Noah Brand breaks down the nature and origins of cultural assumptions about male vs. female libidos.
A version of this post was previously published at No Seriously What About Teh Menz.
I recently came across an interesting post about a very interesting study concerning high-libido women. It was striking for me how much it resonated with my own experiences as a high-libido man, and very revealing in how it differed.
The study talks about how the women interviewed all described needing multiple relationships to be sexually satisfied, and I thought “Whoo, I know how that is.” It’s not practical for me to ask any one woman to be everything I want in a lover, so I stopped trying ten years ago. Polyamory has proven to be a much better fit for me emotionally and sexually. The study also talks about high-libido women consciously organizing their lives around sex to some degree, and again I thought “Oh yeah, right there with you.” I prioritize nookie over some things other folks might consider more important, and when I think about the things I consider successes in my own life, getting laid a lot tends to be near the top of the list.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say. My culture tells me I’m supposed to like sex, supposed to make it a high priority, indeed supposed to define my worth as a person by it. I’m a man, after all. The study also talks about very sexual women having to fight slut-shaming, both internal and external, and having to deal with a culture that wants to pretend they don’t exist. These are not problems I have as a very sexual man. One of the perks of male privilege, I guess.
Except that like all privilege, it’s got the fucked-up dark side. Yeah, I get validated by mainstream American culture, because I largely fit the stereotype of the horny dude. What about low-libido guys? They get erased and denied as much as high-libido women do, to say nothing of asexual folks. A guy who would rather finish his homework than fuck is basically flat-out told that he’s not a real man. That’s not cool, and it can’t be good for anyone’s GPA.
Hell, there have been occasions when I’ve told a sexual partner that I wasn’t in the mood. Of course, as a guy who questions gender assumptions and thinks deeply about these issues and so on, I was totally cool with saying that to them.
Nah, just kidding. It was awful. It was wrenching. I literally spent a lot of time trying to think of any alternative or excuse I could offer other than “I’m not in the mood,” and when I did say it, I felt like a failure. It felt like an admission of something shameful. I very keenly felt the idea that I had failed as a man by having one evening where I wasn’t wildly horny. And that’s going into it knowing that this stuff is bullshit.
So that’s the situation with regard to high-libido folks: horny men and horny women have, in my experience, a lot in common in terms of desires and lifestyles. However, we both deal with the same cultural shit that damages and constrains us in different ways. Not trying to say those ways are perfectly symmetrical or equivalent, just that I’m as validated by the current system as anyone is likely to be, and I still get mindfucked by cultural expectations.
Of course, assumptions about male libido, as godawful as they are, pale in comparison to the incredibly creepy cultural ideas about female libido. One of the earliest known postclassical joke books is the 15th-century Facetiae of Poggio, in which we find the following anecdote, presented in the painfully stiff English translation:
A woman who was once asked by a man, why, if the pleasure of cohabitation was equal for both sexes, it was generally the men who pursued and importuned the women rather than vice-versa, replied:
“It is a very wise custom that compels the men to take the initiative. For it is certain that we women are always ready for sex; not so you men, however. And we should therefore be soliciting the men in vain, if they happened to be not in the proper condition for it.”
Somewhat later, in the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we find this bit, described thus in the DVD package for those who don’t want to watch the video:
Larry is drifting off when Cheryl asks him, “Why am I the one that always has to initiate sex?” Larry explains that he’s always available, and all Cheryl has to do is tap him on the shoulder. Otherwise, he tells her, “I’ll just be mauling you all the time.”
In other words, it is the exact same joke, but the genders have been reversed. (Also, the original version had a perfectly good boner joke, but 21st-century assumptions are forced to omit it. This is not a net gain, from a comedy-writing standpoint.) What the hell happened between the 15th century and the 21st?
Okay, admittedly, several things happened. But the one we’re concerned with is that women’s libidos went from being considered as powerful or more so than men’s to being essentially erased. Pre-Renaissance examples of horny ladies abound, from the Greeks onward: make your own list, but do include Chaucer. He’s such fun. This change in attitudes appears to have been religiously motivated, and based on the idea that women are more spiritual and sacred than men, meaning “less horny.” Again, make your own list of contemporary leftovers of this attitude: there are plenty.
By the 18th century, it was taken as read that a woman who did experience (or at least express) sexual desire was suffering from a disorder. One important 1775 study of the subject linked the problem to “secret pollutions,” i.e. wanking, and (I swear I am not making this up) eating too much chocolate. I guess that’d go a ways toward explaining this advertisement. Women were diagnosed with, treated for, and often operated upon for “nymphomania,” the dread condition that causes a woman to want sex. (Talk to your doctor; you may suffer from it yourself!) And yes, by “operated upon”, I mean clitoridectomy. And yes, that’s fucking appalling.
