Consider the paradox of clitoral orgasm in any world of strict functionalism (I present a Darwinian version, but parallel arguments can be made for the entire range of functionalist thinking, from Paley’s natural theology to Cuvier’s creationism): Evolution arises from a struggle among organisms for differential reproductive success. Sexual pleasure, in short, must evolve as a stimulus for reproduction.
This formulation 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 centered upon the act that causes impregnation—on intercourse itself. But how can our world be functional and Darwinian if the site of 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? (For the most divergent, but equally functionalist, view of some conservative Christians, sex was made by God to foster procreation; any use in any other context is blasphemy.)
Elisabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of science at Berkeley, has just completed a critical study of explanations recently proposed by evolutionary biologists for the origin and significance of female orgasm. Nearly all these proposals follow the lamentable tradition of speculative storytelling in the a priori adaptationist mode. In all the recent Darwinian literature, I believe that Donald Symons is the only scientist who presented what I consider the proper answer—that female orgasm is not an adaptation at all. (See his book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, 1979.)
Many of these scientists don’t even know the simple facts of the matter; they assume that female orgasms are triggered by intercourse and draw the obvious Darwinian conclusion. A second group recognizes the supposed paradox of nonassociation between orgasm and intercourse and then proposes another sort of adaptive explanation, usually based on maintenance of their pair bond by fostering close relationships through sexual pleasure. Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, 1969), the most widely read promoter of this view, writes that female orgasm evolved for its role in promoting the pair bond by “the immense behavioral reward it brings to the act of sexual cooperation with the mated partner.” Perhaps no popular speculation has been more androcentric than George Pugh’s (Biological Origin of Human Values, 1977), who speaks about “the development of a female orgasm, which makes it easier for a female to be satisfied by one male, and which also operates psychologically to produce a stronger emotional bond in the female.” Or Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who argues (1975) that the evolution of female orgasm “increases her readiness to submit and, in addition, strengthens her emotional bond to the partner.”
This popular speculation about pair bonding usually rests upon an additional biological assumption—almost surely false—that capacity for female orgasm is an especially human trait. Yet Symons shows, in his admirable review of the literature, that whereas most female mammals do not experience orgasm during ordinary copulation, prolonged clitoral stimulation—either artificially in the laboratory (however unpleasant a context from the human point of view) or in nature by rubbing against another animal (often a female)—does produce orgasm in a wide range of mammals, including many primates. Symons concludes that “orgasm is most parsimoniously interpreted as a potential all female mammals possess.”
Adaptive stories for female orgasm run the full gamut—leaving only the assumption of adaptation itself unquestioned. Sarah Hrdy (1981), for example, has taken up the cudgels against androcentrism in evolutionary speculation, not by branding the entire enterprise as bankrupt, but by showing that she can tell just as good an adaptive story from a female-centered point of view. She argues—turning the old pair-bond theory on its head—that the dissociation between orgasm and intercourse is an adaptation for promiscuous behavior, permitting females to enlist the support of several males to prevent any one from harming her babies. (In many species, a male that displaces a female’s previous partner may kill her offspring, presumably to foster his own reproductive success by immediate remating.)
Indeed, no one surpasses Hrdy in commitment to the adaptationist assumption that orgasm must have evolved for Darwinian utility in promoting reproductive success. Chosen language so often gives away an underlying bias; note Hrdy’s equation of nonadaptation both with despair in general and with the denigration of women’s sexuality in particular.
Are we to assume, then, that [the clitoris] is irrelevant?…It would be safer to suspect that, like most organs…it serves a purpose, or once did…. The lack of obvious purpose has left the way open for both orgasm, and female sexuality in general, to be dismissed as “nonadaptive.”
But why are adaptationist arguments “safer,” and why is nonadaptation a “dismissal”? I do not feel degraded because my nipples are concomitants of a general pattern in human development and not a sign that ancestors of my sex once lactated. In fact, I find this nonadaptationist explanation particularly fascinating, both because it teaches me something important about structural rules of development and because it counters a pervasive and constraining bias that has harmed evolutionary biology by restricting the range of permitted hypotheses. Why should the dissociation of orgasm from intercourse degrade women when it merely records a basic (if unappreciated) fact of human anatomy that happens to unite both sexes as variations of a common pattern in development? (Such an argument would only hold if adaptations were “good” and all other aspects of anatomy “irrelevant.” I, for one, am quite attached to all my body parts and do not make such invidious rankings and distinctions among them.)
I could go on but will stop here for the obvious reason that this discussion, however amusing, might be deemed devoid of social importance. After all, these biologists may be enjoying themselves and promoting their view of life, but isn’t all this strictly entre nous? I mean, after all, who cares about speculative ideas if they impose no palpable harm upon people’s lives? But unfortunately, the history of psychology shows that one of the most influential theories of our century—a notion that had a direct and deeply negative effect upon millions of women—rested upon the false assumption that clitoral orgasm cannot be the natural way of a mature female. I speak, of course, about Sigmund Freud’s theory of transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm.
