Why Do Women Scream During Orgasm?

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about women screaming during orgasm.

He told me about a hypothesis he'd encountered in the (idealistically egalitarian-utopian, not to mention panned by scholars) book Sex at Dawn that women yell during orgasm to attract competing mates for sperm competition.

Right on the face of it, this hypothesis has always seemed obviously incorrect to me.

First off, not to brag or anything (although I guess it's going to sound that way... can't be helped though, eh?), I've made a lot of girls scream quite loud from sex, yet I've never had a guy knock at my door and ask if he could have her next.

Second off, I've heard plenty of women I wasn't having sex with screaming, yet never has the urge come over me to knock on the couple's door and tell the man to beat it because it was my round with her now.

Third, I have never heard a single story in all my life and all the very many sex stories I have heard from the tons of men I've known in the seduction space of even a single man being chased off by another man following the first man's woman engaging in orgasm vocalizations.

Not even among hunter-gatherers, who are the cheerily idealized subject of the Sex at Dawn book, have I come across any evidence of moaning women attracting competitor males who chase off the guy making the woman moan and take her for themselves.

The "female sex vocalizations attract competitor males for sperm competition" hypothesis seems to describe a behavior that is completely absent from humans from anything I have ever actually seen or heard both firsthand and from others from anywhere else in the world.

Yet, when I dug into the research on women's sex vocalizations a bit more, I discovered some interesting tidbits that do tie in, a bit, to the Sex at Dawn theory -- although, I think, not quite in the way the authors framed it (at least, not based on the synopses I've read, not having read the book).

 

Evolutionary Psychology: It's Tricky

First off, I am fully on-board with the idea that human psychology is what it is due to natural selection.

No tabula rasa over here.

Any time I see any kind of quirky psychology in someone -- and there is a lot of quirky psychology out there, and everybody's got at least a little of it -- I say to myself, "Even though this seems quirky, I bet there is a reason this behavior is adaptive and has not been weeded out of the gene pool. I bet if I think for a minute I might even be able to hypothesize what it might be adaptive for."

The flip side of that is an idea about how things came to be or what their purposes are, if it isn't immediately obvious, and sometimes even then, is going to be a hypothesis, and unless you can back it up with likely evidence and actually test it somehow, a hypothesis it will remain.

Evolutionary biology and psychology alike lend themselves to Kipling-esque 'just-so stories.' Just So Stories was a book by Rudyard Kipling in which Kipling told tales of animals acquiring various traits by their actions. For instance, the elephant stretched out its nose and lip, and thereby extended its trunk. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists weave similar stories about behaviors being adaptive to the natural environment and thus arising due to evolution.

The thing with these just-so stories is anyone with a little creativity can come up with them, and you can concoct just-so stories of all kinds of different varieties to explain the same one trait.

That doesn't mean they're all wrong... but a lot of them likely are.

I could claim, for instance, that women scream during orgasm because screaming helps get more air in the lungs, and during a particularly breathless sex session, if they did not get enough oxygen they might die. Therefore, women who scream during hard sex are naturally selected for, since women who didn't died more often and ultimately failed to pass on their genes.

Or I might claim women scream during orgasm to attract predators, as a test of the strength of their mate. If the male knows a pride of lions might be homing in on himself and his partner right now, but he doesn't stop and run off as she orgasms, he is showing how tough and courageous he is, and thus how superior his genes are.

There's equally as much evidence for either of these claims as there is the claim that women scream during sex to alert other males of their sexual receptivity and spark sperm competition.

Which is to say: little to none, whatsoever.

But people can come up with stories like this to try to explain things.

Sometimes they might be right. But often they are just stories, with little or no actual realistic backing.

Thus, one must be careful when one deals with evolutionary psychology. It can lead to interesting hypotheses, but unless they're tested, hypotheses is all they are.

 

Women Who Scream During Sex

If you've gone to bed with a fair amount of women, you've likely noticed some patterns:

• Not every girl screams every time during sex
• Some women don't ever scream; mostly these women also don't orgasm hard either
• Some women scream easily; mostly these women also orgasm hard, easily
• Some women will fake orgasm screams if they want you to finish in them
• Women may also gasp/yell when you first enter them, and when you thrust in particularly deep
• Every woman screams her lungs out if/when you make her climax hard with your penis

So we can say that a few particular trends emerge:

• Women are most likely to vocalize when they're most excited
• The loudest, most ardent vocalizations happen at the most pleasurable times

There's another trend I've noticed as well, and talked to other men about, and that's this:

Doesn't a woman screaming her head off really, REALLY make you want to cum?

I have plenty of times been going like a machine with a woman with full control over my ejaculation when, suddenly, she starts moaning, and all of a sudden it is a struggle for me not to cum.

