This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to kf I AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Doctor Doctor, you need the news. I gotta AKFI AM six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. That is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. I know I'm here at six o'clock. Right, You're like, what what? What? What? Wasn't there a tease earlier saying Doctor Wendy Walsh after dark at seven pm? Yes, there was. We would call that a technical difficulty.
The truth is I am here for a very special three hour Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. Yeah, Kyla, we have producer Christina in the room. We have Stephen on the board, Stephan or Stefan Stephen, the fush where'd that come from? Nickname for him? Tim Conwee, jr Ah the Foosh, Mark Ronner. You're in the newsroom as always. You're here. You're gonna be blushing, Okay, do your worst. You're gonna be talking a lot about female orgasm today. Before I get going, I want to remind
everybody I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I've been obsessed with relationships, written a few books on relationships. My dissertation was on attachment. I'm a psychology professor, I'm not a therapist, so think of me as a journalist, like, don't shoot the messenger when you hear what I report from the world of science. Okay, I didn't make this up. It all comes
from data. And I will start by saying, gentlemen, there are a lot of things you don't know about the women's body, and we might even teach you something tonight and ladies, there are a lot of things you may not know about your own body too, And tonight's doctor Wendy Wells show may rock your world. I'm going to start off before I bring on a very
special guest from the Kinsey Institute, the world famous Kinsey Institute. I just want to break down some of the science on how men and women have different sexual psychologies. Now, I want to start by saying that when I was a young woman and I was very sexually active at a good time, let's just say, men would sometimes say, well, what's wrong with you if you don't orgasm? Or they talk about other women as being frigid. They love to use those words. And now we're at a place in the world
where we've gotten men out of science. You know they're still there. We've added women to science doing research and discovered a few things. So for interests. For example, men and women have different sexual desire. There's so much
science behind this. Compared with women, men think about sex more often, du they report more frequent sexual fantasies, they report more feelings of desire, and across the entire lifespan every age, men rate the strength of their own sex drive higher than their female partners, so they're more likely to say, Now, when I'm quoting research, you've always got to remember it sounds like I'm generalizing, and I hear you on social media gung your guess and Rabi
hiding. You know, for every statistic, there's going to be a little anomaly. For instance, I got married. I was a child bride at the age of twenty. I think I got married from my Catholic mother because you didn't like that I was shacking up with my college boyfriend. But anyway, in that relationship, I actually had a higher sex drive. But for most of the other ones it was the other way around, and there could have been some psychological things going on to Okay, we won't get into that.
Keep everybody safe here. Men are more visual, women are more relational. Men would rather watch porn. We would rather read a harlequin romance. And let me tell you. When I was like fifteen years old, I had mono, and back then, when you had mono, they kept you home in the house for six weeks and the school would send tutors or whatever
from time to time to make sure you're doing your work. I felt fine, but for some reason I tested positive from mono, and so some old lady in the neighborhood, old she was probably fifty friend of my mom's, came over with a bag of harlequin romances and said, here, honey, is something reading materials? Since you're home for six weeks. I probably read a hundred of them. They became so addictive. I had so many orgasms. Everybody was at work, I was alone in the house and as long
as there's a relationship. Now, later in life, I had guy friends would say, hey, you want to watch Born with me? And I'd try to watch it, and it was so boring to me because I'm like, where's the story, Like how did they meet? What's their background? Do they love each other? Does she have feelings for him? Anyway? It didn't. It never worked for me. There's research to support that I'm normal. Women's sexual fantasies are more likely than men's to involve a familiar partner
and include affection and even commitment. In contrast, oh, we're not surprised here. Men's fantasies are more likely to involve strangers, anonymous partners, multiple partners, or focus on specific acts or specific sex organs. Oh, you guys are just so simple, you know, honestly, I love you, man, I love you so much. But now that I understand you, that old adage that our grandmother said that men are basically a penis and a stomach, and you can get to their heart one or two ways. Of
course. Now I'm at the AGI's cook for my Julio. You know, he's so happy. As long as I picked him a pie last week, strawberry Rubard pie. He was very happy. Okay, I did some other stuff too. All right, let's talk about frequency and the difference between the sexes. When heterosexual dating and married couples disagree about sexual frequency, it's usually the man who wants it more. Usually again, you're always going to find an exception to the rule. Now, how what's the actual frequency, not
