You’ve probably heard things like this: men get turned on at the slightest provocation and are ready to have sex anytime, anywhere, while women want sex less often and need to be “in the mood.” That has been the widespread belief for years: men simply have a greater desire for sex than women.
Research is often cited to support the idea that men, perhaps because of their higher testosterone levels, think about sex more, seek it out more actively, and become aroused more easily. Men’s sexuality is like an on-off switch, while women’s sexuality is a complicated network of connections. Right?
Not really.
Other research—along with an evolving understanding of sexuality, gender, and desire—tells us that sex drive doesn’t fit neatly into columns labeled “male” and female.
“The idea that men have a higher sex drive is not only an oversimplified idea, but it’s simply not true,” says Sarah Hunter Murray, PhD, a marriage and family therapist and author of Not always in the mood: the new science of men, sex and relationships.
“Our social norms and the way we are raised to support or suppress our sexuality have a huge impact on how we experience our sexuality and how we report it in studies,” says Hunter Murray. “People raised as men in our society are generally given more permission to speak openly about wanting sex, while young women are often told not to express their sexuality.”
Justin Garcia, PhD, executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, agrees.
“Our sexual interest is determined by many factors, including not only biology, age and medication use, but also by the situation – for both men and women,” he says. “Sexual attitudes are significantly influenced by social and religious attitudes. If you’ve been told that expressing your sexuality is bad, over time it will affect how you feel about whether or not you should do it.
And those messages may have influenced the research that tells us men want sex more than women.
In a 2007 study, researchers tried to find out how much social norms influenced the way men and women reported sexual behavior, including masturbation, their number of sexual partners and viewing pornography. The people they studied – all students – were asked the same set of questions, but were divided into three groups.
- One group was told that the research assistants (their peers) would see their answers.
- A second group was hooked up to a lie detector machine and told (falsely) that they would know if they were not telling the truth.
- The third group was not connected to the lie detector during their research and was not told that their answers would be seen.
On almost all questions, men and women tended to report different levels of sexual activity, while they thought peers would see their answers. Gender differences were much smaller in the polygraph group.
For example, when they believed that peers would see their reactions, men reported masturbating much more often than women. But those differences virtually disappeared in the lie detector group.
And when people believed their peers would see their answers, men reported having about 3.7 sexual partners, while women reported about 2.6. In the polygraph group, men reported about 4.4 sexual partners and women about 4.0.
Despite stereotypes, a significant proportion of men – as many as 1 in 6 – regularly experience low levels of sexual desire, meaning the person may see it as a problem. A 2010 review of multiple studies found that approximately 14% to 19% of men regularly and reliably reported having problematic low or decreased sexual desire.
“Men are not walking robots who want to have sex at the drop of a hat,” says Hunter Murray. “We often don’t give men permission to talk about the things that lead to low sex drive, like relationship dynamics, stress, exhaustion at work, parenting, and the chores and daily grind of life.”
It is difficult to estimate whether men really want more sex than women if you interview men or women separately for research. If a man says he wants more sex than his female partner, how do you know she would see things the same way?
The few studies that have looked at sexual desire in a “dyadic” relationship — that is, they interviewed opposite-sex couples who were in a relationship with each other — have fairly consistently found that men are no more or less likely to be the partners who do so. want to. more sex, more often.
One of the first studies to find this pattern was conducted more than twenty years ago. Of the group of 72 college-age heterosexual couples, about half reported having similar levels of sexual desire. Of the couples who differed in their desire, about half said it was the male partner who wanted sex less often.
More recently, Hunter Murray published a similar study of college-age couples that yielded virtually the same results. About half of the couples had a similar desire. And among those who didn’t, men were just as likely as women to be the partner with a lower sex drive.
“Multiple studies show that men and women’s sexual desires are more similar than different,” says Hunter Murray. Not much research has been done on the levels of desire in transgender and non-binary people.
“Gender norms around sex drive are outdated in many ways,” she says. “If there is something about the way you experience desire that conforms to a stereotype, that’s fine, but many of us fall outside these narrow boxes. There are men whose interest in sex ranges from little to none to very high, and that goes for women too. As humans we vary, and as long as your sexual expression is in a healthy way, it feels good and good for you [and your partner(s)]chances are your experience is normal.