Without the man's ejaculation, there are no children. Whether women reach sexual climax is immaterial to reproduction. You can get pregnant without orgasm. Evolutionarily speaking, the female climax therefore seems useless.
US researchers now believe that they know why he has survived anyway.
In evolutionary development, the female orgasm could originally have been as important for reproduction as the male, suspected the researchers Mihaela Pavlicev and Günter Wagner. They had already presented their theory in 2016. Now they have presented new evidence, as reported in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences".
Orgasm led to ovulation
In some mammal species, induced ovulation still occurs today. That is, ovulation occurs during sexual intercourse. This is the case with rabbits, cats and ferrets, for example. Pavlicev and Wagner suspect that in these cases the female orgasm is necessary to induce ovulation. This would explain why in these animals the clitoris is inside the vagina and is directly stimulated during sexual intercourse.
To test their theory, the researchers administered female rabbits the antidepressant fluoxetine. The drug inhibits orgasmic ability. In fact, fluoxetine-treated rabbits ovulated significantly less frequently. The difference to untreated females was about 30 percent.
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According to the researchers, this suggests that the female orgasm was originally necessary for reproduction. However, over the millions of years, some mammal species have developed an independent cycle that ovulates at regular intervals, whether the female has sex or orgasm.
With them, the clitoris is usually further out, where it is stimulated during sexual intercourse less often. An orgasm is thereby unlikely, but it is no longer necessary for reproduction.
"That's critical to our understanding of female sexuality," says study author Wagner from Yale University. The findings contradict theories that suggest that women who rarely experience orgasm are mentally immature - as the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested.
Clitoris bigger than expected
However, the current study is not the only explanation for the female orgasm. According to another hypothesis, it is, so to speak, a random product of the male. In the early developmental phase of the embryo, the sexual organs in boys and girls form anatomically identical tissues - penis and clitoris are based on the same systems with a similar sensory apparatus and neuronal structures.
Other researchers suggest that the female orgasm has quite a physiological meaning. This is because the vagina and uterus contract, and the cervix also lowers. These contractions could increase the chance of fertilization.
There are also other evolutionary theories: Accordingly, the female orgasm could be a kind of selection test for the perfect partner. Men who bring a woman to orgasm could thus demonstrate their empathic abilities - and thus turn out to be particularly sensitive fathers.
The structure of the clitoris is just as complex as the evolutionary history of female orgasm. Only in 1998, the Australian urologist Helen O'Connell discovered that the clitoris is significantly larger than previously thought: inside the woman are nearly ten centimeters long corpora cavernosum, which can fill with sexual excitement with blood and so can swell to twice the size.
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