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Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution"

Review

Lloyd's book isn't just a "must-read," it's a must-own, must-cite, and must-assign-to-one's-students. William James once defined philosophy as "an unusually stubborn effort to think clearly." This is the most stubborn effort I've ever seen to think clearly about female orgasm.

--Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm (20050429)

The Case of the Female Orgasm is a review and analysis of the possible adaptive significance of the female orgasm. For decades, evolutionary biologists have questioned why this physiological and emotional response should occur in women; men need orgasm to propel sperm out of the penis and into a female reproductive tract to improve their reproductive success, but women need not orgasm to conceive. Thus female orgasm is a biological puzzle. Some evolutionary biologists have insisted that the response is adaptive while others consider female orgasm an ex-adaptation, a trait that appears only because it happens to appear in the other sex. Both camps have written extensively about their views, both in the popular literature and in academic writing, but to my knowledge, no book has focused solely on female orgasm.

--Meredith F. Small, author of Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children (20050526)

This will make great bedside reading. What, after all, is sexier than a well-constructed argument? Lloyd provides a measured and scholarly evaluation of adaptive and non-adaptive explanations for human female orgasm, a trait that has been the subject of some controversy, and she does it without jargon or acrimony. It is a model of how to fairly and critically look at adaptation.

--Marlene Zuk, Professor of Biology, University of California at Riverside (20050528)

Lloyd summarizes dozens of evolutionary accounts of the female orgasm--and knocks them all down. Like [Stephen Jay] Gould, she thinks the female orgasm is purposeless; which is not to say pleasureless. And she extends the charge of bias, charging that too many scientists take the male-centered view that the female orgasm is closely linked to heterosexual intercourse and reproduction.

--Christopher Shea (Boston Globe 20050901)

It's been 52 years since scientists first considered the female orgasm a legitimate object of scrutiny (thank you, Dr. Kinsey). But they still can't settle on its raison d'etre...Lloyd knocks down all but one of the 21 existing explanations. Along the way, she makes a critical distinction between sexual arousal, which she says is critical in evolutionary terms because it makes women want to have sex (and thus results in pregnancy), and female orgasm, which she argues is merely a bonus...Lloyd settles on the unpopular but, she insists, most scientifically solid theory available...From an evolutionary perspective, female orgasm is superfluous...Lloyd hasn't written off the possibility that an 'obscure' and 'exquisitely designed' Darwinian function has yet to be discovered. But for now, she makes a convincing case that from an evolutionary perspective, female orgasm is just the icing, not the cake.

--Sue Ferguson (Maclean's 20050901)

[Lloyd's] study of evolution and orgasm offers the most thorough and serious treatment of the subject to date--and strongly rejects the claim that orgasm in women serves an evolutionary purpose. Lloyd has scrutinized 21 evolutionary accounts of female orgasm and makes a convincing case for the single account that treats orgasm as a happy accident, a byproduct of the role that male orgasm plays in reproduction and the sharing of early embryonic tissue by the male and female genitalia. The other 20 theories she dismisses as illogical or incompatible with data on women's sexuality. This time the press has it left. Lloyd's analysis is worth all the attention.

--Amanda Schaffer (Slate.com 20061209)

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123