We are perilously close, in this tidy model of evolution, to seeing the clitoris and its picky preferences as something closely akin to one of the primary motor forces in the promotion of human intellectual progress: men who are intelligent and sensitive get more chances to inseminate women; they pass on their own genetic advantage to their children; the traits of intelligence and sensitivity are selected for; humanity moves up the intellectual ladder stage by stage; the survival of the smartest thus ensures the continuance of the species.
And once you start applying this model to other aspects of human sexual behaviour as it has both evolved so far and developed culturally, everything makes sense. The woman’s near-unique, permanent sexual availability, a true evolutionary adaptation if ever there was one, is in perfect harmony with a monogamous imperative. So would the much-discouraged, and apparently self-defeating, practice of faking orgasm, which most women and not a few men have very likely done since ancient times. Additionally, the persistent idea that it takes more than a single sex act to produce a baby, which, as we have seen, is strongly believed in many preliterate societies, is a conviction quite consistent with the maintenance of monogamy and the painstaking development of a loving, skilful sex life. (Tribes we studied in the previous chapter who allow a series of men to ‘help’ inseminate a woman could be regarded as monogamous too, so long as a broad definition was allowed, in which all the men of a village constitute the tribe’s combined manhood, rather than a group of competing males.)
A seemingly peculiar research finding like the mood-elevating effect semen appears to have on women, which makes no obvious evolutionary sense, can also be seen in a certain light to possess a logic of its own. It is rewarding to the male if a woman feels happy after orgasm, as well as advantageous – especially, one might say, if he is not planning to stay for breakfast. Men frequently see their partner’s orgasm as a reflection of their virility. It is equally rewarding for women to receive a mild dose of a natural antidepressant at the very après-afterglow moment their mind might be inclined to stray to the possibility of having just become pregnant.
Even committed sceptics on evolution will point to sexual characteristics in humans that they attribute to culture, but that might equally be the product of Darwinism at work. The American orthodox rabbi and prismatic thinker Shmuley Boteach asserts that God has ordained it that womanising men tend to be low-standard lovers because they never have to be imaginative or creative, but instead can rely on just running through the same old sex routine again and again. But whether it be it God or evolution’s doing, Morris’s or Boteach’s theorising, it remains a constant that being good at sex is a surefire way to keep the pair-bond alive.
Morris’s theory of the female orgasm is satisfying and inspired. If the likes of both sexes were congruent, we humans would experience a very dull kind of coupling. But in its curiously unbalanced form, each sex has a sufficient interest in and identification with the other’s perspective while simultaneously being interestingly different. This makes the coupling fulfilling and, above all, long-lasting, which is the principal reason for it.
And the Morris theory has proved intellectually leakproof enough for some of the West’s most brilliant minds. The philosopher Jacob Bronowski, for one, found it a compelling idea. ‘The preoccupation with the choice of a mate by both male and female, I regard as a continuing echo of a major selective force by which we have evolved,’ Bronowski wrote. ‘All that tenderness, the postponement of marriage, the preparation and preliminaries that are found in all cultures, are an expression of the weight that we give to the hidden qualities in a mate. Universals that stretch across all cultures and divides are rare and tell-tale. Ours is a cultural species, and I believe that our unique attention to sexual choice has helped to mould it.
‘It is irresistible to speculate on this idea that women’s sexual pleasure has been an evolutionary boon. Perhaps its function is to give females a physical incentive to seek out mates who are attentive, and a disincentive to stay with a selfish partner. Distinguishing between partners in this way might prove an advantage in the effort to find a protective, nurturing male who might help to rear the young. Such a mate also benefits in the biological sweepstakes. In short, making women feel good may help men to win the Darwinian contest of supremacy.’