just desire, but how often do they actually do it. Researchers think that most married couples come to a compromise between the desires of the man and the desires of the woman, and one of the ways that they try to figure the out as they also studied gay and lesbian relationships and guess what they've found sexual frequency by partners of the same gender, and lesbian's report having less sex, Gay men more sex. You see, you put two men together,
they're gonna be having more sex. Two women together less sex. Put a man and a woman together somewhere in between, all right, that's what happens. Also, women appear to be more willing than men to forego sex, to adhere to maybe religious vows of celibacy or whatever, or just you go off the market for a year. I did that once. I was in my thirties. I was dating so many bad boys, so many playboys, and I thought, I just need to like heal, so I'm gonna like
just not have sex for a year, And I did. But then I learned you don't heal that way. You avoid and then you step right back out into traffic and get hit by a bus. Another Playboy game rolling on up right. In fact, I was watching what did they have for the NBA? Was the draft thing or something? Yeah, they picked the young men who are good players, and they told them what teams they were gonna
be on, what their jobs were going to be. Yeah, okay, And so I'm like watching in the background at some of these older news news sports newscasters, I'm like, I recognize that Faith. I think I slept with him. I did. Oh, there, he is crazy, all right. Continuing the differences between male and female sexuality masturbation, men are more likely than women to masturbate. They start masturbating at an earlier age. Here's my favorite story. If you ever took your kid to Ten Street Pediatrics,
do you ever remember Nurse Kitty there? She Oh, all the women took their kids there to Nurse Kitty. She was fabulous. We all loved her. She helped the breastfeeding and everything. So a friend of mine brought her ten month old boy there and she said, he's grabbing at his penis so much that it's chafed, Like it's literally red and chafed. And sore, and Nurse Kitty gave her some cream and said, don't you worry, honey, this is just a phase. It only lasts seven decades. Okay.
Relationships. Women tend to emphasize committed relationships as a context for sexuality more than men do, all supported by research. I'm not making this up. Also, women are more likely to romanticize sexual desire and longing to be emotional intimate. To be emotionally intimate is part of their sexual desire, And these are
really common gender differences same sex relationships. Just like heterosexual women, lesbians tend to have less permissive attitudes towards casual sex and sex outside of a primary relationship. And gay men are more likely to say, Okay, it's okay if you have another partner, it's fine. I get it. It's like they understand that for men, sometimes sex and emotions are a separate event. Now here's the most interesting thing about male and female sexuality, and there's been lots
of research on this. Female sexuality is more plastic. No, that doesn't mean we look like a barbie naked. We're not plastic. But basically, plasticity means the ability to be flexible and change. So men's sexuality, whatever it is as gay straight by is fairly hardwired across the lifespan. Women are a little more flexible. In fact, Evolutionary psychologists say one of the reasons why our culture is currently very accepting of and condoning same sex relationships with women
is because we have an oversupply of successful women in our mating marketplace. And ladies, I know you you would rather date another successful woman than an unsuccessful man. Sorry, guys, and so a lot of guys, I know it's a thing, all right. When we come back, I have a researcher from the Kinsey Institute on the line who actually, through her research, discovered the truth about the female orgasm. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on
demand from kf I am six forty. You've got Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. Now I'm blushing with that song, producer, Kayla, was that Beyonce? That was India Iri, Oh, India Irie. But they are both amazing. They both have a lot of orgasms in their music. I think that's what she was describing in those lyrics. I think that was appropriate there is so much new research on the female orgasm, but it is disturbing to me that it has not spread around
the masses. And this is my job to tell everybody what the scientists are trying for everyone to know. But you know, they don't get interviewed by you know, sixty minutes in Glamor magazine, the only doctor Wendy Welsh. Otherwise you got to subscribe to the scientific journals. My guest is doctor Elizabeth Lloyd. She's a philosopher of biology. Okay, that's so cool, I'm like fangirling. She is a faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research on
Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University. But back in two thousand and five she caused an enormous cultural stir when she published a book based on her research on female sexuality called The Case of the Female Orgasm. Wait, bias in the Sciences of Evolution. Let me tell you this book was such a cultural phenomenon that even Saturday Night Live did a piece on it, And of course we have with us tonight doctor Calvin Zuko, who caused quite a controversy
with his theory of the myth of the female orgasm. Doctor Zuko. That's right, Charlie. There's no such a thing as a female orgasm. Women don't have orgasms. This will all be in my new book entitled four Play or just Playing Stalling. The female orgasm does not exist. Let's face it. I've been with a lot of women and not one of them has had an orgasm. Welcome, doctor Elizabeth Lloyd from the Kinsey Institute. How are you. Oh great, that's a wonderful introduction. I had forgotten about that.
