女性的高潮仍旧是个进化之谜

译者 miss芥辣

After baffling biologists for decades, the female orgasm has resisted yet another attempt to explain its elusive evolutionary origins.

几十年来，困惑的生物学家始终试图解释女性难以捉摸的高潮是如何起源进化的。

A survey of orgasmic function in thousands of twins found none of the statistical patterns expected if female orgasm is just a coincidental byproduct of natural selection on its male counterpart, as has been suggested.

一项对上千对双胞胎高潮机能的调查发现，没有统计模型能预计女性高潮是否是对于男性自然选择的副产品。

“The evolutionary basis of human female orgasm has been subject to furious scientific debate, which has recently intensified,” wrote University of Queensland geneticist Brendan Zietsch and Pekka Santtila of Finland’s Abo Akedemi University in a Sept. 3 Animal Behavior article. “These results challenge the byproduct theory of female orgasm.”

在9月3日昆士兰遗传学家Brendan Zietsch和芬兰Abo Akedemi大学的Pekka Santtila发布的动物行为学文章中写道，“女性高潮进化基础的争论最近已经加强。这些结论挑战着女性高潮是副产品的理论。”

While the male orgasm is, in evolutionary and practical terms, a fairly straightforward thing — it makes men want to have sex more often, thus continuing their lineage, and is achieved with ease — the female orgasm is a far trickier beast.

然而在进化和现实中，男性的高潮是一件相当容易的事——这让男人做爱更频繁，从而轻松实现血统的延续——女性高潮则像是困在荆棘里的野兽。

Unlike male orgasm, which is found across the primate spectrum, female orgasm has skipped some species. (Lady gibbons, for example, are out of luck.) In humans, men are far more likely to experience orgasm than women, of whom one in 10 don’t ever experience it.

通过对灵长类动物频谱的研究发现，与雄性动物高潮不同的是，某些雌性动物没有性高潮。（比如不幸的雌性长臂猿）在人类里，男性可能比女性更容易体验性高潮，而女性则有10%从未体验过高潮。

That imbalance runs contrary to traditional explanations of female orgasm: that it strengthens bonds between mates and thus improves the care received by their children, or that the ability to elicit orgasm indicates a male’s virility, or that underlying physiological processes somehow improve reproductive success.

这种不平衡违背了对于女性高潮的传统解释：高潮加强了伴侣间的联系和彼此对子女的照顾，或者使女性高潮能说明男性的生育能力，再或者能够提高受孕成功率。

After all, if female orgasms are an important evolutionary adaptation, they should be easier to attain. Also perplexing is that many women require clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm, not penetrative action. If female orgasms were meant to encourage sex, the opposite ought to be true.

毕竟，如果女性高潮是重要的进化过程，他们应该更容易达到。同样令人费解的是，许多女性需要阴蒂刺激达到高潮，而不是插入动作。如果女性高潮是为了鼓励性行为，那么达不到高潮也就不需要性行为。

All this has led to an alternative explanation, popularized in Elisabeth Lloyd’s popular 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm: That there’s no adaptive purpose. Women simply happen to share biology with men, for whom orgasm is important. It’s an accidental byproduct, like men’s nonlactating nipples.

这些导致了另一种解释，推广了2005年Elisabeth Lloyd的女性高潮案例的书：没有自发的目的，女人容易与重视高潮的男人分享生理特性。如同男人的乳头不会分泌乳汁一样，是个副产品。

But while this idea is plausible, it hasn’t yet been rigorously explored. So Zietsch and Santtila devised a test. They surveyed 1,803 pairs of opposite-sex twins and 2,287 pairs of same-sex twins, asking them how often and how easily they reached orgasm. If female orgasm is evolutionarily connected to male, opposite-sex twins should have similar orgasmic function.

不过虽然这种想法有道理，却尚未得到严格的探索。所以Zietsch和Santtila进行了一项测试，他们调查了1803对龙凤胎和2287对同性双胞胎，询问他们到达高潮的频率和途径。如果女性高潮是进化中基于与男性的联系，那么龙凤胎应该有相同的高潮能力。

But that’s not what they found. Instead, while orgasmic function was genetically shared in same-sex twins — brother tended to share function with brother, or sister with sister — the relationship vanished in opposite-sex twins, though both share the same amount of genetic material. The underlying genetics, and thus the underlying evolutionary pressures, thus appear to differ.

但是他们发现并非如此。相反，高潮的能力在同性双胞胎中基因共享——兄弟或姐妹间趋同——虽然龙凤胎有相同的遗传物质，这种关系却消失了。基础遗传学对于潜在压力出现了分歧。

“This does not support the hypothesis that female orgasm is maintained only as a byproduct of selection on the male orgasm,” wrote Zietsch and Santtila.

Zietsch和Santtila这样写，“这并不支持男性保持性高潮而女性性高潮仅仅是作为一个选择性的副产品的假说。”

However, the researchers warn that their findings aren’t yet definitive. Self-reported surveys aren’t methodologically airtight, and a recent Journal of Sexual Medicine study by Zietsch “found near-zero correlations between women’s orgasm rates and 19 other evolutionarily relevant traits.”

然而，研究人员敬告说，他们的研究结果尚未明确。自我报告的调查方法不够严密，Zietsch最近在性学研究文摘里写道，“研究发现女性的性高潮概率和其他19个相关的进化特征之间的相关性几乎为零。”

Those findings contradict the latest study, and suggest female orgasm might be a byproduct after all. It might also have been evolutionarily important to humanity’s ancestors, but irrelevant now.

毕竟近期这些相抵触的研究报告也假设女性高潮可能是副产品。它也可能是人类的重要进化但现在无关。

“The evolutionary basis of female orgasm is both important and unknown,” wrote Zietsch and Santtila. “Much more work needs to be done.”

Zietsch和Santtila写道，“女性高潮进化的基础是重要和未知的，还有许多研究要做。”