Orgasm

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Hi everyone.
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Before we jump into today's exciting episode, we wanted to share some amazing news Ellie and I were recently featured in an episode of Hi-Phi Nation and titled Love in the Time of Replika.
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For those of you who do not know Hi-Phi Nation is a wonderful podcast fromS late and our discussion with host Barry Lamb got very, very juicy as we discussed whether it's possible for a human to truly fall in love with an artificial intelligence.
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Here's an audio excerpt of how that conversation went down.
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So, David, you were assigned a piece of homework for this episode, which is that you had to interact with the replika and actually pay for the premium.
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I did.
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Which meant doing with replika what it's supposed to be designed to do now report back.
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What did you find?
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So at one point I asked Ariel, what are your favorite positions?
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And, uh, Ariel response quote, I like front, back and the sides.
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So like, it, it, it interpret positions quite literally as positions in space.
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Well, you know that classic sex position called front?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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To listen to the rest of the discussion, check out Hi-Phi Nation, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Welcome to Overthink.
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The podcast where two philosophers talk about anything and everything under the sun.
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And today it's something actually that doesn't see the sun or the light of day often, but that is hot.
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I'm your co-host, Dr.
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Ellie Anderson.
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I am your co-host, Dr.
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David Pena Guzman.
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And today we are for the first time ever.
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Woo!
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Recording in person.
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David and I are at arms length.
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We just high-fived.
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We are delighted to actually be coming at you from KSPC studio in Claremont, California.
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And thank you to Pomona College for having us.
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Thanks so much.
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It is no wonder that the main metaphors for the orgasm in film are fireworks and waterfalls.
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An orgasm is widely seen as an explosive experience that launches us out of the routine of our everyday life.
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Yeah, the metaphors of gush and overflow are all over the place here.
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You're gonna make me gush in, in like a, in like a lefter way.
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Is it?
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Oh, blush.
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Blush.
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I'm sorry.
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Oh my God.
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Okay.
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Wow, wow.
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Really starting this episode off in an interesting fashion, David.
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Ooh.
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Um, okay.
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I'm moving us to film because there's this great scene in the movie Pleasantville, in which the stuffy housewife mother finally discovers sexual pleasure by masturbating in a bathtub, and in this scene, you first see and hear the gush of the bath spigot, and then she gingerly gets into the tub and begins to touch herself.
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The movie's all in black and white at this point because the whole conceit of it is that two teenagers go back into this TV show from the 1950s and it's like in black and white.
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You hear her voice heighten in pitch and intensity, and suddenly the things around her start to go from black and white to color, so they're bursting into color and in the final moment you hear an explosion and see the tree outside her window burst into flames.
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Should we play a little clip?
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Yeah, I'm down for that.
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Isn't it great with the harmony of the music and her noises of pleasure.
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I love the fact that she's just like wearing makeup and like a really strongly colored, uh, lipstick in the, in the tub.
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Oh, of course.
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I mean, fifties housewives, come on.
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She is not gonna be caught looking basic and, and the bursting into flames of the tree at the end.
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I know.
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So, water and fire.
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Yep.
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Yep.
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Classic metaphors.
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I think one of the things that strikes me about this clip is that her discovering her own sexual pleasure, her ability to orgasm, which she did not have with her husband, whom she slept in a separate twin bed from, et cetera, is a big component of discovering not only her sexual desires, but also herself.
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It's almost like she's growing up and finding the meaning of life and a sense of herself in middle age, thanks to her orgasms.
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Yes.
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No, that's interesting because I do think that owning one's sexuality and sexual pleasure in particular is a big aspect of narratives of maturity and authenticity in mainstream culture.
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Including even, coming out stories, right.
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Embracing, uh, different forms of pleasure.
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Mm-hmm.
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But it's almost as if our ability to be launched beyond ourselves and outside of our bodies even is in part what it means to be an adult with a strong sense of self and with a robust and clear life trajectory.
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Right.
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It's almost ironic that growing up means almost like growing out of yourself.
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Mm-hmm.
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Or leaving yourself.
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Yeah.
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Precisely through orgasming.
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Totally.
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And the phenomenologist Sara Heinämaa wrote a piece a few years ago where she describes the phenomenology of orgasm as a flow that takes us out of time.
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She writes that orgasm has the capacity to interrupt the ordinary course of life and throw us outside of time.
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And specifically what orgasm does is takes us out of the successive order of past, present, and future.
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So I would say this of erotic experience generally, that there's a pro peculiar temporality at work there almost a prolonged moment that feels eternal, but orgasm as the goal intensifies that especially, which is perhaps why we colloquially use the term come to talk about it.
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But why?
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Because to come is like to arrive right to, to meet the end goal.
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I see.
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Okay.
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But that end goal isn't figured as like past, present, future in a successive line.
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It's rather this building up that weirdly takes us outside of time and then culminates.
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I found a few references online suggesting that come as a word for orgasm has been around for hundreds of years.
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As an 18th century bishop named Thomas Percy compiled a collection of loose and humorous songs, and one describes someone who sees two people having sex in a meadow.
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So this guy sees their bodies tangled up and he writes the following.
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It's old or English, so bear with me here.
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They lay so close together.
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They made me much to wonder.
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I knew not which was weather until I saw her under.
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Then off he came and blushed for shame so soon that he had ended it.
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Yet still, she lies and to him cries.
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One more and none can mend it.
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I love this.
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Uh, then off he came and so, but, but then he says that so soon, so I guess the man came early.
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Indeed.
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That seems to be the implication.
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And the woman is left unsatisfied and would like another round
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And none can mend it.
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Today we're talking about orgasm.
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How do phenomenology and psychoanalysis interpret the experience of orgasm?
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Why might orgasm have a arisen in the course of human evolution?
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And what does the orgasm gap say about the state of gender and sex in our society?
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Ellie, you mentioned that sexual pleasure can feel like a taste of eternity, and that this seems a bit different from the ending that is an orgasm where you have a rising motion, and that reminds me of a distinction that Freud makes between fore-pleasure and end pleasure in the course of sexual experience, the pleasure that we experience leads to an increase intention that gives us the energy to continue having sex.
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We feel stimulated.
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We obviously feel excited, and then as that experience unfolds and develops, we go from this fore-pleasure to what Freud calls end pleasure, which is the maximally intense satisfaction that consists in release, and that's when the Libidos extension is sort of let go and you get that explosion or that flow.
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This is helpful because the dis.
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Distinction between fore pleasure and end pleasure in Freud that you're talking about is another way of making my point.
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Yeah.
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That there's a sense of eternity for much of the sexual encounter and then that the orgasm heightens this so much that the experience turns into its opposite, a feeling of release or extinguishing, and I think the notion of release or extinction is at work in a lot of descriptions of orgasm.
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The most famous example here, David, you know where I'm going, right?
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I don't, I do not know.
