There is little by way of parity either between the volume of sexual activity each gender finds necessary or desirable. Women have what, to men, seems a remarkable ability to shut down their sexual urge for long interludes in order to preserve monogamy and exclusivity in their relationships. With men in prison, at sea or at war, women seem to function perfectly well without sex for months or even years at a stretch. This ability to shelve sexual needs happens to fit in with human hunting/working/warring patterns perfectly, with men in a variety of ancient societies frequently living away from their mate for long periods.
Additionally, nature has ingeniously devised and we have simply discovered a monogamy-preserving safety fuse in masturbation. It works; but as an echo of the generally more frantic sex drive of the male, masturbation is typically of a rather different tempo for each gender. Anecdotal accounts suggest that it is unremarkable for a typical man on a hunting/business trip to masturbate once or more daily, women, every couple of days or far less. There is, again, an interesting disparity between masturbatory routines. Women can normally masturbate from stone cold to orgasm in about four minutes. Men, however, as women do in ‘real’ sex, often need to get into the mood either by careful mental scene-setting, or the visual stimulus of pornography, after which orgasm is easily and swiftly attained.
Either way, though, the self–masturbatory shortcut is just satisfying enough, if crucially short of skin-to-skin and mind-to-mind contact, to make it, for most people, a wholly fulfilling intercourse substitute. This is paradoxical in itself, because the mechanical orgasm acquired in women by masturbation is widely acknowledged to be more intense than anything achieved through intercourse alone. While it is said jokily that masturbation is better than sex because you can sleep with whoever you want, both sexes in reality seem programmed to enjoy orgasms more in a duet than as soloists, and this makes sense. For if the uncomplicated, emotion-free joys of auto-masturbation were ever to become a full analogue for intercourse, it could threaten the continuation of the species.
For Lionel Tiger, nonetheless, masturbation provides the most arresting and bizarre example of incongruity between male and female orgasm. This is, for Tiger, the existence of dildos and dildo-shaped vibrators. Men have never needed such an aid to masturbation since they have hands as built-in ‘dildos’. But even though fingers can help, women have historically appreciated a little artifice. What fascinates Tiger, however, is that while dildos are broadly penis-shaped, they bear only the most tangential, fleeting relationship to an authentic penis, what with all the natural bumps and ridges smoothed out and a vibrating mechanism, of all things, inserted. The finest human-surrogate aid for a woman to achieve orgasm, then, is a machine that bears the scantest resemblance to any human bodily part. The classic male masturbatory aide memoire, the inflatable plastic woman with a fake electronic vagina and stick-on pubic hair, is, by contrast, a positively sentimental object celebrating the female form.
These may seem marginal points, yet they are not so. For it is almost as if our bodies were wilfully mis-designed for the propagation of the species. For other scientists too, the core sexual discrepancy between men and women is a basic matter of design. Stephen Jay Gould argues that the clitoral orgasm is a paradox for Darwinian biology. ‘Evolution arises from a struggle among organisms for different reproductive success,’ he writes. ‘Sexual pleasure, in short, must evolve as a stimulus for reproduction. This works for men since the peak of sexual excitement occurs during ejaculation – a primary and direct adjunct of intercourse. For men, maximal pleasure is linked with the greatest possibility of fathering offspring. In this perspective, the sexual pleasure of women should also be centred upon the act that causes impregnation – on intercourse itself. But how can our world be functional and Darwinian if the site of our orgasm is divorced from the place of intercourse? How can sexual pleasure be so separated from its functional significance in the Darwinian game of life?’
In the few decades that such matters have been a suitable subject for serious discourse, three distinct, cogent and fascinating theories have been put forward to explain the central problem Gould articulates.
The first, classical theory is the one advanced by Desmond Morris in 1967 and supported by a wide range of researchers, from psychologists to sociologists to psychiatrists to even Masters and Johnson. Their hypothesis is that we display more intense sexual activity than any other major species of primate, and we are also unique in the length of our courtship and pair bonds. This is the result of male and female reproductive attributes having co-evolved, each counterbalancing adaptations in the other. The female orgasm is, then, more or less uniquely human and is ‘designed’, so to speak, to be complementary to the male orgasm by being much harder to bring about. The female orgasm, according to this view, has evolved as an adaptation to enhance the monogamous pair bond and make family life more rewarding. This is because only a long-term, stable male partner will know through familiarity how to make a particular woman climax properly.
The second theory, conceived and embraced by feminists and, to some extent, by the political left wing, also holds that the female orgasm is an evolutionary adaptation, but that it is supposed to be triggered by nothing more elaborate than straight intercourse; if it is not, furthermore, there is either something abnormal about the woman or inadequate about the man. The female’s ability to multi-orgasm without the subdued ‘refractory’ period the male goes through after ejaculation is additionally, to this school of thought, evidence of an almost insatiable sexual desire, an ‘aggressive eroticism’ as Mary Jane Sherfey puts it. For these theorists, monogamy is unnatural and an instrument of political repression. Post-agricultural civilisation, in this view, is another term for the growth of patriarchy and consists of the ruthless subjugation of female sexuality.
