Essay Review The Case of the Female Orgasm

294 ALOT OF PEOPLE HAVE PROBLEMS with the human female orgasm, ranging from women who have difficulty in achieving sexual satisfaction to pharmaceutical companies trying to develop a female version of Viagra. Films like When Harry Met Sally take advantage of the cryptic nature of female orgasm to point to how easy it is to fake. Biologists, too, have problems with female orgasm, or at least its evolution, because it is an enigmatic trait compared with many others.Women can conceive without orgasm, making it less directly connected with reproductive success and hence fitness than male orgasm, which virtually always accompanies ejaculation.What is more, most women do not experience orgasm during so-called “unassisted” intercourse, in other words, without additional stimulation of the clitoris before, during, or afterwards. Freud thought that this type of orgasm was more mature than one resulting from clitoral stimulation, and although his ideas have largely been debunked, they have left a legacy of assigning ranks to female sexual response, so that women worry that their orgasms are somehow inferior or abnormal. The orgasm has also taken its place in the battle about adaptationism, with scholars debating whether female orgasm evolved through natural selection in much the same way as morphological traits, because they enhanced the ability of