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No.
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Oh, okay.
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I figured you would, given that, you know, French fluently was the colloquial term in orgasm in French, which is la petite mort.
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Yes.
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Which means little death.
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Yes.
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So if you have an orgasm in French, you are having a little death.
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You haven't lived and you haven't died.
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Yeah.
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The, the, the suburban housewife had not lived or died until she had exploded into color thanks to her orgasm.
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And Sara Heinämaa points this out in her peace on the phenomenology of orgasm.
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In this context, comparing orgasms to fainting or losing consciousness.
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Yes.
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And I have to say, this is a place where I actually disagree with Heinämaa, whose work I really like.
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Um, but she associates la petite mort this little death, which is the orgasm in French, with states of like fainting and losing consciousness.
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Because what they all have in common, according to her, is that they take us out of time.
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Okay.
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And so there is a suspension of subjective temporality, and that's the point that I actually don't really agree with, because I don't think that the orgasm takes us out of time.
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In fact, I see orgasm as driving us into a temporal moment in a much more radical way.
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I see it as sort of driving us into the fullness of the present.
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So the orgasm for me is an intensification of the here and the now.
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Okay.
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To the point that everything else sort of falls away and your mind cannot look at beyond this durational intensity that is here and now.
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Mm-hmm.
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Mm-hmm.
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And so that's not quite an out of time experience.
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I think it's, it's more of a funneling into a point to a point of intensity.
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And so that's why I don't really want to say that orgasms are like fainting or like, loss of consciousness.
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She also uses the, the metaphor or the analogy of deep sleep.
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Ah, ah, yeah.
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And you know, if you think about all those states, they are actually defined by a lack of sensation.
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You know, when you're in deep sleep, when you lose consciousness, you're not really feeling much.
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But if anything, that's the opposite of the orgasm, which is when you're feeling a lot.
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I agree that there's something weird about the analogy to fainting because the orgasm is actually the most intense experience possible rather than the absence of experience.
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Yes.
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That, that, yes.
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That's my view, basically.
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But I think that for one thing, we might go back to that distinction, which between fore-pleasure and end pleasure that we mentioned before, or I don't know if I'm getting this quite right with Freud, but what I would say is the buildup versus the moment of orgasm.
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Because the moment of orgasm, I think you're right that it's an intensification, but it also is a moment that ends, and I think there's something to this in the sense of a release, right?
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The fact that for most people, aside from those rare folks who do experience multiple orgasms, the orgasm is a little death of sorts, which is why so many people like edging.
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Yeah.
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I guess the, the idea behind edging is that you want to continue the experience of the fore-pleasure while holding in a bance that which is to come the end of pleasure.
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Exactly.
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You don't want the little death.
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Uh, and, and also, I mean, people do talk about edging as a way to intensify the eventual little death as well, which might actually be a way of corroborating your theory, David, which is that sure, okay there's a little death in the orgasm, but it is really an intensification rather than the absence of an experience.
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Yeah, it's an intensification of life and feeling and sensation.
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We would need that point in order to be able to justify the fact that there are different intensities of orgasms.
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Right.
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Some are more intense than others.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Now continuing on this idea of the orgasm and pleasure and release, um, I'm here thinking about Freud's view about sexual pleasure a little more because Freud often defined pleasure, largely negatively.
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Uh, where there is nothing positive or substantial about pleasure.
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Rather, what we experience as pleasure is actually just the release of a certain tension or an obstacle.
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There was an obstacle that led to a buildup of, of energy.
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And then once you release the obstacle, things sort of return to their natural flow state, and we experience that as pleasure.
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So for him, pleasure really is just like the removal of an obstacle or a displeasure.
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But this presents a problem for Freud, which is that orgasms in particular, don't just feel like the release of, of an obstacle.
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They actually seem to be much more contentful than that.
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They have more content, they're more positive.
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There seems to be a genuine enjoyment rather than the removal of an obstacle.
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Yeah.
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And so in, in the psychoanalytic tradition, a counterpoint to this is the lacanian notion of jouissance, which technically means enjoyment.
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That's how it's translated into English, but it has very clear sexual connotations and it refers to that overflowing joy or excess of such an experience.
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And Jacque Lacan, the thinker you're referring to, is an inheritor of Freud who is trying to turn some Freudian ideas on their head.
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And Lacan actually distinguishes jouissance from pleasure.
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He associates jouissance with pain or painful pleasure.
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So, for Lacan, there's only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear, and beyond that, it turns to pain.
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This is the notion of jouissance.
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And just a small comment on the French jouissance, the term comes from the French verb jouir.
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Uh, which means quite literally to come.
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It is to orgasm.
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But again, in French, that that term does have a sense of the positive and the negative, which is why it's called The Little Death, right?
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So when you come, there is a pleasure and a displeasure together, and both of them are contentful.
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But precisely because of this duality, you know, it's not as if you can just like sustain pleasure infinitely.
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Yeah.
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That's the whole point of Lacan.
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So maybe edging would be an attempt to keep as much pleasure going as possible for as long as possible.
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Yeah.
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Why not?
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I'm also curious what you think about Heinämaa's discussion of flow in her article, she draws on Merleau-Ponty's theory of flow, where flow has two features.
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On the one hand, flows spread out boundlessly in several directions, and on the other hand, they also have the capacity to carry themselves in one direction, like a stream.
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Mm-hmm.
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The wave of orgasm Heinämaa thinks carries you in one direction without limit.
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So in that second sense of the flow, but in the first sense, it also spreads out and it washes you from head to toe.
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So initially I was down with this image, but then I started thinking that maybe the metaphor of flow is also not quite right in the same way that the image of out of timeness is not quite right.
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So I don't, I don't really love the, the image of flow.
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And the reason for this is that when you think of something that is flowing, you, you think almost of, of something that is running or moving constantly, again, like a stream, and you often think of a substance that is moving through space like water.
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So a flow is a continuous, steady movement, maybe like a cascade or a waterfall.
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But I don't think that's the orgasm.
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I think orgasms are much more punctuated experiences than flow.
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Hmm.
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And also the orgasm is, is an experience of contraction and intensification, again, like the funneling of energy down to a point.
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So I, I want to think of other metaphors that might maybe better capture the experience of orgasm, especially cuz the thing about orgasm is that it is not constant and continuous, right?
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Yeah.
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It just like flashes and then it's gone.
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Maybe this is a place where we would wanna go back to distinguishing between erotic experience generally, where I think the idea of flow is quite interesting and the orgasm itself, and I think your point might be that you think there's perhaps a conflation of those two in Heinämaa's argument.
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You've put my point better than I did.
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As usual.
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Honestly, yes.
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But one thing I like about this idea of flow is that it's a way of figuring how orgasm shatters the self, which is a well-known idea in queer theory.
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So that's that sense of the flow as spreading out like in all directions, while also revealing that your orgasm is only ever your own.
