Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  The monthly denuding of the uterus’s protective lining at the height of menses would leave it more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to disease. Other mammalian females mate with multiple males, and venereal diseases do not seem to present a problem for them. Why would the lining of their wombs seem so much more resistant to disease than the human one?

  Beverly Strassman has challenged Profet’s theory, arguing that menses is a metabolically sound way to rid the body of the endometrial lining, and disputed Profet’s main contention: that the sloughing of the uterine lining provides women with protection.15 The gynecologic literature overwhelmingly supports Strassman on this point. Menses is a time when uterine infections are the most common. Toxic-shock syndrome occurs because a tampon has prevented the egress of menstrual blood. Harmful bacteria, then, take advantage of the uterus’s hospitable environment, and overpower the woman’s immune system. And not only bacteria: In one study done in the historical span when paralytic polio was a scourge, over three-quarters of adult women diagnosed with the virus were infected during their periods.16

  In general, menses is a vulnerable time for women, and they intuitively know that it is usually an inauspicious moment to initiate ambitious projects. I suspect this is nature’s way of protecting an organism during its passage through a period of relative defenselessness. Even if one were to grant the validity of Dr. Profet’s claim that menses was an evolutionary gain for women, the protection from an occasional unsavory rider accompanying a man’s sperm would not be a weighty enough reason to offset menses’ other serious disadvantages.

  One valuable contribution of Dr. Profet’s theory is her raising the question of menses’ cost-benefit ratio. What was the reason it became so florid and nettlesome in only one species out of thirty million?

  The question becomes more insistent when one considers that, incrementally, the negatives of menses pile up, and it can be said with conviction that, to date, gynecologists have been unable to identify a single uncontested benefit of human menstruation.* On the contrary, it seems to have had a harmful impact on the survival odds of the individual and ultimately the species. Mother Nature rarely burdens a species with a vexatious attribute unless She balances the scales with a positive offset of greater value. Negative adaptations tend to be bred out of a population quickly, within several generations. In chapter 13, I will propose a theory to explain the benefits of human menses that more than counterbalance its many downsides.

  The human female orgasm was an extraordinary addition to the human species’ reproductive life history.

  Chapter 7

  Her Climax/His Climax

  And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?

  —Doris Lessing1

  Now there you have a sample of man’s reasoning powers, as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day she can’t overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man…. Now if you orany other really intelligent person were arranging the fairnesses and justices between a man and a woman, you would give the man a one fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem. Now wouldn’t you? Necessarily, I give you my word, this creature with the decrepit candle has arranged it exactly the other way.

  —Mark Twain2

  Besides the dramatic new reproductive adaptations reconfiguring Gyna sapiens’ life cycle covered in the last two chapters, Natural Selection bestowed several others that proved to be equally momentous. Of these, her orgasm is so extraordinary that it deserves a chapter of its own.

  Humans are at present unable to communicate across the interspecies barrier and therefore can never know for sure what other animals are feeling. The human female orgasm is intensely personal, and the question whether or not other female animals experience a similar degree of pleasure during sex must remain uncertain. Nevertheless, astute animal-handlers can gauge with a high degree of accuracy when one of their charges is in distress, hungry, anxious, in pain, or content. Extensive research has revealed that other animals share with humans remarkably similar, and in most cases identical, neurochemical transmitters and hormone physiology, and the same neuroanatomical structures that mediate emotions.

  Extrapolating from the physiological changes evident in human females when they are at the height of orgasm, reproductive physiologists have been able to identify very few female animals that mimic the extraordinary respiratory and heart-rate increases, profuse sweating, wild gestures, contorted facial expressions, and audible noises associated with the human female’s orgasm. Hormones drive female nonhuman mammals to want to mate, but once the act begins there is little outward evidence that the female experiences the degree of pleasure that a woman enjoys.

  I believe it would be safe to assume, when observing a doe leisurely munching on some tasty clover while a buck busily thrusts at her backside, that this animal does not experience an orgasm of the same order as a human one. For the majority of species’ females, the consummation of the sexual act is followed immediately by a behavior that can best be characterized as nonchalance. Little observable evidence indicates that for the nonhuman female “the earth moved.” From all the available data, it would appear that the intensity of the human female’s orgasm is a unique adaptation. A few female nonhuman primates—most notably, the chimpanzees and stump-tailed monkeys—exhibit physiological signs indicating that they are experiencing an orgasm, but, again, their outward manifestations pale in comparison with those of a woman attaining her apex.3

  Female orgasm was a taboo subject for centuries. Male physicians sporting impeccable credentials pontificated that the very concept was a female fantasy born of fevered minds and could not exist. With the rise of modernity, the floodgates have opened and a deluge of descriptions of female orgasm, advice to women on how best to achieve it, and debates as to its relative merit have poured forth from many different quarters. A casual perusal of the shelves in the women’s-studies section of any bookstore confirms this observation.