In Freud’s landmark and most influential book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905, but first published in complete form in 1915), the third essay on “transformations of puberty” argues that “the leading erotogenic zone in female children is located at the clitoris.” He also, as a scientist originally trained in anatomy, knows the reason—that the clitoris “is homologous to the masculine genital zone of the glans penis.”
Freud continues: “All my experience concerning masturbation in little girls has related to the clitoris and not the regions of the external genitalia that are important in later sexual functioning.” So far so good; Freud recognizes the phenomenon, knows its anatomical basis, and should therefore identify clitoral orgasm as a proper biological expression of female sexuality. Not at all, for Freud then describes a supposed transformation in puberty that defines the sexuality of mature women.
Puberty enhances the libido of boys but produces an opposite effect in girls—“a fresh wave of repression.” Later, sexuality resumes in a new way. Freud writes:
When at last the sexual act is permitted and the clitoris itself becomes excited, it still retains a function: the task, namely, of transmitting the excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as—to use a simile—pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire.
Thus, we encounter Freud’s famous theory of female sexual maturity as a transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm:
When erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation has been successfully transferred by a woman from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice, it implies that she has adopted a new leading zone for the purposes of her later sexual activity.
This dogma of
transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm became a shibboleth of pop culture during the heady days of pervasive Freudianism. It shaped the expectations (and therefore the frustration and often misery) of millions of educated and “enlightened” women told by a brigade of psychoanalysts and by hundreds of articles in magazines and “marriage manuals” that they must make this biologically impossible transition as a definition of maturity.
Freud’s unbiological theory did further harm in two additional ways. First, Freud did not define frigidity only as an inability to perform sexually or as inefficacy in performance, but proposed as his primary definition a failure to produce this key transfer from clitoris to vagina. Thus, a woman who greatly enjoys sex, but only by clitoral stimulation, is frigid by Freud’s terminology. “This anaesthesia,” Freud writes, “may become permanent if the clitoridal zone refuses to abandon its excitability.”
Second, Freud attributed a supposedly greater incidence of neurosis and hysteria in women to the difficulty of this transfer—for men simply retain their sexual zone intact from childhood, while women must undergo the hazardous switch from clitoris to vagina. Freud continues:
The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty…are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria. These determinants, therefore, are intimately related to the essence of femininity.
In short, Freud’s error may be encapsulated by stating that he defined the ordinary biology of female sexuality as an aberration based on failure to abandon an infantile tendency.
The sources of Freud’s peculiar theory are complex and involve many issues not treated in this essay (in particular his androcentric biases in interpreting the act of intercourse from a man’s point of view and in defining both clitoral and penile stimulation in childhood as a fundamentally masculine form of sexuality that must be shunned by a mature woman). But another important source resides in the perspective underlying all the fanciful theories that I have discussed throughout this essay, from male nipples as sources of milk to clitoral orgasm as a clever invention to cement pair bonds—the bias of utility, or the exclusive commitment to functionalist explanations.
The more I read Kinsey, the more he wins my respect for his humane sensibility, and for his simple courage. (His 1953 report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared during the height of McCarthyism in America and led to a withdrawal of funding for his research and the effective end, during his lifetime, of his programs—see the essay “Of Wasps and WASPs” in my previous book, The Flamingo’s Smile.) Kinsey was a measured man. He wrote in a dry and clinical fashion (probably more for reasons of necessity than inclinations of temperament). Yet, every once in a while, his passion spills forth and his rage erupts in a single, well-controlled phrase. Nowhere does Kinsey express more agitation than in his commentary on Freud’s theory of the shift from clitoral to vaginal orgasm.
Kinsey locates his discussion of Freud in the proper context—in his section on sexual anatomy (Chapter 14, “Anatomy of Sexual Response and Orgasm”). He reports the hard data on adult masturbation and on the continuing clitoral site of orgasm in mature women. He locates the reason for clitoral orgasm not in any speculative theory about function but in the basic structure of sexual anatomy.
In any consideration of the functions of the adult genitalia, and especially of their liability to sensory stimulation, it is important and imperative that one take into account the homologous origins of the structures in the two sexes.
Kinsey then provides a long and beautifully clear discussion of anatomical homologies, particularly the key unity of penis and clitoris. He concludes that “the vaginal walls are quite insensitive in the great majority of females…. There is no evidence that the vagina is ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary source of erotic arousal in any female.” Kinsey has now laid the foundation for a swift demolition of Freud’s hurtful theory. He cites (in a long footnote, for his text is not contentious) a compendium of psychoanalytical proclamations from the Freudian heyday of the 1920s to 1940s. Consider just three items on his list:
1. (from 1936): “If this transition [from clitoris to vagina] is not successful, then the woman cannot experience satisfaction in the sexual act….The first and decisive requisite of a normal orgasm is vaginal sensitivity.”