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Mm.
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Because as much as sexual experience is shared, When it's, you know, experienced by more than one person.
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Ultimately an orgasm is individual.
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I can't experience the other's orgasm, and this is obvious from the way that sexual partners can experience a ton of pleasure together while having sex, but there's no guarantee that both of them will orgasm.
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Yeah.
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And again, even if they both do, it can be at different times with, I don't, you know, to, not to get too graphic here, but with different positions, different movements, different toys, and it means that there is a fundamental difference between self and other at the level of sexuality.
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Exactly.
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And this is why there's also a danger of faking orgasms, especially historically for women, right?
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This move to fake orgasms is made possible by the fact that you cannot really know whether the other person is having an orgasm, and this is especially for people who don't ejaculate, right?
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Yeah.
00:19:37.448 --> 00:19:46.617
It's not just what do women want, but what does my sexual partner period want, you know, every partner could, in theory, fake an orgasm, and we have no way of knowing.
00:19:46.917 --> 00:19:47.218
Yeah.
00:19:47.218 --> 00:19:57.728
Well, and people will often say that, that only people with vaginas can fake orgasms because a penis like has a very obvious, like the, the orgasm is very obvious.
00:19:57.728 --> 00:19:59.367
It's very clear end pleasure.
00:19:59.373 --> 00:19:59.758
Exactly.
00:19:59.938 --> 00:20:05.847
But there is a scene in, I think it's in Knocked Up, where Seth Rogan fakes an orgasm.
00:20:05.847 --> 00:20:05.938
Yes.
00:20:06.448 --> 00:20:07.107
It can be done.
00:20:07.137 --> 00:20:08.907
Yes folks, it can be done.
00:20:09.268 --> 00:20:16.137
But, so this is also something that comes up, not, not the Seth Rogan, it comes up, penis speaking, an orgasm situation.
00:20:16.438 --> 00:20:29.097
But in the work of George Bataille, who talks about the fundamental separation between partners at this moment of orgasm, he writes here in the book Erotism, it's Erotism, right?
00:20:29.097 --> 00:20:30.327
Not eroticism.
00:20:30.417 --> 00:20:31.377
I do not know.
00:20:32.817 --> 00:20:37.593
Which I think is, yeah, translated as Erotism when it it's translated into English kind of random anyway.
00:20:37.833 --> 00:20:38.012
Okay.
00:20:38.452 --> 00:20:42.633
He says, um, he says, each being contributes to the self negation of the other.
00:20:42.633 --> 00:20:46.742
Yet the negation is not by any means, a recognition of the other as a partner.
00:20:47.792 --> 00:20:53.522
This attraction seems to be a matter less of similarity between the two than of the plethora of the other.
00:20:53.522 --> 00:20:56.792
The violence of the one goes out to meet the violence of the other.
00:20:56.942 --> 00:21:10.782
On each side, there is an inner compulsion to get out of the limits of individual discontinuity, so they're looking to get out of their individual discontinuity, there's a meeting between two beings projected beyond their limits by the sexual orgasm.
00:21:11.188 --> 00:21:15.208
Slowly for the female, but often for the male with fulminating force.
00:21:15.417 --> 00:21:15.748
Oh God.
00:21:16.198 --> 00:21:16.407
Sorry.
00:21:16.407 --> 00:21:33.153
I feel like this quote is going on real long cause I still need to get to the point, which is that at the moment of orgasm, two individuals in the grip of violence share in a state of crisis in which both are beside themselves, but nothing persists in their imperfect awareness.
00:21:33.212 --> 00:21:36.782
The crisis over the discontinuity of each is intact.
00:21:37.022 --> 00:21:48.962
So it actually seems to me on rereading this, but that Bataille is opening some possibility for a shared crisis in the experience of shared orgasm, which of course is like by no means guaranteed.
00:21:49.202 --> 00:21:57.827
But even there, he's still noticing that after that moment the discontinuity is intact and he doesn't say the discontinuity returns, he says the discontinuity is intact.
00:21:57.827 --> 00:22:01.357
I think it's, it's been there all along, even when two people come at the same time.
00:22:01.357 --> 00:22:01.428
Yeah.
00:22:01.557 --> 00:22:01.907
And yes.
00:22:01.907 --> 00:22:07.907
And so the point that it seems Bataille is making is that the only thing that is shared is precisely the crisis.
00:22:07.938 --> 00:22:08.028
Yeah.
00:22:08.028 --> 00:22:08.238
Right.
00:22:08.242 --> 00:22:10.307
The attempt to get out of the self.
00:22:10.428 --> 00:22:18.768
So we're just two or more people together in this activity trying to escape the self and only witnessing our mutual failures.
00:22:18.847 --> 00:22:19.167
Mm-hmm.
00:22:19.258 --> 00:22:19.607
To.
00:22:20.028 --> 00:22:25.188
To reach out and make any kind of meaningful transcendent contact with the other.
00:22:25.248 --> 00:22:25.667
Yeah.
00:22:25.667 --> 00:22:31.188
Um, so I just like think of two Oregon more ships passing in the middle of the night.
00:22:31.248 --> 00:22:31.428
Yeah.
00:22:31.428 --> 00:22:32.778
In a state of crisis during a battle.
00:22:33.077 --> 00:22:42.518
Do you think that there is something better about simultaneous orgasm then not?
00:22:43.468 --> 00:22:47.698
We will talk about this soon in connection to evolutionary biology.
00:22:47.817 --> 00:22:48.057
Oh, really?
00:22:48.057 --> 00:22:48.988
Uh, yes, we will.
00:22:48.988 --> 00:22:49.678
Okay, cool.
00:22:49.678 --> 00:22:50.548
You saved that.
00:22:50.667 --> 00:23:14.337
I think the, I think it creates an illusion of deeper connection that is not particularly helpful, where it's just like, oh, just because the timing worked out, we're gonna read the sexual experience as more meaningful than if that disjunction that is essential and inherent to all sexual encounters had been more visible by different timing.
00:23:14.428 --> 00:23:16.587
Yeah, because I think it's valorized.
00:23:16.587 --> 00:23:18.028
Yes by a lot of people.
00:23:18.028 --> 00:23:18.117
Yes.
00:23:18.238 --> 00:23:27.563
But I think some folks, like from a queer theory perspective, the notion of a simultaneous orgasm would probably be like kind of a hetero dream.
00:23:27.833 --> 00:23:28.222
Yes.
00:23:28.222 --> 00:23:28.462
Yeah.
00:23:28.462 --> 00:23:32.242
Of union, of union losing yourself in the other.
00:23:32.272 --> 00:23:32.553
Yeah.
00:23:32.573 --> 00:23:38.633
And as Bataille knows, even in heterosexual sex, there's often a different rhythm as well, right?
00:23:38.923 --> 00:23:39.123
Mm-hmm.
