Do Try This at Home

It’s tough recruiting people for sex
research. Oops. Small typographical blip there. But this slight Freudian penis…I mean “father”…sorry…”slip” illustrates something important about sex research. Our recent paper looking at a proof of concept for investigating orgasmic function in women (1) has attracted a bit of press interest. The first reporter (2) wanted to check that I wasn’t some sort of pervert (lucky guess on his part, but I think I managed to put him off the scent) so I thought it was worth an explanatory blog.

Faster, Harder, Deeper
Nothing takes us to the heart of human nature faster than sex research. We are intensely interested in it, yet we find it very tough to think about it clearly. Without giggling. Or guilt. Uninhibited responses usually require privacy and/or trusted partners. This means that for an ethologist—someone who tries to study natural behavior in natural settings—we have a problem. Lab-based research has lots of control but clinical settings are not typically erotic hot-beds of passion (unless you are into that sort of thing). Humans typically have sex in private (unless you are into that sort of thing) and this makes natural sexual behavior tough to study.

On the Horniness of a Dilemma
The brave voyager Odysseus had to navigate between the monster Scylla—who would habitually munch half a dozen sailors if you got too close, and the whirlpool Charybdis, who would suck your entire ship down to its doom. To be caught “between Scylla and Charybdis” is often translated as “between a rock and a hard place” or “between the devil, and the deep blue sea” but that’s not really what the original story implies. There is nothing much to choose between a rock and a hard place, and the devil will devour you just as surely as will the deep blue sea. Let’s face it, to lose half a dozen sailors is bad, but to lose the whole ship is game over. To be between Scylla and Charybdis then is really to accept a lesser evil as the price of transit.

Sex research is caught between the Scylla of lack of control over variables, and the Charybdis of not studying actual sex at all. Masters and Johnson, two of the giants upon whose shoulders sex research stands, carried out investigations into female orgasm in the laboratory. (3) The essence of their research was to take a half dozen (very confident) female participants, insert a glass tube containing a camera (a piece of kit appropriately called “Ulysses”) inside them, and then have them masturbate the outer part of the clitoris (the glans) until they orgasmed. They reported that they had not filmed anything of interest, and on the back of this research rests the bulk of modern research into female orgasm.


State of Play
The bulk—but not the entirety. At roughly the same time as Masters and Johnson were getting women to masturbate in a laboratory, the husband and wife team of Fox and Fox were measuring themselves having actual sex in their actual bedroom (with their actual selves) with telemetry devices inserted to measure pressure changes attendant on the female partner orgasming. (4) I’ve discussed all this research before here and here. And it is still a vexed question as to what, if anything, female orgasm might do. Very, very roughly there is a dispute between

1) The majority: Who think female orgasm does nothing, which I discuss here (5)
 2) A group of researchers who think that it cements bond between partners (6)
 3) Another group of researchers who think that it contributes to fertility in some way—either by making sperm more active, or by directly speeding up sperm transport. (7)
 4) Some combination of the second and third possibilities

Here’s how we tried to navigate the Scylla of laboratory control and the Charybdis of the loss of validity.
How to Not Lose Love's Labor
One of Master’s and Johnson's original selection for participants had this to say about their methodology
“I just know that if someone would watch me copulate with a partner, the best I could do would be a little outer clitoral climax, as fast as possible to get the silly situation over with. I do not call that an orgasm." (7)

In other words—lack of privacy is likely to inhibit sexual response.
We probably wouldn’t divide orgasm into clitoral and vaginal these days, knowing now that the clitoris is a large complex organ most of which is inside. However—not all of it is always aroused during sex, and this means that there is considerable variation in the nature of the experiences that women report during various forms of sexual behavior.(8) We wanted to measure possible sperm retention (options 3 and 4) and we did this by having women (in the privacy of their own relaxed settings) insert gel with similar properties to sperm, along with a device for collecting said substance—much of which gets ejected in a process called back flow—up to an hour following sex. But this presents a problem. If the majority of sensitive tissue is internal, how do we stimulate these areas while maintaining the ability to measure whatever is ejected in back flow?

Step forward the Hitachi Magic Wand™. Hitachi deny that this device is anything other than a body massager. Well, that’s up to them. But some people have discovered that its deep tissue massaging properties (all 6000RPM of them) are just the thing for stimulating sensitive internal clitoral tissue through the outer walls of the body. In other words, we could create deep orgasms from the outside while keeping a collecting device in place.

And this is what we found.
In summary, when women orgasm deep inside, they appear to retain about 15 percent more material than when they do not. This is an interesting figure, and corresponds very nicely with the figures reported in the farming industry (who are lot less squeamish than us) when they use various techniques to maximize sperm retention during artificial insemination. (1)

Conclusions
But—some words of caution. The sample is, as yet, too small to draw firm conclusions. Also, the methodology does not distinguish between the rapid sperm transport theory of the Foxes, and the increasing of sperm viability theory of Levin (because both predict reduced back flow following female orgasm). It’s also entirely possible (likely even) that female orgasm has pair bonding features as well as sperm-retention ones—a sort of “try before you buy” function and our methodology has completely side-lined some potentially important partner characteristics such as attractive smell (9) which we think may advertise immune system compatibility.

But—you can’t have everything. With those caveats in mind we are cautiously excited. This suggests a protocol that is relatively easy to try at home, and could have a small but significant impact if rolled out with (say) persistently infertile couples, if we get access to larger samples to perform randomized control trials (the gold standard of clinical work). Time will tell.