Sex Drive

It’s an accepted assumption in our culture that men have a stronger sex drive then women do. I don’t think that’s true, partly because other cultures see women as the sexual and uncontrolled ones and partly from simple anecdotal, frustrated observation of how our culture refuses to acknowledge women’s sexual desires and artificially conflates all of men’s romantic desires to sex.

Men certainly talk more about sex in our culture then women do. But there is an obvious explanation for it and it isn’t nature.

My groups of friends are, generally speaking, socially liberal and very accepting of me in particular. They’ve taken all sorts of weirdness from me in stride but I’ve found that often even very different friends will be similarly uncomfortable if I talk about sex too much. More specifically if I talk about sexual desire too much. And I don’t even talk about sex all that often!

Strangely, talking with other women about sex in terms of what their partners want seems to be more acceptable then talking about what they want. I think this has the interesting effect of making women think they are strange (or sluts) if they do think about wanting sex.

I’ve personally known about (i.e. not urban legends) several women who have either divorced or seriously considered divorce from their husbands because they weren’t having as much sex as they wanted.

On the other side, there is a cultural perception that all men want is sex. Obviously, this isn’t accurate either, not only do many men want romantic connection and love but some have a low libido and much less of an interest in sex then our culture says is normal. (A little bit of a side issue but this study is great in showing that teenage boys are, surprise, surprise, human beings who are perfectly capable of complex emotion beyond lust, love for example).

In practice, surely many people have realized during their life times that there is a wide variety of sex drives in both men and women and pay little attention to the stereotype, but I think the cultural narrative is still harmful.

This post was inspired by one of those women I mentioned above. I think a loving relationship between two people with widely differing sex drives is a tragedy that is often without a really good solution.

The stereotypes create expectations and depression in those that don’t fit them and prevent people from being more open in thinking about such potential problems.

I do think we’ve made progress in acknowledging that women have sexual desires but I’m not at all sure that we’ve made progress in acknowledging that men can have little sexual desire or have desires that aren’t sexual.