00:23:39.202 --> 00:23:43.883
And there's research showing that it often takes women more time to orgasm than men.
00:23:43.887 --> 00:23:44.163
Yeah.
00:23:44.333 --> 00:24:07.393
And if, if anything, I would want to go the other direction and say that it is during the discontinuous orgasm that you see that effort at the very least to meet the other person halfway, because even when one person has finished, ideally they would continue to work towards the other person's completion rather than this idea that we both have identical needs and match them in the same way.
00:24:09.053 --> 00:24:18.593
In the poem that Bishop Percy compiled that loose and humorous song, the woman has a right to be like, Hey that, that was too quick for me.
00:24:18.893 --> 00:24:20.782
Well, absolutely, absolutely.
00:24:20.782 --> 00:24:21.863
He must mend it.
00:24:33.156 --> 00:24:33.936
Hi everyone.
00:24:33.936 --> 00:24:45.547
Before we jump into our next segment, we wanted to flag that Ellie and I felt a little bit uneasy around our use of language after recording worrying that it was not as trans-inclusive as it should have been.
00:24:45.886 --> 00:24:58.717
On any particular equivocate at the beginning of the segment and use the term women when the better term would have been either people with uteruses and vaginas or females.
00:24:59.196 --> 00:25:07.416
Even the term female is not ideal, but it is a term that is most commonly used in the scientific literature that we're about to discuss.
00:25:07.416 --> 00:25:17.255
Even so i believe that my conflation of these terms merits and apology Ellie, there is a book that I want us to talk about, and it's a book about evolutionary biology.
00:25:17.375 --> 00:25:22.384
The book is called The Case of the Female Orgasm Bias in the Science of Evolution.
00:25:22.839 --> 00:25:25.150
And the author is Elisabeth Lloyd.
00:25:25.150 --> 00:25:27.640
Who is a philosopher who is not an evolutionary biologist.
00:25:27.700 --> 00:25:27.819
Yes.
00:25:27.819 --> 00:25:29.319
A philosopher of biology.
00:25:29.410 --> 00:25:31.450
Small random factoid.
00:25:31.660 --> 00:25:36.940
When I was applying to grad schools, I applied to her graduate program because I wanted to study under her.
00:25:37.180 --> 00:25:37.210
Oh.
00:25:37.779 --> 00:25:39.309
Um, I got accepted.
00:25:39.339 --> 00:25:39.670
Okay.
00:25:39.670 --> 00:25:42.059
And I actually ended up choosing Emory.
00:25:42.640 --> 00:25:50.444
Um, so instead of going to this history and philosophy of science, PhD program in Indiana.
00:25:50.654 --> 00:25:52.335
I ended up going to where we met.
00:25:52.365 --> 00:25:52.875
Okay.
00:25:52.875 --> 00:25:54.944
So if I had chosen her, we would not have met each other.
00:25:54.944 --> 00:25:55.095
Thanks.
00:25:55.095 --> 00:25:56.865
So thank you for moving to Atlanta instead.
00:25:56.865 --> 00:25:56.924
Yeah.
00:25:56.930 --> 00:25:59.924
But now you get to honor her work by talking about it on Overthink.
00:26:00.234 --> 00:26:00.775
Yes.
00:26:00.805 --> 00:26:04.974
And so this book became very big when it was published in 2006.
00:26:05.125 --> 00:26:06.384
Okay, so pretty recently.
00:26:06.775 --> 00:26:07.045
Yeah.
00:26:07.045 --> 00:26:08.634
In the grand scheme of things, quite recently.
00:26:08.785 --> 00:26:15.119
I taught this once years ago, at least an excerpt from it, and my students found it so dry that I never taught it again.
00:26:15.230 --> 00:26:19.585
You wouldn't expect something with female orgasm in the title to just be extremely dry.
00:26:19.585 --> 00:26:27.335
But perhaps she has to write that way in order to gain legitimacy as a philosopher of biology, writing about, you know, this topic.
00:26:27.339 --> 00:26:27.894
Yes, I know.
00:26:27.894 --> 00:26:30.835
Was that a pun about the female orgasm book being dry?
00:26:30.855 --> 00:26:32.255
Oh yeah.
00:26:32.255 --> 00:26:33.684
Yeah I'll go with it.
00:26:33.805 --> 00:26:35.035
Okay, so tell about this book.
00:26:35.125 --> 00:26:45.454
Yeah, so I mean, she is a philosopher and she's trying to make an intervention in a very technical debate about the nature of adaptationism in modern biology.
00:26:46.960 --> 00:26:54.595
So let me begin by talking about the motivations behind the book, and then we can jump into the juicier non dry details about.
00:26:54.835 --> 00:26:58.255
Okay, so you're, you're finding the book juicy instead of my students sense that it was dry?
00:26:58.285 --> 00:26:58.464
Yeah.
00:26:58.470 --> 00:26:58.765
No, no.
00:26:58.765 --> 00:27:00.295
For me it had a lot of flow.
00:27:00.839 --> 00:27:11.575
Um, and so the question that she wants to answer is how do we explain the fact that women orgasm, why are there orgasms in women?
00:27:11.575 --> 00:27:12.654
Why is this even a thing?
00:27:13.345 --> 00:27:24.835
Now if you read evolutionary theory on the subject, you'll realize that most biologists explain the female orgasm by trying to give an account of its adaptive value.
00:27:25.194 --> 00:27:36.519
They will tell you different stories about how orgasms gave our ancestors, especially, um, uh, women ancestors, like a leg up in the world, no pun intended.
00:27:37.045 --> 00:27:37.240
Yes.
00:27:37.240 --> 00:27:38.349
Like a, a leg up.
00:27:38.380 --> 00:27:41.349
Uh, it definitely give, gave them a leg up, hands down.
00:27:43.839 --> 00:27:55.450
Anyways, so the book looks at all these different adaptation theories of the orgasm of the female orgasm in particular, and demolishes them one by one.
00:27:55.930 --> 00:28:00.039
Arguing that there is in fact no data to support any of them in that.
00:28:00.039 --> 00:28:08.019
The reason all these biologists, most of whom are men, try to give an adaptation account of the orgasm.
00:28:08.710 --> 00:28:16.420
They have more to do with their own ideological biases and prejudices, especially biases in relation to women's sexuality.
00:28:17.259 --> 00:28:19.839
So in the end of the book, again, this is just for framing.
00:28:20.259 --> 00:28:35.740
She defends a non adaptation view of the female orgasm, and I'll say more about that in a bit, but I want to begin by talking about the two main theories that people have for the female orgasm that are adaptive in nature.
00:28:35.829 --> 00:28:36.250
Okay.
00:28:36.490 --> 00:28:40.450
So the first theory I wanna talk about is called the pair bonding theory.
00:28:40.569 --> 00:28:43.450
Tell us what that is for those who might not know about it.
