Who has the stronger sex drive: Men or Women?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I completely derailed this thread, so I figured the best thing to do was start another. I didn’t put this in GD because, in my mind, there is no shame in getting moved to GD, while getting moved from GD is quite embarassing.

Here are some of the posts from the derailed thread to catch you up, but this is not exhaustive, so you may be interested in reading it proper:

I brought up the multi-billion dollar porn industry catering to men as evidence that men masturbate more than women. Refutations of that were the romance novel market, the alt.sex author who got published, and the fact that women may simply just fantasize without material aid. Personally, I think the porn industry is the better evidence by its sheer magnitude, but further debate of that is welcome. For instance, the porn industry dwarfs the romance novel industry by orders of magnitude.

Here’s my final reply to that thread that made me realize how far off the OP I had gotten, and thus I decided instead to open this new thread here:

Why do I get the feeling I have crossed a politically correct boundary? Since I’m no fan of political correctness, I welcome the debate.

Here’s a review of a book titled The Social Dimension of Sex:

I found several other potential cites, but they all appeared to be of book reviews (for different books) on the same Journal of Sex Research site.

In fairness, there is apparently “heated debate” over the published theory (Baumeister, 2000) that males have a higher sex drive than females. Why there would be a debate is a mystery to me, as it seems that there is consensus on the fact that males have a more or less continual sex drive, whereas females have a discontinuous (usually cyclic) sex drive.

So I suppose the argument could be that when a woman is (due to her cycle) particularly horny, she is several orders of magnitude more horny than the average guy is. Somehow this rings hollow to me. Then again, I have had girlfriends who had stronger libidos than I did at certain stages of their cycles, so I suppose it is not altogether unreasonable. But these stages usually lasted about a week every month, and the other three weeks I tended to have the stronger libido. In my book, three weeks is more than one week.

At this point I tend to still believe my original assertion, but now some skepticism has creeped in. Could somebody please post any cites at all stating that women masturbate more freqeuntly than men and/or have a higher sex drive in general?

2

Because this is in in IMHO and not GD or GQ, do you not want opinions?

I think the cites are going to determine that men have a higher sex drive than women, because that is the conception of our society, in general. I think it highly depends on stage of life (I would say age, but I think it differes for everyone) and personality.

In my experience, my girl friends and I demand and crave more from our partners than they seem driven to give. And it seems to be a bit intimidating to them, mostly because they think they are not adequately filling a role ascribed to them by everyone else.

I don’t know if this is what you are looking for, but I am unable to give a GD caliber reply, that forum intimidates me.

3

In general, men have a higher drive during their teens and twenties and women have a higher (or more equal one) starting in their late twenties to their forties.

This is only in general though. I’m 22 and male and my sex drive is fairly low, especially in comparison to one of my femal friends of the same age that’s got one that’s higher than a lot of teenaged boys.

Stereotypes only go so far.

4

I agree that alot depends on age and prior experience–for either gender.

I know the above quote is true for me. But I would say that women are as proscribed in those role expectations as men. It appears that if a woman does not follow the expected porno “script” (in other words, perhaps achieves orgasm NOT thru the fav ways depicted in conventional porn) that many men don’t have a clue, become uncomfortable and also intimidated by these women.

My “cites”? Purely anecdotal, but it’s about 10 women of all races and SES…

Which sorta makes us look for other outlets, ya know? Sex for alot of women is all in the head(or at least it starts in the head)–if you don’t appeal to the mind, you can forget it. IOW, looking at naked men in various positions may well induce some sort of arousal in me, for example–but it won’t be acted on unless there is a bit more there–no, not a “happily ever after”, but more than just a picture. It is not enough in itself–seems a bit simplistic and kinda boring, actually. Now, give me porn with a decent plot, some non-pimply-assed people, something to sink my teeth into (so to speak)–and now we’re cooking with gas!
By no means do I speak for all women here–just some observations over 40+ years.

5

I’m not particularly interested in who has a bigger sex drive, but I’ll address what you said about it being in unPC territory. The problem isn’t that one sex might have a significantly bigger sex drive than the other, the problem is when people assume men have a bigger sex drive and then use that as a “biological proof” that women shouldn’t be free to have sex without social consequences but that men should, since somehow men just can’t help it. The fact is that any two different people on the planet are going to vary in their sex drive and whether or not men are generally more motivated by sex doesn’t tell you anything about the drives and motivations of the individuals you meet, and you can’t prescribe rules based on it.

