Responsiveness is a male characteristic. Some men have an orgasm infrequently. The function of the male orgasm is to trigger the ejaculation of sperm. When a man has an orgasm, he always ejaculates. A man can enjoy both as separate phenomena. Ejaculation is physical and orgasm is psychological. The male orgasm rewards a man for ejaculating and potentially impregnating a woman. In modern times, the concept of female orgasm has been used in much the same way: as a means of rewarding men for ejaculating. Most women have such low levels of responsiveness that they never experience orgasm.
Responsiveness must be a recessive gene in females because it occurs very rarely. Whereas responsiveness is presumably a dominant gene for males. There is no justification for the female orgasm. The reproductive capacity of a woman depends on the automatic process of ovulation. The male orgasm is also not directly related to reproduction, but ejaculation is necessary for reproduction. Some young boys can orgasm without ejaculating, but after adolescence, orgasm always triggers ejaculation. In fact, there is no other physiological event (except orgasm) that can explain ejaculation.
Research indicates that when men are isolated (in prison, for example), most men experience little arousal. So responsiveness breaks down into two distinct phenomena. First, there is the biological capacity that an individual has. Then there are the opportunities we have. If a man doesn’t have a partner or doesn’t have access to arousing erotic stimuli, he may not respond at all.
As long as a man can get an erection (get aroused), a woman just needs to be willing to have sex. Men instinctively know that they have the greatest sexual need. This is why men chase and date women. A man has to impress a woman before she agrees to have sex with him. So sex feels like a male conquest. The male ego arises from the idea that a woman has chosen a man for her sexual prowess. In fact, normally a woman chooses a man for social reasons (protection, support and companionship).
The challenge for a man is that he has to somehow posit sexual activity in the context of the social nature of women. It’s not easy. The risk of rejection is high but (depending on the level of his sexual desire) he is still forced to try. Nor is it easy for a woman to get out of her social world and imagine herself in the erotic world in which men live. Women are not turned on by nudity, genitalia, and sexual activity like men.
Once boys reach adolescence (defined by the first ejaculation) they remain sexually active well into old age. Kinsey found that men regularly masturbate or engage in penetrative sex throughout their lives. This is the male sex drive. Women don’t have that urge. Kinsey found that, in general, women were sexually active only when they were in a relationship. Single, widowed, or divorced women can live perfectly happily for decades without engaging in any sexual activity. Clearly, women do not experience the same sexual needs as most men. Women enjoy emotional intimacy.
Kinsey warned about the sexually inert spinsters commonly found in the educational institutions of his day. She commented that teenagers have more orgasms than these women in their entire lives. What she didn’t appreciate is that these women don’t seek male approval. Very few women are willing to be honest about their lack of sexual motivation. Millions of other women actively support the male view of their sexuality or passively allow it to prevail. Most women want male approval.
Women may have a phallus, but they have largely lost their responsiveness. This is because the female orgasm serves no purpose. As a parallel example, some birds cannot fly despite having wings. Take chickens, for example. Since chickens have wings, we might assume that they should be able to fly. But the aerodynamics don’t work. To be able to fly, a bird needs a low body weight relative to its wingspan. Chickens have insufficient wing span and are too heavy to lift off the ground. Women lack the sexual drive that motivates men to seek sexual liberation. Women don’t get turned on by real-world triggers with a lover, but they can use fantasies to masturbate on their own.
The clitoris does not develop like the penis does. The clitoris becomes tumescent but never erect, which is what makes the penis so sensitive to stimulation. For men, the corpora cavernosa are found within the body of the penis. For women, they are within the internal clitoral orgasm. Once she is mentally aroused, a woman uses her fingers and pelvic muscles to massage the internal clitoral organ and push herself to orgasm only during masturbation.
Even a receptive person only aspires to orgasm when they know the circumstances are right. They need to be able to achieve the required mental arousal and get the right kind of stimulation to orgasm. Even receptive women don’t get turned on by a lover, so they approach sex without focusing on achieving their own orgasm. Responsiveness does not imply any reproductive advantage to a female, so female responsiveness is rare. Women have much less common and less frequent orgasm than men.
By age 15, 92 percent of boys have had an orgasm, but by the same age fewer than a quarter of girls have; and the female population is 29 years old before including as high a percentage of experienced individuals as is found in the male curve at age 15 (Alfred Kinsey 1948).
