A woman sits down to write a letter to a magazine advice column. Her husband is in the room next
to her playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Every so often she can hear him curse and shout,
at which points she grits her teeth in anger. “He won’t have sex with me,” she writes, adding,
“The few times we’ve had sex (and I can count those on one hand), I’ve had to beg for it.”
She’s hoping someone will be able to explain what happened to this guy. Today you’ll find out.
The example we’ve just used is real. The woman claimed in the letter that her husband had slept
with her once in the last seven years. Just like that, he stopped. When she asked him what
went wrong, he told her “it just stopped working”, meaning his John Thomas. He explained to her that
this is what happens to men in their fifties. She didn’t believe him, blaming herself and
her weight gain. In the last paragraph of the letter she wrote, “I’m isolated, bored,
frustrated, lonely, rejected, unwanted, hurt, and angry. I’m sick of feeling like I’m selfish
for wanting sex with my husband.” Part of the reply she got was,
“It’s about your husband’s failings as a human being, about his self-hatred,
about his ineptitude and his decline.” But what if he’d just lost his sex drive?
Can that happen? Does it happen more to men than women? Who has the strongest sex drive in nature
in general? What do we really want sexually? Those are some questions we’ll answer today
among many other fascinating things we’ll discuss related to men and women wanting,
or not wanting, to get it on. But first of all, what is a sex drive.
Another term for it is libido. You can’t measure it. It’s not an actual part of your brain. It’s
just a thing we talk about in reference to how much a person wants to have sex.
All humans have these things called sex hormones, which regulate through biological processes our
wanting for sex. If such hormones were absent or for some reason depleted, we might lose our sex
drive. For instance, certain drugs can affect these hormones, such as some anti-depressants.
But there’s more to the sex drive than chemical reactions. There’s the psychological side, too,
such as you feeling the need for sex because you have become very attracted to someone.
If a person really attracts you, your sex drive might go into hyperdrive.
Or, for a woman, her sex drive might get into third gear right before she
ovulates – when the egg is released from her ovary. That’s because her testosterone levels
change during this stage of menstruation. This drive develops when we are very young,
before we really understand sex at all. Then, when we go through puberty, it really gets
going. Ask any teenage boy who’s had to do his own laundry for fear of what his mother may discover.
Boys generally get very horny at around the age of 15. This is the point in many boy’s life when
even sitting on a vibrating bus can cause a stir in his loins. Before this age, both boys
and girls might show some kind of sexual interest in someone, but it can be vague. Still, one study
showed that 25 percent of boys and girls as young as 11 or 12 reported that they “think about sex.”
But when they hit their teens, something changes. It’s in the early teens that many boys will start
having sexual fantasies. What was previously a nascent and vague feeling about sex becomes
something very much real. Only ten percent of boys start masturbating at the age of 10, but by
the time they are 11 or 12 it’s around half of all boys that partake in the odd five-knuckle shuffle.
The vast majority of boys will slap the salami once they get to 13 and 14,
while hardly any girls at all will masturbate before they are 13. From 13 to 14, only about
20 percent of girls will masturbate. These are rough figures we found in the book,
“Puberty and Adolescent Sexuality.” But we have to remember there are many factors
as to when the sex drive develops and as to when it is acted upon, such as our culture.
Scientists tell us that when guys are around that sometimes difficult age of 15 they are
in the most hyper stage of horniness. This is due to their raging testosterone levels. With females
it’s very different, with their sex drive really coming into full swing sometime in their 30s.
Just as a man’s libido might be in the first stages of waning, a woman’s can really get going.
This, of course, can sometimes cause problems in a relationship. It’s akin to discovering chocolate
mountain when your teeth have fallen out and your appetite isn’t what it used to be. In short, men
are fast starters and women but women catch up. But that doesn’t mean both men and women can’t be
involved in a sexual relationship right up until their 70s or even 80s. One study we found said,
“Forty percent of adults aged 65 to 80 are sexually active, and more than half,
54 percent, say sex is important to their quality of life.” That’s not the kind of study
children and grandchildren like reading when thinking about their parents and grandparents,
but don’t think for a minute kids that the older folks can’t wear out the bed springs.
