Conclusive proof that men are hornier than women

"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." - Gore Vidal

***

Here is overwhelming evidence for my dictum that "it's as easy to find a guy who isn't horny as it is to find a girl who doesn't want to be pretty" (well, the first part, anyway).

The part on paraphilias also provides support for the claim that men are more kinky than women. There's also an intriguing bit which might help inform why girls like slash/yaoi. And yet more evidence is offered which supports my claim that getting married without having pre-marital sex is irresponsible.


Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive? Theoretical Views, Conceptual Distinctions, and a Review of Relevant Evidence
Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen R. Catanese, and Kathleen D. Vohs

"The ideal would be that the average sex drive would be equally strong in men and women, in which case individual variations would be the only obstacle to marital harmony, and many people could find a partner with a fairly precise match of sexual inclinations...

In any given relationship, whichever partner wants sex more is in a weaker position, insofar as greater desire creates dependency on the partner. To the extent that sex can serve as a medium for social exchange involving any other social or material resources, it may influence the entire relationship. Gender roles and marital equity will depend on whether other resources are indeed exchanged in a way to make up the imbalance in sexual interest. Thus, unequal sex drives may shape the broader marital relationship in ways that go far beyond the bedroom...

When we told people we were studying whether men and women differ in strength of sex drive, most people responded by saying that the answer was obvious-- but when we cautiously asked them what the obvious answer was, we heard all three possible answers (i.e., men higher, women higher, no difference) endorsed...

We also consulted leading textbooks on sexuality to find whether any consensus existed on the topic about gender differences in sex drive, but the answer appeared to be no...

The only viable way to address the question of differential sex drive is in a broad literature review that examines many studies by different investigators, using different methods and measures, and with different samples...

The sex drive is best understood in terms of the frequency and intensity of desire...

One would expect the difference in motivation to be reflected in desired frequency of sex, desired variety of sex acts and partners, frequency of fantasy, frequency of masturbation, number of partners, frequency of thinking about sex, willingness to make sacrifices in other spheres to obtain sex, and the like...

Our initial strategy was to read all abstracts of all articles in the Journal of Sex Research from the initial (1965) volume up to the present...

Same-sex relationships provide relevant evidence about gender differences in sex drive. People in these relationships are clearly willing to defy social pressures favoring heterosexuality, at least to the extent of forming a committed same-gender relationship, and so it is reasonable to conclude that people are not simply conforming to social prescriptions. Also, the same-gender relationships are relatively free of the direct influence of the opposite gender, and so it is possible to examine what sexual patterns look like when they are set by only one gender...

Gay men had higher frequencies of sex than lesbians at all stages of relationships... the gay men who had largely ceased having sex after 10 years together were often having sex with other partners, whereas the lesbians who had ceased having sex together had generally not compensated for this deficit by finding other sexual outlets. A lack of sexual desire and activity in women is reflected in the phrase "lesbian bed death," (e.g., Iasenza, 2000) which has been coined to describe the low levels of sexual activity among lesbians in long-term relationships...

Sanders and Reinisch... asked a sample of students "Would you say you had sex if ..." and then presented a list of possible activities. Men and women agreed very closely that vaginal and anal intercourse constituted sex and that kissing did not, but they disagreed on the intermediate activities such as fellatio, cunnilingus, and manual stimulation of a partner's genitals. Men were consistently more likely to rate those activities as sex than women. This fits the view that men desired to count those activities as having had sex, which would serve the goal of enabling them to think they had a higher number of sex partners...

The subculture of gay men did briefly establish bathhouses and other institutions that allowed men to have sex with half a dozen or more partners in a single evening. Even though lesbians are better able than gay men to engage in such promiscuity (because of the lack of refractory period), lesbian communities do not seem to have created any market for such institutionalized orgiastic behavior...

Some have proposed that society disproportionately discourages girls from masturbating, so that the gender difference in masturbation may reflect socialization. For example, they claim that society does not teach girls to masturbate or approve of their doing so. We find these arguments dubious. Society has certainly expressed strong and consistent disapproval of masturbation by boys, and if anything the pressures have been more severe on boys than girls. For example, the warnings about blindness and insanity (as putative consequences of masturbation) were mainly directed at young males, not females.

