Why Does The Female Orgasm Exist? - Dr Robert King - #977

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you get into studying the female orgasm?

**Robert King** (0:04)
Let's just get a good dive straight in. Okay, so my background was, I was a school teacher for 20 years, and I was interested in psychology and maths. That's what I taught. About 20 years ago, I came across a really interesting book by a woman called Elizabeth Lloyd. It was a bias in the science of evolution. I was on holiday in Thailand. I read it. The book told me that female orgasm did nothing, had no function. And to say I was surprised would be an understatement. And I got interested and I started studying evolutionary biology. And I approached some prominent figures in the field and said, I think you seem to have an issue here studying this subject. I think I'm obviously quite a nerdy kind of character. I delve into these things. I read the original stuff. And once I started reading the original stuff, it became obvious that there were two very distinct traditions of studying human sexuality, particularly female orgasm. One of them went down this strange route of saying it did nothing. And another one, which had been somewhat sidelined, suggested that she had some really interesting functions.

**Chris Williamson** (1:14)
What was your intuition? What was it that you thought early on, this seems to be a fruitful area to research more into?

**Robert King** (1:24)
It became obvious from a fairly early stage that a number of the people who were opining about female orgasm were not studying sex at all, not in any kind of sense of actually being in the room with other people having sex. That's why I start off the book by talking about animals in zoos and mating in captivity, because what was being studied in laboratories just felt a lot like studying mating in captivity, and that doesn't capture the range of what humans are up to or interested in. It doesn't capture the range of what other animals are interested in. It makes them interesting either, to be honest.
That's why I start off the book talking about COVID and the fact that I live next to Fota, which is a terrific wildlife park and I recommend it highly. We have the breeding group of a number of animals, giraffes, cheetahs. We've got some new tigers there. What else have we got? Lions. They've all had babies. One of the reasons they have babies is because they have privacy. They can hide away from humans when they don't want to play with us, and do want to play with each other.

**Chris Williamson** (2:24)
What does sex research in the lab look like? When it's done well, when it's done badly, what are the mechanisms of how you do this?

**Robert King** (2:34)
Well, I'm not going to reject all lab-based research, but one of the primary platforms on which a lot of sex research is based is, listeners will probably have heard of Masters and Johnson, because there was a TV series about them. I think it's called Masters of Sex a few years back. They are the famous sex researchers from the 60s. The essence of their research into female orgasm was to get half a dozen women to get them to masturbate to orgasm in a lab. They inserted a glass tube, which they called Ulysses inside, which had a camera, and they measured the results. Genuinely, that was the platform on which they based the whole idea that female orgasm didn't really have any function.
I wouldn't say it was done badly, but I would just say that it wasn't the final word.

**Chris Williamson** (3:20)
Okay. And what does better sex research or female orgasm research in a lab look like?

**Robert King** (3:26)
Well, at the same time, Marston Johnson were doing their stuff in labs, there was a team in England, the Foxes, who were both doctors, they were married, and they were having sex in their own marital bedroom. And they're very intrepid pioneers and heroes of the field. So Dr. Fox Mrs. inserted a telemetry device and a pressure change device inside herself, and had sex with her husband on the marital bed, and then measured the pressure changes.

**Chris Williamson** (3:54)
Okay. That sounds like pioneering work.

**Robert King** (3:58)
Yes.
And they found some very interesting, I'm just giving one example of the work that was done. But it was, they found something that Masters and Johnson didn't, which was that female orgasm is associated. I mean, they studied oxytocin action, and they studied into uterine pressure changes. And that provides a mechanism for orgasm to increase fertility. So in many ways, they were sort of the foundation of the thread that we picked up 50 years later. There are other people in that thread. It's not just sort of me and our team and the Foxes. There's a huge team in Central Europe led by a guy called Ludwig Wilt, who did a whole load of stuff on oxytocin throughout the late 80s and 90s as well. And they sort of amplified this research.