Believe it or not, there may be a connection between the mating behavior of grizzly bears and the evolution of the human female orgasm …

In his poem “Of the progress of the soul,” John Donne once eloquently described a young lady he admired (one Elizabeth Drury), by observing that

“Her pure, and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say, her body thought.”

Of course, bodies don’t actually think. Brains do. And should bodies think, they can be expected to do so in silence, as befits good thought. Mr. Donne, moreover, a now-dead white male writing four centuries ago, was probably not gesturing toward female orgasm in any case. By contrast, the 20th-century writer and feminist icon Anaïs Nin definitely was, when she referred to “Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body,” noting how “a rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is,” she announced, “the gong of the orgasm.”

With or without an accompanying gong, orgasms may sometimes appear to speak, at least to the person who occupies that body’s brain and who might stand to gain from the information thereby acquired. More than 30 years ago, the idea occurred to me that female orgasm might be a way by which a woman’s body speaks to her brain, saying something positive about her current sexual partner. I had been studying the sexual behavior of grizzly bears and was struck by the differences between subordinate and dominant males. While copulating, the former constantly swivel their heads from side to side, looking out for a dominant boar who might displace them. Not surprisingly, they ejaculate quickly, something that the sow grizzly may or may not find disappointing but which, under the circumstances, is entirely understandable and likely adaptive as well. By contrast, dominant males take their time.

I don’t know if female grizzlies experience orgasm, but if they do, with which partner would you expect it to be more likely?

And is it surprising that premature ejaculation is also a common problem, especially for young, inexperienced men lacking in status and self-confidence? Or that women paired with such men are unlikely to be orgasmic?

Interestingly, a study of Japanese macaque monkeys found that the highest frequency of female orgasms occurred when high-ranking males were copulating with low-ranking females, and the lowest when low-ranking males were having intercourse with high-ranking females. So maybe a woman’s orgasm isn’t elusive because it is a vestigial by-product, fickle and flaky, sometimes on and sometimes off like a light bulb that isn’t firmly screwed into its evolutionary socket. Maybe, instead, it is designed to be more than a little hard to get, adaptive precisely because it can’t be too readily summoned, so that when it arrives, it means something.

The evaluation hypothesis is even compatible with the fact that orgasm is more reliably evoked by masturbation than by sexual intercourse; potential partners warrant evaluation, whereas there is no comparable pressure to assess one’s own masturbatory technique. Moreover, any information made available in the former case can certainly be used to fine-tune the latter. Masturbation almost certainly is not an adaptation for reproduction in either sex; rather, it occurs just because the wiring exists—in both males and females—for orgasm based on stimulation, even in the absence of a sexual partner.

The evaluation hypothesis yields some testable predictions. One that seems so obvious as to be unworthy of testing is that women should find orgasms not only pleasurable but also important in the context of a sexual relationship. Don’t scoff: If a woman’s climax is merely an irrelevant, tag-along by-product, then it needn’t be accorded any more attention than men do their nipples. In a survey of 202 Western women of reproductive age, 76 percent reported that experiencing orgasm with a partner was between somewhat important and very important; only 6 percent said it was somewhat unimportant to very unimportant.

If orgasm helps women evaluate their partners, then it helps make sense of the otherwise perplexing fact that female orgasm is notoriously inconsistent: It wouldn’t be much good as a means of partner evaluation if it occurred every time and with every partner. The evaluation hypothesis would also seem compatible with an attitude of control and independence. In much of the world, women tend to associate sex with submission, and interestingly, the more they do so, the more they experience impaired ability to be sexually aroused and reduced orgasm frequency, suggesting that orgasms have something to do with autonomy and selfhood, but in an erotic context.

Another prediction: Compared to their socially subordinate fellows, dominant men should be better lovers, that is, more likely to evoke orgasms in their partners. And for women, experiencing orgasm with a particular partner should lead to preference for that partner. In short, after having had an orgasm, a woman would likely want more and would therefore be (adaptively) predisposed to have additional sex with the partner in question.

The evolutionary outcome is that, in the absence of reliable birth control, a woman would increase the probability of being impregnated by this person. Preference for sex with a sexually satisfying lover seems so obvious that it, too, might appear a foregone conclusion, but just because it is obvious doesn’t make it any less true, or significant. In addition, it is at least possible that causation actually runs the other way: Once a woman has a preference for a particular partner (for whatever reason), she might be more likely to be orgasmic with him or her. It might be possible to disentangle these factors, but not easily.