The Purpose Of The Female Orgasm
It’s not a mystery when you look past a historically monogamy-oriented mindset
On average, a man can ejaculate in about 5 minutes. For some, it’s a shorter time, and for some a bit longer, but for most healthy men, getting to the O takes place pretty quickly and easily. Then there is usually a refractory period before they are able to do it again. Not so for most women. The average time to orgasm for a woman is about 13 minutes, but once it’s achieved, many women are ready to go again right away. There is no refraction time needed.
What’s the biological underpinning of this seeming discrepancy and the purpose of female orgasm, since it is not necessary to produce offspring? Orgasm may help a woman more fully receive genetic material from her sexual partner, but if he’s come long before she does and is now rolled over for a nap, she may not get to have one at all, so that’s hardly a comprehensive biological or evolutionary explanation.
From a patriarchal and monogamy-oriented perspective, it doesn’t seem to make much sense, but when you begin to consider the way that human societies were organized pre-patriarchy and also what we know about many of our primate cousins, a much more cohesive picture begins to emerge. In order to really understand it, however, you need to understand the larger context.
Up until about 6–9 thousand years ago, human beings lived in small nomadic bands of 20–50 hunter/gathers. Social cooperation and enforced egalitarianism were an evolutionary strategy that helped them to not only survive harsh and dangerous living conditions but to ensure the evolutionary fitness of their offspring (the chance that progeny would live long enough to produce their own offspring). But no-one human or animal thinks about that specifically. We have sex because we like the way it feels. “First of all, orgasms aside, animals don’t get it on because they really want to make babies. They do it because it feels good (which ends up being good for the propagation of the species, too).”
Historically, small bands of hunter/gatherers with strong kinship bonds cared for all children born into that group, regardless of paternity, which would have been unknowable anyway without the sequestering and control of women that was to only come later with the onset of agriculture and patriarchy. Because all food acquisition was done in groups and shared communally, there is no biological incentive to mating with the best “provider.” Women contributed substantially to the groups ability to feed itself.
It was only with patriarchy that the role of a provider becomes important. Women no longer had any autonomy and instead had only one mate upon whom they were entirely dependent. It is only within this context that a good provider begins to truly matter. In a society that shares everything communally, partible paternity and alloparenting of children makes good sense as a way to ensure the continuation of the species.
The great anthropologist and comparativist Sarah Hrdy tells us that, across species, including among humans, the best mother for many eons was the one who was, under particular and far-from-rare ecological circumstances, promiscuous. By being so, she could hedge against male infertility, up her odds of a healthy pregnancy and robust offspring, and create a wider network of support by lining up two or three males who figured the offspring might be theirs.
In contemporary partible paternity cultures like the Bari in South America, people believe that a baby is created by the sperm of several men, and women who are monogamous may be considered stingy and bad mothers. And among the Himba of Namibia, Brooke Scelza tells us that female infidelity benefits women and their offspring. Ditto for the Pimbwe of Tanzania. When we look at female sexual behavior cross-culturally and among non-human primates, we have to question a lot of our comfortable and comforting assumptions about who and how women are. Vice
“There is no one way of having sex we “evolved” for — we are flexible sexual and social strategists. But our essence, if we can be said to have one, is likely less matron and more macaque,” says Wednesday Martin referring to the monkeys who aside from humans are the most widespread primate genus. They are just one of the non-human primate species that has orgasms and their anatomy functions in other similar ways to ours as well.
For the human female cervix, like that of a promiscuous macaque who may breed with ten males or more in rapid succession, actually serves not so much to block sperm, as was previously believed, as to busily filter and assess it, ideally several different types of it from several different males, simultaneously. It evolved not as a simple barrier but to sort the weak and bad and incompatible sperm from the good, suggesting by its very presence that there was a need to do such a thing — i.e., that females were mating multiply.
Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (p. 145). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
What does this have to do with female orgasm? When you consider the way that our ancient ancestors lived, current societies that don’t value strict monogamy and our primate cousins, a picture begins to emerge of the biological reasons for female orgasm that are not aligned with the way that a man orgasms. This is because cooperative breeding is a lot better evolutionary strategy than monogamous pairings, something that many anthropologists now recognize.