You are not doctor Calvin Zuko, that's for sure. And we will say that women do have orgasms. Let's be clear about that. But there's a lot of misconceptions about orgasms. So let's start. I want to talk to you for a while. So are you comfortable? Are you sitting down? We have a lot to talk about, girlfriend, Okay, yeah, sure, sure. We're going to start with the theories on female orgasm that existed a long time ago, and many people still believe some of them.
And let's start with things that I even learned in graduate school that Sigmund Freud, the grandfather of psychotherapy, believe that there are two kinds of orgasms, a clitoral orgasm and a vaginal orgasm. And he used to call the ones with the glutors the immature orgasm, and the other one the mature one. What's the truth, doctor Lloyd? Oh yeah, well, this was a tragic mistake that women paid and paid and paid for it for over a century.
There is there may be a variety of type of orgasm, depending on where in the body the reflex initiates it. Maybe deep in a vagina, in a cervical region, and maybe from inside the vaginal column, and maybe mostly from the outside or the inside of the inside part of the clitters or the outside part of the glitters. It could be almost anywhere. And there's five different routes to have an orgasm, and it could be any combination of
those. There aren't There aren't just two types. There are at least five types probably, and those in combination. So and one isn't immature and another mature? Is it? Oh? Dear God? Well, he was under He had a theory that in order to understand orgasm female orgasm evolution narrowly, it had to be an adaptation. It had to evolve to contribute to uh female reproductive success. And in order for that to work, it had to contribute to um reproductive sex, that is, sexual intercourse, and that meant
that it had to happen during sexual intercourse. Um happened, Yeah, yeah, and so he said it had to be. In other words, the of course was to have babies. So that we're going to get into all the h some of the other theories. What about the G spot does it exist? Well? Well, uh, in some women there is a sensitive region in um front part of the the vagina that um is very sensitive to touch and pressure. That is called the G spot um by some people.
And yeah, it exists in some women, but not in all women, and not even in fact likely in most women. Um. There you go. So it's just a few lucky women. Okay, So what about the myth of orgasm frequency. Who's actually having orgasms as much men women? Well, men have more orgasms than women do in the context of sexual interactions, in other words, partners tex, especially if they're especially if they're heterosexual. In the lesbian context, So the lesbians, they're giving a heterosexuals the men
that run for their money. You hear that, ladies, Because lesbian women understand anatomy because they have the same anatomy. Right, Yeah, that's that's probably the reason. The other reason is probably because they think it's only fair to take current Oh we're so fair, aren't we. Okay, let's talk about some of those reproductive theories. It used to be thought that the female orgasm was designed to push the egg down. Uh yeah, um, the
I don't know as much about that theory. The the idea that the contractions of the of the um, the the area the ovary, we're going to eventually um lead to many millennia later, many many hundreds of thousands of years later, millions of years later to the female orgasm. That's what a theory that's being pursued today. Um. I don't there's some evidence for it, and I don't know whether it's true or not. We just don't know yet. There there hasn't been enough evidence. Well, we have to go to
a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about your research and the real reason for female orgasm. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI amzix forty. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. We are talking about the female orgasm. My guest, one of my favorite friends of the show, Doctor Elizabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of biology a faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at
Indiana University. Welcome back, doctor Lloyd. Before we get into your research on orgasm, let me go through a couple myths that are still out there. So you say that female orgasm, there's not a lot of research to show that it pushes the egg down. But I've also heard a myth that the point of the female orgasm is to suck the sperm up. Have you heard that one? Oh? Yes, Well, that actually goes back to
the ancient Greeks. It's a very old idea. It's hundreds I mean hundreds and hundreds of years old, thousands of years old, and it's not there's never been any evidence for it. There's never been any solid evidence for it offered and um it's been raked over the colds as far as the proffered evidence and um shown to be absolutely hopeless. I mean, one of the sets
of evidences offered for it is about oxytocin. You you, I'm sure know about the hormone oxytote hormone, the love hormarm and orgasm does really talk totocin, and so it was postulated that oxytocin relief led to the contraction of the uterus, which led to the uterus sucking up the firm and sucking it all