Other times, I may have already recently ejaculated earlier and now here I am, having sex again, with little urge to finish. But as I'm pounding the daylights out of this girl, she starts yelling, harder and harder and more and more lustfully, and suddenly that urge to ejaculate in her awakens in me, burning with full force, and before you know it I'm finishing in her.

Every guy I've spoken with about this agrees: the woman moaning or, in particular, screaming, can make you go from 0 to 60 real quick in your desire to eject sperm.

We already know from a 2007 study that men (contrary to the researchers' hypothesis) spend more time looking at women's faces while watching pornography than women do. Why? Apparently because men are monitoring women's pleasure levels during sex.

Pay attention to your facial monitoring behavior the next time you have sex. I'm certain you will find a few things:

• You enjoy looking at a girl's face (especially if she's beautiful!)
• Women's faces are at their most beautiful during sex (seriously, pay attention to this -- you'll see it)
• As she smiles more and makes a more 'pleasured' face, your urge to ejaculate in her grows stronger

Why do women smile and make those pleasured faces like that during sex?

Is that to attract competitor males too?

How about the way a woman's body writhes and how into it she gets as she nears orgasm? She isn't like that earlier on when she's not as close. That, too, is a tough sell as a "She's just doing that for sperm competition" argument.

Here's my theory:

• Women are smiling, making orgasm faces, writhing, gyrating, moaning, and yelling to trigger ejaculation from males

• Dominant males are more likely to have recently had sex, making them less ready to ejaculate, and more likely to engage in long sex sessions, which are the kinds most likely to prompt hard orgasms in women, with hard orgasms, by the way, just happening to be the ones that involve the most smiling, screaming, and so on, which prompts ejaculation by males

• Women are far less likely to engage in these behaviors with men who cannot bring them to orgasm -- that is to say, men who are not very dominant and/or don't display signs they are successfully mating with multiple women

• Therefore, these behaviors women engage in during sex are aimed at prompting a dominant, sought-after male to ejaculate in the female and impregnate her

Makes a lot more sense than claiming the woman is seeking sperm competition by screaming, yet guys never ever show up to knock at the door, doesn't it?

 

Another Nail in the "Screaming to Attract Competitors" Coffin

Here's another nail for that coffin:

Why do women only scream hard with dominant, sexually successful males? If it's about sperm competition, shouldn't they be screaming the MOST with weak males who CAN'T make them orgasm?

Which men do women create the most jealousy plotlines with? Is it with super strong dudes they respect as being highly worthy of them? No. Women set up competitions between men when they are not certain a man is qualified as a lover for them and/or their existing lover is weak or pissing them off.

You would expect that this same pattern of behavior would extend to any other competitions women set up between men. If a woman is using screams during the throes of lovemaking to attract competitors, you would expect her to do that more with weaker men and men she is more pissed off at, and not at all with men she is totally crazy about.

But instead, we see the opposite:

If she thinks a man is weak, she won't be able to orgasm with him at all, and will make few/no vocalizations.

If she's very annoyed at a man, again, it can be a real struggle to get her to cum (unless that annoyance is also mixed in with a healthy dose of continuing respect/admiration/lust for him).

On the other hand, the crazier she is about a guy, the harder with him she cums.

I think this invalidates the "she screams to attract sperm competition" hypothesis, at least as far as modern humans are concerned.

It would be just as easy for evolution to naturally select women who always scream during sex, except when they are so into a guy that they become breathless, where screaming attracted competitors.

That's how it should work if yelling and screaming was used to bring other men to compete. You want more competitors when your mate is not getting the job done. On the other hand, when your mate is top shelf, you do not want him expending energy fending off likely-lower-quality mates who might just get a lucky shot in and knock him off the throne, then impregnate you with inferior seed.

Nevertheless, there is one possible redeeming note for the "screaming for competition" hypothesis.

 

Screaming to Increase Parental Investment

Why does a woman screaming prompt the male's ejaculation?

To answer this question, we return to this "competitor attracting" hypothesis we almost did away with.

In the paper "The evolution of female copulation calls in primates: a review and a new model", researchers suggest a two-part model for predicting how female primates screaming during sex function:

• In less promiscuous primates, where mate-guarding is effective, "copulation calls should be rare and exhibited only in association with mating with dominant males", where the screaming is used "to concentrate paternity in dominant males and benefit from their protection against the risk of infanticide"

• In more promiscuous primates, where mate-guarding is ineffective, "copulation calls should be frequent and unrelated to male dominance rank", where screaming "may bring genetic benefits to females through facilitation of sperm competition"

So in some, more promiscuous primate species, screaming during sex happens regardless of the level of the male's dominance, and is used to attract other males to mate with after the first.

In other, less promiscuous primate species, screaming during sex happens only with dominant males, there with the intended effect of triggering that male to mate-guard the female and invest in rearing children with her.

Based on the limited data available, the researchers conclude their hypotheses seem to be supported in both cases.

