There are three basic verities to bear in mind about the clitoris and female climax. First, let's admit it up front: the female orgasm is dispensable. A male ordinarily must reach orgasm if he is to reproduce, whereas a female can conceive perfectly well without feeling a thing, and even, in the case of rape, while feeling fear and revulsion. Second, the female orgasm is capricious, its reliability and frequency varying greatly from woman to woman. Third, there's the matter of genital homology—the fact that clitoris and penis develop from the same genital ridge of the fetus.
We are not done with bundles of three. The physiological verities in turn suggest three possible evolutionary categories into which our star organ might fit, three overarching explanations for why the clitoris is there and does what it does (or sometimes fails to do). And though I hate being anthropocentric, the scenarios below apply specifically to women rather than to mammalian clitorises generally. To wit:
1. The clitoris is a vestigial penis. A girl has one because the body is inherently bisexual, poised as a fetus to grow either male or female sex organs. In the event she had been designated a male, she would have needed a functioning, ejaculating, innervated penis. Instead she received a penile remnant, a small nubbin of sensory tissue with the same underlying neuronal architecture as that found in a genuine phallus. The clitoris, then, is like nipples on a man, an atavism, the faint signature of what might have been but no longer really needs to be.
By this scenario, the clitoris and female climax do not rank as adaptations. The ejaculatory penis, a.k.a. the DNA delivery van, is the adaptation, the point of it all, while the clitoris is the booby prize.
Which doesn't mean that we can't make the best of happenstance. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the more prominent proponents of the vestigial penis theory, considers the female climax to be a prime example of a spandrel in Saint Mark's Cathedral, his famous metaphor for a body part or trait that looks like an adaptation but is really the byproduct of something else. When you first see the lavishly ornamented spandrels in the Venetian basilica, you might think that they have an independent purpose, that the master builder said, I want spandrels there, there, and there. But it turns out that you can't build an arch or a dome without incidentally making a triangular bit of wall—the spandrel. The spandrel is not the goal; it's a means to the goal, the goal being the construction of an arch. Yet once the spandrel is in place, you can go ahead and gild it. Make it gorgeous. Enjoy sex all you want, or can. And if it sometimes seems that it's rough work scaling the peaks of ecstasy, hey, it could be worse. Have you ever seen a lactating man?
2. The clitoris is a vestigial clitoris. The previous scenario posits that the clitoris is not now and has never been an adaptation; it's a residual penis. Another argument has it that the clitoris may not be of obvious utility today, but that in the past it was an adaptation—it shone with the light of a whole damned byzantine dome. In this parable, our ancestral sisters behaved rather as the bonobo does, using sex as the universal key—to curry friendships, to placate tempers, to solicit meat or favor from any number of partners, and to disguise issues of paternity. The clitoris gave females incentive to experiment, to shop around, to play the erotic entrepreneur. Such a notion could explain why women are slow to burn: their sexuality is geared toward serial encounters with multiple hair-trigger males. Well, that one didn't quite do it; I'd better go out, cruise the brush, and finish what I started.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, one of my favorite evolutionary biologists, is an adherent of the once-upon-a-time theory. In her view, the organ's fitful behavior, its demand for sustained and perhaps collective attention to perform at its optimum, is evidence of its transitional status from adaptive to nonadaptive. If female climax were a core feature of monogamy and pair bonding, the old saw has it, if it were designed to encourage intimacy between loving partners, then the human clitoris would be far more efficient than it is, Hrdy has said. It would be readily responsive to the motions of copulation alone, and it would rest easy once the man was through. Instead, only a minority of women are capable of orgasm strictly from wham-bam intercourse; most need a bit of prior groundwork. And then there's the asymmetry between a man's ejaculatory limits and a woman's trick birthday candle, the one that keeps popping back no matter how hard you blow. All of which suggests that women once were promiscuous, appetitive, roving diplomats, as many female primates are. They caroused with as many consorts as was practical, and took on the risks that come with multiple matings to quench what Hrdy sees as the far more dire and pervasive threat of infanticide—the tendency of males to kill babies they think are not their own. Well might our ancestresses have shuffled their Latin and cried, Vidi, veni, vici!