the way to the to the all the way up the felopian tubes. And the trouble is that when they presented this evidence, they didn't note that Number One, the women that they were following tracking these these eggs in or these spermen, were unconscious rather than orgasmic. Absolutely Stone called dead to the world. Number two, there was a huge problem with the experiment because they weren't having their or own orgasms with natural oxytocin release. The scientists had to inject
oxytocin. Oh my goodness, all right, we're gonna actually talk in a little bit about this anti scientific bias that you exposed in your book, The Case for the Female Orgasm. One last theory that's I think a myth, but I was taught it even in graduate school that because of this oxytocin release, it's supposed to create a relaxation effect in women, so they would lie still and the sperm wouldn't have to deal with gravity. Have you heard that
one? Yes? Yes. Yes. It's also known as the poleax theory, which I name I always loved U. Yeah. Yeah. The trouble is that the evidence shows and this is actually reviewed and share highs marvelous book, which turned out to with the test of time, to be basically almost purely right. The women don't fall asleep after orgasm. I mean women can tell you that it's men will fall asleep after organs exactly. And I am up taking a shower women at the today, I'm drinking water, I'm fixing
myself a snack. I am not going to sleep, right. Have a friend of mine like to tap dance in the kitchen after she had an orgasm? It's true. And and so this is just not true. It's not it's it's a generalization they made from men to women. And this is what it means to say that the science is male centered. Right, And we're going to get to that, but before we do, let's talk about your
research and your result. Before you give us the results, can you tell me how you got the idea in the first place to do this research, Like, why did the study of female orgasm matter to you? Well, um, I mean I had followed the study of female a female sexuality,
like any good feminist. But actually it was because my a good friend of mine and I were having a little too few too many dacories in the summer heat and in Princeton in grad school, and and she was trying to convince me to go out with older men because they had they were better in bed. And she said, well, what is the evolutionary function of orgasm? Anyway? And I said, I don't know, but I'll go look it
up, and so I did. I went to the library and Princeton, I looked it up in a card catalog back in those days, and um, I trucked some things down and I could not believe what I found. Yeah, no one, and no one had questioned it at that point. So, um, what did you act, truly study to try to come up with your theory? Were you counting number of babies compared to number four
orgasms? Well, I was just comparing the established evidence that people had about experimental and observational evidence about orgasm from anybody's expert study to the assumptions that were made in the evolutionary explanations that were offered. In other words, I was looking at the scientific evidence compared to what the explanations were. In otherwards, I was just testing them in an ordinary scientific play. Oh yeah, doing
real science. Okay, so let's talk about your results. The real reason for female orgasm is well, the evidence shows more and more and more favor to the view that I favored all along, which is that it's actually an evolutionary bonus that comes along with the fact that may orgasms. They're selected because it's very beeficial for the men to have orgasms with ejaculation. It makes them feel good and they go out and have more ejaculations, which helps their reproduction.
And so we share their male we share their body plan, basic body plan of having the orgasmictitious laid down, and we basically get them for free, sort of a vestidial kind of piece of anatomy, like like a male nipple. Males have nipples. They don't breastfeed as far as I know, right, Yes, yes, it's it's a lot like the male nipple. Is exactly like the male nipple. And and we have I mean, men have nipples because women have them, and women have orgasms because men have them.
Fascinating, So we want to pull women off the guilt train, because not all women orgasm and that's okay and it's natural. What does your research tell you about who gets to have this bonus and who doesn't. What's the difference in an out of me? Well, um, we find um that they're well. First of all, the women who don't have orgasm at all, many of them turn out there there we go. Yeah, okay,
so um uh and um. The but the big difference between women who do have orgasm with intercourse the way before I'd wanted, and the women who do not have orgasm then, of course, namely most women UM on a regular basis, um, is that it is simply the anatomy of the actual genitals, which is that the closer the clitterati is to the opening to the vagina, the more likely it is that they will be one of the few women that and I mean four to fifteen percent of women who have vaginal orgasms.
