This is something I wrote while I was at college about a year ago and it details some new research that has been published about the possible purpose of the female orgasm, which I think is pretty interesting. It's pretty dry and academic in tone and contains some fairly specialist language, but most of it should be pretty clear to most people. If anyone has a question or wants some more information on this kind of thing, mail me: mwall@netcomuk.co.uk Does the female orgasm have a function and, if so, what is it? The female orgasm, and indeed female sexuality in general, has been one of the most consistently debated areas in human behavioural ecology. For many years the field was characterised by a paucity of any real experimental evidence; largely because of the ethical and practical difficulties encountered in researching this area. However in recent years a number of studies have been published which go some way towards shedding some light on the possible adaptive significance of the female orgasm. In the history of the field there have generally been two diametrically opposed positions taken up by researchers. The first position holds that orgasm in females is of little or no adaptive significance and that it is merely a phylogenetic holdover from normal development of the male. This idea springs from the fundamental observation that while male orgasm is essential for conception to take place, female orgasm is not, and indeed does not always (or even often) occur during copulation. This view is represented by writers such as Donald Symons (1979): "the potential for female orgasm can be understood as a by-product of selection for male orgasm" in much the same way as the existence of nipples on males can be accounted for by the selection for lactation in females. Symons cites the fundamental neuro-muscular similarity of male and female orgasms as support for this position, citing Masters and Johnson"s demonstration that the contractions reliably occur at exactly the same time interval (0.