The Morris argument nonetheless came under sustained attack – as did the second, feminist theory of female orgasm -by the postmodern voice of Donald Symons. He thought the Morris case to be a little over-stated and designed, consciously or unconsciously, to provide an evolutionary justification for the tradition of marriage. Symons derided as wishful thinking the notion that the clitoris is automatically stimulated to orgasm (as opposed to simply feeling quite nice) during intercourse. Furthermore, if orgasm were an evolutionary adaptation, there would, surely, be very few non-orgasmic females alive – nor many men suffering from premature ejaculation – because orgasmic females and super-controlled males would long since have been favoured by natural selection.
The second theory, of the sexually insatiable female held back from the chance to orgasm constantly only by patriarchal society, was dismantled with rather more relish by Symons. Morris’s ‘pair bond’ and Sherfey’s ‘insatiable female’ theories are contiguous, differing only in their conceptions of the ideal – for Sherfey a paradise of endless sexual indulgence, for Morris a nirvana of sexually intense monogamy.
Both theories, for Symons, exist only in the human imagination. Not only is there, for him, no evidence at all of insatiable, multi-orgasmic women in pre-agricultural peoples, but they are still a rarity today. Even on sexually liberated Mangaia, men are still acknowledged to be more keen on sex than women. Furthermore, Symons argues, a tendency towards sexual insatiability would have interfered with early woman’s genuinely adaptive activities of food-gathering and preparation, and childcare. As the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead also noted, Symons says, in cultures like that of Samoa, where foreplay is encouraged, all women orgasm; but in cultures where foreplay is forbidden, or you have to be clothed to have sex, or the lights have to be out, or all odours obscured by deodorants, the potentiality for orgasm may be universally untapped. ‘It is important to realise,’ Mead concluded, ‘that such an unrealised potentiality is not necessarily felt as frustration.’ Or, as Symons noted acidly: ‘The sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys and the fears of men.’
Symons mentions, but does not support, two views that the female orgasm is actually dysfunctional. The first holds that orgasm may lessen the chance of conception. Extreme excitement in the final phase of sex constricts the outer third of the vagina by vaso-congestion; this has the effect of bottling up and retaining semen. But the vaso-congestion relaxes on orgasm; Masters and Johnson accordingly recommended women hoping to conceive not to orgasm.
This is not considered to be correct today. Psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas states in The Evolution of Desire: ‘Women on average eject roughly 3 5 per cent of the sperm within thirty minutes of the time of insemination. If the woman has an orgasm, however, she retains 70 percent of the sperm and ejects only 30 per cent. Lack of an orgasm leads to the ejection of more sperm. This evidence is consistent with the theory that women’s orgasm functions to suck up sperm from the vagina into the cervical canal and uterus, increasing the probability of conception.’ It might also be noted that if orgasm could reduce the possibility of a successful fertilisation, it would surely follow that it would be easier for women to become pregnant through unsatisfactory intercourse – or even rape – than by means of loving sex. (To be fair, though, there is no data on whether bad sex is more or less productive than good sex.)
The second argument for the proposition that orgasm might be reproductively dysfunctional is this: if the sensation is so pleasurable that it becomes a desire independent of thoughts of child conception or welfare, it could undermine women’s reproductive efficiency
and the creation of the best circumstances for raising her children. The same might equally – in fact, more accurately – be said of the male orgasm; that pure physical pleasure is not the most appropriate sensation to accompany something as serious and burdensome as the conception of a new life.
If, as such a construction suggests, this meant men had no control at all over their urge for orgasm, it would be a flaw in human design. We would then have to consider whether the best way to make sure men understand the gravity of what they are doing when they have sex would be to make sexual intercourse painful and unpleasant, and only permissible after fulfilling much irksome bureaucracy and form-filling. But, of course, one of the key features that marks us out from animals is that both males and females know what sex leads to, and that we have, additionally, the sophisticated psychological mechanisms of romance, love and affection come into play to ensure that, to a large extent, babies are wanted by both parents.
The view of female orgasm that Symons favours is that the phenomenon is not an adaptation at all but a relic, a kind of echo of the male orgasm, just as the male nipple is an echo of the female. While the same body cannot be both male and female, the brain can be wired for both potentialities. Kinsey noted in 1953 that there was a marked similarity between the male and female orgasm, but the most telling evidence was Masters and Johnson’s discovery that orgasmic contractions in both sexes come at the precise same 0.8 seconds apart.
