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).”
