Philosophy of Biology has an article from Elisabeth Lloyd regarding criticisms of her work. Lloyd wrote The Case of the Female Orgasm^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, a book about the evolution of the female orgasm. She lists many quotes from weblogs and print media that are simply shocking in their cluelessness. People are assuming that the book says that female orgasm isn't important, that maybe it doesn't exist at all, that the female orgasm is going to 'evolve away', that the only reason for any function is to make more babies, that Lloyd is an anti-feminist and closet misogynist.

It's dismaying; these people haven't read the book, and they are inventing all these fictions that bear no resemblance to the actual content. Often, the complaints are about problems that Lloyd specifically argues against, and the degree of incomprehension is painful to see.

I've read it twice now. It's one of my favorites, and it's not just for the titillating subject (which, face it, doesn't sustain any arousal after 257 pages of technical discussion)—if people weren't so ready to prejudge it, it ought to be considered a classic of evolutionary analysis. The book is an argument, carefully and lucidly made, that many of the assumptions about the evolution of this property are faulty. It's the work of a first-rate mind, and if somebody were to ask me what use training in philosophy is to a biologist, I'd point to this book as an example.

Right at the beginning, she lays out the prerequisites for demonstrating that a feature is an adaptation. It has to be shown to be the product of genetic variation, it must be shown to influence reproductive success, it needs to have a mechanism shown to work in nature, and it should be shown by experimental manipulation of the trait or environment to have an effect on reproduction (the last one can't be done in humans, obviously). This is not controversial; these are the basics. Then through the middle of the book she goes through each published hypothesis for the origin of the female orgasm and assesses it against each of those criteria, and also examines each for internal consistency and conflicts with the physical evidence. This is all just plain good science.

Lloyd settles on Symon's explanation, that female orgasm is a developmental byproduct of selection for male orgasm, as the best supported explanation. That word, "byproduct", seems to be what is arousing most of the critics' ire, with the implication that unless something is intrinsically advantageous to reproduction, it is less valuable. This is not about value judgements, however; Lloyd is not arguing that the virtue of orgasms lies in their ability to promote pregnancy in women (although that is exactly the idea the adaptive hypotheses for it are promoting)—she's demonstrating that many androcentric assumptions about female orgasm, such as that it promotes pair-bonding with the male, or assists sperm to enter the reproductive tract, or encourages women to lie about in a puddle of semen, are just not credible or supported by any good evidence. She suggests that maybe she should change the label from "byproduct" to "fantastic bonus" to get around this naturalistic bias, but I don't know that I agree. I suspect that a great many human features we like are byproducts (OK, "fantastic bonuses"), and people need to get used to that fact. That a specific feature has been the target of selection does not necessarily mean it is "better" in social terms.

If you don't want to read the book—which would be unfortunate, it's an excellent read—at least go read the briefer explanation at Philosophy of Biology. And, ladies, have orgasms because they're fun, not because you think they will help your partner get you pregnant with his child.

Hardly do I post this but Stranger Fruit cites an interview with Robert Trivers making the same stupid mistake.

Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould’s theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect…"

Maybe Lloyd is right. When a smart guy like Trivers, who is talking out of his ass on this one, can be so scrambled by the mere terms "byproduct" and "side-effect" that he can think their secondary connotations are refutations in their own right, maybe the words do need fixing.