In today's world it is hardly adaptive for a woman to flit about like a Barbary macaque, and in some cultures such wanton behavior is punishable by death. As a result, the clitoris may no longer be considered a woman's best appendage. Indeed, Hrdy and others propose that because its personal and reproductive benefits no longer apply, the organ has been shrinking slowly over the millennia, retreating ever further behind Venusian blinds. If such trends continue ... well, I'm not going to spell it out. I'm just going to stand here and scream.
3. The clitoris is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have listened to the music of Bach and thought, Without this there would be nothing. I have listened and thought, It was inevitable. Evolution has no goal, with the possible exception of giving the world the Second and Fifth Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, and the Well-Tempered Clavier. The dinosaurs died so that Bach may live.
In other words, the clitoris is an adaptation. It is essential, or at least strongly recommended. It is also versatile, generous, demanding, profound, easy, and enduring. It is a chameleon, capable of changing its meaning to suit prevailing circumstances. Like Bach's music, it can always be reinterpreted and updated. So perhaps we should start exploring this thesis with a simple question; would the planet now hold six billion people if women did not seek sex? And can you expect them to play a fugue if their organ has no pipes?
Proponents of the idea that the clitoris has merit and motive—that it is an adaptation and has been selected—start by turning certain assumptions on their head. We said earlier that, generally speaking, a man must reach orgasm if he is to reproduce, so it seems clear that male orgasm is a product of evolution's hand. But Meredith Small, a primatologist who can always be depended on to question biology's bromides, has pointed out that male orgasm is not really necessary for insemination. The penis begins releasing viable sperm well before it ejaculates, and those gun-jumpers can thrash their way toward an egg just fine, which is why coitus interruptus is such a poor form of birth control.
Moreover, who is to say that the experience of orgasm was a prerequisite when the details of male physiology were being selected? As the archaeologist Timothy Taylor has noted, a male theoretically could inseminate a female through a system like urination, a kind of hypodermic injection, no ecstasy required. Chances are that male insects, with their relatively simple nervous systems, operate in just such a no-nonsense manner, releasing a spermatic package as anhedonically as a female later dispenses eggs. If the orgasmic experience evolved in "higher" males for reasons other than mechanical necessity, if we decouple the logic behind male pleasure from the details of gamete conveyance, then we lose a big part of thé argument that the female climax is an atavistic echo of something indispensible to men. All pleasure, by this rendering, becomes hypothetically optional. Yet pleasure does not appear to be beside the point. Indeed, nearly all of us are born with the capacity to seize or be seized by it. And nothing defines an adaptation so well as universality.
If we agree that the clitoris and female climax are adaptive, then we can delve into the particulars of their performance. Let us assume that the clitoris exists to give us pleasure, and that pleasure provides the spur to seek sex—that without the promise of great reward we'd be content to stay home and catch up on our flossing. Then we must revisit the matte
r of disappointment, the frequency with which the clitoris fails us. Why do we have to work much harder for our finale than men do? The clitoris is an idiot savant: it can be so brilliant, and so stupid. Or is it a Cassandra, telling us something that we ignore to our grief?
In my view, all the intricacies we've been mulling—the apparent fickleness and mulishness of the clitoris, its asynchronicity with male responsiveness, and the variability of its performance from one woman to the next—can be explained by making a simple assumption: that the clitoris is designed to encourage its bearer to take control of her sexuality. Yes, this idea sounds like a rank political tract, and body tissue has no party affiliation. But it can vote with its behavior, working best when you treat it right, faltering when it's abused or misunderstood. In truth, the clitoris operates at peak performance when a woman feels athunder with life and strength, when she is bellowing on top, figuratively if not literally. The clitoris hates being scared or bullied. Some women who have been raped report that their vaginas became lubricated even as they feared for their lives—and a good thing too, for the lubrication prevented them from being ripped apart—but women almost never have orgasms during a rape, male fantasies notwithstanding. The clitoris will not be hurried or pushed. A woman who worries that she is taking too long for her partner will take that much longer. A woman who stops watching the pot sends a message to the clitoris—I'm here!—and within moments the pot boils over.
