgasm might be a proximal payoff.

It might accordingly be part of a complex reward system among many animals, not just human beings, that induces females to mate with many different males.

In addition, it might have evolved in nonhuman primates for one reason (e.g., infanticide insurance), then been maintained among modern human beings for another.

If female orgasm evolved as a mechanism that induced women to mate with multiple men it doesn’t mean that human cultural traditions would necessarily welcome it.

Thus, the hideous practice of “female circumcision,” still widespread in much of northern and eastern Africa, may owe its existence to a recognition that female sexual desire can lead to multiple partners.

In order for a woman to be considered marriageable, it is necessary to guarantee her fidelity by curtailing her orgasmic potential, if not eliminating it altogether.

Hrdy has made the interesting proposal that female orgasm may thus be a relic, adaptive among our primate ancestors but potentially disadvantageous—even dangerous—to some women today.

Thus, insofar as orgasm might even occasionally induce women to seek out additional sex partners beyond their designated husband, this consequence in itself might have serious (and certainly fitness-reducing) results.

In much of the world, the penalty for a woman’s having sex with more than one man (especially if she is married) is quite severe, sometimes including death.

As with menstruation, concealed ovulation, the existence of nonlactating breasts, and the other evolutionary enigmas yet to be explored, the conceptual waters surrounding female orgasm are muddy indeed. More...

tags: female  orgasm  multiple  evolution  

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