Oh great, I try giving coding instructions and then I screw up my own. Let’s try that again: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_210.html
[[Guys, think it over. If the tables were turned, and half the people in the world were
three times bigger, uglier, grosser, hairier, and meaner than you, and they all wanted a
peice of your ass, what would you do?]]
[1. I’ve never been physically abused by a man.
2. I don’t think all men are meaner, and I think a lot of em aren’t ugly at all.
3. I use the same amount of weight on the leg extention and leg curl machines as a lot
of men at the gym.]
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Cool! However, my poll is 10 for 12 so far. I define abuse as contact with a closed fist - anything from a black eye up to hospitalization. Is it just my neighborhood? I would call it an exception if you gave better than you got, though
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I, on the other hand, think most men are just plain homely, and most women aren’t. It’s a point of view.
3a. Wow.
3b. AVERAGE. But I agree, three to five times stronger seems a little high to me too. I’ve always been outside the normal range for size & strength, so I don’t have a personal feel for it.
3c. Ya hadda call my bluff, dincha. Now I have to go dig for the reference. From the memory banks, it was a news blip several years ago in Scientific American discussing the results of new recruit testing at Air Force Officer Corp School in Texas. Keep in mind this is before boot camp and may have more to do with American social tendencies than any natural limit.
Hmm, we may be digressing from the original, much more delightful subject.
It was just an idea, generated from trolling through physiology, evolutionary psychology, and watching people at parties. There doesn’t seem to be a wasted ounce anywhere in the human mind or body. You see the range of colors that our ancestors needed to find ripe fruit and tigers, nothing more. Sex is a thread of the fabric; orgasms must have both physical and social reasons for existing.
If it was just a physical function, there would be no reason to waste all those nerves and reflexes on it - my eyes don’t roll up when my thyroid gland releases growth hormone. Baggage does not survive 100 million years of the four horsemen.
<Baggage does not survive 100 million years of the four horsemen>
Yes, it does. Please see the essay by Gould I cited up a few posts. To summarize, it takes less energy for the developing fetus to stick to a basic prototype than to differentiate further. Women have orgasms because their is no disadvantage to it; “Orgasmic” is the default, lowest energy, easiest state because all fetuses have the tissue that latter develops into the clitoris or penis, respectivly.
Secondly, if we accept your premises as true (which I don’t), your conclusion is flawed; I mean, if men are overwhelmingly stronger than women and uncontrolably aggressive, why is female consent an issue at all? All that leg strengh should make it possible for men to catch all the women they need to keep the human race going.
[[I define abuse as contact with a closed fist - anything from a black eye up to hospitalization. Is it just my neighborhood? I would call it an exception if you gave better than you got, though]]
Not saying that I didn’t ever probably deserve it, though. I got some abuse from my older brother, but I’d say I gave better than I got. I kicked mostly. Maybe that’s why my legs are so strong.
Jill
I’ve seen her arms (well, one anyway). Not only pretty but I wouldn’t arm wrestle with Jill and expect an easy win, or even a win. I’m betting it would be fun to try though!
Ugly
Ain’t it obvious why women have orgasms? Having orgasms makes sex pleasurable. Because it’s pleasurable, idiots engage in sex without thinking of the evolutionary consequenses, but the species is sustained nonetheless. If sex for women, on the other hand, wasn’t pleasurable fewer women would have sex, right? Somewhere along the line, a mutated gene caused a woman to have an orgasm, and she had sex more frequently, having more offspring who had the same gene. Making sex pleasurable certainly increases the number of idiots who engage in sex, and brings the species IQ down, but there are many more of us as a result, and we need people to be on Jerry Springer, don’t we?
On a related topic, ‘do women have stronger orgasms than men’ (I tried to answer that column but wasn’t able to find it), I read somewhere (in a women’s magazine while waiting at the dentist) that a woman taking testosterone had noticed a marked decrease in the strengths of her orgasms. If men’s testosterone levels decrease with age (do they?), their orgasms should therefore get stronger, right? I’ve definitely noticed a difference in that respect between adolescence and today (good news, for sure). And as for multiple orgasms, do most men really have that much trouble having a few in a row?
I agree that for the woman, strong orgasms are definitely a way to stay interested and an added incentive (maybe they need more coaxing). And perhaps in the days of the caveman, it was necessary to stay alert and not to have orgasms which lasted to long… And another thing, when they say a man’s sexuality peaks at 18, what do they mean exactly? I am a lot more interested and knowledgeable today than I was then!
Women have orgasms?
That is more than I wanted to know. LA LA LA LA LA! I can’t hear you!
statistics show that if a woman has an orgasm during sex, there is a higher chance that she will get pregnant. i was reading it in some highly esteemed magazine along the lines of time, newsweek, or something like that.
