Samantha Wakil (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Lloyd (2005) analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffer from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. But, there is an alternative explanation for the discrepancies in the case of the female orgasm that Lloyd’s analysis overlooks. I present and argue for the plausibility of this alternative explanation. In short, the alternative explanation is that an imprecise definition of orgasm is what’s primarily responsible for the missteps in this research domain. Further, Lloyd takes her analysis to support Lonigno’s (1990) Contextual Empiricist model. Insofar as Lloyd’s analysis does not capture an important part of scientific practice the alternative explanation picks out, this might reveal a shortcoming for Contextual Empiricism.
