3 Weird Theories About The Female Orgasm

For a child to come into being, a man must have an orgasm.

However, the woman with whom he has sex does not.

Thus, the biological reason for the male orgasm should be obvious. It enables fertilization. However, there seems to be no clear scientific consensus on why women also have orgasms.

The most intuitive explanation is that there are evolutionary advantages to women enjoying sex. Why else would they want to have sex? Without the female orgasm, a central motivation for reproduction could be missing.

However, there are a few more very interesting explanations:

Boosting Conception

This approach to explanation is also called “Upsuck Theory”.

The idea behind this is that the contraction of the uterus that occurs during orgasm sucks the semen up close to the cervix. Also, the orgasm is supposed to help move the sperm through the uterus and fallopian tubes.

Selecting The Best Genes

Another explanation is that orgasm is a kind of mechanism that gives feedback on the quality of the partner or the quality of his genes.

The orgasm, therefore, serves as assistance in the selection of a partner.

This is shown, for example, by the fact that things like shoulder width, income, or a man’s mental strength have an impact on a woman’s orgasms.

The Female Orgasm As A By-Product

The counterpart of the female orgasm is the male nipples. They also have no use at first sight.

Steve Stewart-Williams provides an interesting explanation in his book “The Ape That Understood The Universe”.

He argues that male nipples and female orgasms are merely by-products of the developmental process that gives rise to males and females. As mammalian embryos begin life in a gender-neutral state before diverging from this initial state after about 6 weeks, they “need all the relevant equipment to build a baby of either sex”, as the author puts it. In this way, the male nipples can be explained.

Then he refers to Donald Symons, one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, who assumes that exactly the same applies to the female orgasm. It has no function but is merely a by-product of the male orgasm. Just like the male nipple is a by-product of the female one, which has the use of breastfeeding.

According to Stewart-Williams, this explanation pisses a lot of people off. In her opinion, it would be derogatory to the female orgasm, and therefore to women, to say that the orgasm is not an adaptation but merely a by-product.

Stewart- Williams comments as follows:

There’s no good reason to think that the by-product explanation devalues female orgasm.

Many adaptions are things that no moral person would value, and many things that we do value are not adaptions. As such, people who object to the by-product hypothesis are doing something strange: They’re saying that it’s hugely important to them that female orgasm turns out to be an adaption, like vomiting, cobra venom, and the scorpion’s stinger, rather than a “mere” cultural invention, like science, medicine, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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