Now, this is not an attempt to draw an equivalency, but I for one can’t help thinking of drapetomania, a disease discovered in the antebellum South which causes slaves to want to escape. It sounds like a tasteless joke now, but back then, it was the subject of serious research. In both cases, we’ve got authority telling people how they’re supposed to live, and then labeling any desire not to live that way as a mental illness. Again, not saying women’s libidos are the same issue as slavery, but there’s a structural analogy between the two “diseases.”
So yeah, this ugly idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex, doling it out carefully as a reward, the entire conception behind “sexual economy” nonsense and most misogynist conceptions of women: made up by the church 400 years ago. Total construction, and a relatively recent one at that. Commence dismantling all worldviews and Cosmopolitan articles predicated on it, please.
So, those are the two gross, ruinously fucked-up stereotypes we’ve got: men are expected to be constantly-horny fuckbeasts, and women are expected to not want sex all that much, but trade it for things they do want, like trinkets, cuddling, and babies. Both of these are wrong, but they remain insanely prevalent.
Take, for example, the “porn for women” joke done both by 30 Rock and the utterly godawful Porn For Women series of books, calendars, and assorted junk. The joke here is that women don’t want men to have sex with them, they want men to do housework, listen to their tedious female jabbering, and explicitly promise not to fuck them. So since women hate sex, porn for women should depict no sex whatsoever! Tee-hee!
In the real goddamn world, porn for women looks nothing like the joke. The two examples linked are all about images of hot men, but as the late, lamented On Our Backs demonstrated, lesbian porn for women is also hot and joyous. The disconnect between the joke and the reality is too wide to be funny.
We live in a world where yaoi manga sells too fast to be kept on the shelves, where slash fiction is one of the largest gift economies on earth, where romance novels comprise fifty percent of all paperback book sales, and we’re told women don’t like porn. Some of you may think romance novels aren’t porn. I suggest you read one. That’s how deeply invested our culture has become in the women-don’t-like-sex lie. We have to throw out basically all of the data to make that theory fit, so we blithely do just that.
This grotesque misrepresentation of women’s experience has, with the usual cruel duality of gender stereotypes, created a terrible problem for men. Because straight or bi men want to have sex with women. That’s… kind of the definition, really. We are told, however, that women don’t want sex. Thus, those of us who desire women must believe that we our desire is unwelcome, barely tolerated, and kind of gross. It’s like being biologically driven to fart in crowded elevators.
This, of course, feeds rape culture. Because after all, if there is no situation where any woman genuinely wants sex, then having sex with women who don’t want it… well, that’s just how it works, isn’t it? So if you have to trick her or get her insensibly drunk or lie to her or ignore all the times she says no… that’s basically how everyone does it, right? And there we start down the road of a lot of rape apologists, the “I’m entitled to sex, and women dole out sex as a rationed commodity, so if I rape a woman that’s basically like a starving man stealing bread” theory. I trust I don’t have to explain to anyone reading this how impossibly fucked up that line of thinking is. Short explanation: REALLY fucked up.
The other rape-apologist meme that arises out of this set of cultural assumptions is “Men always want sex, so they can’t help themselves.” Geez, your honor, she shouldn’t have tempted my urges like that. You shouldn’t dress that way because you know what men are like. If you dangle meat in front of the animal cage, don’t act surprised at what happens. You’ve heard these lines. They’re a perfect example of dual-direction ugliness, as they reduce men to animals and blame rape victims for the crimes committed against them. That’s horrible coming and going.
Male rape victims being mocked or disbelieved, or simply afraid to come forward? Arises from the same shit. Because after all, how could he say he didn’t want sex, when everyone knows all men constantly want sex? It’s on simply every sitcom! These poor guys may even tell themselves they must have wanted it, it couldn’t have been rape, because they’re normal healthy guys, right, so they couldn’t have not wanted sex. People will go a long way to rationalize something if it means finding a way to live with it.
The libido meme feeds the same culture from yet another angle too, with women who are afraid to give enthusiastic consent because they don’t want to be seen as one of those women, those rare freaks who really like to fuck, those awful sluts. Unable to ask for what they want or even admit how much they want it, they end up feeding the same kinds of thinking, the same stereotypes, the same ugly behaviors. Lacking the freedom to say yes, they lose the ability to say no, leading to a terrible and all-too-common outcome: a woman who wanted to fool around a bit with a guy, but didn’t want things to go as far as they did, and now she isn’t sure if it was wrong, because if she wanted something, she must have wanted everything, right? There’s no middle ground in the virgin/whore dichotomy.
