The Surprising Science Behind Why Women Moan During Sex
Why do so many women make noise during sex?
I remember being young and feeling out of place as I navigated the world of sex. I fumbled around like a child who’d just been handed a violin and asked to play Mozart.
I think we all were. Puberty is a tough part of life. There’s a lot going on with our bodies and minds and we don’t quite know what to make of it. If it felt like you were a child living in an adult’s body, that’s because you were. I know it felt that way for me.
My young mind was opening up to a world of sexy, scary, and intimidating things as I navigated my way from boyhood to manhood. And one thing that always confused me was the way women moaned during sex.
It was the 90s and the sounds of sex were everywhere. And it was especially important that our culture, like other cultures, focused on the sounds that women make during sex.
Women moaned during sex in movies, they moaned during sex in pornos, their moans were described by friends and romance novels alike. I couldn’t tell if everyone was exaggerating how awesome sex was or if it was really just that awesome and I was missing out by being a child.
It felt like the kind of fraudulent exaggeration we see all over our culture in the way that lipstick is an embellishment of red, blood-filled, and perky lips; or the way that foundation is an exaggeration of smooth, blemish-free skin that nobody really has.
Sexual vocalizations seemed like the Instagram influencers of the sex world.
Culture and Sexual Vocalizations
If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine couples having sex, which party do you automatically assume is going to be the loudest?
I’ll let you answer that question.
Of course, the truth is a bit more nuanced than that. Some men are very vocal (and many women love this, by the way). Some women aren’t vocal at all. But on a whole, in every culture, whether you’re on the far eastern reaches of Asia, up north in Finland, or even down south in the rainforests of the Amazon, all over the globe, women are the louder sex when it comes to sex.
And it’s because of this universality that cultures place such a premium on emphasizing female sexual vocalizations.
Cue Meg Ryan’s epic performance from When Harry Met Sally where she had an orgasm in the restaurant sitting across from actor Billy Crystal, a moment that would basically go down in cinematic history.
As such, if we scan history, we’ll find that there have even been instruction manuals on how to properly moan during sex. The Kama Sutra instructs women on how to moan. In related news, sexual vocalizations have also been performative for a very long time.
It wouldn’t be until years and years later that I would discover something truly fascinating, that sexual vocalizations are actually built into our biology.
The Sounds of the Animal Kingdom
Humans aren’t the only ones with a loud, proud vocalizing female when sex takes place. Primatologist Meredith Small thinks she might have some of the answers to our questions about sound and sex.
A sample of 550 primate vocalizations was taken and the results became strikingly clear as they were analyzed.
Such vocal sounds aren’t made in any other situation a primate might find themselves in. They’re reserved specifically for sex.
What’s more, in primates, vocalizations can communicate a lot about the female in question, namely, overall health, fertility, and place in the ovulatory cycle, cueing men in on what they’re likely to get out of a sexual encounter with said female.
It’s advertising. It’s a strategy the females employ to bring in new males in order to try and mate with them.
While mating with one male, a female might be sending signals to other males to advertise her robust sexual health and try to capitalize on any other guys who may have gotten turned on and want to get in on the action.
Human Evolution
By now most of us know the old-school model of human sexual evolution and how it pertains to evolutionary psychology. It’s a simple story wrapped up with a nice, neat little bow. Let’s call this the “standard model” of evolutionary biology in terms of sex. It goes a little something like this…
Women have a limited number of ova, men have billions of sperm, so men are basically indiscriminate and ready to pounce on anything that even remotely looks warm, alive, and somewhat resembles the same species.
Women are much more selective about who they mate with because, in the end, they can only have one or two children a year while the lads can inseminate innumerable women.
They say that women want a catch who’s hubby material, men want an abundance of women, a harem!
And these two drives constantly come into conflict.
But what if it isn’t that simple? What if we’ve moved beyond this simplified conception of human sexuality?