According to a paper written by researchers at Manchester University’s School of Social Sciences,
there are some “sexual survivors” who just don’t retire their sex organs. These are the folks that
are still going at it in their 80s, and they are loving it. Still, these folks are in a minority.
The paper said by the time we reach 85, only one in ten women are still interested in sex,
but for men, it was a quarter of them. For men, though, their drive isn’t always
represented by a phallus that can stand up straight when it’s needed to go into battle.
Luckily for them, there are drugs these days that can help the little fella spring back to life.
But as we said, there are more than biological concerns when it comes to sex drive. Plenty of
women have hit stagnancy in the sexual realm in middle ages and found in later life when they
met the right guy, their sex drive suddenly flourished again. And the same goes for men.
There are social elements, too, such as people thinking they are past it. Old folks might be
stuck in a home for the elderly which is not exactly a sexy environment, but some older people
might use their retirement to travel the world where they find their sexuality explodes again.
But what about in general? Do either men or women have a higher sex drive?
You already know that young males have a stronger sex drive than young females, but in the case
of the married couple in the intro, they were both grown up. It seems in that circumstance,
the woman had the stronger sex drive, but if science is correct, this is an anomaly. It’s also
likely the man just didn’t find the woman sexually attractive anymore. He blamed his age, but was he
secretly fantasizing about a younger woman? A man in his 50s wouldn’t usually just lose
his sex drive. In fact, males aged from their late teens to their 60s will think about sex on average
once a day, although it’s not easy to measure this, as you can understand. Still, men it’s said
will fantasize about sex a lot more when they are still young, but they’ll keep fantasizing
until they hit their winter years. Yep, your grandfather will more than likely still look at
young women and imagine getting it on with them. A social psychologist at Florida State University
named Roy Baumeister has made a name for himself studying the sex drive, as well as
writing myriad well-known books on other matters such as addiction. He researched the sex drive
for a long time and after interviewing scores of people he discovered that men get sexually turned
on in a spontaneous sense much more than women. He said, “Men want sex more often than women at
the start of a relationship, in the middle of it, and after many years of it.” This goes for
heterosexual men and homosexual men. He also found that men want a higher number of sexual
relationships in their lives and they are more down than women on average in having casual sex.
Women focus more on having meaningful relationships,
while men are generally more ok with having one-night stands and things like that. We know
this sounds like an old-fashioned stereotype, but this is what researchers have found out.
It seems men are just more simple in regard to sex. They look at a woman and some chemical
reactions go off in their heads and they wouldn’t mind jumping into bed with this woman. Women,
on the other hand, will be aroused often only when other environmental factors are involved.
As another researcher put it, “Sexual desire in women is extremely sensitive to environment
and context.” This social scientist wrote the book, “The Social Organization of Sexuality:
Sexual Practices in the United States.” In a purely evolutionary sense,
a male might want to spread his seed to as many women as possible if they look like they could
provide him some offspring and proliferate his genes. But with women, it doesn’t make
evolutionary sense to sleep with any old man. They will be looking for a suitable mate.
As for masturbation, around two-thirds of adult men, married or not, will carry
on beating the beaver. More so, of course, if they’re not in a healthy sexual relationship.
Still, they will usually knock the odd one out on the sly even if they are with someone.
On the other hand, only about 40 percent of adult women report masturbating and if they do,
they do it less often than men. Men also seek out sex more when
it comes at a cost. The vast majority of prostitution is men seeking women or other men,
rather than women seeking another woman or a man. Even priests, who’ve taken a vow of
celibacy, seek sex more than nuns seek sex. So, what is going on inside men and women?