Also, it’s a quagmire because it’s so difficult to know what the average woman’s libido would be like if she didn’t face any social consequences, and there is a pressure on men to have a “healthy” interest in sex, so it is a chicken and the egg situation. In my crowd, it’s hard to see any way that men and women are particularly different when it comes to drive or behaviour. People are more different from person to person in their appetites and expressions. But I don’t run with a conservative or traditional crowd. I have met people who believe women and men *should * be different, and their sexual lives and attitudes express that belief.

I’ve noticed a lot of times people try to use vague biological or evolutionary theories to defend traditional ideas, as if putting women down couldn’t have come out of human folly and must have been based in some type of genetic law. It’s like trying to find an excuse for why it’s okay to call women sluts. That’s what makes it “un PC” instead of just an innocent question. If it were some matter of science, you’d be at the library reading up on human sexuality and asking questions in GQ instead of launching a pseudo-debate that begins with the assumption that a sexual double standard is probably okay and natural or else we would not have it in the first place.

6

Take this as the anecdotal opinion of a guy(me).

From the age of 37-60, I had an ongoing sexual relationship with about nine women, who ranged in age from 27-59. Some I married, some I cared about but they were married. Some were (mainly) about the sex, at least for me.

In almost every case, the woman was interested in sex because she cared for me. She would do anything, because she cared for me. Things they would not have done on a casual sex basis. I would have had casual sex, because it was better than masturbating.

I think that women, when they are mentally into it, in love with the guy, are the more sexual creature. OF course, I’m generalizing here. Some women are driven for sex, with no need for love. But, in my experience, the bulk of women, especially as they get older, know their bodies, know their mind, and respond in an intense sexual way, but only if they are “into” the guy.

YMMV

7

However, pokey, I would not be so quick to infer an agenda to “justify” a hierarchy of power behind the question on stronger/weaker sex drive.

(Yes, it IS a tool often used for that purpose but it’s not the only one. One could just as easily imagine a context in which “keeping women in their place” is done because their sex drive is such that if they’re not given strict limits and conditioned negatively from an early age, they’ll just go totally berserk.)

Now, it is clear that socially, we operate from the presumption that males are the ones who “think with the smaller head”. The question to me is whether this says anything about libido per se or about how the males and females handle it. IOW is it that men have a “stronger sex drive” OR is it just that we have weaker willpower or less-discriminating taste; or that for women the consequences of a bad reproductive choice are so much more dire that awareness of it overrides their drives?

Or, could it be that we have different sex drives, optimised for divergent evolutionary strategies, so a 1:1 comparison “whose is strongest” is meaningless, like asking if males would be able to tolerate the pains of childbirth.

8

In my very limited experience men (me) are more urgent in their desire for orgasm. Women are more willing to forgoe the whole thing. For a while. :wink:
About the pain of childbirth? Of course men could endure the pain. The real question is whether a man would ever have a second child. Most wouild rather give up sex entirely, I suspect.

9

I’m just going to peek in here and address this particular portion of your post, Ellis Dee, with some anecdotal evidence. Please keep in mind that I speak only for myself, and not for women as a whole. My sex drive is very cyclical, so during the four week cycle, it will be elevated for roughly 3 weeks of the four. Of those three weeks, two will be spent at a much higher level than my husband. These two weeks are the week before and the week during my period. The week just after my period, we match up pretty evenly, but the week following that one could be totally without sex- and it wouldn’t bother me a bit!
In addition to this monthly cycle, my sex drive is somewhat cyclical depending on the time of year. I teach, so during the end of August, the end of October, the end of January, the end of March, and the end of May my sex drive approaches nil no matter what time of the month it is. These times being the beginning of the school year, the ends of the four grading periods, and the end of the school year. My work and stress load doubles (and more), so I tend to view sex with less interest that I would normally. During summer, spring, and winter breaks I am a total nympho. Now, this yearly cycle is based more on depressed sex drive due to stress, rather than a true cyclical pattern, but because my stress points throughout the year are very regular, it amounts to the same end.

10

I think you’ve underestimated the romance novel industry. Remember, those babies are sold all over the place (they ain’t called “grocery store novels” for nothing), not just in specialty shops or even general bookstores. I could believe that the porn industry has a larger gross, but the business models are very different. The porn industry makes a lot of profit from rentals and doesn’t lose much business to secondhand retailers. I’d suspect they also have higher expenses.

