This is more or less what I came in here to say. There is some research to support this theory. The book Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski is not a book I would recommend, but before I quit reading it, I did come across the statistic that approximately 75% of men have spontaneous sexual desire, compared to 5% of women; and that 30% of women had responsive desire, compared to 5% of men. The remaining percentage do not fall cleanly into one category or the other. I’m not writing about this with the book fresh in my mind, but I believe what this meant was that people with responsive sexual desire could only be sexually aroused if their emotional state was a certain way, whereas people with spontaneous sexual desire didn’t have such an intrinsic connection between sexual and emotional desire. If someone else can explain this more clearly, by all means, please do. The main point I’m trying to make is that current research backs up the idea that the average male sex drive is different from the average female sex drive.
who said “statistics are damn lies?”
Yeah. A study or ‘research’ is only as good as the study and the protocols used. Is this a self-report? Are the people demographically and economically different? Are they all broke college students answering a study for some free pizza? Are they people who answered a random phone call or unexpected solicitation at their doors?
All that stuff matters. The popular ‘statistic’ that men think about sex per day however many times more than women was a based on a self-report, had less than 300 participants, and all of them were affluent liberal arts college students who were also tracking how often they thought about food or sleep for less than a term.
So basically it’s not quite bullshit, but it certainly isn’t universally applicable.
There aren’t yet any good studies of sexual desire BECAUSE it’s still such a new concept that women be ‘allowed’ to have (let alone freely express) such desires. How on earth do you think you’re going to get any real answers when half the population spent their entire life denying or repressing anything that wasn’t acceptable and the other half is dealing with stereotypes that tell them if they’re not ‘hound-dogs’ who are ‘getting it’ nightly, they’re too pathetic to be associated with their assigned gender?
I definitely believe that, ON AVERAGE, men are more sex-driven than women and that it is not just because of “society”
A lot of female-to-male transgender people have said that their libido increases with testosterone supplementation, at least temporarily (but I have also seen transgender men who say that the increased libido never really goes away - you just learn to handle it).
I also remember reading a study on pairs of platonic, mixed sex friendships where each friend was confidentially asked about if they had romantic interest in their friend. The men in these pairs were interested in their female friend much more often than vice versa. This mirrors real life situations I have seen, where it seems like men get “friend zoned” more often than women do. I honestly think that MOST of the time, a man would probably be willing to have no strings attached with most of his female friends IF he was really convinced there would not be any kind of drama or social problems from having sex with a friend.
There was also a psychology study I read in which the researchers arranged for a hired actor to approach strangers of the opposite sex and just bluntly ask them if they would go out on a date or have sex with the actor. Some women agreed to the date, but the number of women willing to go have sex with a stranger was literally zero as I recall (but I don’t have the study right in front of me - if it was not zero, it was very close to zero). On the other hand, but there was a significant percentage of the men who were willing to go along with the random offer of sex.
It also seems much more common for high profile men who have a lot to lose to end up in sex scandals, in contrast to high profile women. This is not to say that women in positions of power NEVER try to bang their interns or grope guys - just that it seems less COMMON.
Sure, women DO get horny and some women DO choose to be promiscuous solely because they enjoy sex. I myself would say that I have a higher sex drive than my husband. However, I don’t think those exceptions contradict the idea that, IN GENERAL, sex is more important to men and that men are much less selective about who they will sleep with if they’re offered no strings attached sex.
As for what would happen if the sex drives of each gender were the reverse, well, I think we would have a major problem with overpopulation since if women were all super-horny, all it would take would be one horny guy (even if most guys aren’t horny anymore) to end up knocking up every woman in town. I guess night clubs would have “Guys Night” instead of Ladies Nights. And men on dating sites would complain about getting “Vag Pics” instead of women being upset over getting dick pics.
Nothing you have posted is a convincing argument AGAINST societal conditioning and physical safety concerns, you realize that, right?
Especially that ‘random sex with a stranger’ study. I know that one and I’d argue that one isn’t about sex at all, at least not to half the population. Because it doesn’t matter if I’m hot and horny, if some strange man asks me at random out of the blue if I’m up for sex, the answer is NO because I DON’T WANT TO DIE.
For most women, the answer is ALWAYS going to be no! But that doesn’t mean someone is not horny or even sex-starved, it just means they’re not desperate enough to be an idiot.
There is no way I’m sittin’ down to pee!