Fortean Slips: The Orgasm Chasm

Science has fallen into
the orgasm chasm in its
quest to find the root
of copulatory ecstasy.

The Orgasm Chasm

by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com

Notice:This special PG-13 Fortean Slip contains the word "orgasm" 26 times, and is all about orgasms and stuff. So if you don't feel comfortable reading orgasm-related material, you should stop right now... or else learn to fake it.

It seems like a silly and sexist question to ask: "Why do women have orgasms?" A logical first response is, "Well, why the hell shouldn't they?" But the fact of the matter is, scientists really don't know the answer. Not even those scientists who have actually scored.

With a few debatable exceptions, no other female mammals appear to experience a profound climactic episode associated with sexual intercourse, whereas the males of the species across the board whoop and holler in manifest bliss upon finishing up their business. This distinction suggests that human female orgasm is a product of evolution, and recent medical findings are taking that premise one step further: it seems that women's orgasms may be a more highly evolved biological feature than men's.

Scottish doctors at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh arrived at this conclusion after studying a 44-year-old woman who suffered from a bizarre affliction. Some women complain about not having enough orgasms, but she was getting way too many. The unnamed woman had been stricken with an intense headache that persisted for several days, and afterwards she found herself repeatedly beset by "an internal, ascending feeling indistinguishable from an orgasm," which would strike unexpectedly in the middle of her everyday activities. The orgasmic sensations were debilitating and embarrassing, not pleasurable, and they occurred spontaneously about twice a month for three years.

It wasn't until one particular episode caused her to go into mild spasms and pass out that the woman sought medical help, and even then she was hesitant about describing explicitly what the attacks felt like. Neurologist Paul Reading discovered a deformed artery in her brain's right temporal lobe, which had probably ruptured and caused her initial headache. Subsequent tissue damage had led to a case of epilepsy, apparently stemming from the area of the brain that registers sexual stimulation.

Thus diagnosed, the woman was prescribed epilepsy medication and the spontaneous climaxes came to a halt. As freakish as this condition may sound, it turns out there have been 20 prior cases of epileptic women who reported orgasm-like seizures, and every one of them was known to possess a physiological anomaly in the same region of the brain. It seems likely that this part of the temporal lobe is the primary nerve center of the orgasm. But it may be for ladies only.

There is no medical evidence that this part of the brain has anything to do with orgasms in men. In the single recorded case of comparable seizures afflicting a man, examinations revealed that he had an abnormality in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates autonomic processes such as body temperature and hormone production.

Since the temporal lobe is involved with such high cerebral functions as memory, language and speech, and the hypothalamus is basically part of the lizard brain, Dr. Reading and his associate Robert Will have concluded that the female orgasm and the male orgasm are fundamentally different in origin. And the female orgasm, they believe, is the much more sophisticated and fully evolved of the two.

This pronouncement may be something of a premature ejaculation, if you'll pardon the expression, being based on the study of one solitary male subject. But assuming that their hypothesis is correct, we're still left with the original question: what Darwinian purpose would womankind have evolved this super-fancy orgasm to serve?

One possible answer comes from zoologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, who suggests that human females' orgasms make them more likely to get pregnant. In the case of quadruped mammals, gravity ensures that semen will stay in place following coitus, but the upright walking position of human females would allow the precious fluid to trickle away from its intended goal. Therefore, Morris says, evolution cooked up the human female orgasm to keep women exhausted on their backs long enough for the sperm inside her to swim unhindered upstream. Morris's overly-tidy evolutionary theories have been criticized by many authorities, including the world's smartest human, Cecil Adams. "Sounds like something I'd make up," Cecil said of Morris's "Lay Down Sally" view of female sexuality. "But the difference is, I'd wink."

Another dissenter is evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argues that male and female orgasms are neurologically created equal. "The clitoris and penis are one and the same organ, identical in early form, but later enlarged in male fetuses through the action of testosterone," Gould wrote in Bully for Brontosaurus. This being the case, it stands to reason that the orgasms of both sexes would be governed by the same part of the brain.

While Reading and Will's proposal of the female uber-gasm awaits further investigation, researchers at Rutgers University are making inroads on another front of this important field of scientific inquiry. Barry Komisaruk has studied a little-known nerve running directly from the cervix to the brain stem that allows some women with spinal cord injuries to continue experiencing orgasms. Along with his colleague Beverly Whipple, author of the controversial 1982 bestseller The G-Spot, Komisaruk identified a chemical neurotransmitter that appears to trigger the orgasm sensation in the brain.

When this story made the news in the spring of 1997, the media touted it as a breakthrough that could lead to the production of an "orgasm pill." Such a pharmaceutical offering is actually not likely, because the chemical messenger in question is a neuropeptide whose unstable structure would not be suited to pill form. But the substance might still be used someday as a treatment for sexually unfulfilled women, and also as an all-natural painkiller that could surpass morphine.

Between the news of the orgasm chemical and the looming prospect of human cloning, some observers have noted with mock dismay that women will soon be able to do everything all by themselves, leaving men completely obsolete. But I have two major problems with that line of thinking. First, any fool who believes that women don't already possess the ability to have an orgasm without male participation needs to wake up and smell the Duracells. And more importantly, I think there's a much bigger issue at stake here, which could really make all us men worthless.

Regardless of the respective origins of male and female orgasms, we may one day have the technology to produce them artificially and faithfully in the brain, without the muss and fuss of using those sloppy genitals. And this could be the most devastating Pandora's box ever unleashed by humanity -- especially if it means introducing men to a mega-cataclysmic level of ecstasy formerly known only to women. Nothing else in life could possibly matter to men after that. This is why it will be a miracle if Reading and Will ever find another case of a man who has involuntary orgasmic seizures: unlike women, who have enough presence of mind to get tired of continual spontaneous orgasms after a while, a man would never dream of complaining. If this secret paradise were freely available to every living male past puberty, it would be the complete and utter end of the world as we know it.

In every possible sense, we'd be gone to Kingdom Come.

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