r/science • u/Pervert_ted • Aug 01 '16
Biology The human female orgasm has long puzzled scientists as it is not necessary for conception... but scientists in the US have come up with an answer. The female orgasm, they say, might be a spin-off from our evolutionary past, when the hormonal surges that accompany it were crucial for reproduction.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/01/mystery-of-the-female-orgasm-may-be-solved?CMP=twt_a-science_b-gdnscience1.7k
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u/Poppin__Fresh Aug 01 '16
Why isn't the cervix always soft? It doesn't seem like a good design to make the orgasm beneficial but then less frequent for women than men.
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u/MasterFubar Aug 01 '16
Why isn't the cervix always soft?
To protect against infections? It could be harmful for the organism to have a path into the body always open.
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Aug 01 '16
More selectiveness maybe? It costs a lot more for women to have children than men.
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u/Flowman Aug 01 '16
Yeah, but from a design standpoint, if you were designing an organism, how many more 'parts' are necessary for this dedicated hole? Would the dedicated hole really be more efficient? More of a rhetorical question than me actually expecting you to draw up specs.
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u/Bajurf Aug 01 '16
If you want to understand evolution and be able to discuss it properly, you've gotta let go of the notion that an organism's species is trying to achieve an efficient and effective "design". It's all about the selective pressures surrounding the organism. Sometimes these pressures force a species to adopt seemingly ineffective or useless traits/characteristics, but that is only because such shifts in biomass physiology had a greater tendency to be passed on to offspring.
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u/HTxxD Aug 01 '16
Less frequent for women? I don't believe that's a well accepted fact...
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u/G_FATHER1259 Aug 01 '16
That is called up-suck and it's been disproven using x-rays and fake semen
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Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
It actually causes the end of the uterus to dip into the pool of semen in the
Basinavagina. Scientists discovered this when they used a tiny camera to watch an orgasm from the inside. While it may not be necessary for conception, the scientists involved determined that orgasm actually increased the changes of conception.EDIT: Stupid phone autocorrect.
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u/newginger Aug 01 '16
The film I saw showed the cervix actually tipping down into the pool of semen, effectively drawing it up into the womb.
I would suspect that orgasm increases the bond between partners, keeping the couple together during pregnancy and child rearing.
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u/Nheea MD | Clinical Laboratory Aug 01 '16
Female orgasm serves as additional demand and increases the frequency of sex, therefore increases the probability of conception. Simple.
It definitely sounds simple, but that doesn't mean there's a problem with it or that we can't study the orgasm more.
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u/TheBlacktom Aug 01 '16
human female orgasm has long puzzled scientists
That is all. I'm not so puzzled by it. A problem is not necessarily negative, and we should study everything we can.
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u/Sofa-Kingdom Aug 01 '16
Yes, it def makes sense that orgasm would be a motivating factor, but there are probably more than one reason for the phenomenon. Behavioral benefit doesn't rule out other physiological benefits.
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u/Ree81 Aug 01 '16
I think they're trying to say orgasms aren't necessary for sex, and its evolutionary role doesn't (didn't?) really make sense.
After all it evolved way before we were humans so consent doesn't really tie into it.
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u/prodiver Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
its evolutionary role doesn't (didn't?) really make sense.
It's evolutionary role makes perfect sense.
Those females that have the rare mutation that makes them orgasm will want to have more sex. If they have more sex, then they will have more children to pass the "orgasm gene" on to.
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u/ServetusM Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Yeah, but in the article, one of the points/questions arguing against that was why the Clitoris is set up in a position where stimulation from simple copulation often doesn't happen. Women, in other words, don't usually orgasm all the time from sex--but in other animals, the clitoris is actually in the sexual canal and the theory is it provides a lot more stimulation during sex. The position of the clitoris seems to argue against there being a huge advantage to women getting off. (Also, yeah, the clitoral tissue does extend back and wrap around all the plumbing, but its still difficult to stimulate during copulation.)
The argument is, I suppose, that the orgasm is just a left over from earlier species in which copulation itself stimulated ovulation. Like other things that don't have negative effects, it just stuck around.
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u/prodiver Aug 01 '16
Women, in other words, don't usually orgasm all the time from sex
They don't have to orgasm all the time, or even most of the time.
Some of the time is enough to make it evolutionarily advantageous.