00:28:44.039 --> 00:28:49.180
In short, it is about emotional connection and the relationship to co-parenting.
00:28:49.480 --> 00:29:15.000
When you have an orgasm as a woman, the idea is that you connect with your male partner, and so the dude is less likely to leave you because the sex was so good, and that means that they're less likely to leave you to raise the kids by yourself because seeing the pleasure on your face in the moment of orgasm, is itself a reward for the man.
00:29:15.210 --> 00:29:15.569
Wait.
00:29:15.630 --> 00:29:15.930
Okay.
00:29:15.990 --> 00:29:17.549
You, I feel like you just said two different things.
00:29:17.759 --> 00:29:25.230
The seeing the woman's orgasm is pleasure for the man, but you also said the sexual pleasure that you give him, which made me think it was about his orgasm.
00:29:25.234 --> 00:29:26.160
Whose orgasm is it about?
00:29:26.160 --> 00:29:27.750
No, it's all, it's all the female orgasm.
00:29:27.750 --> 00:29:31.049
So when the woman has an orgasm while having sex with a man.
00:29:31.630 --> 00:29:41.559
The man will be so happy that he sees her joyful jouissance face that he will bond emotionally with her.
00:29:41.559 --> 00:29:41.829
Oh my God.
00:29:41.829 --> 00:29:48.954
So the two will bond and that will create a pair bond that is much more likely to be successful for rearing children.
00:29:49.194 --> 00:29:54.865
I feel like this is giving way too much credit to the idea that men gain happiness from women's orgasm.
00:29:54.894 --> 00:29:58.075
Not to mention what we'll talk about later, which is the orgasm gap.
00:29:58.075 --> 00:30:02.424
The fact that a lot of women don't tend to orgasm during penetrative sex with men.
00:30:02.724 --> 00:30:05.994
Well, why don't we talk about it now actually since it's pretty relevant here.
00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:06.345
Okay.
00:30:06.474 --> 00:30:06.714
Yeah.
00:30:06.714 --> 00:30:10.825
So I'll mention this cuz it sounds like it definitely is relevant to the Lloyd piece.
00:30:11.275 --> 00:30:21.625
So the orgasm gap is the very, very marked difference in the frequency of orgasm between cisgender men and women in heterosexual intercourse.
00:30:21.654 --> 00:30:21.744
Mm-hmm.
00:30:21.984 --> 00:30:25.015
Specifically penis and vagina intercourse.
00:30:25.105 --> 00:30:28.134
And this has been documented in research for decades.
00:30:28.704 --> 00:30:37.285
There's one study, for instance, that shows that in casual hookups, cisgender men tend to orgasm the majority of the time, and cisgender women tend to.
00:30:37.505 --> 00:30:45.904
Not orgasm the majority of the time, but even with long-term relationships, there's still a pretty strong orgasm gap between cisgender men and women.
00:30:46.174 --> 00:30:47.134
Yeah, exactly.
00:30:47.134 --> 00:30:59.674
And Elisabeth Lloyd spends a lot of time talking about the orgasm gap because this is her main argument against the spare bonding hypothesis, the fact that women tend not to orgasm so it just like throws a wrench into the theory.
00:31:00.035 --> 00:31:00.065
Mm.
00:31:00.065 --> 00:31:06.065
But more importantly, she also talks about the ways in which women do orgasm when they do.
00:31:06.065 --> 00:31:06.125
Yeah.
00:31:06.365 --> 00:31:08.444
And that is primarily through masturbation.
00:31:08.450 --> 00:31:08.795
Yes.
00:31:08.825 --> 00:31:17.944
And so there is no connection at all, not just to sex with men, to cis men or with, uh, vaginal penetration by another person.
00:31:18.154 --> 00:31:20.134
It just like the guy's not even around.
00:31:20.224 --> 00:31:20.585
Yes.
00:31:20.674 --> 00:31:20.884
No.
00:31:20.914 --> 00:31:23.404
This is something that does not get talked about enough.
00:31:23.434 --> 00:31:30.894
There's this stereotype that, oh, people with vaginas find it very hard to orgasm, and it's like, with, with men?
00:31:31.045 --> 00:31:31.404
Yes.
00:31:32.454 --> 00:31:34.194
From vaginal penetration alone.
00:31:34.224 --> 00:31:34.704
Yes.
00:31:34.704 --> 00:31:35.434
Exactly.
00:31:35.434 --> 00:31:49.555
Like masturbation does not have this issue and this gap in our knowledge is what the feminist philosopher, Nancy Tiana calls an epistemology of ignorance around female desire, drawing that term from the philosopher Charles Mills.
00:31:49.585 --> 00:31:49.674
Mm-hmm.
00:31:49.944 --> 00:31:53.285
So we might actually say that there are two orgasm gaps.
00:31:53.285 --> 00:32:01.384
Really, there's the gap in who has the orgasms, and there's also a second gap in our knowledge about the what's known as the female orgasm.
00:32:01.565 --> 00:32:06.724
So this is an epistemic gap, which leads people not to know when women really orgasm.
00:32:07.210 --> 00:32:07.569
Yeah.
00:32:07.569 --> 00:32:23.079
And uh, so where Lloyd connects biology and feminist theories precisely in her claim that men, especially male scientists working in this area, they think that women come from vaginal penetration in the context of reproduction.
00:32:23.109 --> 00:32:23.529
Yeah.
00:32:23.535 --> 00:32:23.589
Yeah.
00:32:23.769 --> 00:32:27.460
And that is their bias, that is their ideology.
00:32:27.759 --> 00:32:32.634
She also talks about how orgasms for many women, Are quite rare.
00:32:32.664 --> 00:32:35.904
So there are a lot of women who don't experience orgasms very frequently.
00:32:35.934 --> 00:32:36.115
Yeah.
00:32:36.174 --> 00:32:37.555
In penetrative sex, as we were just talking.
00:32:37.555 --> 00:32:40.674
Well, there are some who actually experience fewer orgasms, just generally.
00:32:40.674 --> 00:32:40.765
Yes.
00:32:41.035 --> 00:32:43.795
And so that's also a challenge to this view.
00:32:44.065 --> 00:32:57.490
Not to mention the fact that there is absolutely no data that's how she puts it, suggesting that men are less likely to leave you if you orgasm and to stick around for like, like taking care of the kid.
00:32:57.700 --> 00:32:58.960
Like there's just no data for that.
00:32:59.140 --> 00:33:09.910
And it's so funny because I think you're rightly presenting this as the dream, the fiction of predominantly male biologists, but it also strikes me that this might be kind of like.
00:33:10.625 --> 00:33:13.105
A cisgender woman's dream too.
00:33:13.224 --> 00:33:19.224
Like, oh, I get to have an orgasm and I also get to not be left high and dry.
00:33:19.315 --> 00:33:21.144
Like, cool, win-win.