This helps us nicely dovetail our anecdotal findings with the other things we know about why women scream during orgasm.

First off, a few more tidbits we'll also tie in:

• Men whose women are greater infidelity risks want more sex and get angrier at sexual rejection
• Men are more aroused (at an unconscious level) by sperm competition with other men
• Men ejaculate harder when they suspect a woman of infidelity (can't find a link for this one, but I've seen it)

Have you started to piece the puzzle together yet?

Here's one potential explanation of how we got to where we are:

1. Perhaps in some distant human ancestor female copulatory calls were most likely used to trigger sperm competition. That said, there's not a lot of current evidence to actually back up the claim that copulation calls attract competitor males in any primate species. Only a few studies of macaques and baboons show males will investigate female copulation calls. There's been no evidence I've come across that males will actually hear a screaming female, then line up to take a crack at sex with her after the male that made her scream departs (or is chased off). But let's say this actually did happen at some point back down the chain of distant human ancestry, perhaps among early hominids or pre-hominids.

2. As such, copulatory calls may signal sperm competition to a man, priming his ejaculation. If copulation calls originally served a purpose of attracting competitor males, they would also serve as signals to a male of sperm competition, which heightens male arousal and desire to mate with / impregnate the female. Thus, a copulating male will be more aroused, thus more likely to ejaculate, and ejaculate harder, when his female starts making these cries.

3. For that reason, females may have adapted to use copulatory calls to control male ejaculation and commitment. Because her calls can trigger the male to ejaculate and mate-guard, among a less promiscuous species, the female is under adaptive pressure to use those calls not to summon competitor males but instead when she wants to use the heightened arousal and desire to inseminate the calls create to prompt a male to ejaculate in her and mate-guard her. Thus, she is much more likely to use them with dominant males (whom she wants to inseminate her), particularly at the point of penis-in-vagina orgasm (during which time sperm retention goes up!). Because males are more likely to mate-guard females who engage in copulatory calls, females are able to use these calls to secure greater commitment from males they want commitment from.

4. The original behavior (using calls to attract competitors) was abandoned, and the calls came to serve a new function. There are many cases in evolution where a trait that evolved for one purpose was adapted to a different one. It is my proposition that female copulatory vocalizations evolved for mate competition but adapted to be used by females to procure sperm and commitment from dominant males.

Thus why human women scream during vaginal orgasm with dominant males:

• To prompt ejaculation by the male
• To prompt commitment/mate-guarding/parental investment by him

And thus, even though female copulatory calls no longer attract mobs of competitor males trying to elbow in for their shot at inseminating the female, the calls continue to trigger a deep part of the male brain that evolved originally to guard against getting out-competed for a female's reproductive resources.

 

The Psychology of This Stuff Is Really Fascinating, Isn't It?

So much of it is only semi-conscious.

Women will fake orgasms to get guys to ejaculate and finish sex.

They will also scream in delight during especially good sex -- apparently with the ultimate aim of triggering ejaculation.

If you've ever made a woman scream her brains out during sex, then didn't cum, you've probably seen how distressed she can get about this. She looks concerned, she asks you why you didn't cum, she gets extra sexual and goes back to working hard trying to make you cum, or she behaves in a way that shows you she's doubting herself a bit or has lost a little confidence. Even women who are normally selfish lovers often behave this way.

All of it because, apparently, the screaming behavior is designed to prompt male ejaculation and investment (and if it doesn't work, the female is going to assume something might be wrong with her, she might not be attractive enough, or that she is for whatever reason somehow losing her mojo or her man).

You can also look at guys who engage in all sorts of unusual sexual practices and realize it is likely really about this orgasmic high they get due to sperm competition. The study on men being aroused by sperm competition above actually found there is more two-guy-one-girl pornography on the net than there is two-girls-one-guy porn. Why do men like watching two dudes double-team a chick? Apparently because the sperm competition on-screen increases their arousal.

On that note, why do guys engage in things like cuckolding/bulling, go to sex clubs, become swingers, or visit prostitutes? Well among perhaps other reasons, sex in all these circumstances introduce sperm competition with other men, which amplifies these men's enjoyment of the sex and the strength of their ejaculations.

Curious stuff, human sexuality, isn't it?

Anyway, now you know a lot more about why women scream during orgasm:

It is, most likely, an adaptation of a behavior that used to be about one thing (prompting sperm competition) but came to be about something else (prompting insemination and investment from dominant males).

I will also add there's another side of this we didn't even touch on, which is the effect of climaxes on females.

Why among human females are orgasms so difficult to produce (to the point where only a quarter of women regularly orgasm during sex, and many women report never having had an orgasm from sex), yet so often wildly powerful when a woman meets a man who is able to make her climax?

That's a different question from our focus in this piece, although equally fun to discuss -- however, that's all I've got for today.

Happy shagging,

Chase

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