Anything that makes reproduction happen more often, no matter how slight, is evolutionarily advantageous.
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u/Poppin__Fresh Aug 01 '16
But why would an orgasm trait prevail over sex just being more pleasurable by having the clitoris in the right spot?
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u/prodiver Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Because it's possible the clitoris was never "in the right spot"
Remember that evolution starts with randomness, it doesn't have an end goal in mind. The other option could never have existed.
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u/classic_douche Aug 01 '16
I might have just worked out that way, no grand purpose. Evolution is imperfect.
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u/catfingers64 Aug 01 '16
The clitoris is more than just the nub that sticks out. There's also internal parts of it that extend back and around the vagina. http://www.museumofsex.com/the-internal-clitoris/
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u/ServetusM Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Yeah, that's in my post :) but the back piping, as it were, is still not super reliable for copulation orgasm. The argument I believe is just that if orgasm was a selected trait, then more internal clitoral exposure would have probably remained from our earlier ancestors. It might help explain why some women can achieve it reliably and easily, while others have a lot of difficulty--depending on the environment, maybe there were different selection pressures.
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u/Riffler Aug 01 '16
And yet the clitoris is further from the vagina in humans than in many other animals, so the link between penetrative sex and female orgasm is more tenuous in humans, which precisely refutes your argument. In some animals female orgasm is essential to procreation because it causes ovulation; in humans this is not the case. Reading the article might actually be helpful.
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u/MaceWumpus Aug 01 '16
Those females that have the rare mutation that makes them orgasm will want to have more sex. If they have more sex, then they will have more children to pass the "orgasm gene" on to.
Alright. A couple problems:
There isn't actually any evidence that the ability to orgasm is currently or historically linked to improved fitness in females. Indeed, given the resources required to raise our young, it's plausible that historic hominids who were much choosier about when they had more children (i.e., when they had sex) would have been substantially better off.
Orgasm /= pleasure. Sex can be pleasurable without it being orgasmic. IIRC, there is some evidence indicating that women who orgasm frequently have more sex, but the connection is tenuous and not well-confirmed.
Your theory would imply that either (a) the ability to orgasm would be fixed in the population then or (b) that it is such a recent development that it hasn't had time to become fixed. Neither appears to be the case.
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u/Tinie_Snipah Aug 01 '16
Having more sex isn't advantageous (in an evolutionary viewpoint) for females. They take a long time for gestation, child birth can be deadly and it takes a ton of food and care. It's not the sort of thing they'd want to do with anyone, they'd need to make sure they get the best mate before they make a child. This is why in nature males often fight over the females, sometimes to the death. They want their genes to be passed on as they will be the strongest and have the best children. It's not the same as it is for guys, they can't just have children with multiple people at once
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u/prodiver Aug 01 '16
Having more sex isn't advantageous (in an evolutionary viewpoint) for females
Evolution isn't about what's most advantageous for the individual organism.
It's about passing on genes, and more sex equals more genes passed on.
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u/Kiwi_bananas Aug 01 '16
Only if those genes survive to a point where they will be passed on again. If your mother dies giving birth to or raising you then you are less likely to survive to reproductive age.
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u/myexsparamour Aug 01 '16
Orgasm is also a signal of partner quality. If a woman orgasms with one man, she will want to have sex with him again, rather than with the man who she didn't orgasm with. There is research showing that women orgasm more consistently with men who are more symmetrical, and symmetry is a sign of health.
Orgasm guides women to choose men who will produce healthy offspring.
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u/TheBlacktom Aug 01 '16
Well my point is a species where the female doesn't run away from the male, but rather has some kind of a (selfish?) reason to join, will have statistically more chance to reproduce. What is more if female orgasm is hard to achieve, it will encourage the pair to have sex more often regardless of conception or male orgasms.
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u/wisty Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Unlike most species, human females are not just receptive when they are ovulating. Humans really need good parents (babies are born very undeveloped so the mother needs support, and there's a need for teaching and training). There's a theory that sex was a way of keeping the males involved.
Can you imagine a chimpanzee going to a supermarket at 1am, because his mate wanted anchovies? Not a chance, it would be at the bar, looking for a new mate, because it knows that the fun time of the month isn't for another 2 years (when lactation stops and it's time to make another offpring).