The third view of the female orgasm, proposed by Donald Symons and heartily backed by Steven Jay Gould, is that a whole nexus of anatomical, social, cultural and emotional factors make female orgasm the subtle phenomenon it is. Theirs is something of a middle way, proposing as it does that female orgasm is the happy coincidence of an existing, but minor, bodily quirk resulting from the similarity of the sexes in the womb – an echo, in other words, of the male orgasm – and a cultural artifice no more adaptive than a learned ability such as reading and writing. The curious ability for human females to orgasm, to Symons and Gould, is magnified by our unusual preference for face-to-face copulation. The cultural, learned aspect of female orgasm is similarly amplified by our propensity for love at an emotional and intellectual level.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher points out that, despite its name, the missionary position is not a Western imposition but the preferred copulatory posture in most cultures. (It is seen in pre-Columbian American pottery, for example, says Desmond Morris in Manwatching.) So, argues Fisher, it seems that the peculiar arrangement of forward-tilting vagina and face-to-face sex may have evolved as it has for the very reason that it encourages social copulation, where partners can see each other and communicate with intimacy and understanding.
Desmond Morris’s key point in describing the first theory, which is overwhelmingly the most widely accepted, is that because the female orgasm is unnecessary for procreation, it has in the past been regarded as a pleasure-seeking indulgence. However, in reality it is ‘a unique human evolutionary development of the utmost importance’, which helps to ensure and maintain pair-bond maintenance.
The evolutionary reason for this having come about, he argues, is the size of our brains and the inordinate time they take to develop from babyhood to maturity. Because our young take so many years to become independent, then, a child’s chance of survival is best helped by a large social group sustaining him or her. We need consequently to maintain stable families, and the best way of doing that is by providing human couples with the pleasurable incentive of female orgasm – so long as this is a fickle and scarce commodity attained only after practice with a partner who knows a woman intimately at
a bodily and an intellectual level.
One of the prerequisites of this ‘higher’ form of intercourse humans possess is our form of face-to-face, personalised sex. This practice also happens to facilitate (a bit) the stimulation of the clitoris during penetrative sex, and has accordingly changed our entire sexual morphology at some point in our transition from four-footed scurrying to knuckle-dragging to bipedalism. As opposed to other primates, humans have evolved displaying virtually all their erogenous zones and sexual signals on the front of their bodies. The vagina seems at some time to have taken up its human forward and downward-tilting attitude to facilitate further the progress of face-to-face intercourse The process of reconfiguring humans for their preferred sexual position also required some interesting decorative flourishes. By the time the frontal position was adopted, for example, early humans had shed their fur.
Why this happened half a million years ago is an interesting question, especially since nakedness plays such an important and unique role in human sexuality; we are the only creature that has a distinctive, bare-skin ‘sexual’ mode, or has at least, in most cultures, sexualised lack of clothes to suggest availability. It has long been thought that our hairlessness evolved as an aid to keeping cool during the day after we came down from the trees and began hunting on the hot African plains; but this would mean Nature allowed humans to trade the marginal benefit of hunting in comfort for the very considerable disadvantage of freezing at night, which would make little sense.
The latest thinking is that the disappearance of our hairy covering was a clever evolutionary strategy to deal with the time-consuming, but necessary, business of controlling ticks and fleas. Getting a little sweaty under one’s fur while chasing dinner is not species-threatening; but being driven frantic with itching 24/7 as well as contracting dangerous, parasite-borne diseases is enough to destroy a population. Other primates, it is easily observed, have almost a full-time job grooming themselves and one another; but, generally, they only have to stretch up to a nearby branch for lunch. The intellectually ambitious early man’s bigger brain required high-protein sustenance, and his schedule was simply too busy with chasing it to be spending time picking out ticks. The cold was still problematic some nights, but not the stuff of extinction since we had discovered fire and were using shelters.
This, of course, leaves the conundrum of why we still have head, beard and pubic hair. Head and beard hair almost certainly survived as sexual attractants. Pubic growth, it could be argued, has a cushioning function, and could equally have remained as a navigational aid in pitch-dark shelters. Another current theory is that pubic hair helps store and disperse sexually enticing odours.
According to the Morris et al theory, the female orgasm has an ingenious by-product, too. Female monkeys, once inseminated can wander off on all fours without losing any seminal fluid to gravity. But if a woman gets up after sex, gravity will ensure that some or most of the sperm she has received escapes. The satiating nature of orgasm, however, has the side effect of keeping the female horizontal and exhausted for a while, hence motivating her to retain semen in the vaginal canal for longer and giving a better chance for fertilisation. Finally, as Morris does not mention but other theorists in the same vein do, the satisfaction of orgasm stimulates a woman to seek more coitus, and thus further raise the chances of a successful conception.
