Critical Notice

I Introduction

In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd carefully examines evolutionary accounts of female orgasm advanced over the past four decades — a total of 21. All save one of these treat female orgasm as an evolutionary adaptation that has arisen as a result of natural selection. The single nonadaptive account is the developmental explanation of female orgasm put forward by Donald Symons in his 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Lloyd argues that the evidence is decisive in favour of Symons' explanation and that all 20 of the competing adaptive hypotheses should have been rejected by scientists, whether for faulty logic or lack of empirical support. She concludes that the case of the female orgasm is 'patently a story of scientific dysfunction' (2005a, 229), and that the failure to arrive at the rational outcome in support of Symons' account is due to the operation of 'pernicious' biases that have led researchers to overlook empirical data that fail to support, and even contradict, the adaptive hypotheses they advance. Lloyd describes her book as 'a case study on how biases and background assumptions can affect the practice of science' (18).

In this project, Lloyd joins with other philosophers and science studies scholars in paying closer attention to scientific practice and the intersections of science and society than has been traditional in the philosophy of science. Feminist theorists have been especially influential in this regard. The Case of the Female Orgasm engages with feminism in several ways — with the wider social significance of scientific accounts of female orgasm for women, with feminist biologists who have been critical of Symons' account and/or defended adaptive explanations of female orgasm, and with feminist philosophers of science concerned with the epistemology of theory choice. Lloyd correctly notes that facts about the evolutionary origins of female orgasm come to figure in cultural understandings of sexuality, even if fallaciously, and that recognizing female orgasm as a nonadaptive rather than an adaptive trait in no way diminishes its importance, and is even potentially liberating. However, Lloyd wrongly surmises that feminist biologists critical of Symons have succumbed to the naturalistic fallacy (by assuming that only adaptive traits can be important) and allowed their politics to get the better of their science. Inasmuch as Lloyd's own theoretical presuppositions in deciding the case of the female orgasm in Symons' favour are open to reasonable challenge, feminist biologists need not be pulled just yet from the case. I argue that Lloyd's expressed allegiance to the contextual empiricism defended by feminist philosophers of science is undermined in two ways: more seriously, by retaining the traditional distinction between good and bad science based in separating what is empirical and logical from what is social and political; and less seriously, by appropriately telling this 'story of scientific dysfunction' as a failure of objectivity at the community rather than individual level, but without sufficient sociological analysis to do so convincingly.

II Female Orgasm and Feminist Biology

An evolutionary adaptation is a trait that has arisen as a result of natural selection operating in ancestral environments — whether experienced by that particular species (e.g. Homo sapiens) or earlier members of the lineage (e.g. hominids, primates, etc.). Scientists have hypothesized a range of possible modes of selection that could be responsible for the origin of female orgasm, and Lloyd covers these in detail. Pair-bond accounts hold that orgasm has encouraged females to maintain pairing relationships, with the pair bond, in turn, adaptive for a variety of possible reasons: promoting male cooperation in hunting by sharing females as mates, satisfying increased female need for male protection and economic support in the move from forest to savannah, facilitating the rearing of offspring, increasing frequency of copulation once estrus was lost, or providing a means of facilitating female choice by assessing male contribution to the emotional quality of the relationship. Nonpair-bond accounts have also been proposed: orgasm could encourage females to remain horizontal post-coitus...