Victorian ideas about the inevitability of monogamy because it was morally correct have long obscured the truth. Only 3% of animals are monogamous and although many humans may be culturally that way there are also many societies today that engage in marriage or other forms of pair-bonding that don’t maintain strict monogamy. It is something that has only widely emerged in the past 6–9 thousand years with the onset of patriarchy. Other non-human primates engage in these same multiple mating strategies for the same reasons as well.
“To prevent the killing of their offspring, female baboons employ copulatory calls in order to attract other males, allowing multiple mating acts and creating parental confusion among the males involved. The resulting uncertainty of who the father is hence reduces the occurrence of attacks, given the newly incited risk of potentially harming their own offspring. Additionally, mating in rapid successions also entails sperm competition, and therefore fulfills the additional function of obtaining high quality sperm.” Female Copulatory Vocalizations
Studies show that women are typically much noisier than their male partners and often vocalize during sex in order to boost their partner’s self-esteem and to bring him to orgasm more quickly. In a monogamy-oriented society, that may be because she is tired or otherwise wants the interaction to be completed, but in a different time and a different paradigm, her copulatory vocalizations could be saying, “Hang around guys, I’ll be with you soon.”
Amongst many of our primate cousins, that’s exactly what they are for. Female copulatory vocalizations advertise to nearby males that they are about to become available for the next sexual partner. In humans, multiple mating increases sperm competition as well as parental uncertainty, and that reinforces the communal care of all children, something that was and is still common in hunter/gatherer bands.
In most of rural Africa today, children wander in and out of the homes of unrelated adults in their villages, where they are treated like family. This stems from a more community-oriented lifestyle in general, but also from a lack of concern for parentage because sexual exclusivity is not prioritized. In fact, in some cultures, it is considered downright stingy. Read more about that here.
Besides feeling physically good, sex can be used as a bonding exercise, something that has been observed in both human and non-human primates and that I can confirm from my own experiences with group sex. It’s hard to explain, particularly if someone is very geared towards monogamy, how fundamentally natural and human it feels to build community in this way, but this takes place in some cultures around the world today and anyone who regularly engages in group sex can confirm it.
We evolved as a highly social species. It was our ability to socially bond rather than compete that kept us alive. Humans are hardwired for cooperation and connection and by hardwired, I mean that it is encoded into our genetics. Organisms that work well in groups tend to have an evolutionary advantage.
We tend to assume that people’s behavior is narrowly self-interested, focused on getting more material benefits for themselves and avoiding physical threats and the exertion of effort. But because of how social pain and pleasure are wired into our operating system, these are motivational ends in and of themselves. We don’t focus on being connected solely in order to extract money and other resources from people — being connected needs no ulterior motive. Scientific American
Men may be designed for one and done, but women are not and this explains the basis for female orgasms. Everything from copulatory vocalizations that help the current sexual partner to hurry up and finish — to the function of the cervix — to the fact that the clitoris is the only organ in the human body designed solely for pleasure speaks to the evolutionary benefits of multiple mating for women.
Female orgasm that takes time to achieve with a body part designed strictly for pleasure is because she’s not meant to stop at just one partner. Sperm competition will give her the best chance at a healthy offspring because it guards against infertility as well as genetic flaws or incompatibility. Multiple potential fathers within a group that is already communally oriented will give that offspring the best chance of being well cared for.
We have sex because it feels good, but there is an evolutionary incentive to do it in a way that best propagates the species. Contrary to what you’ve probably been told, that isn’t through mate competition prior to the act, it’s through sperm competition from a variety of inseminators. The coronal ridge on the human penis is designed to scoop out semen left there from other genetic competitors. It wouldn’t be necessary if that competition had already taken place prior to coitus. And because you don’t want to accidentally scoop out your own semen, it’s typical for men to become flaccid after ejaculation and to need that refractory period before they can go again.
When you connect these dots, it all adds up.
Women don’t typically reach orgasm in 5 minutes the same way men do because it is an incentive to go seek another partner. If mate number 1 is having a post-coital snooze, then subsequent sexual partners can be sought out, with female sexual stimulation continuing to build with each subsequent partner, perhaps eventually leading to her orgasm.
And since we’ve only been doing it differently for the past 6–9 thousand years, a drop in the bucket of human history, our bodies have not adapted to a different configuration. Of course, the way that we are presently designed doesn’t really mesh all that well in our current monogamy-oriented culture, but it does explain how it evolved in the first place in a way that nothing else does.
