Why Does The Female Orgasm Exist? - Dr Robert King

King’s team asked women to compare different sexual partners and rate predictors of orgasm. Smell had the largest effect size, surpassing muscularity, height, or conventional good looks. This aligns with a large body of research on olfactory cues in mate choice across species. The finding suggests that women’s orgasms are not purely about technique or emotional connection but about deep biological matching. He interprets this as evidence that the orgasm is an evolved mechanism to detect genetic quality, and that ignoring smell in modern dating misses a critical channel of information.

When King’s team analysed partner predictors, they were surprised that two traits that seem opposite—sexual dominance and considerateness—both emerged as significant. King resolves this by arguing that dominance signals genetic fitness and the ability to provide, while considerateness signals investment and lowers the woman’s guard. The combination allows a woman to surrender to the experience without fearing exploitation. This insight also explains the appeal of the ‘dark romance’ fantasy: a dominant man who is ultimately safe and commits. He contrasts this with purely physically attractive traits like muscularity, which did not predict orgasm in their data, suggesting women discriminate between mere aesthetics and behavioural qualities.

King references the human penis’s relatively large girth compared to other primates, noting that bonobos are long but not thick, while chimps have huge testicles but smaller penises. Human sexual selection, he argues, has favoured thickness because it provides the stimulation needed for female orgasm. He contrasts this with the ‘baby‑head’ hypothesis (that the penis had to enlarge to match a larger vagina), which he rejects in his book for comparative reasons. Instead, girth functions as a fitness signal—erectile quality and thickness both require cardiovascular health—and as a direct pleasure‑giving mechanism that likely underpins female choice.

King acknowledges the difficulty of studying natural sperm movement ethically and practically. His team’s method provided a controlled, replicable demonstration of backflow reduction. He distances this finding from Baker and Bellis’s sperm‑competition model, which posited that women time orgasm to favour one man’s sperm over another’s. That model required an instantaneous insuck effect and failed to replicate. King’s model is simpler: orgasm boosts fertility in absolute terms, regardless of multiple partners. He also notes that female orgasm during casual sex is less common, which may be a protective mechanism to avoid pregnancy with lower‑quality partners.

Throughout the conversation, King positions female orgasm as an evolved discrimination mechanism. The difficulty some women have orgasming is not a pathology of womanhood or nature, but a reflection of female choice operating as a filter. He points to cultural suppression of female orgasm—from clitoridectomy to guilt‑based advice like ‘lie back and think of England’—which he frames as intra‑sexual interference tactics. Therefore, a woman’s orgasm difficulties may reflect a poor match or environmental barriers, not personal failure. This protocol encourages women to reframe their experience as information, potentially motivating them to pay closer attention to the predictors (smell, dominance, considerateness, penetrative vigour) when choosing and evaluating partners.

King traces the lineage from Symons through Gould to Lloyd. Gould’s famous ‘spandrels of San Marcos’ paper argued that certain traits are architectural byproducts, not adaptations. He applied this to female orgasm to block what he saw as dangerous sociobiological thinking. However, King points out that by the 1990s detailed anatomical knowledge made the byproduct claim untenable, yet it persisted because Gould was a prominent defender of evolution in politically charged US debates. His followers were willing to overlook the factual errors to avoid applying evolutionary theory to humans. King adds that Gould even misnamed the architectural features—they are pendentives, not spandrels, and in fact they are integral to the structure, undermining the entire analogy. This historical debunking sets the stage for a functional account.

Factor analysis of the questionnaire responses revealed two patterns: orgasms experienced ‘on the surface’ (more intense, sharp) and those experienced ‘deep inside’ (often during penetration, co‑occurring with breath‑holding, feelings of floating, and trust). The team did not measure oxytocin directly, but these deep‑orgasm concomitants match oxytocin’s known effects. This suggests that deep orgasms may be especially potent for pair‑bonding and sperm transport. Importantly, women themselves did not rank one type as better, and some individuals experience both. This provides a framework for understanding why different sexual acts yield different orgasmic experiences and how each might carry distinct functional consequences, without imposing a normative hierarchy.

King argues that these books reflect a genuine, widespread female desire for a sexually dominant yet ultimately committing partner, channelled into fantasy. The public response follows a predictable script: the work is anonymous, critics decry it as internalised patriarchy, then the female author steps forward and the furore subsides—until the next iteration. He suggests this pattern persists because acknowledging it openly would undercut women’s real‑world signalling strategies; women need to distinguish between ‘safe’ dominance and dangerous aggression, and openly endorsing the fantasy could give the wrong men a green light. This ‘disguised’ quality is itself adaptive. The host adds that attempts to replace these dark romance archetypes with ‘cinnamon roll’ or ‘golden retriever’ husband narratives have failed commercially, indicating the fantasy is robust to ideological sanitisation.

King draws an analogy with Athena Aktipis’s work on fake laughter: laughter is a signal of acceptance and dominance; people fake it to gain those benefits. Similarly, an orgasm signal can imply ‘I am bonded to you’ or ‘you have impregnated me’, motivating investment or mate‑guarding. But the signal isn’t only for the man—audible orgasm noises also broadcast to other women that this man is now attached, warding off rivals. King was planning a collaboration to analyse acoustic features (voiced vs unvoiced) in orgasm sounds, analogous to research showing voiced laughs are more likely to be fake. This lens reveals sex as a semi‑public act embedded in social competition, not a private cooperative exchange.