Symons speculates further that the female orgasm can only have been retained through evolution (having existed in the first place as a functionless throwback like the male nipple) because it was of such importance to men. Female multi-orgasm, he claims, may be an incidental effect of women’s inability to ejaculate. It may even be a direct imitation of the pre-adolescent male’s orgasm. Boys who masturbate pre-puberty are able to achieve repeated ejaculation-free orgasm (and this is recorded as early as five months) in a short period of time. Their capacity to repeat this ‘dry’ orgasm without loss of erection diminishes in adolescence and decreases again in mature manhood. Stephen Jay Gould draws a conclusion from this that many women will find awkward: ‘The reason for a clitoral site of orgasm is simple – and exactly comparable with the non-puzzle of male nipples. The clitoris is the homologue of the penis – it is the same organ, endowed with the same anatomical organisation and capacity of response.’
The Symons/Gould camp, although currently in the ascendant, is far from immune itself to post-post-modernist criticism. Helen Fisher differs from them on the question of female multiple orgasm, and why men do not have the same sublime capacity. Comparing the female orgasm to the male nipple is, for her, invalid. The male nipple, Fisher points out, is inert, whereas the clitoris is a highly sophisticated little instrument that produces a massive physical sensation and emotional experience – an altered state of consciousness, no less. It also has a signalling capacity. Men like women to climax because it reassures them that they have satisfied their partner, and that she is less likely to seek sex elsewhere, and the genetic material he has implanted therefore has more chance of surviving than his neighbour’s. ‘Female orgasm boosts the male ego,’ Fisher reasons. ‘Why else would women fake orgasms?’
Even woman’s notorious failure of orgasm, Fisher says, may have been selected for millennia ago. Women tend to climax when they are relaxed, with attentive and committed partners. That is why, to the moralists’ delight, surveys such Redbook’s tend to confirm that women have better sex with husbands than with secret lovers. Street prostitutes, she adds, are said to climax less than call girls with clients who are prepared at least to mimic ‘real’ lovers – confirmation for Fisher, as for Morris, that woman’s fickle orgasmic response is a mechanism evolved for her to sort worthy partners from unworthy.
A male anatomical reality, meanwhile, again suggests persuasively that the female orgasm is a pointless but pleasant relic rather than the product of ruthless evolutionary selection. It is the bothersome question of how on earth men with small penises have managed to survive the rigours of evolution? Desmond Morris’s assertion that human beings have evolved to be the sexiest primate is supported by the human penis being so large. But it is not always that large, and if women’s universal assertion that size does matter – and very much so – is to be believed, small penises should have been bred out of the population hundreds of generations ago by women voting with their vaginas.
Penis size, however, comes in two dimensions, length and width, and it is width that is the critical factor, Helen Fisher explains. Even if a wide penis does not often produce orgasm on its own, it certainly seems to provide a more satisfying sensation to more women, and this should, Fisher says, have ensured that males with thick penises have more lovers and more children and that penises accordingly became thicker over the generations. Without fossilised soft-tissue evidence one way or another, it is impossible to know if penis size has increased down the generations. The likely reality is that the most minuscule or string-like penises have died out, but that, through the millennia, men have generally been able to make up for any deficit in their penis size with such attractive attributes as charm, kindness, bravery, power and brains.
One very important problem that tends to be by-passed by all these theories of the orgasm, however, is whether women really are as inclined towards monogamy as tends to be assumed. The received wisdom among evolutionary psychologists and their like is that men, with their implausibly large testicles pumping out sperm by the billion, are inveterate philanderers, while women, with a finite supply of eggs that require a significant investment, are naturally reserved and choosy about whom they sleep with, the question of sexual pleasure being very much secondary in their lives. Men, as a result, are biologically inclined to be promiscuous, while women concentrate on sifting through potential mates in search of ideal father material.