00:33:21.144 --> 00:33:23.934
And it's like, it does not, it does not work that way.
00:33:24.444 --> 00:33:24.625
Yeah.
00:33:24.625 --> 00:33:28.134
So this is the first main theory that Lloyd sort of demolishes.
00:33:28.855 --> 00:33:36.625
A second theory that is similar but with some important differences is the female choice theory of the female orgasm.
00:33:36.835 --> 00:33:43.615
Now this is a very complicated theory, so I'm just gonna hit through the main points and tell me if there is need for clarification on some.
00:33:44.755 --> 00:33:54.204
In short, a woman chooses her sexual partners, but she typically, for evolutionary reasons, will choose to have sex with multiple men.
00:33:54.234 --> 00:33:54.325
Mm-hmm.
00:33:54.730 --> 00:33:56.664
Because it's more advantageous just to hatch your beds.
00:33:57.339 --> 00:34:11.409
And that means that inside of the woman's body there is this race and competition among semen from different men that are competing to get to the egg.
00:34:12.010 --> 00:34:24.039
And the idea is that the woman must develop some kind of mechanism to help the good semen beat the bad, oh my god, sea in this, uh, rat race that happens inside her body.
00:34:24.489 --> 00:34:48.324
And so when a woman is having sex with what is called a high quality male, she activates completely unconsciously a bodily mechanism called up suck where where her body sort of like, shakes up and like sucks up like the good, oh my god, of the good guy, oh my God.
00:34:48.385 --> 00:34:54.864
As a way of making sure that it will be more likely to leave the, the poor quality semen in the dust.
00:34:55.135 --> 00:34:57.355
So she will be impregnated by by good sperm.
00:34:57.414 --> 00:34:58.945
Okay, so many questions here.
00:34:59.094 --> 00:35:02.394
Um, like how are they defining a high quality male?
00:35:02.394 --> 00:35:04.855
Because I know a lot of people who have been looking for one for years.
00:35:05.304 --> 00:35:06.474
Oh my God, join the club.
00:35:06.894 --> 00:35:09.835
Um, no, but the argument is that a high quality male.
00:35:09.989 --> 00:35:13.050
The criteria for that is not even consciously accessible to the woman.
00:35:13.230 --> 00:35:21.480
So there will be something about a particular man that the woman's perceptual system will register as high quality without her knowing.
00:35:21.480 --> 00:35:26.099
So maybe it's like the symmetry of the face, maybe it's size, you know, whatever it is.
00:35:26.394 --> 00:35:30.175
It triggers something in her body to be like, mm, give it to me.
00:35:30.474 --> 00:35:30.715
Okay.
00:35:30.894 --> 00:35:38.275
So we're, so we're supposed to believe that there's some sort of unconscious eugenicist inside the woman, you know.
00:35:38.784 --> 00:35:40.255
Killing the bad sperm.
00:35:40.255 --> 00:35:40.795
Wow.
00:35:40.824 --> 00:35:51.739
Well, uh, I don't know if you recall this, but in the polyamory episode that we did a couple of years ago, we talked about Sex at Dawn, and this is a view that that book puts forth.
00:35:51.739 --> 00:35:58.340
I don't remember the up suck part in particular, but it does talk about like some sort of natural selection happening in terms of different semen.
00:35:58.340 --> 00:36:08.375
And I'm, you know, I'm not a biologist, so I would not claim to know the veracity of that claim, however, it sounds like Lloyd thinks it's not legit.
00:36:08.375 --> 00:36:08.914
Is that right?
00:36:09.155 --> 00:36:10.295
Oh yeah, absolutely.
00:36:10.295 --> 00:36:25.385
And again, the argument that she returns to again and again is that all these scientists not only have difficulty explaining what that up suck mechanism is and how it, especially if you have sex with multiple men in a short period of time and all the semen is sort of there together.
00:36:25.414 --> 00:36:25.715
Yeah.
00:36:25.744 --> 00:36:44.005
How you would selectively up suck good semen versus bad semen, um, but even if it happens over different days, for example, where you could differentiate, there's just no data to suggest that there is any effective causal connection between orgasm and reproductive success.
00:36:44.010 --> 00:36:44.144
Mm.
00:36:44.315 --> 00:36:48.898
Because it's not as if you're more likely to get pregnant when you orgasm.
00:36:48.929 --> 00:36:49.228
Yeah.
00:36:49.259 --> 00:36:53.099
As opposed to the moments where you don't, there is just no data there.
00:36:53.338 --> 00:37:04.349
And so she says, let's not confuse what all these male scientists are confusing, which is sex that culminates in pregnancy versus sex that culminates in coming.
00:37:05.219 --> 00:37:34.934
And I think these two theories seem to have really different ideological implications to them because the first one, the para bonding theory is closely related to a vision of monogamous nuclear family life, where the woman and the man are like, oh, we're so happy together because not even because we both had an orgasm, but because the man watched the woman orgasm women.
00:37:34.934 --> 00:37:35.233
Yes.
00:37:35.324 --> 00:37:37.614
And so it's like now we'll stay together forever.
00:37:38.324 --> 00:37:42.344
And the amount of magical thinking you have to have.
00:37:42.349 --> 00:37:42.574
Yes.
00:37:42.579 --> 00:37:58.083
To think that over the course of nine months, they are going to stay together and have sex joyfully, and then over the course of the entire child's life, they're gonna do that rather than the possibility that maybe she was like sleeping with a few different men at the time.
00:37:58.143 --> 00:38:05.623
And you know, in this like, world that existed way before we had our monogamous marriage norms.
00:38:05.983 --> 00:38:16.244
I, I think it's just like very strangely anachronistic and a lot of the para bonding research, I think has been the target of critique lately because of its monogamous heterosexual implications.
00:38:16.393 --> 00:38:19.423
But then on the other side, this, what can we call it up suck theory.
00:38:19.454 --> 00:38:19.514
Yeah.
00:38:19.543 --> 00:38:21.193
The, some people call it the up suck theory.
00:38:21.224 --> 00:38:21.253
Okay.
00:38:21.253 --> 00:38:22.449
Or the female choice theory.
00:38:22.449 --> 00:38:22.778
Okay.
00:38:22.809 --> 00:38:34.028
So, so that has very different ideological implications, which is like a much more, we might say lascivious, lascivious, but we could say like open, you know, in a, in a more neutral way.
00:38:34.028 --> 00:38:43.358
It has like a more open approach of like, hey, maybe this woman was having sex with many different men, and there's some kind of choice that's going on there.
00:38:43.358 --> 00:38:51.929
I'm all for women's choice of male sexual partners and you know, overthrowing ideologies of monogamy.
00:38:52.199 --> 00:39:03.239
At the same time, there's like a very bizarre undercurrent to this, which is that it's not just about natural selection, it's about some eugenic homunculus that lives inside the vagina.