It’s hard to say, but one researcher at Northwestern University tried to figure it out
by conducting a sex study. She showed the participants a series of erotic movies while
a device was attached to their genital areas to measure how turned on they were. The participants
were also asked how aroused they felt. The straight guys in the study told the
researchers that what moved them the most was watching male to female sex but also female to
female. Those devices told the researchers this was very true. As for homosexual men,
they were aroused by seeing male to male sex. The women in the study said they were the
most aroused by watching male to female sex. Maybe they weren’t telling the truth, though,
because the devices showed they were just as aroused watching men have sex with men
and women having sex with women. One of the researchers concluded,
“Men are very rigid and specific about who they become aroused by, who they want to have sex with,
who they fall in love with.” He said women are more open in general to having same-sex
relationships, and while they might not do it, they have more of a capacity to do it. That’s
why more women report being bisexual than men. In terms of making out with people willy-nilly,
women who were interviewed showed that many things influenced who they would have sex with. If the
person went to church mattered, but it didn’t with men. With women, their friends had an effect on
who they’d sleep with, but not so much with men. The study even said that education counted for
something with women. The more educated a woman was, the more up for experimenting she was, such
as giving and receiving oral sex. Education didn’t seem to make any difference when it came to men.
In all, the researchers said that men certainly seem to have a higher
sex drive and they are less vulnerable to outside factors when it comes to having sex.
But is this just plain old-fashioned thinking? It wasn’t too long ago that women were expected
to hide their sexual feelings and impulses. That might still be true in some cultures,
but it seems that men do want more sex with more women and it doesn’t have to involve
lots of preceding chasing. Another researcher said women like a story. They are more complex.
An example is that a lot of those online apps that tell a sexual story are dedicated to women.
Women like a plot. Men are ok with a paragraph. One researcher explained it like this:
“Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex. For men,
sex is the connection. Sex is the language men use to express their tender loving vulnerable side.
It is their language of intimacy.” Maybe some of you have started falling
in love and said to yourself, “If she liked me, she’d sleep with me.” But maybe the woman thinks,
“If he really liked me, he’d wait and let this story flower into something
more than a bedboard banging against the wall.” Even a woman’s orgasm is more complex. With guys,
they are usually done within four minutes. That’s when they are grown up. When that guy
who has the stiff socks has sex for the first time he’s more likely to last four seconds.
But the average woman, young or old, would on average take 11 minutes to reach orgasm if she
reaches it at all. In couples, men reported having an organism during sex 75 percent of the time,
but with women, it was more like 25 percent. The funny thing is, the men in the study said their
partners reached orgasm 45 percent of the time. As for that couple in their 50s we talked about
at the start, other studies have shown that it’s actually women who generally lose interest in sex
first. Sure, the guy could have had some kind of erectile dysfunction, which can happen to
men as they age, but it is possible his member would have worked in different circumstances.
Citing another study, the BBC reported that women were twice as likely to lose their sex
drive when in a relationship, but this wasn’t always about biology. It was often a result
of “a lack of emotional closeness.” This study was undertaken by the British Medical journal
and involved 5,000 men and 6,700 women. Of those people, 15 percent of the men said
they’d lost all interest in sex for a period of three months or more in the last year,
but for women, it was 34 percent. Nonetheless, with men, the sex drive started faltering between
the ages of 35 and 44, and with women, it was between the ages of 55 and 64.
Again, though, just because the sexual flame has died it doesn’t mean the sex drive is gone for
good. Various circumstances, such as hard work or kids or even boredom, play a part, but the drive
would still be there if things were different. And if you think about what we’ve already said,
if men’s sex drives are not as complex and they are more willing to jump in bed with more people,
they will likely be having more sex at an older age than women. It’s likely that as time goes on,
men will feel more of a need to spread their seed than women will want to have sex for sex’s sake.
Now you need to educate yourself some more with “Why Do We Actually Have Sex.” Or,
have a look at “Why Men Have to Wait and Women Don't - Refractory Period (Sex Education).”