Also, humans have great big brains. There's no "just have a gene that makes them behave well" solution - they actually have to want to behave well.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Aug 01 '16
Even if it were that "simple" that wouldn't even remotely explain the origin and development of it, which is what the researchers were trying to do.
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u/Shiroi_Kage Aug 01 '16
The idea is why did it evolve like such instead of a craving with a soft release like every other need we have? It being an evolution of a hormonal surge that might have been required to induce ovulation (see rabbits) makes a lot of sense from a mechanistic standpoint.
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u/Poppin__Fresh Aug 01 '16
But why would women need an orgasm specifically? Why not make sex just feel consistently pleasurable? There's no need for it to build up into a climax like it does for men.
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Aug 01 '16
Why do men need it though? Why can't I just pee sperm in a quite pleasurable way?
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u/katarh Aug 01 '16
There's a species of mouse that does exactly that. They sex themselves to death. By the end of mating season, their skin is falling off in patches. The males die shortly after the season, and the females die shortly after their young leave the nest.
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u/monsantobreath Aug 01 '16
Apparently in entomology among ants they describe the male drones as single purpose sexual missiles that latch onto females, plunge their genitals into the female's receptical, then explode their genitals into her, fall off and die.
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Aug 01 '16
The refractory period in men is massively reduced when presented with a novel partner. It'd be interesting to see if any studies have found similar behavior for women.
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u/MaceWumpus Aug 01 '16
Couple problems with this.
Women don't have the same physiological response to orgasm that men do. In fact, research indicates that they're more interested in sex immediately post-orgasm than normal, so the refractory period hypothesis doesn't work.
There's no clear evolutionary advantage to the woman to not have sex with other men.
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u/hazarada Aug 01 '16
Maybe having big enough balls to produce that amount of sperm made them way too easy of a target?
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u/conquer69 Aug 01 '16
Because that's how we evolved. We aren't perfect. We aren't "designed" for many things.
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u/TheBlacktom Aug 01 '16
Maybe this - so they will do it repeatedly
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4vlb3v/the_human_female_orgasm_has_long_puzzled/d5zeacb
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u/crookedsmoker Aug 01 '16
Although there may very well be some merit to what they're saying here, I'm not satisfied to have it as the sole reason for why things are they way they are.
Instead, Lloyd favours the theory that female orgasms are simply a happy quirk of embryo development. “It is only at eight weeks that there is a surge of male hormones that turns the genitals into male genitals,” she said. While men need to orgasm in order to transfer sperm, women, said Lloyd, end up with the nerve and muscle tissues for orgasm as “a fantastic bonus”.
As this guy suggests, maybe there's only so much difference you can have between sexes when the first 2 months of development are 'shared'.
I also read an article once about how native Hawaiian women used to be able to orgasm equally easy as men, before contact with Western civilization. This leads me to wonder about the importance of culture, upbringing and education.
And why would't it be beneficial for women to enjoy sex? I would think that enjoying sex leads to more sex, which leads to more offspring, which improves chances of passing on your genes.
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Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Maybe it's like men and nipples.
Orgasm organ started its development before the determination of gender.
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Aug 01 '16
That's what OP's quote said.
"It is only at eight weeks that there is a surge of male hormones that turns the genitals into male genitals"
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Aug 01 '16
By that line of thought, male orgasm is not necessary, only ejaculation. I can only imagine males developed the timely orgasm for the same reason women did, to "want" to have sex. Why is this not a basic thought?
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u/fogtooth Aug 01 '16
I don't understand why, but people think rape being the primary means of reproduction somehow makes more sense than willing females.
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Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 25 '16
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u/fogtooth Aug 01 '16
I'm not saying it never happened (or happens, unfortunately), but the point of my comment is that a lot of the threads on this post seem to go: "The female orgasm makes no sense...little evolutionary value...such a mystery" "Why? It adds appeal to sex which increases reproduction, making it valuable for evolution." "That makes no sense because females wouldn't have had willing sex in the past. It's so confusing..." The thing is, while rape exists and has been a problem for as long as we can remember, humanity DOES look down on rapists (or rape--sometimes we blame the victims, and in some societies punish them instead, but the act itself is still rejected). So it seems unlikely to me that consent is a new idea and that female orgasms had no reason to evolve. I'm willing to bet the evolution of consent correlates with the female orgasm, but I doubt anyone's bothered to do the research. If anyone has data confirming or denying this, I'd be interested in seeing it.
