What’s the purpose of the female orgasm?

Maybe: you could argue that if there were no male orgasm, there’d be no reproduction. Because without ejaculation, there’s no children (of course, without many other things too, but here it’s about the orgasm). A remarkable performance, taken men an average of just 10 explosive seconds.

With a woman’s orgasm, it’s different. The orgasm isn’t required to produce children, and doesn’t contribute anything else to the reproductive performance of two people. It’s purely fun. So the primary sexual organ of the woman – the clitoris – also pursues no higher goals than solely pleasure.

Why women have an orgasm at all is still a mystery to science today. Why do men need an orgasm to reproduce and women don’t? What’s the purpose of female pleasure in reproduction? In short, why do women come? The latest research could shed light on this.

Ancient orgasm theories

Theories about the female orgasm have been circling since Aristotle, who «ingeniously» stated, «The female is as it were a deformed male.» The scholar based his thesis on a simple assumption: that ejaculation beats vaginal secretion – and the woman has nothing to contribute to reproduction anyway.

Even the father of psychoanalysis and women’s whisperer Sigmund Freud criticised the female orgasm. He discredited the clitoral orgasm as an infantile gimmick for little girls and thus invented the pipe dream of the «vaginal orgasm».

Today, we know that every orgasm is clitoral. Even during penetration the inner clitoral legs (page in German) are stimulated by the vaginal wall. Speaking of penetration, not even a quarter of all women worldwide reach their climax through penetration alone.

Even when distanced from Freud’s and Aristotle’s thinking today, the female orgasm and its reproductive benefits continue to give researchers pause for thought.

Its origin has, for a long time, been explained anatomically: the clitoris and penis arise in the womb from the same erectile tissue and are indistinguishable from each other during the first weeks of embryonic development. However, this doesn’t explain why men need orgasms to reproduce and women do not, as current studies point out.

Theories from evolutionary biology

Further theories in the field of evolutionary biology haven’t been proved conclusively in recent years either. One such theory states that the female orgasm may provide an evolutionary advantage by increasing the probability of fertilisation through muscle contractions of the entire genital region. These may help transport sperm to the uterus more quickly. Solid evidence is still lacking, as stated by the authors of this comparative study: «The bulk of the reported evidence favors the conclusion that the female orgasm, with its concomitant central release of oxytocin, has little or no effective role in the transport of spermatozoa in natural human coitus.»

Related to this thesis is the theory of mate selection, which views the orgasm as a guarantee for a high-quality partner. But here, too, evolutionary biology raises questions: according to a study in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, women experience orgasms more often with men who possess attractive (character) traits such as humour, creativity, and fitness. However, this still wouldn’t answer the question of why the clitoris is needed to determine partner quality. From today’s perspective, it seems almost naïve to infer quality as a family man from quality in bed.

What women have in common with rabbits

None of the theories provides a satisfactory answer to the question: why do women have orgasms? One thing seems certain: the female orgasm is too complex to be an evolutionary coincidence.

So, what’s left if it’s not a means of mate selection, nor an evolutionary advantage, nor a coincidence? Quite possibly, a relic from our origins.

At least that is what Mihaela Pavlicev and Günther Wagner claim in their study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, they explain that, on the one hand, a woman’s orgasm may once have been as evolutionarily important as that of a man. In order to understand this, we have to compare women not to men, but to other female mammals. With the doe rabbit, for example.

Rabbits – like cats and ferrets – experience induced ovulation. That is, the orgasm triggers ovulation and thus fulfils a direct reproductive function. In humans, on the other hand, ovulation occurs monthly – independent of orgasm and sexual intercourse.

To test the theory, the researchers gave rabbits the antidepressant fluoxetine, which is known to inhibit orgasms. And indeed, ovulation occurred 30 per cent less frequently in the test group than in the control group.

Emancipation of the clitoris: how the regular cycle came about

In women, too, the orgasm may have once taken over this important reproductive function. Today, female ovulation – and thus fertility – is independent of external influences such as the penis and orgasm. Even a woman who hasn’t experienced an orgasm in her life can get pregnant and give birth to a child.

Why the induced cycle evolved into a regular, hormone-driven one isn’t conclusively understood. There seems to be a connection with the location of the clitoris in the body. In mammals with induced ovulation, the organ is located inside the body for optimal stimulation, whereas in females today the clitoris is located outside, at least to an extent. Stimulation of the clitoris through penetration is, as a result, less likely – no longer needed for ovulation. Whether the migration of the clitoris to the outside was the reason for the development of an independent, regular cycle or the consequence of it isn’t clear.

The female orgasm remains a mystery to this day – even though the study by Pavlicev and Wagner has certainly shed some light on the subject. «This is important to our understanding female sexuality,» says Yale lecturer and study leader Wagner in a Yale School of Medicine release. With that, the Freudian understanding of women’s sexuality, which dominated the discourse not so long ago, can now be put to bed.