Do men have a stronger sex drive than women? The question came up last week because, in one of those quirky moments that modern life provides where you’re not sure if you’re living in a sitcom, the actress Alyssa Milano called on women to start a sex strike in protest to US abortion laws.
It kicked up a great big fuss, because various other women said: wait, hang on, I enjoy sex, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be a thing that I grant to a man like a favour. But it also caused a lot of hilarity, when a bunch of men said things like “women may CLAIM to like sex, but you really don’t”, or “I have yet to meet a hetero woman who enthusiastically participates in sex”. (I’m not going to link: they’ve been piled on enough already.)
As people pointed out, this is what the kids today call a spectacular self-own. “I have yet to meet a hetero woman who enthusiastically participates in sex WITH ME”, they rephrased. Or, alternatively, “People hate food, it’s a known fact! Just ask anyone I’ve ever cooked for.”
It’s obviously true that the “women don’t enjoy sex” guys are wrong: women do enjoy sex. A slightly more interesting question is whether, on average, they want it as much as men do. And the answer, there, is almost certainly no.
The most famous research on the subject is a 2001 meta-analysis by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, combining the results of 150 earlier studies. You can’t measure “sex drive” directly, so the study looked at a wide range of proxy measures. They found that men had more frequent sexual “thoughts, fantasies, and spontaneous arousal” – for instance, one study they looked at reported that “nearly all the men (91%) but only half the women (52%) experienced sexual desire several times a week or more”.
Men’s “desired frequency of sex” was higher, too, throughout the lifetime of a relationship: one study found that “wives consistently reported that they were quite satisfied with the amount of sex they had in their marriages, but men on average wished for about a 50% increase”, another that “a majority of husbands (60%) but only a minority of wives (32%) said they would prefer to have sex more often”.
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