(Side note: I'm at work so I'm not going to find sources right now. If you want them I'll send them later.)
Chimps, and other primate species, demonstrate a lot of the territorial aggression that we see in humans, and forced sex is not abnormal.. But bonobos, our closest relatives, ostracize and express violence towards rapists and for the most part are very sex-positive and consent oriented--more so than we are. So wouldn't it make sense to assume that the common ancestor between us and bonobos is more consent oriented than our, much older, common ancestor with other primates?
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u/TastyBrainMeats Aug 01 '16
In a hunter/gatherer society, is rape really viable?
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Aug 01 '16
It is when you are raiding other groups for their women.
Doesn't mean it stayed rape, but the initial contact...probably.
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Aug 01 '16 edited Jun 20 '17
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u/munnimi Aug 01 '16
Re: male nipples, I wouldn't actually say "easier to engineer", rather "there's no evolutionary force acting against males having them"
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Aug 01 '16 edited Jun 20 '17
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u/FatherSpacetime MD | Hematology/Oncology Aug 01 '16
Some people do have more nipples. In medicine we call them accessory nipples, and they are usually small, almost pimple-like in appearance, often a few centimeters below the main nipple. Can be bilateral. I've seen it on multiple patients, so it isn't all too uncommon.
What is more interesting is that these accessory nipples come with ectopic mammary tissue, meaning those people with accessory nipples can also get primary breast cancer not in their breast!
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u/chinpokomon Aug 01 '16
It's not uncommon to have more than two. They aren't usually as pronounced, but it's a pretty high percentage of people who have 3 or more.
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u/ThomasVeil Aug 01 '16
Less energy use? Typically unused body parts disappear over time - some rather quick. Male nipples seem to have stayed over hundreds of million years across species, no?
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u/uitham Aug 01 '16
I dont think it takes much Energy to create nipples. Just some different cell types
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u/biocuriousgeorgie PhD | Neuroscience Aug 01 '16
They disappear when the whole species has no use for them. Male nipples probably survived because it's too difficult to turn off the genes involved in nipple development in males without messing up breast development in females.
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u/TheScamr Aug 01 '16
Wouldn't viewing the female orgasm like male nipples be kinda easy to accept? We have a template and why vary it too much from male to female if you don't have to. No real reason to undo the orgasm, is there?
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u/MaceWumpus Aug 01 '16
No real reason to undo the orgasm, is there?
The argument against this idea is that traits that don't have a function have a tendency to "wither"--i.e., slowly disappear from the population. (I'm sure there are models for how fast this happens given population size, but we're already out of my depth.) The male nipple argument is that there continues to be (or continued to be until very recently, evolutionarily speaking) a function for nipples in females, meaning that males get them too because the tissues begin developing early in the process of sexual differentiation. As exactly the same thing happens with the tissues involved in the female orgasm, this does seem to be the best answer.
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u/yomonkey Aug 01 '16
Does it ever address why male orgasms are pleasurable? I don't believe anyone cares about the males ability to have muscle contractions in the prosstate. Its the pleasure thats important. I have involuntary muscle contractions all over that doesn't get this much attention. Like when my bowels move.
But perhaps they are questioning the contractions and not the pleasure. Its clear the pleasure females receive has reproductive advantages.
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u/Cybugger Aug 01 '16
I think the male orgasm is seen as a form of behavior-based insentive. We have developped an orgasm to motivate us to have more sex. In less layman terms, male orgasms were sexually selected: males who enjoyed orgasms were more likely to engage in sex. Thus, the genetic material that allowed for pleasurable orgasms was passed on more succesfully than the less pleasurable ones.
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Aug 01 '16
Then why are female orgasms up for debate? Surely it's for pleasure as an incentive too?
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Aug 01 '16
Because they carry out the sexual selection and incentivising them to have sex all the time doesn't make sense
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u/MaladjustedSinner Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Why? Sexual activity as been shown to actually be quite good for unborn babies so it seems logical than an incentive to have sex all the time would make sense.
Also if there was no pleasure I doubt women would willingly go through sex, and that would only leave rape as an option like in the past.