On the other hand, romance novels can be “rented” for free from the library and bought used cheaply. Still, the romance novel industry is clearly doing huge volume. I wouldn’t believe that the porn industry is bigger by “orders of magnitude” without a darn good cite.

You don’t really need to imagine it. The Ancient Greeks, to name one society, believed that generally only men had the intelligence and willpower to control their sex drives. Women were also thought to enjoy sex much more than men (this is mentioned in Our Perfect Master’s column on the subject). It was considered necessary to marry women off at a young age and keep them under pretty strict supervision after marriage. Even with these controls in place there was a lot of concern that the good wives of Athens might be sleeping around with the classical equivelants of the pool boy and milkman.

I think this goes over the head of some modern audiences, but in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata part of the comedy comes from the fact that the women are the ones calling the sex strike. Women, give up sex? Ha ha! Lysistrata has plenty of trouble keeping the other women in line, and barely manages to keep the strike going until the men finally cave to their political demands.

11

WARNING: ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE AHEAD

Before I got together with pasunboyfriend, I was kind of a frigid person. Yeah, I masturbated for release, and it was quite clearly tied with sex in that the same apparatus were used, but I’m not sure I really tied it with the desire for sex in my mind. Pasunboyfriend was, on the other hand, what one would consider typical of the average teenage/early twenties male.

The introduction of an intimate and caring relationship really revved me up, though, so that I matched him in desire: we were both horny all the time.

Now, with growing depression over a difficult job search and other stressors in his life, pasunboyfriend’s sex drive has dropped to pretty much zero, while I’m still hot to trot all the time–in what might be labeled a rather masculine pattern (by those who think the generalization means anything) I cannot keep myself from making little advances even though chances are that they won’t be reciprocated or even necessarily welcome.

My point is this: given the right alignment of emotional states, relationship status, etc., you would probably be able to get the male horniness > female horniness generalization to work, but the fact is that all kinds of life events, emotions, and interpersonal factors can and often do converge to make the picture look quite different. Right now it would fall flat on its face in describing my relationship (and, FTR, every other relationship I know of, in which sex drives seem to be at least equal). In the future, it’ll probably be right again–but only because certain stressors will have been removed from the BF’s life and added to mine.

12

I love studying human sexuality and this is one of those topics that I think would make a great dissertation. Unfortunately, I am very new in the field and there are a million books to read, so it is entirely possible that I have a backwards position. The natural assumption is that males have the greater sex drive, but I’ve found in human nature that often the natural assumptions are completely wrong. Plus, my personal experiences have been completely the opposite. Of the horniest people I know, most of them are female.

Also, I am at my parent’s house for the holidays and most of my sex books are at home, so bear with me.

I think that surveys or amount of porn consumed or number of sex partners don’t give us any idea about a person’s true sex drive. The expression of sex is greatly influenced by culture. In a culture were women are permitted and encouraged to be sexually free and expressive, you will find far more women consuming porn and admitted to a greater sex drive than those in a culture which repress women’s sexuality. Our own culture tends to look very negatively on female sexuality as compared to male sexuality, so of course, one would expect to find men purchasing more porn, having more sex partners and admitting to higher sexual drives, which makes the results of such observations meaningless.

Hopefully someone who is better at google or has a better library than the one I currently have acess to will be along to give the details of this study, but it was found that while males readily are aware and admit to their own arousal, a good deal of females either aren’t aware or won’t acknowledge when they get horny. Now while this study was done on American women, I would expect that the results would be different had it been done on women in a culture which had a different attitude towards female sexuality. Unfortunately, I don’t think such as study has ever been done and further more, there is some argument about what exactly constitutes arousal. Not all hardening pene mean the man is getting horny, likewise, it is possible some women display signs of arousal without actually being really physically aroused.

Until good, widespread studies can be done, I base my conjectures off of two things. First, on the sexual behaviour of our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom. And secondly, the behaviour of primative tribes.

Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are extremely sexual. Both males and females have many sexual parterns, sometimes more than one in one sexual encounter. The females are just as, and in some cases, more horny than the males. There are cases where horny females will hold down males and forcibly mate with him. (i bet a lot of human guys wish this would happen.)

