The maladaptive western phenomenon of downplaying female pleasure

     Some years back I was introduced to a "book" (I use that term only because the pages were too rough to serve as effective toilet paper) called The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution written by an alleged "feminist", "biologist" and "philosopher" (again, the terms are used very loosely here) named Elizabeth Lloyd in 2005. The central thesis of this "book" is that scientists for the past century (or longer) have given undue weight to the phenomenon of female sexual pleasure and orgasm in particular, enshrining its importance both biologically and culturally, when in fact it deserves neither. To Lloyd, only a crazy, right-wing, anti-feminist misogynist would regard the female orgasm as having any purpose whatsoever, whether evolutionarily adaptive or spiritually liberating. The fact that scientists have proposed various adaptive functions for the female orgasm (from assisting sperm transport to facilitating sleep to helping in mate selection) is only a proof that all of these "male" scientists are in fact anti-science, unlike Lloyd, who is, of course, the sole stalwart defender of Real Science (despite having a background in humanities, not biology or neurochemistry). As a good "feminist", Lloyd instead promotes the theory of Donald Symons, the infamous arch-misogynist and one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology (and a profound influence on such progressive feminists as David Buss, Stephen Pinker, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate). 

    Symons, in his 1979 work The Evolution of Human Sexuality (which is only slightly more readable than The Case of the Female Orgasm) outlines the position that women experience orgasm solely because men do, and the female capacity for orgasm is just a "spandrel", or useless byproduct, similar to men's nipples. Symons' claims were roundly savaged by nearly all feminist researchers at the time, and a large number of non-feminist researchers as well, but in Lloyd's perverse mind, none of this matters, since only "biased male academia" is so obtuse and arrogant that it would fail to see the liberating potential of telling women that they are nothing but twisted and mutated men, whose capacity for sexual empowerment is nothing more than a random byproduct that occasionally exists due to their failed male bodies. 

    The good news is that Lloyd's work was scarcely better received that Symons, with David Barash offering my personal favorite of her numerous and well-deserved shellackings. Barash, who unlike Lloyd actually has training and credentials in the relevant fields, ruthlessly demolished both her incredibly poor understanding of basic biology, her conspiratorial paranoia about everyone who disagrees with her, and her bizarre, emotional meltdowns which seem to make up the majority of this absolutely turgid, vile "book". I would like to go even farther than Barash in this blog article, however, and expose what I believe is the bizarre psychological and mental illness that causes so many in our society (including a large number of women and even some so-called "feminists") to argue against the sexual liberation of their own gender. 

    Every now and then, one comes across various articles, blog posts and newspaper editorials, usually written by women, decrying the obsession of society with the female orgasm. One of the most infamous recent headlines was published in the Atlantic in 2021 under the title "The Tyranny of the Female Orgasm Industrial Complex", by Katharine Smyth. This article, as is typical of female pleasure-downplaying, puritanical screeds, relied heavily on misinformation and false claims, including with a twisted and completely false "history" of why evil men have argued for the importance of female sexual pleasure, claiming the ancient Greeks "created" the notion of the female orgasm as adaptive due to their poor understanding of the female body (how this ancient Greek origin jibes with Papua New Guinean and Amazon rainforest culturex holding the same belief is apparently irrelevant to Smyth). Instead, once again, a far more scientific, and "liberating" perspective would be to regard as useless and merely a function of the male biological drive. Once again, the proper "feminist" option is to read women's pleasure through a male lens, and to regard women as screwed-up men (which, incidentally smacks far more of "ancient Greek misogyny" than the adaptationist view). And once again, people who disagree are pathologized in emotional and irrational language, because they dare to resist the neo-Puritan Stockholm Syndrome that affects the Smyth, and all other truly liberated women.

    What I love about Smyth's Atlantic article is that it presents a sense of personal honesty rarely found in conventional orgasmophobic literature of the Symons, Gould and Lloyd variety. Kathy begins the article with an admission that speaks volumes, and colors her entire prism of understanding. You see, Ms. Smyth is, herself, a proud anorgasmic. She has never had the "big O" herself, in her almost 40 years of life, and so it's purely normal and natural in her mind that a woman would be deprived of such joys. In fact, going even further than that, maybe the only reason women really care about the "big O" in the first place is because they're being lied to by the patriarchy, and forced to conform their naturally different bodies to a "male" standard (gender essentialism is pretty much par for the course in all orgasmophobic literature, with Symons being probably one of the most influential gender essentialist writers in modern social science). Once we start realizing that anorgasmic women are perfectly normal, healthy, and in no way could possibly have any sort of trauma or repression that might cause them to be anorgasmic, we can have a truly sex-positive society. After all, we all know that women don't need sexual release the way men do. Their libido just isn't nearly as high. Everybody knows that and only a nutjob would even think of disagreeing. 

    It makes perfect sense for two major groups to downplay the female orgasm: anorgasmic women and men who are terrible in bed. And I suspect that the majority of orgasmophobes fall into one of these two categories. Because there are more of the latter than the former, most orgasmophobes are men. These men can be found crawling all over the murky "red pill", manosphere and incel forums. The "Incel Wiki", one of the most virulently anti-women websites I have ever seen, agrees with Lloyd and Symons' "byproduct theory" and heavily quotes from these authors to turn Lloyd's "progressive feminist" hypothesis into a retrograde, ultra-misogynist one (the incels, to their credit, make much more sense out of her theory than she ever did). They can also be found in various locker rooms and men's restrooms, at frat parties and football games, out late at night at various redneck bars and other "male" spaces, joking and mocking "weak pussies" who try too hard to please their wives. Many of them can also be found in academia: aside from Donald Symons, we can also mention Geoffrey Miller and Stephen Jay Gould as some of the most prominent male academics who are apparently troubled by the idea that women's libidos may have played a role in natural selection. 

