Why Does The Female Orgasm Exist? - Dr Robert King

How do you get into studying the female orgasm?

(laughs) Um, let's just go, go, get, dive straight in. Um, okay. So my background was, I was a school teacher for 20 years. Um, and I, uh, was interested in psychology and maths. That's what I taught. About 20 years ago, I came across a really interesting book by a woman called Elizabeth Lloyd. Uh, it was, uh, uh, A Bias in the Science of, uh, of Evolution. I was on holiday in Thailand. Uh, I read it. Um, the book told me that female orgasm did nothing, uh, had no function. And, uh, to say I was, I was surprised would be, uh, an understatement. And, uh, I, I just, I got interested, and I started studying evolutionary biology. And I approached, uh, some prominent figures in the field and said, "I think I have an i- you seem to have an issue here, uh, studying this subject, I think..." Um, and it, it, it, um, you know, just sort of, I, you know, I'm obviously quite a, a nerdy kind of character. I, I delve into these things. I read the original stuff. And once I started reading the original stuff, it became obvious that there were two very distinct traditions of, of studying, um, human sexuality, particularly female orgasm. One of them, uh, went down this, this strange route of saying it did nothing, and another one, which had been somewhat, uh, sidelined, uh, suggested it actually had some really interesting functions. So like-

What was your-

Uh-

W- w- what was your intuition? What was it that you thought early on, "Huh, this, this seems to be a fruitful area to research more into"?

Um, it, it became obvious from a fairly early stage that a number of the people who were opining about, about female orgasm, we're not studying sex at all. Uh, not in any kind of, you know, sense of, of actually being in the room with other people having sex. Uh, that's, that's why I start off the book by talking about, uh, animals in zoos and, uh, mating in captivity because what was being studied in laboratories just felt a lot like studying mating in captivity. And that doesn't, doesn't capture the, the range of, uh, what humans are up to or interested in. It doesn't capture the range of what other animals are interested, uh, makes them interesting either to be honest. Uh, um, I mean, it's, you know, it... That's, that's why I start off the book talking about COVID and the fact that... Uh, I, I live next to Fota, which is a terrific, um, uh, wildlife park, and I recommend it highly. And we have the, uh, the breeding, uh, group of, of a number of animals, uh, giraffes, uh, cheetahs. We've got some new tigers there. What else have we got? Uh, lions. And they've all had babies. And one of the reasons they have babies is because they have privacy. Uh, they can hide away from humans when they don't, don't want to play with us and do want to play with each other.