The clitoris loves power, and it strives to reinforce the sensation of playing commando. Sex researchers have found that women who are easily and multiply orgasmic have one trait in common: they take responsibility for their pleasure. They don't depend on the skillfulness or mind-reading abilities of their lovers to get what they want. They know which positions and angles work best for them, and they negotiate said postures verbally or kinesthetically. Moreover, the positions that offer many women the greatest satisfaction are those that give them some control over the sexual choreography: on top, for example, or side by side. A movie that shows a woman reaching frenzied crescendo while being hoisted up and slammed against a wall in classic Last Tango in Paris fashion is not a movie directed by a woman.
In addition, most women get better with time and experience. The 1950s Kinsey report on sexuality found that 36 percent of women in their twenties were anorgasmic, while for those in their thirties or older the number dropped to 15 percent. Several studies done since then have found a greater capacity for orgasm among all women, yet still the older women as a group remain more orgasmic than their younger counterparts. Of course, part of the explanation could be that the older women are having sex with older men, who are defter and less precipitous than young men and who have enough self-control to sustain a session for as long as it takes their partners to climax. However, older lesbians are more easily roused to orgasm than young lesbians, suggesting that we are not talking about the deficiencies of callow Quick-Draw McGraws. Instead, the power of knowing yourself, a power cultivated over the years, translates into greater collaboration from below.
The clitoris not only applauds when a woman flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does not need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.
The intimate connection between a woman's psychic humor and her clitoral power means that the clitoris must be wired up to the brain—the big brain—before it can sing. The brain must learn to ride its little rod the way it must learn to balance its body on a bicycle. And once learned, the skill will not be forgotten. Some women learn how to climax in childhood, while others do not make the connection until adulthood. It is not an engineering problem, though. You can't figure it out with the neocortex alone, the new brain, that thickly ruffled top layer of fish-gray tissue that cogitates, hesitates, and second-guesses every impulse. Instead you must tap into a more ancient neural locus, the hypothalamus, which sits on the floor of your brain a few inches behind your eyeballs and reigns over appetite: for food, salt, power, sex. Sometimes wiring the clitoris to the hypothalamus demands a rerouting, a circumvention of the neocortex. The neocortex is clever and imperious, and it can be too controlling to grant its owner honest control. The control I'm speaking of is a whole-brain operation, a delicate negotiation between neo and primal, intellect and desire. And so if a woman's neocortex is stentorian, it must be muffled just long enough for the hypothalamus and the clitoris to seal their partnership. Alcohol might accomplish the task, if it weren't such a global depressant of the nervous system. More effective are drugs that distract the intellect without dampening the body's network of impulse relays. Most of these drugs are illegal. Quaaludes were said to be extraordinary aphrodisiacs, but Quaaludes no longer exist. They were too good, which meant too dangerous, and so had to be eliminated. But marijuana is still with us, and marijuana can be a sexual mentor and a sublime electrician, bringing the lights of Broadway to women who have spent years in frigid darkness. All the women in my immediate family learned how to climax by smoking grass—my mother when she was over thirty and already the mother of four. Yet I have never seen anorgasmia on the list of indications for the medical use of marijuana. Instead we are told that some women don't need to have orgasms to have a satisfying sex life, an argument as convincing as the insistence that some homeless people like living outdoors.