High-libido women may not get caustic agents up their ladybusiness any more, as was a popular 19th-century treatment for “nymphomania”, but they still get slut-shamed for being on the wrong side of that same old dichotomy. Being told that only sluts and whores want what they want may lead them to decide “Okay, I’m a slutty whore” and behave according to what they think that means. This can lead to a lot of bad and painful choices, when thinking “I’m a woman who likes plenty of sex” might have led to some better ones.
Then, too, there are the low-libido fellas, the guys for whom fucking just isn’t that high a priority. They’re told that they don’t exist, that they’re not men, that their experience is either mythical or deeply wrong. A lot of these guys will try to have sex just to prove that they’re “normal,” and being driven by a desperate need to fit in, rather than by their own natural urges, may lead them to make bad choices. Maybe they’ll hurt themselves with those choices. Maybe they’ll hurt someone else. Maybe they won’t hurt anyone, just feel lonely and freakish and wrong their whole lives. None of these outcomes are okay.
The way we think about libido in our culture now is deeply broken. It involves denying the experience of damn near every person alive, everyone who doesn’t fit into a binary men-horny/women-not framework, and since human experience falls into a spectrum far more subtle and complex than that, that’s everyone. Feminism has made a good start on helping women embrace their sexuality in a healthy way, as some of our blog friends are living exemplars of, but that’s only a start. We have a lot of work yet to do.
Read more from our special “Polyamory” section.
—Photo: The_Gut/Flickr
About Noah Brand
“It’s like being biologically driven to fart in crowded elevators.”
BEST LINE EVER!!!!
As well, this is an excellent article Noah. Excellent indeed.
I’m a young woman with a high libido. As such, it’s not really a secret that I really enjoy sex. I don’t feel like I should really hide that fact. But even among my friends (especially my female friends!) they tend to make comments to my boyfriend when I’m not around, as if a) he doesn’t know, or b) doesn’t keep me satisfied, then I’m likely to look elsewhere or something. What bothers me is that even my friends have this mindset that since I am a sexual being, then it doesn’t matter who it is that I’m fucking, because I have a high libido and that makes me at risk for being a whore. To me it matters quite a bit, I would like to keep sex to relationships, and it’s not just that I love sex, but that I love sex specifically with my boyfriend. That intimacy really enhances sex for us. The emotional connection makes it so much better. That nuance is lost on them.
Yes. This absolutely happens. After seven years of monogamous marriage to my husband there are still raised eyebrows and questions to him because I talk openly about things like liking pornography, ogle males as openly as my male friends ogle women, ogle women with my male friends who are ogling women, discuss my fondness for my vibrator when topics of ‘spanking it’ arise (teehee) and relay stories of impressive sexual exploits of my youth at times when my male friends are doing the same.
Despite the ring on my finger and my, i’m sure, sickeningly happy marital relationship and plenty of stories about loving sex with my husband I still have to give some of the more clueless males I know the “I’m a married woman and we’re just friends, even though we once talked about how I like porn in the middle of that huge discussion of all our friends discussing porn, sorry.”
Yea, I like sex, nobody is tricking me into fucking my husband’s brains out. In fact, I married him because he gets that. I am tired of being treated like the town bicycle because I am as vocal as my male friends about enjoying sex. It’s archaic. If you’re wondering why they’re my friends, when things like this come up, I do too.
You and I should be friends. Because then we can sit down, have a drink, and talk about enjoying pornography, vibrators and masturbation (I’m never giving up masturbation), ogling men and women, and enjoying our monogamous sex life with the understanding that even as high libido women who probably like some mindless fucking occasionally, we don’t go sleep around because we made the choice to be monogamous. I direct almost all my sexual energy toward my boyfriend, and I’m sure the same goes for you. Why don’t people think that our SOs are the luckiest men on Earth, instead of questioning our character?
Different women get turned on by different people and situations…
Maybe seeing David Beckham or George Clooney is going to turn some women (okay, a lot of women) on….for me, it’s Viggo Mortensen or Aiden Quinn (looking forlorn and vulnerable)….or my husband when I’m not mad at him (and he did something really great with our kid or with our friends…or when he does something really thoughtful and unexpected)……
Personally, looking at male porn wouldn’t do it for me….I like Viggo and Aiden fully clothed and acting some scene in some historical looking picture (my weird preference, I guess)….
