The Female Orgasm: How it Works

Want it, need it, have to have it — but what precisely is happening when you're climaxing? Here, the science behind the female orgasm

It's the only thing that feels better than diving into a cool lake on a sweltering day, biting into a juicy cheeseburger when you're starving, or even getting your wallet back after losing it on vacation abroad. An orgasm is that good. Which is why it bites that it doesn't happen more often. According to several major surveys, only 25 percent of women always climax during sex with a partner. The rest of us either hit — or miss — depending on the night, or never experience a female orgasm during intercourse at all. Compared to the male version (more than 90 percent of men get their cookies off 100 percent of the time), the female "O"; is a fleeting phenomenon. The question is: Why? What the hell was Mother Nature thinking?


That's what evolutionary biologists have been trying to figure out — with little success. The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution by Elisabeth Lloyd, Ph.D., a biology professor at Indiana University, shoots holes in virtually every theory that has ever attempted to pinpoint an evolutionary purpose to the female climax. "The clitoris has the indispensable function of promoting sexual excitement, which induces the female to have intercourse and become pregnant," Dr. Lloyd says. "But the actual incidence of the reflex of orgasm has never been tied to successful reproduction." Translation: Because women can and do get pregnant without climaxing, scientists can't figure out why we orgasm at all.

The good news is that most scientists do agree on the how. Here's what they know, so far — and how that knowledge can help the average girl hit her peak more often. Because even if the female orgasm does turn out to be pointless in terms of sustaining the species, it still feels pretty damn good.

While You Were Blissing Out...

When in the throes of an orgasm, you wouldn't notice if your dog, your cat, and your cockatiel started rearranging the furniture. Which makes it unlikely that you could track all the subtle changes that are happening in your body. Luckily, famous sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson have done it for you in their seminal work, Human Sexuality. Here's what they found:

That warm, sexy rush you feel during foreplay is the result of blood heading straight to your vagina and clitoris. Around this time, the walls of the vagina start to secrete beads of lubrication that eventually get bigger and flow together.