New Study Reveals Orgasms Evolved As A Way To Control Your Partner

Let’s face it, as a species, we love orgasms. They’re pretty much our favorite thing, and it’s not hard to understand why. We’re one of three species that can even have orgasms, so we don’t just like them because they’re fun, we like them because orgasms is one of the many things that sets humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, a new study has proven that orgasms didn’t evolve because they’re fun, they evolved because evolution gave us a built in positive reinforcement system that works particularly well on females. Basically, orgasms can actually control our behavior and that of our partner’s. It sounds really out there, but apparently science proves it, and the more you look at the evidence, the more you find that this actually makes a great degree of sense, especially when you consider the orgasm’s role in reproduction. Here’s everything you need to know about how orgasms can actually control our behavior and even our partner’s behavior.

People like orgasms. It’s basically a fact of life at this point. Since time began, we’ve been all about orgasms, and have thought up ways to bring more of them into our lives. There’s evidence of cave women being discovered with suspiciously phallic looking objects that show that maybe the sex toy was invented a few thousand years before we think it was, if you can believe it. That’s how much people enjoy orgasms.

A new study may have proven how orgasms came to be. Dr. Diana Fleischman, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, has put forth a study that has shed light on just why evolution blessed us with orgasms in the first place. After all, orgasms aren’t necessarily for strict procreation.

It turns out orgasms do play a big part in reproduction. According to the study, orgasms came into being because humanity needed a reason to have sex that didn’t have anything to do with procreation. Orgasms became that reason, and it’s why we’ve been having sex for as long as our species has been on Earth.

That reinforcement actually became a means of control. Orgasms basically served as a reward system that prevented men from looking for other mating opportunities and kept women from sowing their wild oats and abandoning the father of her kids. Orgasms basically ensured successful reproduction, because while the sex made the next generation, orgasms made people continue having sex.

Women deal with the brunt of this. As every woman who’s had sex knows, it’s a lot harder to achieve an orgasm, but when we do achieve orgasm, it’s a lot more intense than a man’s orgasm. That means that this control system created by orgasms worked that much better on women, because women who want orgasms have to work a little harder for them.

This is how orgasms became a sexual currency of sorts. We’re not being paid in money or anything tangible for taking part in the process of procreation, but we are being rewarded for our participation in it with something that some people consider far more valuable. “All animals engage in behavior that has positive consequences and learn to associate reward with the stimuli that go with it, eventually finding those stimuli rewarding in their own right,” said Dr Fleischman.

Sexual pleasure is fulfilling on its own. Even taking orgasms out of the equation, sexual interaction has its own rewards. The more we have sex with one person, the more we start to see little things we really love about them that we wouldn’t have seen before. Even without orgasms, being connected to our sexual partner so intimately is its own reward.

Rewards work better than punishments. Think about how we teach kids. Kids don’t learn by getting punished all the time and modifying their behavior to avoid the punishment, they learn by having their good behaviors reinforced with rewards and falling into line because they want the rewards that come with doing so. The same is true here.

Rewards make punishment hit that much harder. Think about how we’re quick to fall in line when our partners are mad at us. Some partners don’t even have to do anything for us to know we messed up, and we modify our behavior to keep them from “punishing” us with the silent treatment. That’s when we get rewarded again.

Rewards should fill a need. This is where the theorizing comes in, because while orgasms are rewarding, they don’t necessarily fill a need in the traditional way. However, orgasms, while they don’t directly do anything for reproduction, they could still be filling a need by improving the bonds between parents.

That bond will end up ensuring reproductive success. According to the study, it’s actually better for a relationship to have a lot of orgasms together, because it makes for a more harmonious parenting experience. “Rewarding someone with sexual pleasure or orgasm and having someone like you more, could help build a foundation for people in relationships caring for children,” Dr Fleischman said.

Orgasms could have been a fail safe for cheating. To be fair, evolution didn’t quite think that cheating fail safe through, but it’s not like evolution has a brain to speak of anyway considering it’s a concept. Regardless, staying monogamous would have been really advantageous for early humans. Dr. Fleischman had this to say about that: “A man's pleasure at sexual contact with the mother of his children may prevent him from allocating his effort or resources to other mating opportunities or other children, and for a woman, continued sexual pleasure with the father of her children could prevent her from abandoning a relationship that is provisioning and securing her offspring and could act as a reassuring signal of paternity to her mate.”

This is also a good reason why this works better on women. Since women have less frequent orgasms, that’s an indicator that while orgasms are necessarily for creating bonds, they’re not a biological necessity. However, the fact that women can have them shows that they do have a purpose.

This also has to do with the investment put into conception. Men don’t really need an incentive to have sex, because their job in reproduction is pretty low risk and doesn’t really cost anything for them. However, women can only reproduce once every nine months, and they have to carry the child. This means that women are more selective about mating, and some might actually need a push to do it. In this case, the push is orgasms.

You might not believe any of this. Evolutionary science is very much a guessing game, and it’s very easy to get caught in the what ifs. However, anyone who has ever had sex knows that orgasms can really mess with your head and make you make some pretty questionable decisions, so maybe this whole “orgasms as control” thing has some merit.