Perhaps you could ask women what turns them on…I bet you would get a lot of different answers…..
The character Kahl Drogo from Game of Thrones. The actor in the HBO series has an awesome behind.
“or my husband when I’m not mad at him”
They way you wrote that makes it sound an awful lot like that is the default state of your relationship. Which is a scary thought.
Gah, must proof-read. That should have started with a “The” not a “They”.
I know it’s a myth! I know plenty of women that are frequently horny… as long as I’m not around.
(rim shot)
“In both cases, we’ve got authority telling people how they’re supposed to live, and then labeling any desire not to live that way as a mental illness.” I know homosexuality was once considered a mental illness as well, and unfortunately I know a lot of people who still believe it is.
Also this article is ****ing amazing and I’m going to share it on all the social medias I can find. Good job!
I’m glad to see such a well-written piece that flies directly in the face of media and the culture relative to libido – male and female. This blog post is a keeper and will be the catalyst for many discussions. Thank you, Noah.
I really liked this article. You could say my standard way of operating is all women are sluts. Because if you really break it down being a slut is enjoying sex. So normal would be enjoying sex and thats what society calls a slut. When I was married my wife said that I was the only person that could call her a slut because she knew I wasn’t being mean. I’ve operated with this mindset since about seventy two.
But its a wonderful way to be because my wife and girlfriends can talk freely about what turns them on and off. So things can happen like; my wife and a lady I knew in undergrad were walking down the street and a sexy woman walks by. Instead of the sneaky glance I did a big lear and turn; it was a sort of joke between my wife and I. The woman with us said Are you goin to let him get away with that? My wife laughed and said, He’s married not dead. What the lady friend didn’t know was that later that night I took my blind (she was born with RP) wife to a lovers hotel room for a wild night of sex. I picked her up at a diner the next morning. We had three-somes at times. But it was a very abusive relationship. Just because you have fun in bed and one of the two people is very emotionally mature doesn’t mean that its not a really bad relationship.
Absolutely love this article!
Decent article, quite informative. However this struck me as odd – “Except that like all privilege, it’s got the fucked-up dark side.” – If it has a darkside, a negative, how exactly is it a privilege?
I think he’s saying that when a privilege becomes an expected way of behaving, then it has a “fucked-up dark side.” So like…in this case men can have a high libido and not be called sluts…but low libido men are somehow seen as less masculine. And like…well what we’ve talked about with women in the military. It’s a privilege to not be expected to give up our lives for our country…but the dark side is that when women do want to join the military their femininity is questioned and they are limited in their roles within the military.
Or I’ll add another one for women that’s a bit more on topic for this article – women are privileged with regards to sex and sexuality in that they can experiment more without having their sexual identity called into question. But the dark side to that is that a self-identified lesbian often has a hard time convincing people that she isn’t just experimenting.
Ah ok, I always found the privilege idea quite strange since I try to judge things on the whole. A privilege here n there needs to be weighed up with the alternatives and what responsibility is applied to it, every privilege seems to have a responsibility or negative associated with it. I see the term used in a way that describes a benefit without a negative which always makes me wonder wtf. The dictionary meaning tends to imply there is no negative yet many I see listed generally do have negatives.
Ahhh the wonders of the world, so many dynamics interlinked!
“Ahhh the wonders of the world, so many dynamics interlinked!” – so true.
Yeah there’s a crazy discussion of privilege over at this article. I think privilege is more like…when the benefit outweighs the negative…which I guess is very subjective. Or like…there are privileges that don’t come with a direct negative. – or where the negative is to a small group inside the largely privileged group.
I dunno, I think gender-specific privilege is especially complicated. It’s very rarely..one side has it awesome and the other side is totally screwed.
Excellent points about yet another flawed gender binary out there.
I’m guessing most people would say that it’s not so black and white. Most people would say that stereotypically men have a higher libido than women, as a general tendency. I don’t think anyone I know would say categorically men are horny and women aren’t.
I don’t think I’m in denial or trapped in some sort of gender construct (how would I know anyway?), but I’m still finding it hard to believe that the average woman has as high a libido as the average man, or that men and women are essentially equal in their sex drives. As mentioned elsewhere, if this is true than I and most of the men I know have been incredibly unlucky. We’ve rolled snake eyes twnety times out of twenty. Or, we’ve been consistently lied to or misled by our partners, who must have had other outlets somewhere.
There’s no doubt a bias at work here. It’s a lot easier to remember the times I was rejected than the times she wanted to as much as I did. Maybe I’ve forgotten times in which she wanted sex and I turned her down. Those times must be so deeply locked away in my memory that I don’t even know of their existence. I can count those times on one hand.
