This was brought up in chat and it is something that always pisses me off. The clitoris is not a "mini penis". And it's not a vestigial organ. The clitoris has more nerve endings than the entire penis has...if it had less, then it could be considered vestigial. But it's not...
A lot of people say that orgasm doesn't have a purpose for females. Here are some arguments that are tossed around:
1. (Supposedly) most females don't experience orgasm during penetration only. A. So? Remember that the male and female have these things called hands? Even Bonobos fondle each other during sex (or just masturbate each other). Thanks, anthropology class.
2. Females don't need to orgasm to conceive. A. That's true. But, the ones who do are more likely to want sex and want it more often, thus having more children (think the beginning of the human race) on the average. Also, women don't need to orgasm during sex for this to work - it can be before. Foreplay has been around for a long time. Even in many other species.
3. The orgasm does nothing to help women conceive. A. There have been studies that the orgasm helps pull sperm deeper into the body, thus retaining more sperm and having a greater possibility of conception.
There was a study done on primates in the 80's which expanded on this: "A series of studies by two Liverpool University anthropologists in the late 1980s have lead to a “bizarre and astonishing explanation of the female orgasm” (Ridley, 1993 ). Baker and Bellis found that the amount of sperm that is retained in the vagina after sex varies according to the frequency and timing of previous orgasms — as well as the presence or absence of a “noncopulatory” orgasms having occured since the last date of intercourse.
In layman’s terms, this means that the longer it’s been since a woman has had sex, the more sperm she will retain if she orgasms. It also means that female masturbation reduces sperm retention. And we are not even to the shocking part yet. The researchers, having uncovered the above information, were not terribly impressed — the information, by itself, wasn’t all that earth-shattering, even though Baker and Bellis were the first to unearth it. The two scientists next did studies to determine how often women achieved orgasm, and what type of orgasm, when sleeping with their husbands…versus their extramarital lovers. The results are telling: faithful women, those who did not have a lover, experienced high-retention (fertile) orgasms about half the time (55% to be exact).
So an average man, sleeping with his wife with the intention of getting her pregnant, has about a 50% chance that, when she orgasms, she will have the type of orgasm that essentially vacuums his sperm up into her cervical canal, where it has a much better chance of fertilizing an egg. Unfaithful women had these fertile orgasms with their husbands at a rate of 40% — and with their lovers at a rate of 70%. And (unconsciously) these unfaithful women were also having sex with their lovers during the times of the month where they would be most likely to conceive. These two effects, taken together, combine to form the following rather staggering fact: an unfaithful woman may have sex with her husband twice as often as with her lover and still be slightly more likely to conceive by her lover than her husband. I’ll quote directly from The Red Queen here, as Mr. Ridley’s mastery of prose easily surpasses my own: The typical woman’s pattern of infidelity and orgasm is exactly what you would expect to find if she were unconsciously trying to get pregnant from a lover while not leaving her husband."
I don't particularly go for the last part - that a woman is unconsciously trying to conceive from a lover instead. The fact of the matter is, you're with that person because they're more exciting - thus your orgasms are going to be bigger, an the contractions more powerful. Studies show orgasms in women are much stronger when the mate is more symmetrical or "beautiful", usually the trait of a lover (or at least a perceived trait).
What do you people think?
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