  Evolutionary biologists waded into the fray in the late 1970s, contributing a number of possible explanations to the question that interested them most: What was the selective pressure that would have stimulated this unusual trait to hypertrophy so in the current female version of the hominid line? Many features of the human female’s orgasm suggest it is a recent hominid addition and still a work-in-progress. For instance, why is female orgasm so unevenly distributed? Some women experience it all the time, some experience it some of the time, and some never experience it. Some women achieve orgasm quickly, whereas others may take a prolonged time to reach a climax. And some women easily attain multiple sustained repeats.* Evolutionary theorists begin with the premise that orgasm is an adaptation that evolved in response to a specific environmental challenge. They reason that it seems to be too central to the life of Gyna sapiens to have been an accident or a spandrel.

  However, the possibility also exists that the whole subject is so much threshing of straw, and any attempt to discern an evolutionary reason for the human female orgasm may well be an exercise in futility simply because there is no “reason.” At present, three theories vie with each other for top honors. Sexologists and interested anthropologists have whimsically given them the names Pole Ax, Upsuck, and Cuddles.

  The Pole Ax Theory proposes that orgasm had to be installed in human females to prevent the species from simply leaking away to extinction. When Gyna sapiens stood up, stretched, and started walking, she created a plumbing problem no other species’ females had ever encountered. Bipedalism radically re-engineered the lower half of the body to accommodate this
new and unusual form of locomotion. Along with the innovative shape of her pelvic bony ensemble, Gyna sapiens’ vaginal opening moved from high in the rear to low in the front. Positioning the vaginal orifice (or its anatomical equivalent) high in the behind provides easy access for a mounting male and is the favored location in virtually all arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and other mammals.† The rear-entry position has been used with unerring success for millions of years by millions of other coupling species.

  Because of the relative youth of our species, the vagina’s present position may represent a halfway station on its journey to its intended final resting place, somewhere slightly below the navel (said with tongue in cheek). If indeed this is its ultimate destination, sexual intercourse will be considerably more comfortable for future cuddling couples but probably less interesting, and certainly less challenging. Such an anterior position would most likely eliminate a great deal of embarrassment and markedly reduce the humiliating fumbling of the inexperienced. Moving the vagina nearly halfway between front and back has not only introduced the need for a certain degree of contortionism between lovers, but also created a confounding evolutionary problem.

  The vagina’s anatomic migration, necessitated by bipedalism, markedly altered this vital sheath’s spatial orientation. When a woman is standing erect, the axis of her vagina aligns close to vertical. In every other mammalian female on the move, the vagina lies in a horizontal axis. A flat vagina makes perfect evolutionary sense. Upon completion of a male’s delivery call, sperm can begin the sprint of their short lives on a level playing field.

  If a Gyna sapiens resumed normal activity immediately after intercourse, as is the practice of other species’ females, she would stand up and begin ambling away. Homo sapiens’ sperm, having just left the starting line, would discover to their collective dismay that, despite their earnest efforts to advance, they would keep slipping backward. If they looked over their metaphorical shoulders, they would witness with horror that they and millions of their competitors were descending toward a precipice from which there was no return.

  Mother Nature had two options to prevent this inevitable occurrence. She could either equip each sperm with some sort of miniature piton and hand-ax device to hang on and climb upward, hence eliminating the basic streamlined design She had perfected, or She could flatten the female by creating an experience that would temporarily disincline her to arise from a horizontal position. Mother Nature decided in favor of streamlined sperm. She therefore invented the human female orgasm.

  A woman who has just completed satisfying sex luxuriates in repose. While she is recumbent, the most vigorous sperm inside her take advantage of this respite to charge past the cervical opening. Once inside the womb, they are free from the vagina’s deadly gravitational hazard. Those laggards still remaining in, for them, the Tunnel of Terror would also receive the gift of precious postcoital minutes during which they could advance higher, thereby reducing their danger of spilling out.

  From a single sperm’s point of view, a female’s orgasm has the same effect on its quixotic quest as if a postcoital woman had been hit over the head with an ax handle (hence the name Pole Ax Theory). Her orgasms serve a similar but far more pleasurable function by stunning her into a temporary paralysis followed by a period of sweet lassitude.

