The mystery of the useless ‘O’

Ms. X wakes up extra fresh in the morning from an exceptionally wonderful night with her lover, Mr. Y. She looks at him while he still sleeps. She gently removes his arm from her and she rises and walks out of the room. She makes coffee for two and pours a cup for herself that she starts to sip while looking out the kitchen window. She recalls last night’s sensory feast – the burgeoning eternities in a woman’s innerspace that lent her an afterglow that morning. This afterglow enables her to embrace the day with a wholeness that makes the world ripe to fall in love with again, fresh. Mr. Y wakes up and joins her in the kitchen and they exchange knowing glances of shared pleasure. They open the newspaper and they come across this article: Science Finds Female Orgasms Useless.

Well, most likely they are reading an article on the recent work of Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and biology professor at Indiana University. The New York Times, by Dinitia Smith (May 17) and the Boston Globe, by Christopher Shea (April 24) recently carried articles of her and her new book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, where she shoots down 20 leading theories in favor of the evolutionary purpose of female orgasms from the biological cannon. She also analyzed 32 studies, done over 74 years, of the frequency of female orgasm during intercourse and since there is no clear link with fertility, she claimed that female orgasms cannot be "adaptive" which is evolutionary science talk for "useful." Hmm… 20 theories on the biological purpose of the female Big Os, about four times more than the Big Bang origins of the universe. Well, at least we know our evolutionary scientists are pretty busy, not to mention, prolific.

Not to be content with Lloyd and the 20 theories she took on, my curiosity led me to a good find – Catherine Blackledge’s The History of V ( Rutgers University Press: NJ 2004). It is the most recent, most comprehensive book on the "seat of female sexual pleasure" I have come across. The book is a sweeping tour on the topic and a very long chapter was devoted to the anatomical, historical and cultural context of the "O." Commonly referred to as the Big O apparently because of the "O" shape of the mouth that the one experiencing it takes, it is called no less dramatically than "la petite morte" (little death) by the sensuous French, and in what seems to me, the ultimate Oktoberfest, höchste wallung or "maximum bubbling" by the Germans. The earliest natural philosophers like Hippocrates and Aristotle were intrigued by this female phenomenon and offered "two-seed" theories which offered the belief that it is only when orgasm occurs in a woman that an egg is released to join the seed from the man. Like the Y’s "Apollo," this belief was a double-edged sword. For the Y, one end held what Neruda wrote as a "drop of honey" to be received by the woman, while the other end is attached to what is usually a troublesome historical enterprise called the man. Believing then that female orgasm held the key to the shutters of the tube which received the male "honeydrop," orgasm was thought to be necessary for conception and women, as a consequence, were quite assured of pleasure in every act of love-making. However, it was also a curse since not being able to conceive when an orgasm already occurred laid the blame on a woman’s inadequacy.

What a let-down though when in the 1770s, a mere syringe in Lazaro Spallanzani’s hand, triumphantly artificially inseminated a water spaniel, sounding off the death of that two-seed theory that by the start of the 1800s, a growing consensus grew among doctors, predominantly male at that time, that orgasm was not necessary for conception.

But apparently, the 1,800 years of this inability and refusal by mostly male "theorists" on female orgasms to let the women have a say on these theories that mainly involved women anyway, did not vanish easily. The 1800s was still an extraordinarily confused time for notions of female orgasm. It was thought that female orgasm was a cure for women’s "hysteria" that required male doctors in their clinics to use mechanical devices to rouse orgasm in women. Talk about the call of duty! The book was not clear on what "hysteria" really meant, but knowing that male doctors were then medically sanctioned to give this to their women patients, I could now hear the steadily rising voices of the women of the succeeding generations march toward this idiotic notion and give those doctors of the past, "hysteria" like they have never heard it before. And if a woman then did not have "hysteria" which qualified her for the "treatment," it was still believed necessary for her health since she needed to "expel" the "retained" seed within her. And mind you, this "expulsion" in the physician’s office was conducted with a vibrating tool that made use of a wide variety of sources of energy: steam-powered, water-propelled and even foot-operated! And the book names Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville, physician and inventor, as the one whom women have to be deeply grateful for since he came up with the electro-mechanical version of the vibrating tool. Ah, gives a new layer of meaning to "necessity is the mother of invention."

I now predict large-scale blushing in my readers once they know, as I did from Blackledge’s book, what women did when they slowly discovered their own powers in the late 1800s and stopped going to doctor’s clinics for hysteria or "seed expulsion." This "tool" in the doctor’s office underwent innovations that made it the fifth home appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, kettle and toaster and eventually landed in the 1913 Modern Priscilla magazine being advertised as "a machine that gives 30,000 thrilling, invigorating, penetrating, revitalizing vibrations per minute." I do not know where they based that rate but with that, you be the judge of whether it is the cure or the cause of this desirable kind of  women’s "hysteria." But wait, with this liberating notion of female orgasm, the medical community in the early 1900s, then began to "frame" women’s sexual desires, imposing male standards on women’s sensitivity to women’s sexual pleasure. Male doctors wrote things like "women when properly educated have little sensual desire or if they do,  are on a fast track to a form of insanity that those who visit lunatic asylums must be fully conversant with." The 1899 Merck Manual reference guide for physicians even recommended sulphuric acid for nymphomania. The Pacific Medical Journal of 1903 suggested that a "mild faradic current" ("faradic" as in "Faraday," the scientist responsible for the equation that makes electrical energy distribution possible) be administered to a woman who is "more sexually sensitive than she should be." What is it with men and electricity? Thomas Edison thought of doing the same to women to conform to his notions of what a woman should be. Mary Shelley, I think, leveled the equation when she created Frankenstein, a confused male resurrected by electricity (or a resurrected male confused by electricity.. take your pick).

Some theorists think that the "usefulness" of orgasms may lie not directly on the release of the egg but the release of oxytocin from the muscle contractions. Oxytocin is a hormone that enables one to have feelings of "nurturing" toward a beloved which is useful in ensuring the survival of offspring. It also said that an orgasm can be an anesthetic, increasing the woman’s threshold for pain by 75 percent, as would 15 mg/kg dose of morphine sulfate. Perhaps, it is a way of priming women for the pain of childbirth, or perhaps for the pain of enduring a lifetime with Ys. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Lloyd’s book, however, retains her verdict that female orgasms do not have an evolutionary purpose.

What puzzles our Ms. X is that for something that science finds "useless," it has fueled the phenomenal rise of industries of thought, invention, publications, and other auxiliary enterprises devoted to it, throughout human history. The "vibrating visits" alone in the 1800s totaled an aggregate annual income for doctors of $150 million! In the lab, painstaking methodological efforts have been done to find out the record number achievable in an hour: Women, 134, as opposed to 16 of men’s. I think that this matrix of movement and feeling inside a woman that gives rise to indescribable joy and pleasure in women is as "useful" to our human history, how we know ourselves, as it is "useless" to "evolution." She is the other half of what it means to be human and gentlemen, if she exclaims "O!" I dare you to risk it and ask her "So?" Then you may want to think fast of your own evolutionary way to survive her response. And don’t say I did not warn you.

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