When you’re in a particular moment and one person is in the mood and the other isn’t, then in that moment it doesn’t seem to matter if libido is relative or absolute. So, I can see how people select those moments, add them up, and voila, there’s the binary – I want it and they don’t.
I’d say it’s likely a large number of women have the potential to have a larger libido, but don’t know what they’re looking for or how to get it. If you’d never had an orgasm, would you really be all that interested in sex? Probably not.
I agree 200%!!!
Exactly. It’s easy for men to orgasm, but it took me six freaking years to find mine–and the solution was surprisingly simple!
I agree with “That Guy”, that there is variance. It’s not so black and white. But I do think that many women like sex a lot WITH someone they love, not with just anyone who passes by. I must say that when I am in a highly sexual relationship I tend to think about sex more. It’s like I go dormant otherwise. And in marriage with kids it’s easy to let things like sex fall to the wayside not only because we re-prioritize, but because of the changes that happen in a marriage. So, like many women, I didn’t have all that much sex with my husband (but for lots of other reasons, too.) And I don’t think a high sex drive means you have to have mulitple partners, either. Not at all! I just think you need to stay in good communication and playful and open with the lover you have. If you want more, fine, if it’s not sneaky. But me? I just want the one. And lots of it please. – Alexa
You raise a good point here about going dormant. I suspect that on the whole women’s libidos are more susceptible to hibernating than men’s libidos. At least that’s my experience. I’ve been in committed relationships in which my partner goes through times in which she simply forgot that sex exists. Oh yeah, that thing we used to do. It had slipped my mind.
I just have a hard time believing that very many men could just forget about sex. Maybe I just need more hobbies. It seems inconceivable that I would go very long without thinking about it.
IA. No one is arguing simply that men are horny, women aren’t. But let’s be real-men in general are just more interested in sex and get more pleasure from sex than women in general. Sex is generally mre of a male prerogative, and I dont see the controversy in that. Token super horny women and token not so horny man exist, but let’s be real things aren’t usually like that.
I just have a hard time believing that very many men could just forget about sex
Yep. Sex is a very, very big part of the average man’s life
Hmmm….i not entirely convinced. I think there is a very real biological imbalance in sex drive between the avg man and avg woman that is, unfortunately, fully exploited. Pretending we’re exactly the same when we’re not isn’t progress.
Random_Stranger, I too like to look for scientific explanations. I really detest arguments that the current state of affairs developed simply because “the church wanted to oppress women.” That’s just silly, does anyone really think a group of bishops got together and had a formal “How can we oppress people today?” discussion?
Fortunately, in this instance, the science supports the theory. Amartya Sen, among other development economists, pointed out that a drop in fertility usually precedes economic development. In many disparate cultures that successfully achieved industrialization, some manner of social organization served to restrict fertility. In Europe, this was a proliferation of Victorian-esque morals (whcih actually predated Queen Victoria by over a century). In Japan, a similar set of social beliefs began to emerge in the 1600s and 1700s, enabling Japan to also rapidly industrialize, and in China it was the one-child policy which started the current boom we see today.
In each case, the method is different, but the results are the same: fertility drops and the nation becomes more successful. If you look up articles in Development Economics, you can find this demonstrated very convincingly with a wide variety of statistics and historical surveys.
Thankfully, in today’s wonderful world of contraceptive choices, there’s no need for the old social structures that once served the same function. Unfortunately, the introduction of new technology didn’t do away with the old social system, the vestiges of which we are still dealing with today. But that doesn’t mean we should let it hold us back.
RE: Fertility rates.
Isn’t that mostly because the healthcare gets better, survival rates for children rises so they don’t need to have multiple kids to ensure at least 1 survives + also not needing the children to work to bring in income?
exactly correct. fertility rates are inversely correllated with with survival rates.
Noah, I was with you until you used the flawed and meaningless term “rape culture.”
Nobody says women aren’t horny. Nobody says women don’t want sex. This myth doesn’t exist and the premise of this piece is without merit. This article exploits a stereotype, and it does so at the expense at having a real conversation about real differences between men and women that this author and too many people try to sterilize.
Good point. I’ll never understand why people try to ignore all forms of sexual dimorphism that are not visible to the naked eye. Sometimes you get the “true believers” who try to explain those away as well.
What I love the best is when people argue that the existence of a few individual exceptions disprove a general rule.
“What I love the best is when people argue that the existence of a few individual exceptions disprove a general rule.”