We should not be surprised that the clitoris loves power, or that its nature is complex. For women, sex has always been risky. We can become pregnant, we can contract disease, we can forfeit our lucky lactose. At the same time, we are primates. We use sex for many reasons beyond reproduction. We may not be bonobos, but neither are we seasonally breeding sheep. In the face of vulnerability, we need effective defenses. The clitoris is our magic cape. It tells us that joy is a serious business and that we must not take our light, our sexual brilliance, lightly. The clitoris integrates information from diverse sources, conscious and unconscious, from the cerebral cortex, the hypothalamus, the peripheral nervous system, and it responds accordingly. If you are frightened, it becomes numb. If you are uninterested or disgusted, it remains mute. If you are thrilled and strong, it is a taut little baton, leading the way, cajoling here, quickening there, andante, allegro, crescendo, refrain.
Some experts have argued that natural selection has given women a lower sex drive than men, and that such inhibition makes sense: we shouldn't be out there screwing around and taking the chance of being impregnated by a genetic second-rater. The theory is rank nonsense. Sex is too important on too many social and emotional counts for us to be indifferent about it. Women display abundant evidence of a robust sex drive. They respond physiologically to sexual stimuli as rapidly as men do. Show a woman a pornographic film, and her vagina swells with blood as rapidly as the penis of a male observer does. Yet there is no doubt that a woman's sex drive is an involved instrument. It is tied to mentation, mood, past experience, the Furies. At the eye of the storm is the clitoris. It knows more than the vagina does, and is a more reliable counselor than the vagina—remember that a woman may lubricate during rape, but she will almost never climax. Surely it is more logical for a female to have a sophisticated sex drive than to have either a simple-minded or a stifled drive. If a woman retains control over her sexuality, if she feels powerful in her sexual decisions and has sex with whom she wants when she wants to, her odds of a reasonable outcome are good. She is likely to have sex with men she finds attractive, men with whom she feels comfortable for any number of reasons, and thus to further her personal, political, and genetic designs.
The clitoris is flexible. It can adapt to different habitats, different cultural norms. Among our ancestors, who adhered to the comparatively promiscuous schedule that is the primate norm, the clitoris might well have fostered restless experimentation, as Hr
dy said. Yet unlike Hrdy, I believe that the clitoris can accommodate the contemporary strictures of monogamy as well—that it will nourish the bonds of love and marriage when such bonds are useful to a woman's interests. In this country, which exalts marriage to extravagant heights, married women are quite orgasmic. According to the University of Chicago's 1994 Sex in America survey, three quarters of wedded women say they always or usually reach climax during sex, compared to fewer than two thirds of single women. Of all the subgroups queried, married, conservative Christian women were the likeliest to say that they came every single time they copulated. And why not? For our God-fearing sisters, marriage is a sacrament, which means that every bounce on the matrimonial mattress is a holy and ennobling event. Right makes might, and with power comes the glory, and so it is that foes of the sexual revolution can emerge as orgasmic empresses.
There is another body of evidence suggesting that the clitoris trades in the currency of power. Recent work from the British researchers Robin Baker and Mark A. Bellis suggests that orgasm offers women a recondite way to control male sperm, either by imbibing it or by repelling it. They propose that the timing of a woman's orgasm relative to a man's ejaculation influences whether or not his semen has a shot at fertilizing her eggs. If a woman climaxes shortly after her partner ejaculates, her cervix, the gateway to the uterus, will do a spectacular thing. As it pulses rhythmically, the cervix reaches down like a fish's mouth and sucks in the semen deposited at its doorstep. This has been shown on video. A microcamera was attached to a man's penis and the deep events of intercourse were recorded: the milky ejaculate streaming forth like woozy pennants, followed by the cervix dipping into the preferred gene pool and with viscous, fluttering motions appearing to paddle the semen up into the uterus. Now whether the cervical palpitations truly enhance the chance that the semen will reach an egg is not known. Baker and Bellis have preliminary evidence suggesting that when a woman climaxes anywhere from several seconds to forty minutes after her partner, her chances of being impregnated are slightly higher than if she doesn't climax or if the orgasm occurs before or after this rather widely gaping window of opportunity.
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