You’d think so, but studies don’t hold that as true for gay and lesbian populations. So it isn’t even a case of vulnerability exactly - thus my opinion that it’s pretty much entirely culturally imposed rather than innate.
ETA - replying to Grrrr, not Wesley.
Not exactly the same question, but I figure it’s close enough: one clichéd talking point is that men crave sex a heck of a lot more than women do, right? Think of every joke built around that, every stereotype you’ve heard, all of it.
And another cliché is that — despite the guy being more interested in sex — the idea is that she can have multiple orgasms and he’s done after just one?
So what happens if we hypothetically swap that last part, there?
In that case, the human race would have died out long ago, and would have been replaced by some other species where the males (or whatever the impregnating sex is called) have stronger sex drives than the ones who do the gestating (the females).
Every once in a while, someone poses some form of this question where we’re asked to wonder how the guys would handle it if women were the sexual initiators. (Disclaimer: I’m not stating that they never are in this world). Anyway, lots of folks have opined that men find it offputting to be approached.
One reasonable take-away from this is that when one is in, or is placed in, the reactive situation instead of the initiating situation, being hit on is a bit offputting, so a certain wariness (as the initial reaction) may be less of a statement about the overall personality and sexual nature of the person than it is a statement about being the ask-ee.
In my household that would mean my husband would be spanking the monkey a couple times a week while I … dunno… read books/worked in the garden/worked on cars.
To anyone who truly believes that males and females have similar sex drives: how much money, globally, do males pay to females in exchange for sexual services or intimacy or anything of a similar nature? And how much do females pay to males for the same?
And where the fuck were you when I spent a year blogging about being an exception to the rule and got ambushed by hordes of people claiming that I, and only I, believed that there were any differences to which I could conceivably be an exception?
Not that I would have agreed with you — at least based on what you’ve posted here so far — since you seem to believe the differences are fully binary, all men being one way and all women being the other. But still, it would have been easier to point to people like you as among the folks who constitute the world I have to live in.
[/hijack]
That’s in part a matter, not of sex drive, but of women not having access to other ways to eat / make a living / pay back the coyotes…
There’s also social acceptability to consider. It’s gradually going away, but part of the problem here is if you aren’t allowed to express that you want sex because of the social consequences, you learn to keep your mouth shut, which leads to people continuing to believe you aren’t interested because you keep your mouth shut.
I’ve always wondered about the push for men/boys to boast about their sexual conquests and lose their virginity ASAP, while women/girls are expected to keep their legs closed always. Is the assumption that all of those guys are just sleeping with the same couple of women? 'Cause that always seemed damned unlikely to me, even as a teenager.
If we’re talking just about prostitution, I’m sure men do spend more money there. If you look at money spent on sexual gratification in general, however, it’s important to consider more than just that.
Take a look at stores devoted to selling toys, clothing, and accessories. The vast majority of them are made and marketed for women to use. Male sex toys are still a fairly tiny market. This also supports the idea that women are expected to keep their traps (and legs) shut about what they do and what they want and discreetly take care of themselves.
How much money (and time!), globally, do women spend on making themselves look sexually appealing to men, and how much do men spend on making themselves look sexually appealing to women?
Why is there so much cultural encouragement of men’s sex drives (he’s a stud! :D) and so much discouragement of women’s (she’s a slut! :mad:) if men’s sex drives are naturally so much stronger anyway?
I can’t claim to know which (if either) sex really has the stronger natural sex drive. I doubt there’s any real way to control for the effects of culture to find out. But in a world where men have more power than women, what men want is going to be treated as more important than what women want. Who’s actually hornier isn’t going to make much difference.
Because women get pregnant and men don’t. If a woman sleeps around, she’s likely to have consequences that she’ll have to deal with. Men can just walk away from those consequences. They shouldn’t, of course, but they can.
And again, even if men and women have the same amount of sex drive it (typically; individuals of course will vary) manifests in different ways. Women will spend more effort into trying to get the right partner, while men will try to get more partners. Again, this is because women get pregnant, while men don’t.
I’m not sure what that has to do with what you quoted (which was more about wondering just who all of those guys are supposed to be sleeping with, in a very hetero-normative sense), but your point falls apart a bit when you bring in the prevalence of birth control.
Physical consequences are much less of an issue, and have been for a long time, than social consequences. I could have safe sex (multiple BC methods, planning around ovulation times, etc) all day long and our society as a whole would only care about their moral judgment regarding how dirty and slutty I am. You hear words like “ruined” and “tainted” in regards to women wanting to have sex. That is a much larger issue than being capable of pregnancy.
I believe it was Larry Miller who said, “The difference between the male and female sex drive is like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.”
There would be short term volatility, but over time the market would return about 8%.
The other 92% would stick with the switch. 
Not to hi-jack, but I think a more interesting thought experiment would be: “What if males and females switched their primary sources of sexual arousal?” What might happen if suddenly women were primarily aroused by visual and auditory stimuli, and suddenly men required a sense of emotional connection and actual physical contact before getting “in the mood”? (Not saying women can’t be aroused by sight and sound, or that emotional connection and a good snuggle won’t float a dude’s boat; just that they aren’t the respective primary drivers of arousal.) I posit even a temporary experience of what it takes to get the opposite sex’s motor runnin’ could go a long way to helping us understand why “men are pigs” and “bitches be crazy”.
If men had babies they’d be women.
As for imbalanced sexual attraction, that’s always going to be a thing, because everyone is different. Lots of women complain about how they aren’t getting enough sex.
And if men are always prowling around having meaningless one night stands, while the women stay home waiting for Mr. Right, who exactly are the men having sex with? Each other?
The truth is that most women want men and want to be wanted by men, just like most men want women and want to be wanted by women. The problem is that women want men, just not exactly the way men want to be wanted, and they want to be wanted by men, just not exactly the way men want them. And vice versa. And same thing applies to same sex couples, because none of this was designed to work perfectly. It was created as blind urges for this and that, and those urges and yearnings and needs can never be totally fulfilled because they’re bottomless.
I believe Larry Miller has not been both and therefore lacks expertise.
I’ve never been both either but I do have the strong visual connection to my sexuality that people always talk about as a “male thing”.
It’s kind of uselessly irrelevant. I see so many women who look deliciously appealing from a visual standpoint that it’s nothing special when it happens. I mean, it doesn’t make the sexy-looking person stand out from the crowd. Apparently, based on what I hear women saying, it’s nothing all that special for them either. And, finally, it’s completely lousy as a clue for whether or not I’m going to connect well with that person, whether we’re going to make beautiful harmony together and all that. No, I’m not saying I’m a “more evolved person” whose sexuality is driven by my appreciation of her soul and mind, I’m very much driven by what women look like, but on the visual plane I’m a slut and everyone looks yummy and delicious, whereas it’s rare to meet a woman with whom I can connect, where we “get” each other, so the latter is more important simply because it’s the criterion that’s difficult to meet.
I don’t know “how it is for women”, a notion that seemingly pretends all women are the same but perhaps only seeks to generalize… I don’t know if in general it is different for women or not. But I do strongly suspect that “how it is for women” is not very close to some of what passes for conventional wisdom here on the Straight Dope, particularly the recurrent notion that women are coldly pragmatic and are “attracted” to men with financial success and the ability to be [del]a useful host to parasite on[/del] a good provider and don’t really have any attraction to the male body or to the person in the sense of personality and character and all that. (I think I’d find that perpetually regurgitated allegation rather insulting if I were a female person).
I don’t know “how it is for men” either. My own experience of maleness doesn’t seem to be much of a key for making sense of their behaviors.
Came in expecting a mention of mine, I was surprised as fuck