Gender and Libido

All kinds of other possibilities occur to me, other than the "repressive hypothesis". In no particular order:

Women actually were the hornier sex in antiquity, but something in the Western diet changed our hormone balance.

Women actually were the hornier sex in antiquity, but some disease (the Black Plague? syphilis?) selectively killed or rendered infertile the horniest women and/or the least-horny men.

The claim that women were the hornier sex acted as a justification for rape: "that slut wanted it!" writ large. Since women didn't write the histories, we have no idea what they thought of this claim. As the status of women rose from near-slaves to near-equals over historical time, this claim has been increasingly untenable.

The claim that women were the hornier sex was reported by the tiny fraction of men who were literate, who also tended to be the highest-status, best providers, most well-spoken, most artistic, having the most leisure time, best-fed. In other words, among the ancients, the literate men (who wrote the histories, the plays, etc.) were by far the most attractive to women. We don't have any records of whether illiterate ancient men, who were the majority of the population and who were less attractive, also believed that women were sexually insatiable.

I'm currently having a hard time finding the study, but I distinctly recall reading an article that tried to address the question of relative sex drives by looking at the sex drives of people who took hormones as part of the gender reassignment process. Female->male sex changes reported greatly increased libido when they began taking testosterone.

I can see why one might be reluctant to generalize to the population as a whole, but it is at least weak evidence that the current conventional wisdom correctly reflects the difference in sex drives today.

I wouldn't trust the quoted article very much. It sounds like a narrative constructed around a few datapoints that are not necessarily representative (or even authentic), and certainly not like the writing of someone with in-depth knowledge of the subject. In particular, the concluding claim about ideas "made up by the church 400 years ago" is completely absurd -- by that time, there had been no such thing as "the church" in the West for almost a century.

The subject is certainly interesting, but in order to come up with any sensible theories, it would be necessary to do a far broader and in-depth study of all kinds of extant sources that offer relevant information. The fact that some people published various crackpot theories that gained some following doesn't mean that the prevailing opinion was the same, even among the intellectual classes, let alone in the general population. Just think what an absurdly distorted view of the prevailing 20th century opinion on any subject could be created by focusing selectively on various fringe ideas that gained some traction at a certain point in time.

I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?

Perhaps because women weren't allowed much say in the writing of medical books at that time? I may be wrong, but there weren't many women doctors around to begin with before the 20th century.

An acquaintance of mine said about this thread: "no-one seems to be raising the idea that there may be strong cultural factors related to gendered expressions of libido".

To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with "natural" sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.

I don't remember the exact source, but I've done Web searches for relevant scientific literature, and today, when psychologists survey people (admittedly, mostly WEIRD people), they do indeed confirm the conventional wisdom: the statistically average man has more interest in sex than the statistically average woman.

Ancient cultures were so comedically wrong on so many things that I have a hard time finding this odd. they simply had no or almost no idea how many parts of the universe worked. Female genital mutilation is appalling but it's no more nonsensical than bleedings, taking mercury as a cure-all, or wasting decades of your life trying to transmute lead into gold.

I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?

Part of why there could be disagreement is that the question is very hard to answer. How does one determine that one group of people has a greater libido than another group?

It would be easy if the two groups were presented with the same choices, and one group consistently chose sex more often than the other. But this historically has not been the case with men and women. Choosing sex typically involved very different consequences and opportunity costs for the different groups.

The next best thing would be to have an empirically verified robust theory that lets you play out counterfactuals. Then you could say, "Yes, in reality the members of groups A and B confront different choices. But, using our robust theory, we can see that were an individual in group A to confront the choices faced by members of B, that individual would choose to do X, in contrast to the members of B, who choose to do Y." Unfortunately, no such robust theory of the libido was available in historical times.

Libido is a part of personal experience. But answering the question "Who has a stronger libido, men or women?" requires much more than personal experience. Personal experience doesn't tell me whether I would choose sex more or less often than women do if I were faced with the same choices that they have.

Answering such questions amounts to evaluating counterfactuals. But, historically, people evaluated these counterfactuals without the help of a theory that could be expected to correlate strongly with the truth of the matter. This meant that people gave answers based on intuition and religion and other considerations that track the truth very poorly. It is therefore unsurprising that their answers differed so much from one another.