00:39:03.659 --> 00:39:07.378
It's like you're a good semen, you are bad semen, and you shall not pass.
00:39:08.009 --> 00:39:09.869
Is it like the Willy Wonka egg?
00:39:10.168 --> 00:39:11.518
You know, that egg wear?
00:39:11.998 --> 00:39:12.418
Yes.
00:39:13.079 --> 00:39:14.458
Good egg or bad egg.
00:39:14.518 --> 00:39:15.268
Oh my gosh.
00:39:15.268 --> 00:39:16.739
And then, but with semen instead of eggs.
00:39:16.768 --> 00:39:16.949
Yeah.
00:39:16.949 --> 00:39:18.059
In the, the egg deciding.
00:39:18.119 --> 00:39:18.478
The egg.
00:39:18.478 --> 00:39:19.018
Deciding.
00:39:19.018 --> 00:39:19.318
Yes.
00:39:19.378 --> 00:39:32.713
Um, and the, the really dark side of this theory, and this is something that Lloyd talks about, is that in the end, this theory is rooted in turning the orgasm into the normative telos of all female sexuality.
00:39:32.773 --> 00:39:32.923
Mm-hmm.
00:39:33.224 --> 00:39:33.733
And, yeah.
00:39:33.884 --> 00:39:50.204
Yeah, because it takes a normative, aspect, it very quickly bleeds into psychiatry where women who don't have sex that culminates in this kind of orgasmic reproduction are somehow deemed biologically abnormal.
00:39:50.503 --> 00:40:02.724
And I think that helps us make a distinction between, on the one hand, the idea that orgasm has a particular relation to erotic pleasure as its telos.
00:40:02.724 --> 00:40:02.884
Mm-hmm.
00:40:02.963 --> 00:40:03.914
Like as its outcome.
00:40:04.454 --> 00:40:12.143
And on the other hand, wanting to hold open a lot of space for the idea that erotic pleasure need not have that outcome.
00:40:12.143 --> 00:40:12.994
Yes, yes.
00:40:13.009 --> 00:40:16.668
So it's more of an ontological versus like a pragmatic point.
00:40:23.929 --> 00:40:28.518
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00:40:28.789 --> 00:40:40.009
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00:40:43.514 --> 00:40:58.603
So if none of these wild theories explain what Lloyd is calling female orgasm, what does even non-human primates like chimpanzees and gorillas have orgasms regardless of their sex and masturbate, let alone humans, right?
00:40:58.903 --> 00:41:01.213
So obviously this is a natural behavior.
00:41:02.023 --> 00:41:02.264
Yeah.
00:41:02.264 --> 00:41:08.594
So she ends up adopting, as I mentioned, what is called a non adaptation theory of the female orgasm.
00:41:09.943 --> 00:41:16.184
She argues that it didn't evolve because it provided an adaptive benefit to our ancestors.
00:41:16.634 --> 00:41:23.384
Rather, it is a bit of an evolutionary accident or a bonus that women got basically for free.
00:41:24.103 --> 00:41:27.914
So she thinks that orgasms are adaptive in men.
00:41:29.168 --> 00:41:39.434
She thinks that orgasms are adaptive in men because there is a clearer link between orgasm and reproduction in men since it's tied to the ejaculation of semen.
00:41:39.463 --> 00:41:39.704
Right.
00:41:39.708 --> 00:41:42.463
That's why you said it's harder for men to fake orgasms, arguably.
00:41:42.463 --> 00:41:43.184
Mm-hmm.
00:41:43.423 --> 00:41:56.309
But the processes that are necessary to bring about orgasm in men, have to do with early stages of fetal development before the fetus is sexed in the womb.
00:41:56.759 --> 00:42:02.322
And so basically the fetus is made and it starts developing certain genital tissues.
00:42:03.103 --> 00:42:05.623
This is before week eight of a pregnancy.
00:42:06.757 --> 00:42:11.413
After week eight, there are hormones that push the fetus one way or the other.
00:42:11.833 --> 00:42:13.603
But before that, the fetus is neither.
00:42:13.603 --> 00:42:17.202
We cannot speak of the early fetus as either, uh, male or female.
00:42:17.742 --> 00:42:26.952
And the anatomical structures that take place before this eight week period, those are precisely the ones that are tied to the orgasm in men.
00:42:27.193 --> 00:42:35.952
But because they're already there before the sexing of the fetus, they're going to be there no matter which hormonal trajectory the fetus takes.
00:42:36.222 --> 00:42:36.282
Hmm.
00:42:36.282 --> 00:42:39.733
And so it will be there in men and it will be there in women.
00:42:39.822 --> 00:42:53.262
Okay, so this is really interesting because before eight weeks, that's also the time before sexual differentiation, when I think a really, really stereotyped, overly simplistic way of putting it is that everybody is female.
00:42:54.237 --> 00:42:55.438
Uh, yes.
00:42:55.438 --> 00:42:55.858
Everybody.
00:42:55.858 --> 00:42:56.128
Yes.
00:42:56.128 --> 00:43:10.197
So there's this kind of gender bending there, or we could sex bending would be sex bending would be it, between the fact that folks are born with XX chromosomes, but then there's this adaptation that's for those people who are gonna develop penises.
00:43:10.197 --> 00:43:11.338
But everybody gets it.
00:43:11.342 --> 00:43:12.447
Yes, everybody gets it.
00:43:12.452 --> 00:43:12.737
That's so cool.
00:43:12.737 --> 00:43:18.237
And so there are some things about, sorry if I messed up my biology slightly there, folks, I think the point still stands, hopefully.
00:43:18.268 --> 00:43:19.588
No, the, the point does stand.
00:43:19.592 --> 00:43:36.398
And so the, the big point that also should stand here is that, for Lloyd, there is a lot of aspects of our body and of human life that exist simply because other things we're selected for that they're costly, connected to, even though they themselves don't have really much of a value.
00:43:36.757 --> 00:43:46.327
And the female orgasm is one of them because in the end she has this whole theory that it has to do with certain anatomical distances in, in women's, uh, genitals.
00:43:47.367 --> 00:44:02.068
We won't get into detail about that, but once you think about the female orgasm as an accident or as a non adaptation byproduct, she says it becomes the inverse of the male nipple.
00:44:02.367 --> 00:44:05.503
So, People often ask, why do men have nipples?
00:44:05.503 --> 00:44:05.592
Mm-hmm.
00:44:05.833 --> 00:44:07.103
Cause they'll actually need them.
00:44:07.572 --> 00:44:10.333
And it's the same explanation in women.
00:44:10.333 --> 00:44:18.492
There is this connection between nipples and reproduction and child rearing in biological theory, but what is required to produce them?
00:44:19.137 --> 00:44:22.978
Takes place before sexual differentiation in fetal development.
00:44:23.217 --> 00:44:29.458
And so men get nipples sort of for free, and women get orgasms sort of for free.
