On Gender and Sexual Desire
And unspoken assumptions
My article on evo psych has started to generate a little backlash. As usual, there’s a pretty clear divide between the genders of the commenters involved.
Well, that’s not actually true. Male and female readers were supportive of the article, but the negative responses were exclusively male.
Anyway, here’s one of the responses:
BULLSHIT.
So you’re telling me the levels of desire for sex of both genders are more or less on the same par ?
Do you think the magnitude of romance novel / Whatpad industries are comparable to porn / sex work industries ?
Which gender do you think has lesser threshold to a have a sexual encounter with the opposite sex?
He’s having a mad because I had the gall to bring up how popular steamy romance novels are as evidence that women do, in fact, really, really enjoy sex. Just not with him.
And even in his short response, he says a number of asinine things. So let’s take them one at a time.
“So you’re telling me the levels of desire for sex of both genders are more or less on the same par?”
With respect to gender, the general rule is that there’s more variability between individuals than there is between genders on average. For example, the average man in the United States is apparently 5'10" tall and the average woman is 5'5" tall. 5 inches might seem like a lot (I know plenty of men who would argue that), but in the scheme of things… it’s not. If I told you I knew somebody who was 5'6", would you be able to guess their gender? There are very short men and very tall women out there. To make a blanket statement like “Men are taller than women” might be true, but it also may not be useful, depending on the context.
But there’s another thing, too: height varies quite a bit from area to area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country
It ranges from 6'1" in the Dinaric Alps to under 5'3" in East Timor, according to that Wikipedia link.
So even something as supposedly genetically determinative as height is not uniform throughout the human species.
But to answer your question: Hell to the yes.
Seriously, go visit BookTok and you’ll meet women who put the kids from American Pie to shame with their rampant horniness. I’m old enough to remember when 50 Shades of Grey was a bestseller. And that book is horribly written. Women were just reading it for the smut.
And kudos to them!
Do you think the magnitude of romance novel / Whatpad industries are comparable to porn / sex work industries ?
So, first of all: it’s Wattpad. Not Whatpad.
But it’s also apples and oranges. The romance novel industry brings in $1.44 billion annually. I couldn’t find exact numbers on the adult film industry, but it’s maybe roughly 10x that (but also, let’s be real, the adult film industry is largely a money laundering scheme).
And the video game industry is about 10x that. So what? Men like sex more than women do but what they really like is video games?
The porn industry targets men, but maybe it would make even more if there was more porn aimed at women. I don’t know. Capitalism doesn’t actually work — things would be much simpler if it did.
Which gender do you think has lesser threshold to a have a sexual encounter with the opposite sex?
Well, as it turns out, here we have some actual data. In fact, there was a famous study from the 1980s with a simple enough design. An attractive man propositioned random women asking them if they would like to go on a date with him, go back to his apartment, or go to bed with him. An attractive woman did the same but towards random men.
I’ll cut to the chase. Here are the results:
Well that seems pretty conclusive. While men and women were equally likely to go on a date with their random propositioner, none of the women would agree to go to bed with him. And men were more likely to agree to go to bed with the random woman than they were to agree to the date.
So I guess I was wrong. Men are the thirstier sex.
Except not so fast.
Further research revealed that actually, women were just as likely as men to accept a casual sex offer with a woman. If a woman is the propositioner, she’s more likely to get a yes, regardless of the gender of the person she’s propositioning. And men are more likely to get a no.
Now why might that be?
Could it be that we assume men are riskier and more dangerous? Surprisingly, the study suggests that this wasn’t a deciding factor. Though, yes, the men were deemed more of a threat than the women were, the data doesn’t indicate that this was what led to their rejection.
No, the biggest correlation the researchers could find that separated the yeses and the nos was that nobody thought the men would actually be good in bed.
Proposer sexual capabilities strongly predicted acceptance of the casual sex offer in each of the three studies. Moreover, sexual capabilities are the reason that males are turned down for casual sex more often than females.
So… what then?
Look, it’d be easy and cheap for me to tell men to just figure out where the clitoris is and not treat it like the Street Fighter button when you’re trying to get E. Honda to do his hundred hand slap.
I could tell men to get a trial of Kindle Unlimited and read a few romance novels, laugh at how silly some of them are, but also learn that as silly as they are (and they’re no sillier than, say, John Wick movies), women love them and love the way they make them feel.
I could stress the importance of foreplay and communication and dirty talk and a million other things.
While that all is important, and I do suggest it, I don’t think it’s what we should take away from the second study.
It was a very limited study and so it’s impossible to take any broad generalizations away from it. But, at the very least, it suggests how the answers are never as clear cut as they seem, especially when it comes to human psychology.
In neither of these experiments did anyone end up “sealing the deal,” so to speak, and they were both relatively small-scale experiments dealing with isolated populations.
But that’s my point.
Whether or not a person wants sex has to do with so many factors and a huge component of that, in I would say nearly every case, is the person whom they’re having sex with.
I’ve said it over and over again: if you think women don’t crave sex, you’re saying more about yourself than you are about women.