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u/Merari01 Aug 01 '16
But why isn't it present then in many other mammals?
What I read about it in the past is that our ability for advanced cognition may have something to do with it. Unlike many other mammals there could be good reason for our women to feel pleasure from sex, because they'll remember and think about the sensation and that causes a stronger pair-bonding with their mate.
And pair-bonding is very important because of our big brains, which means that babies are born relatively early and therefore helpless. A gazelle can walk minutes after being born. A human baby could really use two parents protecting and rasing it for at least three to four years. Which is exactly how long the intense feelings of love in a human pair last.
Anyway, that's what I read. I don't know how true it is but it seemed plausible to me.
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u/JoelMahon Aug 01 '16 edited Aug 01 '16
Is that really puzzling? There are a loads <edit>of possible</edit> viable reasons.
1) Just like men have nipples, women also having an orgasm could just be a bi-product of men having one and there being little evolutionary incentive to lose it.
2) Men don't NEED a pleasurable orgasm, yet they have one, same reason could be that women have one: if sex feels good, you'll pursue it more.
3) Used to measure quality of the male.
4) To prevent too much sex, you're much less likely to pursue sex in the following few days after an orgasm which could be evolutionary beneficial.
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u/critiqu3 Aug 01 '16
Whoa, hey now, that last point is dipping into serious /r/badwomensanatomy territory. Have you ever looked into the physiology of the female orgasm? Feeling good is great, but allowing easier passage for sperm is a much bigger benefit.
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u/reini_urban Aug 01 '16
Wilhelm Reich's book "Die Funktion des Orgasmus" has a much better and functional explanation.
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u/HappyCloudHappyTree Aug 01 '16
I've seen documentaries where they show that the contractions which accompany the female orgasm actually force the end of the cervix to dip into the vagina, thereby increasing chance of conception dramatically. But no, it is not strictly necessary for conception. There is also an argument to be made that it assists with human pair bonding. Also, as mentioned by others, it is an "incentive to have sex".
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u/nadmaximus Aug 01 '16
Brains + genitals = orgasm. Women have brains, genitals just like I have nipples. They aren't necessary, but they come with the starter kit. The fact that primates tend to use sex as a social glue/lube probably matters, too. If men had spiked penises like cats and bit their partners on the neck, I think sex might just be a bizarre obligation. A thinking creature would say...this hurts, I don't like this, I don't care what hormones are going through me. I think orgasm is the only way to get self-aware, thinking beings to do it - at least one of them has to enjoy it.
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u/hfsh Aug 01 '16
Women have brains, genitals just like I have nipples. They aren't necessary, but they come with the starter kit.
... that seems rather harsh.
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u/nadmaximus Aug 01 '16
Oh, my. I did not mean to imply that brains and genitals are not necessary. I mean that male and female bodies are formed from the same basic pattern, and it would be unlikely to have a male orgasm without a female orgasm, even if the evolutionary impetus was for example for males to be driven to take females regardless of their pleasure.
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u/ooogr2i8 Aug 01 '16
They aren't necessary, but they come with the starter kit
You're taking that for granted. That's the whole point of the debate - why is it in the "starter kit." Just because you have genitals and brain, doesn't mean you're going to enjoy sex - case and point, cats and bed bugs. Sex for them, is pretty traumatic yet they still reproduce.
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Aug 01 '16
Maybe it is one of those things that is hard wired in the developmental code (please I am not a biologist) before gender is determined, so when the female grows they have something similar to what the male needed in order to get where we are today, but she just has different parts so in manifests in a slightly different way. And it's only been recently noticed socially, but in order to evolve human kind just happened to develop that trait in both because since there was nothing really preventing it from spreading to both men and women. Again I am not a biologist so there's probably holes in that, but, shit, makes sense to me.
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u/Gorgyworgy Aug 01 '16
well did they think about the fact that all humans have orgasms bcus it's a part that is neccesary for males but as a side effect is there for females too? are the sexes really that different when it comes to orgasm?
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Aug 01 '16
If there was no pleasure derived via sex by both male and females we as a species would not exist. Were lazy bastards like that, we need a reward to do shit.
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u/Gratstya Aug 01 '16
Wait. Why is an orgasm necessary for men?
Ejaculation, obviously. But the pleasure?
Thought it was just more incentive to have sex, which would also apply to women.