If the “general rule” is being paraded as a “universal truth” then a few exceptions would disprove the rule. Just fyi.
The tails do not define the distribution… (just FYI)
We weren’t talking about statistics or averages. You are correct, outliers can be disregarded from the general trend. However you used the word “rule” which implies a universal. In order to disprove the universal, all that is required is a single exception.
In application to this topic: what is an assumptive “general trend” (men being hornier than women) is frequently touted as the stereotypical universal rule of “men are always hornier than women.” In that case, my own relationship would prove this to be untrue and therefore not a universal rule.
OK- I hear that. Going from “general rule” where known exceptions exist to universal truth is wrong and can be hurtful to the people who don’t tend to fit into the neat boxes.
My argument would be that there is so much variation among and between the genders in regards to sex that a “general rule” would be so vague as to not be helpful or informative and be rarely applicable.
And that is where we differ. Credible research points out clear and definite differences between the gender distributions. Ignoring information because you don’t like the conclusions isn’t advancing anyone’s understanding of anything.
I agree. I’m guessing that the two libidos are like overlapping bell curves: Some women are more horny than most men, and some men are less horny than most women, but there are general tendencies for men to be higher on average.
There’s a third choice between totally equal and completely opposite.
NAILED IT.
This article is absolutely perfect. It just encompasses everything that has bothered me about this stereotype/myth and articulates it in a much clearer way than I ever have. I bought into this myth for years until I entered into a sexual relationship and realized it just was not true. Getting to the point where I realized it was not true was pretty rocky though.
Thanks for writing this. It’s always nice to know someone out there “gets it.”
I’m probably stirring the pot here….but do you think some of the differences in sex drive btw men and women is contextual? Seems like when women express desire for sex, its predominantly in context with a committed partner while men appear to desire a series of fleeting one-time partners. If true, this may explain why female sexuality is more private than male sexuality which by contrast, is more in the public square.
(and yes, I just committed the cardinal sin of men are like this and women are like that)
“but do you think some of the differences in sex drive btw men and women is contextual? Seems like when women express desire for sex, its predominantly in context with a committed partner while men appear to desire a series of fleeting one-time partners.”
I honestly have no idea. I don’t know anyone (male or female) who really does the “one-time partner” thing. Except for one of my female friends who went through a break-up and had one horrible one-night stand. So I can’t really speak for any differences between genders there. Perhaps you have had different experiences.
“If true, this may explain why female sexuality is more private than male sexuality which by contrast, is more in the public square.”
I would say that female sexuality is more private than male sexuality, but I would attribute that to social judgment of female sexuality. Women who do want one-night stands would be unlikely to openly admit it, because then they would just be called sluts and whores.
The only way I could see there being a disparity in wanting sex in a relationship vs. outside of a relationship would be…. bad sex. For men, I get the impression that “bad sex” can still be pretty good, unless someone ends it mid-session crying or lays there like a fish or something. For women, “bad sex” is pretty horrible. I have had bad sex and I would have rather been taking a shower or writing a paper. It was not like sex at all, I was not remotely aroused. And I think it’s really easy for men to be bad at sex. So as much as I would like to fantasize about one-night stands, I would probably not run the risk of having terrible sex and rather spend time finding someone who gets to know what I like sexually.
Basically: women require more work to enjoy themselves during sex, some men don’t seem to know that/care, so women may not see it worth taking a chance on a one-night stand, whereas this problem would not exist for men. That is the only way I could really see there being a disparity between the sexes wanting sex within vs. outside the relationship.
Just a theory, feel free to input.
Coming from a slut, thank you so much for this! I hate the assumption that when I have sex with a guy, I’m only doing it because want jewelry, because I have low self esteem, or because I was tricked. I’m not a fucking gatekeeper.
Women (generally speaking) are, in fact, the gatekeepers of sex. That they are the gatekeepers of sex does not mean that they are only gatekeepers when it comes to sex. Women and men both enjoy sex equally, but men tend to want it with greater frequency and more indiscriminately than women owing to biological differences. It is this particular asymmetry than animates much of the goings-on in sexual marketplace.
Once again—-women are the gatekeepers of sex…but they are not only gatekeepers when it comes to sex.
Why is this so hard to understand?
haha, so all of you people up above saying this myth does not exist, please see dragnet’s response as Exhibit A that this myth does indeed exist.
“Why is this so hard to understand?”
Loving the condescension, it is fantastic. Maybe it’s hard to understand because it is not true for the women posting here. Maybe it’s been true in your experience. But you have a whole bunch of people here saying it is not true for them, and that Noah has helped dispel this myth that you are perpetuating.
