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by Jonathan Margolis

  ‘At the age of three or four,’ Dr Yates continues, ‘children band together and explore the mysteries of the dense tropical bush … Sex play flourishes in the undergrowth and coital activity may begin at any time … The young boy is taught at puberty by older males … [he] is coached in techniques such as the kissing and sucking of breasts. He is told about lubrication and trained in methods of bringing his partner to climax several times prior to his own ejaculation.’

  For anyone with a mind, however, to believe that caveman sex, after all, was probably peremptory and brutal, there is a thread of evidence in the apparently liberated sex life of Mangaia. Marshall detected more than a trace of a darker side, too.

  Although it seems that the women of Mangaia are their men’s equals in their desire for casual sex, Mangaian men, according to Marshall, still succeed in being far more promiscuous than the women. ‘The average girl has had at least three or four lovers between the ages of thirteen and twenty whereas the average boy has had over ten,’ wrote Marshall, adding that boys often travel to neighbouring islands to expand their experience. So while the Mangaia culture may be more promiscuous than Western cultures, men still allow themselves within its generous confines to be more libidinous than women. Marshall additionally discovered that Mangaian men believe they naturally desire sex more frequently than their womenfolk. As a result, he concluded, ‘some husbands beat their wife into submission’.

  Since Marshall, although Mangaia is still routinely used as a standard argument in favour of extreme sexual liberality, there has been a parallel process of scales falling from researchers’ eyes. The island’s violent side now attracts more academic attention than its sexual free-for-all. Sociologist Murray Strauss of the University of New Hampshire headed up a more recent report, published as part of a project on intra-family violence for the US National Institute of Mental Health, with this statement from a Mangaia woman: ‘How do I know that he loves me if he doesn’t beat me?’

  6

  The Evolutionary

  Paradox of Orgasm

  ‘Sex and the City star Kim Catrall and husband Mark Levinson have split up shortly after forty-six-year-old Kim said he was the first lover to give her earth-shattering orgasms. The thrice-married star now claims he has become obsessed with sex. They are co-authors of a book called Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm.’

  December 2002 news item quoting

  US gossip columnist Cindy Adams

  The chapter that follows is in many respects the core of this book. It seeks to examine how the sexual desires and orgasmic sensations of the two genders have diverged; how this might account for some of the ways our societies have become ordered; whether women, freed from cultural restraints and taboos, from physical and social conditioning, are naturally as promiscuous and gratification-centred as men; whether the very different Nature of the female orgasm from the male has developed as a Darwinian adaptation, with specific reproductive benefits, or whether it is a pointless if pleasurable biological quirk.

  ‘The desire for intercourse is the genius of the genus,’ wrote Schopenhauer. But what a complex genius it turns out to be. By virtue of a series of devilishly clever evolutionary tricks, or perhaps due to sheer happenstance shaped by cultural factors, or by the deliberate design of a devious God, women and men have quite different sexual desires, different sexual experiences and different sexual aims. They probably always have had different expectations from sex, since the dawn of humankind. And as men and women are aware, they do not actually need one another to enjoy orgasm.

  Yet from prehistory up to the present, most members of these two very different tribes have continued to seek out one another’s company and spend their lives broadly together, centring a large part of their shared emotional existence on an activity, sexual intercourse, of which they have a very different experience. The genius of the genus is that the huge majority of the world’s population is not homosexual – that, for one reason or another, the complex attraction of otherness has always managed to outweigh the easy pleasures of sexual like-mindedness, and the furtherance of the species has thus been assured.

  It is a close-run thing whether the most striking disparity between the male and female yearning for orgasm is emotional or physical. On the emotional front, it is axiomatic, if not everyone’s experience, that women fall in love first and later discover lust, while men fall in lust and only subsequently learn to love. Put another way, there is a broad, cross-cultural, popular perception, accurate or not, that women set out with a generalised longing for romance, affection and security that only finds proper fulfilment with the relief of a localised neural desire in the pelvic region; whereas men set out with a localised neural desire in the pelvic region that only finds proper fulfilment in romance, affection and security.

  The most basic physical disparities between the male and the female orgasm are the most conspicuous. Take the obvious point, as delineated by Kinsey in his 1948 debut on the sexology scene, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, that, ‘Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does.’

  Or take another major conclusion of the same work, that, Tor perhaps three-quarters of all males, orgasm is reached within two minutes after the initiation of the sexual relation.’ (A time some men will regard as quite impressive!) Or the demonstrable fact that the average female has to be twenty-nine before she can match the orgasm rate of a fifteen-year-old boy – a remarkable inequality given that, according to Stephen Jay Gould in Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples, male and female humans are anatomically very nearly the same creatures. Typical male orgasm also lasts no more than a couple of seconds, while in women, climaxes of up to a minute are known.

