<< Summary and Comparisons of Female and Male >>

    1.    More than a score of the elements which have been recognized in the physiology of sexual response have been discussed in the present chapter. Females and males do not differ in regard to any of these basic elements. Because of differences in anatomy, the processes in the two sexes may differ in details. Tumescence, for instance, is most noticeable in the male in the erection of his penis, and most noticeable in the female in the erection of the nipples of her breasts and of the clitoris and labia minora; but the physiologic bases of these several events are essentially identical. The female and male are quite alike, as far as the data yet show, in regard to the changes in pulse rate, the changes in blood pressure, the peripheral circulation of blood, the tumescence, the increase in respiration, the possible development of an anoxia, the loss of sensory perception, and the development of rhythmic muscular movements, even including rhythmic pelvic thrusts.
    2.    Orgasm is a phenomenon which appears to be essentially the same in the human female and male. This is somewhat surprising, since orgasm appears to occur only infrequently among the females of the infra-human mammalian species.
    3.    Females appear to be capable of responding to the point of orgasm as quickly as males, and there are some females who respond more rapidly than any male. The usual statement that the female is slower in her capacity to reach orgasm is unsubstantiated by any data which we have been able to secure. But because females are less often stimulated by psychologic factors, they may not respond as quickly or as continuously as males in socio-sexual relationships.
    4.    In general, the after-effects of orgasm in the female do not differ in any essential way from those in the male. Ejaculation occurs in the adult male, and there is no such phenomenon in the female; but ejaculation depends upon a minor anatomic distinction between the female and male, and not upon any fundamental differences in the physiology of the two sexes.

In spite of the widespread and oft-repeated emphasis on the supposed differences between female and male sexuality, we fail to find any anatomic or physiologic basis for such differences. Although we shall subsequently find differences in the psychologic and hormonal factors which affect the responses of the two sexes, males would be better prepared to understand females, and females to understand males, if they realized that they are alike in their basic anatomy and physiology.

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