Now again, I am far from an anthropologist, so it is entirely possible that I have my facts wrong about this, but from what I remember about the tribes that I’ve studied, women in primative societies tend to have a lot more sex, at about the same level as men. Unfortunately, sex is not discussed as much as I think it should be in most general books about the tribe. There are often just a few phrases here and there or whole chaptures if you are lucky. Expressions of sexuality, again, vary between tribes so there is no way to say ‘all people were originally this’ but from what I have read and pierced together on my own, it appears that the females are just as sexually interested in the men as the men are with them. And of course, I have encountered plenty of cultures that considered women to have greater sex drives then men.

I don’t think that women are hornier than men, I think the levels are about the same. Most women also tend to go through cycles of horniness in addition to change with age, while men tend to change with age mostly.

Whatever the case, more studies need to be done. For now though, I’m sticking with my position that the levels are about equal.

13

As a woman, I think they are about equal.

You are forgetting here that women do not have the sexual culture that men do. They don’t make locker-room jokes and brag about their “scores” like men do. They arn’t introduced to the idea of masterbation at a young age, and for women it’s not always so obvious what to do. It’s not that women don’t care about orgasms, it’s that they’ve never felt free enough to explore their sexual responses and lay the ground work for having positive sexual experiences. They don’t fully own their sexuality because they don’t understand it. Guys come in to sex with years of orgasms under their belts. Women often don’t. Add to that a healthy dose of guilt and shame and confusion and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of sexually frusterated women.

It’s worth noting that most other cultures think of women as having the stronger sex drive. Women are sequestered not to protect them from men, but because it was thought that they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from seducing everyone they see. Women are considered raw fonts of sexual energy in many cultures, and men are considered to have refined and controlled sexuality that can keep women in line with marriage and protection. It is sometimes thought that women’s sexual power keeps them from being able to participate in religion properly, which is the excuse for why so many religions exclude females from many rites and roles.

In my personal experience, men have steadier but weaker sex drives. They are happy to get off once and call it a day. Wheras my sex drive is affected by cycles and stress, but if I’m horny I’ll go at it all day and it’s hard to stop myself from seeking out any old partner thats nearby. Sometimes I literally can’t stop myself from masterbating- especially in the morning. I feel like my fantasies go deeper and are more complicated. I also feel like my orgasms are stronger and more numerous than any of my partner’s. Orgasms will leave me unconscjous, with ringing ears, dizzy and spinning, and unable to move for some time. Orgasms leave my partners simply satisfied and occasionally a bit light headed.

14

What you describe also agrees with my experience of women, as a man. Except that over here, the women talk about sex among themselves a lot more than the men, again in my experience. I am a bit of a ladies man in a sense that I get along with them well - probably because unlike some men I recognise we’re not all that different. :wink:

There are some small differences when it comes to sexuality though. Some of them are physical, and some are influenced by social interactions. There’s one physical difference that you see from research (though on average, individual variances apply) and that is that the arousal state of men tends to drop to near zero after an orgasm, where it typically remains high for women. This also agrees with your personal experience. And mine, for me it’s often something I need to get out of my system, after which I can go on doing something else almost immediately. But again, there are women who are like this too - just that there are many more who’ll happily go for a few more orgasms.

Sex drive is definitely something that you can wake up, and when it’s awake its certainly not less powerful in women than in men, I’m sure of that. Like you, I am far more aroused by a good story and setup in a porn movie than by moving flesh, so to speak. Surrendering to the passion almost involuntarily is the kind of thing I like to see - just not being able to help yourself, no matter what the circumstance. In general, there’s nothing that arouses me more than a woman’s arousal, and if anything keeps my arousal alive, it’s that.

I do think that research has shown there is unconscious behavior in women from a getting pregnant point of view. From personal experience, I noticed that after a few months a woman will temporarily lose interest in a man, and since this seems to occur so regularly, I attribute this to the fact that not getting pregnant is a factor that suggests a woman to move on to another partner. Real studies have shown that women tend to get aroused during the period with men they don’t want children with. And Danish research showed that women can still be very primitively attracted to the dominant male, and get pregnant by him, while being with a man whom they see more as a care giver. I think that DNA research showed that as many as 1 in 6 children were not by the real father.

I think our long cultural oppression of women is masking the true nature of woman’s sexuality and sex drive and also prevent us from seeing properly what the true differences are. But simply in terms of ‘size’, I don’t think the difference is significantly tipped towards either party. I remember how my first girlfriend and me were at one time so incredibly ‘into it’, not even touching each other, but just looking at each other with clothes on, and it was something very powerful that we experienced in precisely the same way. We were 20 and 19 at the time.

And that’s I think how I see it. As with nearly everything, men and women are more alike than they are different.