Right now (I haven't researched the subject in too much depth), I'm inclined to believe that women's libido has never been considered more powerful than men's, and that the "evidence" presented here was cherry-picked or over-interpreted.

Does anybody have a link to a more thorough research?

It should be noted that if you try to fit two multidimensional quantities over a single dimension, one is greater than the other depending on which axis you do the projection. In the case of a married couple in which the woman wants to have sex with her husband every single day, while he is bored and avoids her because of the lack of variety, who has more sex drive?

Besides, making studies without understanding the generation of female attraction is rather moot: the experiment where moderately attractive men simply ask women for sex makes my inner seducer smirk. In my experience, healthy women experience a sharp surge in sex drive, both in frequence and in variety, when they feel they are in safe environment, both from physical injuries and from social stigmatization.

Has anyone considered the idea that many people judge how sex crazed the opposite sex is by the interest the opposite sex gives them? All stereotypes are true after all, what if most are starved for attention but the few who are getting lots and lots of attention aren't socially celebrated or perhaps even accepted? What stereotypes will form about the genders in such conditions? I mean X, Y and everyone I know that I've asked say they aren't getting any. Gee I guess the opposite sex just generally isn't interested in it.

Couldn't changing perceptions of female or male horniness be partially due to changes in the balance of the sexual marketplace?

The evidence in the article is pretty scant. I'm not sure I'd read much into "horny ladies" abounding in fiction (or joke books). My guess is that the ancients, the Victorians and we moderns are all wrong when it comes to sexual desire, male and female. Sexual desire is a sort of appetite (like hunger and thirst) but it's the only appetite we suffer no consequences from not satiating. It's subject to tremendous variability. People have different levels of sexual desire at different times throughout the day, from one week or month to another, it changes as we get older, it varies between individuals and I don't doubt that the prevailing sexual culture changes it immensely (we have to eat and yet food culture has a tremendous influence on how we satiate hunger including some cultures systematically under-eating). It's possible (although unlikely) that for many women sexual desire was a sign of a disorder in the context of the prevailing sexual culture of the Victorian era.

Its an interesting pattern that the people who are most inclined to claim women are uninterested in sex are the same groups as those who most restrict womens sexual choices and punish those deviating from the norm.

If it were true that women had lower sex drives there would be no need for repressive cultures to have mechanisms to limit them, any more than they have mechanisms to limit flying.

However, if ones goal, for whatever reason is to restrict female sexual choice then propagating a belief that sexual desire among women is abnormal is instrumentally useful for that goal.

It's pretty easy to see why the Victorians were wrong. The social norms (especially middle class) cherished female chastity, since chastity is an important virtue for monogamous societies. This is because men are more reluctant to form long-term mating commitments to women with a reputation for strong sex desire (this increases paternal uncertainty). So over centuries, the parochial assumption that women were genuinely chaste would have become common among men. Now that female chastity is out, marriage rates are declining, and we seem to be evolving to a more "forager" sexual style (this trend is currently incomplete).

I've also read anti-porn radical feminists who argue that women only pretend to accept male use of porn (or bondage/discipline in the bedroom) to seem "cool", when really they find it disgusting/evil.

I'd already seen the evidence for this, but your link is broken, and was apparently less than rigorous. You may wish to replace it.

To me it seems obvious that one of the primary causes of differences in end sexual conduct has its roots in the anatomical differences of men and women. While accidental and satisfying self-stimulation of the penis is for most males very easy, the commonly elusive and non-prominent positioning of the clitoris makes masturbation difficult for many females. It doesn't help that due to its auxiliary role in reproduction, in some countries it is extremely common for young women to go on completely oblivious to the existence of the clitoris. Hence the ultimate development of male and female sexuality diverges widely. Cultural evidence? The narrative of discussion of masturbation among men, adolescents, and even young boys is extremely vibrant. The narrative on female masturbation is virtually nonexistent and in most cases doesn't develop until post-adolescence at the earliest, and has only really blossomed in the twentieth century as a result of (well, besides the sexual revolution) development of machine-based stimulation.

Also considering the time scales we can't discount natural selection playing a role. Both in humans and various pathogens (which might alter human sexual desires and behaviour - rabies and toxoplasmosis being two known examples that seem to influence sexual behaviour, desire and even desirability).

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