  ‘Males and females are not separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection,’ Gould argued. ‘Both sexes are variants upon a single ground plan … The external differences between male and female develop gradually from an early embryo so generalised that its sex cannot be easily determined. The clitoris and penis are one and the same organ, identical in early form, but later enlarged in male foetuses through the action of testosterone. Similarly, the labia majora of women and the scrotal sacs of men are the same structure, indistinguishable in young embryos, but later enlarged, folded over, and fused along the midline in male foetuses.’

  For women, despite such similarities at the manufacturing stage, sexual intercourse is a hopelessly inefficient way of producing orgasm. According to Desmond Morris in his 1967 book The Naked Ape, at the age of fifteen, peak child-bearing time for our distant ancestors, only 23 per cent of twentieth-century females have experienced orgasm in any form, masturbatory or through sex. By the age of twenty – on the elderly side for our forebears – Morris claims only 53 per cent of women have known orgasm, while the figure only reaches 90 per cent at the female sexual peak of thirty-five.

  More modern research does not show any significant improvement in those dismal 1960s statistics. The Queen Dom.com poll of 15,000 respondents supported the existence of a fundamental difference between men’s and women’s experiences of orgasm, especially during intercourse. Women were still much less likely to orgasm. Only 42 per cent reported that they ‘get there’ most of the time, while 26 per cent of females said they experience orgasm ‘rarely or never’ during intercourse. The ‘during sex’ figure for men was 89 per cent, with only 2.5 per cent of men reporting problems reaching climax. ‘To put this into perspective,’ the website commented, ‘women are ten times more likely to have problems with orgasm during sexual intercourse.’

  The masturbation figures showed an improvement on Morris’s data from forty years earlier, probably reflecting a relaxation on the taboo of practising and/or admitting to masturbation. In 1999, 77 per cent of women said they could masturbate to orgasm always or most of the time, 10.5 per cent, rarely, almost never or never. The corresponding masturbation ‘success’ figures for men were 92 per cent
and 2 per cent. Looking less positively on the same figures, it was still the case that even when masturbating, orgasm is five times more likely to be to some extent problematic for women than for men.

  Men, as the QueenDom figures plainly reflect, are virtually assured orgasmic climaxes – and additionally can orgasm from the age of ten or eleven, and often much younger, unless they suffer from some physiological or psychological disability. More often than not, however, the male mechanism is far too swift and efficient to give a female partner even a slender chance of a ‘classic’, penetration-induced orgasm. Orgasm for women, as a result, is far more often produced by a masturbatory mechanism of some kind than by straight reproductive intercourse. But as if to compensate for this physical mismatch, Nature has intriguingly made the female orgasm produced by masturbation far and away the more intense.

  It is in the arena of the emotions, however, that the gap between male and female orgasmic expectations and feelings widens still further. Whether this was the case for our preliterate ancestors is a matter for conjecture, but the evidence again from surviving primitive tribes gently nudges us towards the conclusion that there has always been such a gulf to a greater or lesser extent.

  Everyday experience and anecdotal evidence strongly suggest that human males tend to a significant extent to have a high interest in orgasm, placing less importance on relationships, coupling, security and monogamy, while females tend, again, to prioritise relationships, coupling, security and monogamy over mechanical orgasmic satisfaction per se.

  Research data supports this proposition. In the QueenDom poll, respondents were asked how important orgasm was to them. The site editor comments: ‘We asked this question from two different perspectives: how important is it that YOU reach orgasm and how important is it that your PARTNER reaches orgasm? Only 10 per cent of women say that it is extremely important that THEY reach orgasm, but 41 per cent of women say it is extremely important that their partner reaches orgasm. In other words, it is four times more important that her partner achieves orgasm.’ (This is not to decry the importance men place on their partners’ orgasms; 48 per cent of male respondents reported that it is extremely important that their partner reaches orgasm, which suggests they place more stress than women on mutuality of pleasure. At the same time, though, 27 percent of men said in the poll that orgasm was extremely important for them. So what the figures reflect is probably a greater all-round interest in orgasm as an essential of sex for men than for women.

  Women’s more compromising (not to mention accommodating) Nature is accepted even by radicals like Mary Jane Sherfey, who acknowledged in her 1966 essay ‘A Theory of Female Sexuality’ that: ‘A woman may be emotionally satisfied to the full in the absence of any orgasmic expression.’ (She did add in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, that: ‘The woman usually wills herself to be satisfied because she is simply unaware of the extent of her orgasmic capacity.’)

  Feminist theorists find women’s tendency not always to prioritise orgasm for its own sake a little uncomfortable. Their models of sexually voracious, promiscuous females in prehistory may, for all we know, be perfectly accurate. Yet survey evidence in the modern world stubbornly refuses to support such a view. Shere Hite in The Hite Report found that whether or not they regularly achieve orgasm in intercourse, the majority of women who responded to her questionnaire cited affection, intimacy and love, rather than orgasm, as their principal reason for liking sex. Neither did women report orgasm to be the most important bodily gratification resulting from sex; the preferred physical sensation by a significant majority was the moment of penetration.

