Obviously hunger and thirst are powerful drives as well, perhaps the most powerful. I think about it a lot, how important sleep is too, when I don’t get enough sleep say just a handful of hours in a 48 hour period I really turn into an irritable, irrational person and the urge to sleep becomes the only thing that matters, or that I think about.
I bet enough people if deprived of sleep systematically and repeatedly would be just about willing to do anything, maybe totally delirious they would agree to strangle someone to death just to get a few minutes of that precious sleep, hey they’ll just worry about the consequences when they wake up
It’s a Simpsons reference. Homer says that it’s important that Bart learn how to weasel out of things, because that’s what sets people apart from animals…except the weasel.
For another example of the urge overcoming adults who are well aware of the social and legal consequences of such conduct in public, google Alexis Frulling (and her 2 friends)… and then realize that this probably happens hundreds of times every day somewhere throughout the world (we just don’t have youtube video of each and every time).
The obvious point with reproduction is, absent any social restrictions such as mandatory child support (a very recent invention) the incentive for the male is to reproduce early and often; pausing only occasionally to grab a bite to eat.
For the female, they have one episode of reproduction after which they raise a litter; an investment that lasts the proverbial 18 years. So their incentive is to find one (or a few) high quality male(s), rather than a wide variety.
So - different motivations; quantity vs. quality. For the mare in the OP example, she’s willing, but she waits for whoever can win the contest between the males to claim her has the prize, because the best fighter supposedly equates to the best genes.
Of course, that says nothing about the woman’s willingness or appetite once she decides a male is acceptable; and there’s material for a whole book to be written about the implications of such human reproductive details as hidden fertility, monogamy vs. polygamy, incentives to keep the male around coming back for more… (Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond)
yes, it’s your male sexist pig coming out. Women are just as horny, but they have lots of things to think about before having sex versus men. Having sex has few consequences for men but lots of consequences for women. Like death in childbirth or being imprisoned for 20 years after seeking an abortion or developing cervical cancer due to an STD. Or just the fact that most men are pretty lousy in bed and the odds of a woman being satisfied during the encounter are kind of low. Vibrators have none of these problems.
Mares and bitches in heat have been known to break out and go looking for a male. We had a mare who would perform oral sex on a gelding when she went into into heat, trying to get him to be aroused enough to satisfy her. Didn’t really work.
Bullshit. Libido is controlled by testosterone. Given that the average man has 8 times more of the hormone than the average woman, it logically follows that men have a stronger libido.
I think you have a misconception here. There are urges and then there’s behaviour.
For example, I rarely eat donuts. However this is not necessarily proof that I don’t enjoy donuts as much as a guy who scoffs them daily. As a human I can resist my underlying urge to do something for whatever reason.
(Untrained) animals simply have no reason to resist their urges. They have no awareness of the consequences of their actions.
Our mating urge is likely of comparable magnitude to similar mammals (with the one slight caveat that we don’t have a mating season so we may not have such a feeling of urgency, but the strength of the desire is likely comparable).
If you want an example of humans just being unable to resist something then you have to go very low-level e.g. reflexes. Complex behaviours seem to all involve consciousness, and much of the point of consciousness is to allow malleable and context-driven approaches to stimuli.
I think those studies show that the complexities that constitute people’s sex drives aren’t as black and white as once thought. For example, high testosterone levels in women showed a decrease in desire for partnered sex but an increase in solitary desire (masturbation). This could be argued that it’s because the women are feeling less emotional connection to sex and simply want sex for the orgasm (that sounds like a man).
I would disagree with the basic point of the OP – I think humans have stronger mating urges than animals.
From years of raising horses, I can assure you that horses only act like this at the times when they are ‘in heat’. But with humans it’s constant every day. Stallions are quite controlled, except during the time of the month when a mare is fertile (‘in heat’). Teenage humans are far less controlled, and much harder to control.
Also, if you think teens aren’t havin sex in the hallways, you haven’t been in a high school lately – they seem to be getting awfully close!
When I was in high school in the late 1970s, two kids at my CHURCH got caught doing it in a Sunday School room. :eek:
Several years later, I was working at a restaurant with a HS boy who was telling some other kids there that he took girls out to his car during lunch and had sex with them. Yeah, right. Oh, maybe he was telling the truth, but c’mon. A packed parking lot where you don’t know who might just happen to walk by? However, a few years after THAT, I was working at a hotel and two ADULTS were caught going at it in the closed coffee shop during a wedding reception (and no, they weren’t the bride and groom). They hadn’t noticed that the alcove opened onto a heavily trafficked hallway. :smack:
Breaking out of a stall for guaranteed mating is nothing.
I’ve known men who were willing to stay up hours past bedtime giving away dozens of $14 cocktails and pretending to enjoy shitty music while making absolute fools of themselves on the dance floor and telling ridiculous lies about their socioeconomic status just for a ~5% chance of getting laid.
Like I tried to explain before, it’s a risk-benefit analysis. Men experience minimal risks and high benefit from having sex, women experience a lot of negative effects and often minimal benefit from having sex. Plus there is the cultural component-our culture shames and stigmatizes women who admit to having a sex drive and encourage men to exaggerate and brag about theirs.
I don’t get all the off-the-cuff insistence that animals can’t resist the urge to mate. We see them do so all the time. When a male bird sings and dances to impress a female, and his performance doesn’t impress her, neither one of them mates. Sometimes when animals DO choose to go at it, they look for a safe/sheltered place (from predators, not preachers or paparazzi) first – and put off the urge at least temporarily. When I watched elephant seals on a California beach this spring, I could see males chasing other males away from their “harems,” and the loser males clearly decided to suppress their urges until a safer opportunity, at least.
I think the entire question is more an artifact of how we like to think about ourselves as somehow magically disrinct from animals than it is an inquiry into any real phenomenon.