I love it. We have to who reliably have orgasm with the inner coourse without assistance from either hands or vibebrators. Yes, I love it. Okay, when we come back, doctor Elizabeth Lloyd, I want to continue this conversation as well. Let's talk about the anti scientific bias that you encountered. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from kf I AM six forty.
This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. We are talking female orgasm with one of the world's preeminent researchers on female orgasm, a philosopher of biology, Doctor Elizabeth Lloyd, is a faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University. Okay, doctor Lloyd, before we get into bias and science, I want to talk about the fact that you've discovered that orgasm is really about anatomy. It's a vestigial thing like a
male nipple. Some women have it, some women don't. What percentage of wh we'll never have an orgasm in their life for physiological reasons, Well, we don't actually know that because we can't really do experiments on people, but it's something between we think five to ten percent. Perhaps so five to ten percent may never orgasm, four to fifteen percent may have an orgasm vaginally or during intercourse in some way without an additional hand or help in some way.
So you know, for years women have thought that they were supposed to be like men, and it caused many women to fake orgasms. What do you think of that? Well, yeah, I mean it's understandable, and it's something that made it very hard to get an honest number about orgasm rate with intercourse because women have been shamed about this for so long. They lie about it, and so do their partners because of the widespread sexual scre it's like
the one you're mentioning. It teaches how to conduct their sexual encounters and try to follow that that Freudian script that you mentioned, and the idea that you have to have a vaginal orgasm in order to be quote normal exactly. I mean we all thought that. I thought that when I was young, and men, of course keep the myths up because they say what's wrong with you,
etc. And so it can cause feelings of inadequacy. But also the world of psychology diagnosed women who didn't have orgasms, right, it became a diagnosis. Oh yes, Indeed, the very definition or of sexual dysfunction quote was that women didn't have orgasm with unassisted intercourse. That means no hands, no vibrator assist on the intercourse here, that's correct, terrible, yes, and that only changed extremely recently. Oh my goodness, I mean they've taught
us that when I'm in graduate school. Yeah, your book is called The Case of the Female Orgasm Bias in the Science of Evolution, And in your book you looked at thirty years of studies that were designed to prove that women's orgasms evolved only to make us better at reproducing, and then you knocked them down one at a time for different reasons. Three reasons, mainly either it was bad data, bogus assumptions, or they had a fatal bias. Let's
explain this to everybody. What makes data bad? Well, it can, it can be inappropriate, like the data that they used from those women in the oxytocin studies about the up stuck that those data were inappropriate because real women that the oxytocin they injected into the unconscious women was sixty times the highest recorded
level of orgasm induced oxytocin in real women. So so they basically researchers put women under anesthetic, then they injected them with oxytocin, and then they gave them an orgasis the normal ye. No, no, they never gave them an orgasm. No, they just simply injected them with sixty times the normal level of oxytocin that they would have with the maximum level of orgasm induced oxytocin in order to get the upsucking effect, which is what they were looking for.
So they did, and they then said, hey, guess what orgasm causes the upsucking effect. That is lousy data. That is lousy data. And let's not forget bias. It was mostly men who did this research. What kinds of bias did you discover the most? Well, that probably the biggest bias was simply that they thought that whenever intercourse occurred, orgasm occurc female orgasm. Yeah, they just assumed that they had whole series like, for
example, the pair bonding series. Oh, they were like eleven different series about how the pair bond is good for you, and frequent intercourse is good for the pair bond, and of course frequent intercourse gave orgasms to both the men and the women equally, and so therefore that's why female orgasm evolved. Well, that doesn't work unless female orgasm actually occurs every time you have frequent
intercourse with sing dinging. No, it doesn't. No. My favorite discovery was that if they said, if female orgasm is good for reproductive reproduction, then the more women orgasm the more children they would have. And there's no correlation at all. No, that's right, no correlation whatsoever. It's crazy. Well, thank you so much for being with us, doctor Elizabeth Lloyd.
I encourage everybody to get your book of the two thousand and five books, The Case of the Female Orgasm, because everyone needs to learn about this, men and women. And my favorite thing that I'm going to say is my takeaway from our conversation today is that heterosexual men better pay attention because it looks like lesbian women are having and giving more orgasms. They're beating them.
Thank you so much for being with us. When we come back, I want to talk about the new HBO series The Idol, clearly a male lens on female sexuality. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show and KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walls. You can always hear us live on kf I AM six forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.