Rethinking Evolutionary Models
One of the first major challenges to the ‘standard model’ came from a book titled Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles (available here on Amazon). That book marked a turning point when the standard, old-school model of human sexuality began to come under attack.
Sperm Wars was quite controversial. And it still is today for the fact that it spells out in plain English that in the battles of evolutionary theory, women would do best by sleeping with more than one man and ‘pitching’ the seed of the less genetically fit man.
Alas, the tides of the revolutionary war of the sexes had finally turned and now men were starting to feel the brunt of scientific explanations for behaviors that make us uncomfortable.
As more evidence came out, it began to appear that women might have just as much to gain as men from copulating with multiple males, from extra-pair copulations (read: infidelity), and even ethically non-monogamist sex.
One important part of the book was the analysis of a particular kind of sperm called ‘kamakaze sperm’ which don’t actually try to impregnate ova but seek to find other men’s sperm and destroy them in an act of self-sacrifice, allowing their fellow comrades in tails to reach the finish line and become another human life in time.
Sperm: brothers in arms until the gory end.
What’s more, it’s believed that about 40% of a man’s sperm are thought to be ‘fighter sperm’ or ‘kamakaze sperm’ that don’t actually try to impregnate women, instead, like a blocker in football and try to allow other sperm to reach the end zone.
And get this: if a man suspects his partner has been unfaithful in a modern relationship setup, the number of ‘kamakaze sperm’ increases so that the man would have the more likely advantage when it comes to the reproductive battle.
Even on a hunch, our biology is always preparing for the worst, sending in the shock troops, and getting ready to do battle on the front lines.
But What About Humans?
As was said by Christopher Ryan Ph.D. in his groundbreaking book titled Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, the female vocalizations is likely a call to any nearby males in humans, too:
British primatologist Stuart Semple found that, “In a wide variety of species, females vocalize just before, during or immediately after they mate. These vocalizations,” Semple says, “are particularly common among the primates and evidence is now accumulating that by calling, a female incites males in her group….” Precisely. There’s a good reason the sound of a woman enjoying a sexual encounter entices a heterosexual man. Her “copulation call” is a potential invitation to come hither, thus provoking sperm competition.”
And now it all starts to come together.
The idea is to maximize sexual encounters for women, letting the sperm do their work, and providing her with the best possible offspring, regardless of who sticks around to raise the children.
In species that are more monogamous, female copulatory vocalizations (moaning) were less emphatic, less intense, less complex, and generally less powerful than in species that were more polygynous or otherwise non-monogamous species — if such vocalizations were present at all.
This all raises an important question that we have to ask ourselves: Where on the spectrum from monogamous to non-monogamous do we truly fall?
There’s a growing body of scientific literature that says that both humans and animals are a whole lot less monogamous than we previously thought.
Humans: Monogamous?
In The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, it says that only three percent of species have turned out to be truly monogamous. Birds were once species we thought were happily monogamous. But they’ve turned out to be anything but.
We’re starting to discover that a whole lot more animals are fathered by extra-pair copulations (infidelity) than previously had been believed. Birds are often socially monogamous (monogamous in name only) but sexually non-monogamous.
DNA tests have proven that many birds we thought were monogamous were having children with other birds from outside of the nest. They’re cheating!
It’s difficult to pin down exactly how monogamous we humans even are because of the social monogamy-sexual monogamy distinction. Is that couple down the street really monogamous, or are they just pretending to be and having wild sex parties on the weekends when nobody’s looking?
In time, more science will likely reinforce the fact that both animals and humans are likely much less monogamous than we have always thought, and the idea of a secure, happy, lasting, loving, monogamous relationship might be much more myth than reality (sorry for bursting anyone’s bubbles).
This might run much deeper into the fabric of our DNA that we want to admit.
In the end, women moan because humans aren’t a monogamous species. We sometimes just like to pretend we are — but our biology is rooted in non-monogamous practices, up to and including copulatory vocal responses.
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