The laptop continued to decline. Today, it goes in for repairs. Yesterday, I finally broke down and loaded bookmarks, address book, a couple of small but much needed applications to bring our older laptop up to on-line speed. It should allow me to blog without the cognitive dissonance I experience at a standard desktop. (Yes, laptops have spoiled me.) That said, on with the links!
Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd’s book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, sits on a nearby table, one of many books waiting for a read and, yes, I’ve seen the growing press about her take on female orgasm. Sometimes, I don’t really get the whole evolutionary biology thing, but not because I think intelligent design has any merits..
If anything, I think “intelligent design” should be kept in engineering and software development circles. I get the idea that the history of evolution on a species level has its curiosities and intricacies, but I fail to see how laypeople benefits from it. And the whole female orgasm thing is a case in point.
First, the vestigial aspect of the clitoris makes sense from an embryonic development standpoint. It has a reasonable logic to it. And I actually appreciate Lloyd’s statement that female orgasm is “for fun.” If a clitoris and an orgasm exist primarily for fun, then let’s have fun. Let’s embrace and enjoy pleasure seeking.
What I don’t know is whether evolutionary biologists have looked at the evolutionary origins and benefits of pleasure and pleasure-seeking behaviors. Orgasm as “fun” would, I think, help propel a species forward because pleasure — in this case, pleasurable fucking — would increase the chances of conception simply because there’s more fucking going around.
But what do I know? I guess I’ll have to read Lloyd’s book to find out.
I would like to consider two comments, however, that appear towards the Times article’s end. A peer of Lloyd’s comments:
“Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it’s phasing out,” Dr. Hrdy said. “Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about.”
Hrdy’s talking specifically about the fleeting frequency of female orgasm. Consider this my evolutionary “use it or lose it” call to action, but if ever I’ve felt a need to thwart evolution, it would be here. I’d want to preserve the existence of women’s orgasm, not let it disappear into the fog of the future. Granted, we’re probably safe for a few million more years — after all, we still carry a clearly useless appendix within us — but it’s discouraging to think that pleasure doesn’t matter. And that, specifically, women’s pleasure doesn’t matter.
Women’s pleasure has been illusive enough to treated as threatening to male pleasure throughout history, which brings me to my second point. The Times piece again:
Western culture is suffused with images of women’s sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.“Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function,” Dr. Lloyd said.
If women, she said, are told that it is “natural” to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.
“Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women,” Dr. Lloyd said. “And indirectly for men, as well.”
Getting the evolutionary story straight to get the greater picture straight is important, but it cannot do it alone. We have too long and too pervasive a history of misinformation and fear of women’s pleasure, and it remains difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you read a Victorian novel, you’re going to get one view of women’s pleasure and who’s entitled to it. (Think “spending” and lower class women.) The preference for deflowering a virgin remains so important that it routinely shows up not only in Victorian novels but current, modern romances. Which, at its worst, hints that sexual self-awareness is a lower status creature. And we have way too many depictions of female orgasm during penetration that its fiction remains the normative view of how orgasm occurs.
Maybe what we need is an evolutionary treatise on the value of female masturbation. Something — anything — that reasonably promotes the realities and value of orgasm. Because I can’t help but think that if evolutionary biology is still arguing about orgasm, then how successful has the work of Betty Dobson and everything book on masturbation have been?
On the other hand, maybe Dobson and self-help books are the answer. Maybe that’s where the layperson goes to understand, there, in the everyday, matter-if-factness of the self-help shelves of your local bookstore — and not in arguments among biologists. For laypeople, why it exists may not matter as much as that it exists. And we want consistent access to it.
‘Nuff said.
