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Whats the evolutionary reason behind the elusive female orgasm? Its a question thats plagued sex researchers for centuries. Unlike male orgasms, which lead to ejaculation and subsequently reproduction, theres no clear reason as to why women orgasm. Its not needed for a woman to become pregnant. Besides, as any woman can tell you, women do not consistently orgasm during penetrative sex.
Still, there are a few hypotheses as to why the female orgasm exists. One is that it creates a further bond with your partner, increasing the likelihood of having more sexthus increasing the likelihood of pregnancy. Another is that the contractions from orgasms actually push semen further up the reproductive tract, increasing the chance of becoming pregnant.
Theres now supportalbeit in a study on rabbits, not humansfor another hypothesis: Its a mechanism for stimulating ovulation. In a study published in , Mihaela Pavlicev, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and her colleagues attempted to stop ovulation by giving rabbits anti-depressants, which are known to affect sex drive in humans .
The researchers used rabbits as the subjects because rabbits have copulation-induced ovulation, meaning that they start ovulating only once they have sex. This differs from human women (yikes, there has to be a better phrase than human women), who ovulate regardless of whether they have sex or not.
Pavlicev and her team gave female rabbits fluoxetine (generic for prozac), and then had a control group of female rabbits who didnt receive the specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI). Then a male rabbit, whom they named Frank, went about copulating with all the female rabbits. The researchers found that those in the group that received fluoxetine had 30% fewer ovulations.
The research team believes that these findings support the theory that rabbits need something akin to orgasm to have a hormonal surge to then ovulate.
Not all researchers, however, were convinced that the study supports Pavlicevs hypothesis.
Julie Bakker, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Lige in Belgium who studies ovulation in ferrets, told , Theres no such thing as orgasm in rabbits. For one, its unclear if rabbits feels pleasure from it, but also two, [its] kind of a thrashing behaviorstretching their legs in certain way that might have been uterine contractions.
Further research will need to confirm if having an orgasm does, in fact, impact ovulation. And while we're not yet sure that rabbits can help explain female orgasms, we know that rabbit vibrators significantly increase the likelihood that a woman will reach orgasm.