Pre-theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality

My contribution to this Symposium focuses on the links between sexuality and reproduction from the evolutionary point of view.' The relation between women's sexuality and reproduction is particularly important because of a vital intersection between politics and biology feminists have noticed, for more than a century, that women's identity is often defined in terms of her reproductive capacity. More recently, in the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States, debates about women's identity have explicitly included sexuality; much feminist argument in the late 1960's and early 1970's involved an attempt to separate out an autonomous female sexuality from women's reproductive functions. It is especially relevant, then, to examine biological arguments, particularly evolutionary arguments, to see what they say about whether and how women's sexuality is related to reproduction. We shall find that many evolutionary arguments seem to support the direct linking of female sexuality and reproduction. Yet I will argue that this support is not well-grounded. In fact, I think evolutionary explanations of female sexuality exemplify how social beliefs and social agendas can influence very basic biological explanations of fundamental physiological processes. In this paper, I shall spend some time spelling out a few examples in which assumptions about the close link between reproduction and sexuality yield misleading results, then I shall conclude with a discussion of the consequences of this case study for issues in the philosophy of science. The fundamental problem is that it is simply assumed that every aspect of female sexuality should be explained in terms of reproductive functions. But there is quite a bit of biological evidence that this is an empirically incorrect assumption to make. This raises the question of