David Buss demonstrated this divergence between the sexes experimentally in a 1993 study of college undergraduates. The women in his research typically stated that they would ideally like around five sexual partners in a lifetime. Men’s idealised figure was in a range from 18 up to 1,000. Women invariably had high standards even for one-night stands. For short-term partners, however, Buss concluded, men ‘are willing to go down to the tenth percentile, as long as she can mumble’.
Even what Symons cuttingly calls the ‘Sherfian paradise’ -of endless wild sex for women, the older they get – does not necessarily imply female promiscuity. It is telling in the extreme that only one of the four female lead characters in Sex and the City, the aspirational manifesto for so many twenty-first-century Western urban women, is truly promiscuous. Sherfey would take heart that the wanton Samantha is the oldest of the four women, but it can be assumed that, informally or otherwise, the show’s creators did their market research, and that they must have been persuaded that true promiscuity, as opposed to serial monogamy, does not resonate very well with even that show’s target female viewers.
Sexual pleasure and proper, non-masturbatory male orgasms have always been a scarce resource controlled by women who, in prehistoric societies, were both in a minority and, like now, sexually available for only two-thirds or less of their life. But it seems probable, too, that women have always had affairs; for every philandering male, after all, there has to be a philandering female.
A clue as to the real state of women’s sexual faithfulness through the ages may be gleaned from modern data on the sex drive of females. In the 1950s, psychologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach showed that women around the world begin sexual advances, and subsequent studies have shown that a perceived equality of sex drive is more prevalent than not in the large majority of societies. Helen Fisher regards it is as curious that Westerners still cling at all to the image of man as seducer, woman as submissive. She argues that this is a relic of our agricultural past, when women were pawns in property exchanges at marriage and their value depended on their ‘purity’. This meant girls’ sex drive was denied, effectively, for financial re
asons. Today, economically more independent, women are often sexual pursuers – and not merely in Sex and the City-style fiction.
Prehistory (plus the usual healthy dose of informed guesswork) must hold the most important clues as to whether women are naturally as prepared as men to encompass promiscuity in pursuit of sexual pleasure. So what may we reliably garner from what we know of our ancestors? Their sexual morphology seems to have been similar to ours, so they almost certainly practised face-to-face copulation; from that, we can be fairly confident that couples were recognised. But were prehistoric couples faithful?
The consensus among anthropologists is that prehistoric females did mate with more than one male in one cycle. But males at some level understood that their sperm was competing with that of other men, because notions of jealousy grew up despite (or because of) the affection-producing hormone oxytocin. This would suggest that women took advantage of their seller’s market in sex, but that they also liked to reserve a particular lover as ‘theirs’ – quite possibly because of his special skill in giving them orgasms.
From the seemingly instinctive territory-marking habits that survive among some women today – scratching a man’s back with their fingernails as they reach orgasmic ecstasy is one such – we may intuit that women, too, were capable of sexual jealousy. There is also cultural evidence of formal pair bonding, which leads to the contention that relationships developed in prehistory as a norm in spite of a promiscuous desire in both sexes. Unfaithfulness came to be seen as non-ideal, but frequently necessary to ensure the survival of the tribe or the species.
According to Helen Fisher, there is plenty of genetic advantage to women as well as men in having offspring with a variety of mates. Women could assure themselves of extra resources for them and their children, a measure of insurance, and, although they could not have the foggiest idea they were so doing, better genes and more varied DNA for their children’s biological futures. ‘Hence those who sneaked into the bushes with secret lovers lived on,’ Fisher writes in her Anatomy of Love, ‘unconsciously passing on through the centuries whatever it is in the female spirit that motivates modern woman to philander.’ She does not mention the more obvious construction on this – that it simply felt nice to women to have orgasms with more skilful or varied lovers. But she does consider it perfectly possible that female prostitutes accept money and gifts for sex not necessarily for economic motives, but because they enjoy sexual variety.
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