“Women (generally speaking) are, in fact, the gatekeepers of sex. ”
I am not. If you generalize women to be gatekeepers of sex, then you expect them to be, and when they are not, they are called sluts because they run counter to expectations. Such expectations hurt women like me and like Aya, who enjoy having sex and having sex frequently.
Also, I have a higher sex drive than my boyfriend, so we generally have sex when he is interested. Would I call him the gatekeeper for sex? The person who is denying me access to having sex except when he feels like it? Nope, because that point of view does not make a healthy relationship. He is not denying me access because he is not interested. He is just not horny. The idea of a gatekeeper implies that a person is forbidding access, which is an incredibly twisted way of looking at a sexual relationship.
Great article! Looks like you’ve thought about this a lot.
http://www.google.fi/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psychologie.uzh.ch%2Fsowi%2Fteam%2Freips%2Fpapers%2FISDP_JPSP.pdf&ei=zIaZR7_gI5jAwwGvhuW7Bw&usg=AFQjCNEinA2pfGKUit4-szWefANR6wHBiA&sig2=vlJW4kYL1BqX9nE8zqZ_9g
Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests From 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands.
“This study provides the largest and most comprehensive test yet conducted on whether the sexes differ in the desire for sexual variety. The results are strong and conclusive – the sexes differ, and these differences appear to be universal. Men not only possess a greater desire than women do for a variety of sexual partners, men also require less time to elapse than women do before consenting to sexual intercourse, and men tend to more actively seek short-term mate ships than women do. These sex differences are cross-culturally robust and statistically significant regardless of whether mean, median, distributional, or categorical indexes of sexual differentiation are evaluated. These sex differences are robust and significant regardless of the measures used to evaluate them.”
Okay I haven’t read that…but here’s the thing…the problem isn’t whether there are some general trends that can be observed cross-culturally or not. Are women more likely to seek long-term sexual relationships? Are men more likely to seek short-term sexual relationships? Maybe…but that’s not what’s at issue.
The problem is when these trends have a value placed on them…when doing something outside of these trends becomes something worthy of shame and derision. It’s one thing to say, most men behave in such-and-such a way with regards to sex….it’s quite another to say most men _should_ behave in such-and-such a way with regards to sex. And so the problem with studies like that isn’t what they find…it’s how that information is often used. Instead of people looking back and going…hmm that’s interesting…that sort of study gets used to justify sexual stereotypes.
Hope you get what I’m saying.
then the message in these articles should be – a minority of people do not fit this rule that tends to be true in most cases.
I’ve seen men BROKEN over very specific women just as often as I’ve seen men on the prowl for pussy. If we focus on stereotypes, are these men weird and feminine in the same way that high libido women with wandering eyes are sluts? It’s important to understand trends, but it’s also important not to fixate on them, make them the ‘normal’, or use them as excuses. I appreciate when people get away from focusing on the ‘men are like this’ and ‘women are like this’ thing. That’s why I appreciate this article.
If I end up falling for someone I have sex with–I’m just being the stereotypical woman. It’s simply my womanly bits getting to my brain. If I don’t or get bored–I’m just a slut. And easy, insecure, tricked, and obviously game for whomever/whatever. I’m somewhere in the middle of it all, and it’s changed during various stages of my life. And I’ve been with (sexually) and been friends with men who span the range of major player to incredibly in love with one girl and one girl only. And even a lot of them have changed their views (in one direction or the other) throughout the course of their lives. I’ve been able to have casual sex with men and can barely remember their name now. I’ve also fallen in lust and even love after sex with certain men. Can we get away from the black and white of it all?
Aya, I completely agree.
Talking about general trends may be helpful from a statistical point of view, but it erases all variety, of which there is A LOT. It is more beneficial to discuss the vast amounts of variety in sexual attitudes and behavior than the average, because it doesn’t create norms for genders that are harmful for those outliers.
If we don’t discuss the variety and those people who fall outside general trends, then people who don’t fit those trends are just considered “abnormal” and are open for judgment and shame (as we have already pointed out with the whole “slut/whore” terminologies that exist for women).
Basically, general trends are not useful when discussing sexual behavior, and the focus should not be on them.
Wow. Studies of mostly college students, and they claim that the only way a cultural explanation could be plausible would be if cultural norms developed independently to the same result? Cultures have never really developed independently, so it should never be a surprise that cultural phenomena are similar in distant places, but it should especially not surprise anyone that college populations should show lots of common features given the degree of communication and mutual influence in such institutions. In other words, this is a typical example of what’s wrong with far too much evolutionary psychology. The explanation is assumed to be genetic because the inability of people who obviously haven’t bothered to study or seriously think about social/cultural phenomena to think of any social/cultural explanations conclusively establishes that there couldn’t be any.