[[statistics show that if a woman has an orgasm during sex, there is a higher chance that she will get pregnant. i was reading it in some highly esteemed magazine along the lines of time, newsweek, or something like that.]]
Uh, haven’t we already been here?
Jill
I think Uncle Cecil would agree that, on a topic of such import, we need more data - preferrably from direct scientific study. Looking for female volunteers to join in this quest for knowledge.
This is all very baffling to me. I mean, I can’t think of a good, sound reason why women should not have orgasms. First, as someone previously mentioned, the rush of arousal is the lure that compels people to have sex. (Anyone ever consider that humans’ 24/7 raring-to-go-ness is an adaptation to our relatively poor sense of smell? If there were a woman giving off pheromones in our vicinity, chances are we’d have no way of knowing.) And if arousal is the thrill of watching the slot machine dials spin, orgasm is the payoff that makes us glad we did it and wanting to do it again sometime. Second, no one has mentioned vaginal contractions, whose purpose seems fairly clear: intensify the sensation for the male, and milk that intruder for every last drop. Third, I didn’t know about the mechanics of the uterine contractions, but the other posters’ descriptions sure seem to fit with the other data. If all of these things exist and seem to have intuitively obvious functions, why is the female orgasm such a mystery? It seems like having all these data points, then speculating that they’re actually just side effects of some other unknown evolutionary force is a gratuitous violation of the principle that the simplest explanation is usually right.
Disclaimer: I ain’t no skyentist.
I believe the mystery lies in the fact that female orgasm is not by any means a zoological universal.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Geenius wrote:
The latest I’d heard, pheromones aren’t detected by the normal sense of smell at all. They’re picked up by a tiny organ in your nose called the V-something Nasal Organ, or VNO, which is wired to a different part of your brain than the normal olfactory nerves are.
I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.
Wow, what a long thread.
Ok, just adding something I didn’t see in the posts I read (I started getting tired near the end) there’s one thing people haven’t mentioned. I remember hearing about how when a female orgasms, she releases an egg which makes it’s way down her fallopian tubes, thus increasing the chance to become pregnant (since sperm will stick around [no pun intended] for a few days). Wouldn’t this be a reason for the orgasm? Because there are methods of having sex without using a contraceptive and not get pregnant by mapping out certain dates and times in the female menstrual cycle. I’d have though (me not being an expert nor someone who’s given this a lot of thought) by having an orgasm, you could technically become pregnant even when an egg is not waiting around inside the womb.
There you go, my 2.683 cents.
I want my change back.
Michael said:
Michael – Eggs aren’t merely stored in the ovaries, they develop there. The cells that hang out in the ovaries are “primary” cells, which can’t be fertilized. About 1/3 to 1/2 of a woman’s menstrual cycle is needed to develop that cell into a “secondary” cell (the egg). AFAIK, anything that just pops out of an ovary on demand wouldn’t be worth anything, reproductively speaking.
Also, by the time the egg makes it to the uterus, it’s almost certainly too late for it to be fertilized and implanted into the uterine wall before menstruation starts and everything is flushed out. The best chance for pregnancy is right after ovulation, when the sperm can meet the ovum in the fallopian tube.
–Da Cap’n
“Somebody light a match – I’ve been talking out of my ass.”
ps - The theory that the female orgasm increases the likelihood that she will become pregnant has been explored elsewhere on this thread. The theory that an orgasm actually induces ovulation is, of course, false.
Yay well… the whole theory of lowering of the cervex and contracting to capture all the sperm doesn’t seem to hold any weight seeing that most men, if they weren’t trying to be “kind” would ejaculate within moments of entering the woman. I would think the early stages of man would act more like an orangatang or ape and spend only moments inside the woman until climax and then withdraw. Not giving the woman NEARLY the time require to have an orgasm. But the theory of the body not wasting a single function does seem to be true so at some point there HAD to be an advantage for a woman to climax or maybe it’s just a side effect of the way the female body developed.
frankly, i think the orgasm for a man and a woman are just little cookies of evolution and we shouldnt be looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Jay.
bump - cecil post
That the capability may be down to “biological efficiency” might be true, but the female orgasm does serve useful purposes. By making sex a pleasurable activity, it helps bonding between mates. The human species does tend to have pairing or at least some form of cooperative relationship for the care of children. Of course, in some of our more complex societies, convention may replace this basic need!
On a practical note, humans are odd in that they walk upright. While jumping up-and-down after sex is a poor contraceptive, it does have an effect. Thus making sex a pleasure to be practiced in quiet circumstances with multiple orgasms inducing a “stay still and recover” response, increases fertilisation rates. It also ties in with the “dipping cervix” observation.