  The second of the trio of main theories concerning female orgasm is inelegantly named the Upsuck Theory. Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, using both sophisticated monitoring equipment and uninhibited volunteers, measured the movements of the uterus during and just after female orgasm. They also roughly quantified the amount of sperm entering the uterus in women who had experienced an orgasm as compared with those who had not. The uterus, contrary to what most people assume, does not lie in a straight line with the axis of the vagina but is oriented nearly at right angles to it. During intercourse, the upper vaginal vault distends significantly when a woman experiences an orgasm. These actions serve to form a large reservoir in which sperm collect if the coupling woman lies supine.5

  At the moment of orgasm and for a short period afterward, the cervix, now positioned directly above the concentrated collection of sperm and driven by the rhythmic contractions associated with orgasm, repeatedly dips its cone deeply into the posterior pool of sperm, exerting a gentle suction and drawing many of them up into the womb. In cases of rape, or if a woman is not particularly receptive to a male, reverse mechanisms serve to protect the woman from pregnancy by increasing the difficulty for those sperm trying to penetrate the cervical opening.6 Unfortunately, these maneuvers to aid in conception or to prevent its occurrence are not always reliable.

  The third theory, Cuddles, postulates that Mother Nature bestowed on Gyna sapiens a multisynaptic orgasm to help a couple more thoroughly bond with each other through mutual great sex. Female orgasm encouraged women to engage in sex more often, because they found it to be so pleasurable. This in turn made them feel sexier and increased their efforts to attract men. Men were drawn to women who displayed outward signs of availability and interest in sex. The ultimate result was that more babies were born. Because of their mutual interest in sex, couples remained together to help raise their children to the point where their children had children. Despite the warm, fuzzy appeal of this hypothesis, there are several features of human orgasm that do not square with the facts of life.

  Other organisms that mate monogamously do not require the female to experience an exciting orgasm to cement their relationship. Moving sex away from the nuts-and-bolts function of merging an overeager, ovulating female at the height of her estrus with a sperm-laden, lusting male places sex in the arena of a sporting activity. This transfer would seem to be a strange and risky adventure out of keeping with Natural Selection’s normally conservative agenda. Remember, evolution is driven by an organism’s twin needs to survive long enough to reproduce. One or both eyebrows must elevate when sex begins to disconnect from reproduction.

  Then there is the problem of the extraordinary mistiming of the male and female orgasms. Men’s capacity to ejaculate, and quickly repeat, peaks in early adolescence and then suffers an inexorable downhill slide. The slope of his decline accelerates after a man reaches his mid-forties and, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, slowly fades until nothing remains but his feral leer. A woman typically does not experience orgasm until she is in her late teens or early twenties. Her peak arrives in her mid- to late thirties, many years after her optimal years to gestate a baby have passed.

  Was Natural Selection playing a cruel joke? Perhaps Nietzsche was on to something when he claimed, “God is a comedian performing before an audience that is too frightened to laugh.” What conceivable evolutionary benefit would there be in having women and men so jaggedly out of phase with each other? Ideal sexual compatibility would demand that thirty-something women should pair up with postpubertal boys. Such an arrangement, however, would completely upend the norm of family, child-rearing, and societal organization. In general, women, the world over, prefer older men, and men, the world over, prefer younger women. Yet both sexes’ orgasmic barometers are set awry against these universal predispositions.

  If Natural Selection provided orgasm as a mutually pleasurable event to encourage sexual union, why not enable the two sexes to synchronize easily? Adolescent boys can set off their supersensitive detonator in their sleep, in class, or while daydreaming. All this hyperactivity occurs at an age when it is unlikely that any of their sperm will ever be called upon to swim anyplace useful. Yet most women of the same age don’t experience such hypersexuality. In fact, many women never know what all the fuss is about throughout their entire lives.*7

  There are further incongruities. Why do many women who can achieve orgasm, sometimes (or in some cases always) experience multiple sustained repeats? The man lying on top of (or under) her is spent. His reload time increases with his years, just as her ability to do it over and over again increases. How can this mismatch be a feature that guarantees a man and woman will
mutually desire to re-engage in an activity that can often be so unsatisfying for either participant? The disharmony of male and female orgasm is the source of much contention and frustration in the bedroom. Again, it would seem to make little sense, from an evolutionary point of view, to have these two physiological events occurring in tandem instead of simultaneously. For many new couples, on that uncommon occasion when their two orgasms occur in synchrony, the surprised pair effusively congratulate each other on their extraordinary feat, as if they had both climbed to the top of Mount Everest, arriving from different directions but reaching the peak together.

  Many women, frustrated by their encounters with premature ejaculators, turn to masturbation, discovering that they can achieve satisfaction much more easily by themselves. Many men, exasperated by the directives of a hyperorgasmic (or hypo-orgasmic) woman, turn to masturbation, discovering they can save themselves the embarrassing feelings of inadequacy by playing solitaire. Mother Nature would have to have Her head examined if She purposely installed a feature in the human genome that encouraged individuals to desire sexual release without a partner. What is the evolutionary point She was making when She initiated so much distressing mischief?

  Another quirk further jangles relations between the sexes: Men, as a general rule, achieve speedier ejaculations more often with unfamiliar women than with women with whom they have been intimately familiar over a long period of time. Sexologists call this phenomenon the Coolidge Effect, named after an incident that occurred between the taciturn thirtieth president of the United States and his wife.