2. (again from 1936): “The sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm.”
3. (from 1927): “In frigidity the pleasurable sensation is as a rule situated in the clitoris and the vaginal zone has none.”
Kinsey’s sole paragraph of evaluation ranks as the finest dismissal by understatement (and by incisive phrase at the end) that I have ever read.
This question is one of considerable importance because much of the literature and many of the clinicians, including psychoanalysts and some of the clinical psychologists and marriage counselors, have expended considerable effort trying to teach their patients to transfer “clitoral responses” into “vaginal responses.” Some hundreds of women in our own study and many thousands of the patients of certain clinicians have consequently been much disturbed by their failure to accomplish this biological impossibility.
I then must ask myself, why could Kinsey be so direct and sensible in 1953, while virtually all evolutionary discussion of female orgasm during the past twenty years has been not only biologically erroneous but also obtuse and purely speculative? I’m sorry to convert this essay into something of a broken record in contentious repetition, but the same point pervades the discussion all the way from Erasmus Darwin on male nipples to Sarah Hrdy on clitoral orgasm. The fault lies in a severely restrictive (and often false) functionalist view of life. Most functionalists have not misinterpreted male nipples, for their unobtrusive existence poses no challenge. But clitoral orgasm is too central to the essence of life for any explanation that does not focus upon the role of sexuality in reproductive success. And yet the obvious, nonadaptive structural alternative stares us in the face as the most elementary fact of sexual anatomy—the homology of penis and clitoris.
Kinsey’s ability to cut through this morass right to the core of the strong developmental argument has interesting roots. Kinsey began his career by devoting twenty years to the taxonomy of gall-forming wasps. He pursued this work in the 1920s and 1930s before American evolutionary biology congealed around Darwinian functionalism. In Kinsey’s day, many (probably most) taxonomists accepted the nonadaptive nature of much small-scale geographic variability within species. Kinsey followed this structuralist tradition and never absorbed the bias of utility. He was therefore able to grasp the meaning of this elemental fact of homology between penis and clitoris—a fact that stares everyone in the face, but becomes invisible if the bias of utility be strong enough.
I well remember something that Francis Crick said to me many years ago, when my own functionalist biases were strong. He remarked, in response to an adaptive story I had invented with alacrity and agility to explain the meaning of repetitive DNA: “Why do you evolutionists always try to identify the value of something before you know how it is made?” At the time, I dismissed this comment as the unthinking response of a hidebound molecular reductionist who did not understand that evolutionists must always seek the “why” as well as the “how”—the final as well as the efficient causes of structures.
Now, having wrestled with the question of adaptation for many years, I understand the wisdom of Crick’s remark. If all structures had a “why” framed in terms of adaptation, then my original dismissal would be justified for we would know that “whys” exist whether or not we had elucidated the “how.” But I am now convinced that many structures (including male nipples and clitoral orgasm) have no direct adaptational “why.” And we discover this by studying pathways of genetics and development—or, as Crick so rightly said to me, by first understanding how a structure is built. In other words, we must first establish “how” in order to kn
ow whether or not we should be asking “why” at all.
I began with Charles Darwin’s grandpa Erasmus and end with his namesake, Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest of all Renaissance scholars. Of more than 3,000 proverbs from antiquity collected in his Adagia of 1508, perhaps two are best known and wonderfully apt for the point of this essay (which is not a diatribe against adaptation but a plea for expansion by alternative hypotheses and for fruitful competition and synthesis between functional and structural perspectives). First a comment on limitations of outlook: “No one is injured save by himself.” Second, probably the most famous of zoological metaphors about human temperament: “The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all.” Some have taken the hedgehog’s part in this dichotomy, but I will cast my lot for a diversity of options—for our complex world may offer many paths to salvation, and the hounds of hell press continually upon us.
9 | Not Necessarily a Wing
FROM Flesh Gordon to Alex in Wonderland, title parodies have been a stock-in-trade of low comedy. We may not anticipate a tactical similarity between the mayhem of Mad magazine’s movie reviews and the titles of major scientific works, yet two important nineteenth-century critiques of Darwin parodied his most famous phrases in their headings.
In 1887, E. D. Cope, the American paleontologist known best for his fossil feud with O. C. Marsh (see Essay 5) but a celebrated evolutionary theorist in his own right, published The Origin of the Fittest—a takeoff on Herbert Spencer’s phrase, borrowed by Darwin as the epigram for natural selection: survival of the fittest. (Natural selection, Cope argued, could only preserve favorable traits that must arise in some other manner, unknown to Darwin. The fundamental issue of evolution cannot be the differential survival of adaptive traits, but their unexplained origin—hence the title parody.)
Bully for Brontosaurus Page 13