    A much sadder, and probably even more pathological case is that of anorgasmics like Katharine Smyth (I won't speculate whether or not Elizabeth Lloyd is anorgasmic). The truth is that nobody (except perhaps some severely disabled women) is born anorgasmic; even Symons admits that in "a few" traditional, non-western tribal societies virtually all women are able to regularly enjoy orgasms whenever they have sexual relations. Geoffrey Miller attempted to find scientific evidence that female orgasmic capacity is largely genetic and (predictably) distributed randomly throughout the population; the methodology of the study was so poor that it was savaged by his colleagues, and it is quite surprising that the study even passed peer review. And predictably, his findings have not replicated and are in striking contrast to almost a century of literature on the subject. With the biological determinist explanation of female anorgasmia out the window, the question arises: how does a woman become an anorgasmic, anyway?

    It would seem that various forms of psychological trauma and sexual repression are the main cause of a young woman ending up in Katharine Smyth's shoes. Puritanical and strict parenting, fundamentalist religion, and growing up in a culture where sex is seen as something that "women have and men want" (which Symons argues is a human universal, despite the total lack of anthropological support for his ridiculous thesis) are major factors that blitz a woman's ability to have a normal, functional, healthy sexual experience. Various medications and therapies pushed by the allopathic, for-profit western medical complex also play a major role. Many anti-depressants and hormonal birth control pills destroy a woman's libido, thus creating (in modern western societies) some truth to the myth that women are inherently "less sexual" than men. A large number of women are put through obstetric procedures that are little different from what we call "female genital mutilation" when they occur in sub-Saharan Africa. To critique any of these procedures, however, would be to lay the blame with culture and institutions (especially Big Pharma) that are untouchable and more or less ensure that you will never be able to publish an article in a "respected" rag like The Atlantic again.

    Lacking empirical support for any theory that anorgasmia is a natural, inborn trait, Smyth, Lloyd and all the other female orgasmophobes end up directing their scorn at cultural expectations that they have an orgasm. Nobody wants to feel like a deviant; even the most miserable deviants, those whose lives are most ruined by psychological or physiological problems, desire to believe themselves to be just as normal as (if not better than) everybody else. So, in a culture where people are finally beginning to have conversations about "the orgasm gap" and the harm that orgasmophobic culture does to young women, what most women regard as a welcome (even necessary) breeze of fresh air becomes a fierce, terrifying gale to those whom society has failed and warped the most. Just like incels often reject the very sex positivity that might save them from being incels, anorgasmic and sexually repressed women find refuge in their anorgasmia and sexual repression, demanding that society view their pathologies as "normal", rather than being, as they are, the horrific result of society's anxieties over female sexuality.

    To those who are still attempting to argue that there is nothing "pathological" about anorgasmia, that women don't really need sexual release the way men do, that a woman can be perfectly healthy and happy without the gratification that psychologists like Wilhelm Reich believe all humans must have, I would like to demolish all of these false claims. Although (predictably) the issue of female orgasm has been far too understudied in all fields, even sociology, it should be noted that the correlation between regular female orgasm and positive physical AND mental health outcomes is one of the strongest and most consistent in ALL of sociological literature. An overwhelming crescendo of evidence has accumulated over the past three or four decades finding consistent positive associations between frequency of orgasm in women and a huge variety of factors: compared to women who orgasm infrequently, they are more physically healthy, physically fit, less depressed, more calm, less irritable and truculent, sleep more hours and have better sleep quality, age more slowly, feel younger than they actually are, have higher self esteem and confidence, feel more positive about their bodies (regardless of what society has to say), have warm relationships with children and significant others, are less likely to divorce or break up with their partner, and live longer. On the other side of the equation, anorgasmic women are associated with having poor self-image, chronic pains and other adverse physical conditions, poor quality sleep and frequent tiredness during the day, poor aging, lower life expectancy, poor quality marriages and frequent divorces, mood swings, and abusive and violent behavior towards their children. In every single one of these cases, the correlations are not only significant but strong, robust and consistent; often they are some of the strongest and most consistent findings in the sociological record. To hell with "anorgasmia is healthy and normal"!

    We as a society have a moral duty, if we truly expect to "evolve" in any meaningful way, to resist the orgasmophobic lies and just-so stories told by modern westerners to justify their sick and culturally-bound understanding of female sexuality. We are too deeply mired in a quagmire of physical and mental despair to risk holding such bizarrely and intrinsically modernist, barrenly allopathic theories as "female orgasm is an irrelevant spandrel" as our own society spirals out of control with mental illness and deracination. The time to grow the fuck up is right now. And only when we begin to understand the Trobriand Islanders, Muria Gonds, Ulithians, Pomo Indians, Tuareg, Mosuo, Lepcha, Li (Hainan), Ao-Naga, Wayuu, Zuni, Hopi, !Kung, Nicobar Islanders and a whole host of other pre-state societies are much, much wiser and healthier in their understanding of human sexuality than our sick and twisted "civilization", do we have any chance of saving ourselves from the well-deserved apocalypse.