Before you throw social/cultural phenomena into the ring as a causative factor you should at least be able to design an experiment to test it….
It seems like culture and social factors get used as a “catch all” dismissive whenever research comes up with a conclusion that someone doesn’t like.
Almost all the credible research around libido that I have seen shows that men tend to have a higher libido than women. However, that does not preclude the existence of women who have higher libidos than many men.
This whole comment thread seems like Manute Bol saying his height would be average if more people were not culturally driven to think short rather than accepting the fact that he was a true outlier.
I absolutely agree that society should be more accepting of people who do not fit the general mold. However, lets not pretend that measurable differences do not exist.
I’m sorry, I must have missed the experiment to test if genes were a causal factor in the study cited. Perhaps because it wasn’t there? But the evidence of social/cultural factors being huge is, well, huge. And yet they are dismissed as an explanation on the basis of absolutely laughable controls whenever a study gets a result that seems to confirm stereotypes.
Other research seems to indicate that men and women lie about their interest in sex and their sexual histories. There may be some biological reason men would lie and exaggerate their libido and women would lie and understate it, but that would be moderately surprising. In any event, this paper doesn’t even consider whether such lying behavior might be biological or social/cultural, as it doesn’t seem to consider that lying might be a factor; one of countless examples of this paper simply ignoring well-established research or highly plausible alternatives that might get in the way of drawing a stereotype-reinforcing conclusion.
A simple example- androgens are hormones that regulate libido (among other things). Higher levels of certain androgens correllate with higher sex drive in both men and women. Men tend to produce far more of these androgens than women. Now are you going to present a cultural explanation of dimorphic androgen production?
Again, this does not preclude the fact that some women do have very high libidos. However, there is an absolute mountain of credible evidence out there that indicates sexual dimorphism in terms of libido. Its OK that the average man has a higher libido than the average women.
If men and women on average have the same libido, then the message is quite clear: if your libido doesn’t match that of your current partner, you can simply find someone else whose level matches yours. There’s no need to put up with mismatched libido. It’s just a matter of looking until you find the right match, and theoretically there are equal numbers of men and women for each level of libido. You will never have to put up with a partner who doesn’t want it as much as you do.
Is this the conclusion we should come to?
If your libidos are dramatically mismatched, then yes, I would find it likely that such a relationship would be difficult and probably not last. Every partner needs to make some concessions, no one will be perfectly matched, but if it is a difference of you wanting sex every day and your partner wanting sex every month, that will probably be difficult to compromise on.
People who don’t want to have sex very frequently will probably be happier with people who have similar libidos rather than deal with nagging for sex or feeling guilty for not being able to fulfill their partner. And vice versa.
I would highly recommend people find partners with similar libidos. As long as its within an acceptable range for you, I wouldn’t think there would be a problem. I think a couple times a week is pretty standard, so I would be surprised if you couldn’t find anyone to meet that. Once you get to the extremes (sex once every year and sex like 5 times a day) I imagine anyone would have more difficulty finding an appropriate partner. And it’s hard to have a lot of leeway at those extremes.
This is excellent. You see everyone’s side in a very human, caring way.
Bravo.
Oh my god, this article is so spot on. Thank you Noah Brand! I work for a company called OneTaste that teaches about female orgasm. and we cringe to hear women say they just don’t really like sex. Of course, we know it is the conditioning, not the women (i.e, her nature) speaking. We know that on a deep level, as Noah so perfectly pointed to, all humans are meant to enjoy sex. The conditioning Noah speaks of is really a sad state of affairs, having men in a constant position of reaching forward, grasping for sex, while women are pulled back holding the lock AND the key to the exact thing both men and women are so hungry for: Connection. Deeply engaged and pleasurable sex. Play. Intimacy. I want women everywhere to read this article, to know that great sex is possible for them and that it doesn’t have to look like the sex on the menu. There is so much more available. And I think it has to start with women being willing to admit that they are hungry for sex and for men admitting they aren’t sure how to navigate women’s sexuality. What will it take for women and men to admit this?
You are so right. I was in an abusive relationship that my wife was an abuse survivor and she was totally cut off from the idea of pleasurable sex. Often after the sex I would want to cuddle and enjoy the after-glow and see would be pushing me away. Apparently guilty about enjoying the wam bam sex we did have. It’s just so sad.