The neat Morris theory offers a plausible explanation, additionally, for a number of social benefits in humans, all of which tend to reinforce the idea that we are designed to live in monogamous couples and stable families. The most important of these social advantages seems to provide a highly satisfactory explanation for the most perplexing of the disparities between the male and the female orgasm – the level of mechanical contrivance necessary for the great majority of male/female couples to achieve anything approaching mutual orgasm.
Is then orgasm a natural process which can only work by the non-instinctive, learned application of fingers, toes, noses, mouths, whatever, to the clitoris, and by males making a determined effort to think of the previous week’s football results in an attempt to avoid ejaculating too early? It all sounds highly unnatural, which doubtless has led to the taboos that surrounded such forms of manually and mentally assisted sex in so many cultures for so long. Yet the Morris view asks us, and cogently, too, to accept that it is part of a grander design; that nature means shared orgasm to be difficult.
His argument is that in prehistoric societies, where women were in a minority of two to three – a reality confirmed by skeletal remains – and also lived on average eight years fewer than men, they had the luxury of choosing which men to have sex with. It is stretching a point to suggest that women were consciously in the position of choosing a father for their children, because that link, as we have previously noted, was unlikely to have been made.
But it is not unreasonable to assume that sex was seen as a special, valued activity, and if a women was going to do it, she would surely be more likely to do so with a male who showed some sign of wanting to make the experience a pleasant one for her too? A male who had taken some time to learn, by whatever means – from an older, more experienced male, from the guys in the hunting gang – how to raise sex from a pleasant diversion to a proper hobby. A male who, to put it baldly, had learned a thing or two about foreplay and had the brainpower to work out, or learn, what a clitoris was for. It is likely that such attentive males have for thousands of years attracted the pick of the female population, and, in addition, had the more psychologically satisfying sexual experience themselves of feeling they are satisfying a woman.
The mild muscular ‘clamping’ feeling to a man’s penis of a woman experiencing orgasm while he is inside her is pleasant yet pretty marginal, much as is the slight sensation some women get from a man ejaculating inside them. But the feeling of the penis being gripped is also clearly one not welcomed by a minority of men; notions of the vagina having teeth or being lined with thorns have existed in many cultures as the justification for a fear of castration. However, the sense of accomplishment that a man feels in the rare situation of supplying a woman with an orgasm by penetrative sex is tangible. Failure, especially when repeated, to induce climax in a woman by any method is, conversely, very damaging to the typical man’s prestige. He is painfully aware of having failed a woman in an event whose success he believes depends on him.
There is another perspective on men’s fear of the vagina and of orgasmic, sexually active women in general. There are obviously many psychological and political explanations for this, but a simpler reason cannot be overlooked. It is this: that women who want sex, rather than being prepared merely to accept or endure it, are in the male’s mind more likely to expect and demand a high standard of performance. An inexperienced man fears that this can mean only one thing – unless he is able to maintain an erection for some implausible, Olympian duration, he will be subject to scorn and derision. The more sophisticated man will know that what will almost always be more welcome to women is a level of mental engagement combined with a deft action of finger or tongue in the right place; his failure then can only be down to laziness, which is optional, not unavoidable.
The sexually adept male may still however be mistaken; Donald Symons suggests that the male’s concern with the female orgasm can be ‘based on the misconception that it plays the same role in her sexual experience as it does in his own’. But concern it is all the same. (Symons also makes the interesting point that prostitutes who feign enjoyment of sex are the more highly prized and expensive for so doing – evidence that the desire for some semblance of an equitable sexual exchange rather than a mere one-way traffic in pleasure runs fairly deep in men.)
Another facet of the evolutionary importance of pleasure-giving in sex by men for women is pointed out by Lionel Tiger. Even women on 100 per cent effective contraception, he points out, are still notably choosy about who they mate with; the atavistic, selective tendency asserts itself in most circumstances. And the durability of t
he ancient erotic and emotional imperatives also shines through in the orgasm-only mating patterns of homosexuals. Lesbians, Tiger observes, mirror their reproductive, evolutionary role even in patently non-reproductive relationships. They are, he says, far more discriminating than men, typically having four to twelve partners in a lifetime. ‘Even when there is no ultimate cause of reproduction,’ he concludes, ‘male and female homosexuals still act as if there is.’
The mechanically tricky, emotionally enigmatic nature of the female orgasm can thus be seen in a remarkable new light: as a selective mechanism for women to choose mates not as an animal would, by body size, ferocity and aggressiveness, but by qualities such as intellect, sensitivity, kindness, reputation and popularity – plus a little dexterity with finger or tongue, for added spice. In animals, cruder parameters are the most important predictors of a male mate’s providing ability and his genetic quality; but in humans, social qualities are an infinitely better augur of genetic success in the future.
No wonder, then, that Darwin said: ‘The power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle.’ Or that the clitoris has been referred to by anthropologists as the ‘mate meter’. Or that our friends the Mehinacu in the Amazon basin have a saying that the clitoris is, ‘the nose that sniffs out sexual partners’.
O Page 13