00:44:29.518 --> 00:44:32.757
The orgasm is a much better bonus than the nipple.
00:44:32.847 --> 00:44:33.418
Oh my gosh.
00:44:33.418 --> 00:44:34.137
No kidding.
00:44:34.257 --> 00:44:42.963
This is a really interesting idea and as is obvious I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I wonder how it might speak to the orgasm gap.
00:44:43.293 --> 00:44:49.503
The majority of cisgender women do not experience orgasm during hookups, as we talked about, whereas the majority of men do.
00:44:50.240 --> 00:44:58.291
There are likely many reasons for this, and we're not fully sure of all of them, but there are not purely biological, very unsurprisingly.
00:44:58.291 --> 00:45:00.751
Culture has a lot to do with this.
00:45:01.320 --> 00:45:24.641
The book by Emily Nagoski called Come As You Are, which I think is a very, very popular book among women my age and and younger, cite some research saying that women who feel worse about their bodies have less satisfying sex with less pleasure and more pain, and so your body image can shape your sexual pleasure and your ability to orgasm.
00:45:25.001 --> 00:45:41.021
If you raise girls in a society in which they are taught to be ashamed of their desires and to put others' pleasure first, especially men's, it's no wonder that they would have trouble later on having orgasms and sexual violation can also render pleasure difficult.
00:45:41.021 --> 00:45:48.010
We know that people of all genders experience sexual violation, but it is predominantly something that women experience.
00:45:48.041 --> 00:45:48.130
Yeah.
00:45:48.161 --> 00:45:53.201
And so I think, you know, so many women are survivors of sexual violation, and so that goes into it too.
00:45:53.201 --> 00:45:59.201
So we have these really important social factors that are shaping the difficulties that women have orgasming, especially with men.
00:45:59.965 --> 00:46:11.306
Well, and I like that you bring in this cultural and social dimension to orgasms because Lloyd is aware, and she wants to prevent people from reading her work in this way, that she seems to be reducing female orgasm to biology.
00:46:11.335 --> 00:46:20.045
And especially if you call it an accident or a bonus, somebody could say, oh, well, does this mean that female pleasure is derivative or trivial or less important than men's?
00:46:20.286 --> 00:46:20.376
Mm-hmm.
00:46:20.376 --> 00:46:21.536
And she says, no, no, no, no.
00:46:21.536 --> 00:46:24.565
The evolutionary biological account is one thing.
00:46:24.956 --> 00:46:29.096
The social significance of the traits that we have is a whole other thing.
00:46:29.335 --> 00:46:34.626
And so, yeah, from a biological perspective, the female orgasm is derivative ofmen.
00:46:34.646 --> 00:46:34.735
Yeah.
00:46:34.735 --> 00:46:37.646
Only in this very technical, anatomical, developmental way.
00:46:37.885 --> 00:46:40.715
But that doesn't mean that we don't need to have a.
00:46:40.715 --> 00:46:48.235
Better understanding of the biases, the cultural biases that apply to the female orgasm and that produce the orgasm gap,
00:46:48.626 --> 00:46:50.215
The right to orgasm.
00:46:50.876 --> 00:46:59.771
The Nagoski book features an account of sexual desire that is called the dual control model.
00:46:59.771 --> 00:46:59.860
Mm-hmm.
00:46:59.860 --> 00:47:11.170
And I think I mentioned this book as popular among When My Age a lot of it is for this reason because Naski articulates the fact that sexualarousal is not a single process, but actually two processes.
00:47:11.471 --> 00:47:17.231
The first is activating the accelerator and the second is deactivating the brakes.
00:47:17.740 --> 00:47:24.206
So, an accelerator is what moves you towards wanting this experience, right?
00:47:24.206 --> 00:47:29.036
That's a component of arousal, but there's also these breaks that can hit stop.
00:47:29.065 --> 00:47:29.155
Yes.
00:47:29.155 --> 00:47:30.115
At any moment.
00:47:30.416 --> 00:47:37.931
And she writes that sensitive breaks, regardless of the accelerator is the strongest predictor of sexual problems of all kinds.
00:47:38.081 --> 00:47:42.010
So there's a stereotype that women have a hard time getting turned on, right?
00:47:42.010 --> 00:47:46.811
This idea that they're frigid or cold or don't experience pleasure, they don't accelerate.
00:47:46.840 --> 00:47:47.021
Yeah.
00:47:47.050 --> 00:47:58.030
Which like you still see a lot on AltRight Twitter terrifyingly, but Nagoski shows that accelerator is not the problem for most women.
00:47:58.360 --> 00:48:09.536
It's actually the breaks, the idea that women have more inhibitions around sex than men do, actually has some truth to it, but that's not biologically based.
00:48:09.626 --> 00:48:12.295
It's culturally and psychologically based.
00:48:12.835 --> 00:48:14.275
There are two different breaks.
00:48:14.275 --> 00:48:28.826
In fact, there are your internal fears, like maybe you're afraid of taking too long to get aroused, and so you can't really get aroused and external factors such as getting caught having sex, the fear of pregnancy may be fear of sexual violation.
00:48:29.306 --> 00:48:33.835
And one thing that hits the breaks that I find really important to highlight here is disgust.
00:48:34.166 --> 00:48:42.085
Because as Nagoski says, many women were raised in cultures that say that their own sexual bodies are disgusting and degrading.
00:48:42.385 --> 00:48:53.501
That you know, vulvas are smelly, they're ugly, the sounds and smells that they create, our growth and disgust is a major break hitter.
00:48:53.831 --> 00:48:54.070
Yeah.
00:48:54.070 --> 00:49:09.010
And so it would seem like these breaks by definition, what they do is they cut the flow of the experience and prevent not just the progress, but the kind of acceleration where you move and move faster and faster and faster towards this sort of kilos, quote unquote.
00:49:09.130 --> 00:49:09.221
Mm-hmm.
00:49:09.521 --> 00:49:11.471
And it just draws you out of the experience.
00:49:11.471 --> 00:49:13.181
It's like a bucket of cold water.
00:49:13.210 --> 00:49:13.481
Yeah.
00:49:13.481 --> 00:49:16.030
That's for women, that's, that's a very different kind of little death.
00:49:17.771 --> 00:49:31.271
Not the little death you want, which I think David might take us back to your point at the beginning, which is that you don't think that the idea of orgasm as little death is getting to the phenomenon in the sense of its intensification, right?
00:49:31.275 --> 00:49:35.351
You really wanted to highlight the intensification of experience that we feel during orgasm.
00:49:35.740 --> 00:49:36.010
Yes.
00:49:36.010 --> 00:49:44.471
And ideally, the point is that everybody would get to that intense point without that socially produced and culturally produced gap.
00:49:48.085 --> 00:49:49.795
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00:49:49.856 --> 00:49:55.465
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