  For many women, then, orgasm is an overrated sensation. A British journalist, Lucretia Stewart, has written: ‘Personally, I have always thought it was possible to exaggerate the importance of orgasm, believing that in many cases it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive. As any fool knows, the best stage of a love affair is the early stages, when you are in a state of constant, frenzied, unsatisfied desire. Once a man knows how to satisfy you there is no mystery, and within lie the seeds of boredom.’

  Previously, Madeline Gray, in a book called The Normal Woman – which set out to assure women at the height of the sixties Sigmund Freud cult that they were normal even if they had not experienced ‘mature’ vaginal orgasm – had been considered rather controversial by writing: ‘So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations … It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.’

  It would seem that for women across cultures, during an individual act of sex, the journey – from wooing to scene setting to foreplay – is all important, while the consummatory end is very much a secondary goal. But, in any overview of a woman’s sex life, her ultimate ends – enduring love, security, intellectual parity, intimacy, trust, a good environment for the children and so on – are more important than the sum of individual journeys, of isolated moments of gratification. This apparent reality has contributed to the common – and possibly correct – view of women as ‘traders’, who exchange sexual favours for security rather than sex for sex.

  The opposite applies on both counts for males. Men are able to offset almost all the ends women value most for relatively few, and brief, orgasmic ‘highs’, often with partners who are unsuitable over a wide spectrum of parameters – the most extreme case being prostitutes.

  For a zoologist such as Tim Birkhead, this disparity between men and women has a biological rationale; males, for Birkhead, are interested principally in how many eggs they can fertilise, women in who fertilises them. The different emphases of the genders are no better illustrated than in the pleasures each sex chooses deliberately to forego when joining monastic orders. Monks give up the male’s powerful craving for the frustration-releasing physical ‘sigh’ of orgasm and subsume it (or so we are led to believe) in prayer; there is no approved way of dissipating the desire for female companionship. Nuns, on the other hand, forego relationships and ‘marry’ Jesus instead.

  Even the deliberate adoption for cultural or political reasons of a more male-pattern sexual lifestyle seems not to diminish in women some inexorable, atavistic drive towards romance and stability. Tarvis and Sadd, summarising an enormous, 100,000-response 1977 survey by the American Redbook magazine, made a revolutionary finding for that time: that women who were more adventurous and experimental sexually had fewer orgasms than women who, if they had sex at all before marriage (which many did not), had it with the man they loved and subsequently married. Among the Redbook respondents who had had a series of one-night stands, for example, 77 percent said they never reached orgasm, compared to 23 percent among the women who had sex frequently with stable partners. Tarvis and Sadd quoted Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: ‘And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?’

  Donald Symons, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of what is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative book on sex, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, prefers a pithier maxim from W.H. Auden to sum up the disparity between men and women’s view of sex: ‘Men are playboys, women realists’.

  Another anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, delves into the lyrics of a classic pop anthem for his illustration of male sexual thinking and how similar it is to our imaginings of a caveman’s sexual repertoire. ‘In the story told in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, the raucously brilliant song by Jim Steinman that was recorded by Meatloaf, a man is seducing a woman. The process is described (by the baseball hero and announcer Phil Rizzuto) in adolescent male terms – getting to first base, second base, rounding third, heading for home. Suddenly, the music stops. The woman calls an abrupt halt. She heatedly queries: ‘Do you love me? Will you love me forever? Do you need me
? Will you never leave me? Will you make me so happy for the rest of my life? Will you take me away and will you make me your wife? … I gotta know right now.’

  ‘“Let me sleep on it,” exclaims the evasive, equivocal male. She refuses sexual access until he promises to be with her “till the end of time”. In the bitter final verse, the new husband desperately shouts, “Now I’m praying for the end of time.” The promise of the relationship and of the duct of pleasure at its center is not matched by the real quotidian life within which they exist. Here, as elsewhere, the female has the more serious and complex task of assessing this pleasure and its role in her life. She must form and re-form the larger picture and adjust it for the passage of time and the varying circumstances in which she and her partner might spend their time.’

  Not all men can accept that they are, in effect, ejaculation addicts, semen-spraying drunks, who inexorably seek the palliative null point of post-ejaculatory relief at whatever cost in broken promises, social embarrassment or any of the other penalties resulting from careless or cavalier sexual conduct. There are plenty of pop songs from a male point of view that attest to how much better ‘making love’ is to ‘just fucking.’

  But there seems no getting away from the conclusion that it is primarily for women that shaking off inhibitions and responding sexually to the point of orgasm depends on being in love and feeling comfortable with their lover. The female trait throughout history of body decoration and adornment -with great attention given to make-up, clothing, jewellery, dieting and so on – would suggest that women are more interested than men in attracting a superfluity of sexual partners. But the female’s extensive concentration on her appearance is a decoy; it has to do with factors other than the signalling of sexual availability, continuing as it does long beyond the successful discovery of a mate.