As to the feminist suggestion that society fails to teach girls to masturbate, literally that may be true, but we do not think that society teaches boys to masturbate either. Arafat and Cotton (1974) found that half the girls and more than half the boys (who masturbated) said they discovered it themselves... The high rates of self-taught masturbation suggest that it is not a technically recondite, esoteric practice. Anyone who wants to masturbate can probably figure out how to do it...

[A] possible objection in terms of guilt would be that men and women have an equal desire to masturbate but guilt weighs more heavily on women than men. This is directly contradicted, however, by Arafat and Cotton's (1974) finding that more males (13%) than females (10%) reported feeling guilty after masturbation. By the same token, more males than females said they regarded their masturbatory activities as perverse (5% vs. 1%). Thus, if anything, guilt weighs more heavily on men.

If not guilt, then what is the major deterrent to masturbation? According to Arafat and Cotton's (1974) data, the most common reason for not masturbating was a lack of desire, and that was reported by more of the nonmasturbating females (76%) than the nonmasturbating males (56%)...

Another very instructive case concerns clerical vows of celibacy. This is especially important because there is no question of separate values or double standard: Among Catholic Christian clergy, both men and women take profoundly important and sacred vows to forego all sexual gratification throughout life. The single standard of absolute purity is thus clear to both priests and nuns. Yet the evidence suggests that nuns are far more successful than priests at achieving that ideal...

Fewer sexual practices appeal to women than men... On 13 of the 14 practices, a higher percentage of men than women rated the activity as appealing, and the 14th showed no difference ("being forced by a sex partner")...

Although the list used by Laumann et al. (1994) contained practices that are favored by people in the so-called normal range of sexual activity, such as watching a partner undress, receiving oral sex, or stimulating the anus with a finger, a similar conclusion emerges from examination of unusual or deviant variations of sexuality. Nearly all the paraphilias appeal to men more than women...

The greater appeal of multiple practices to men than women is not confined to the modern United States. A study of elderly people in Sweden, which is supposedly a very egalitarian and sexually liberated culture, found that men liked the full span of sexual activities more than women...

Some might object that most pornography is more geared toward men than women. There are two reasons to dismiss this objection, however. First, several studies have found that women do have strong physiological responses to pornography and experience levels of sexual arousal that compare with men's (e.g., Fisher & Byrne, 1978; also Heiman, 1977). It is thus clear that currently available pornography is amply arousing to women. Once they see it, they like it and find it stimulating--but women are simply not sufficiently motivated to seek out that kind of stimulation as often as men.

The other reason to dismiss the argument of gender bias in the sex industry is that if the market existed for a special, female-targeted pornography, it is highly likely that someone would have been willing and eager to make the millions of dollars that it would represent. In actual fact, the sex industry has tried repeatedly to reach out to women, but it has repeatedly failed... unlike the male market for pictures of nude women, which has sustained an assortment of magazines for decades.

Another instructive category is the purchase of sexual aids and devices: There too one expends money to obtain sexual pleasure. Both men and women find such purchases embarrassing, but men are more willing to swallow their pride and make such a purchase (Laumann et al., 1994). This is true even though what is available for women (vibrators) seems superior to anything available to men (see C. M. Davis, Blank, Lin, & Bonillas, 1996). The vibrator is thus a further counterargument to the view that the sex industry is only aimed at men...

There is some evidence that women only have extramarital affairs when they are dissatisfied with their marriage...

One could examine the expenditure of other resources for the sake of sex. We do not know of systematic studies, but we predict that the same conclusion would emerge. Jeopardizing one's career for the sake of a sexual indulgence would be one relevant measure. To our knowledge, female politicians and leaders have not had their careers endangered by sex scandals almost at all, whereas such scandals have damaged and even ended careers by male politicians. It is conceivable that an anti-male bias in the media leads to greater exposure of men than women, but we think that the American press is sufficiently free and competitive that it would be eager to publicize sexual misdeeds by eminent, powerful women if it could find evidence of them...

Women have less permissive attitudes toward sex than men. Although they are equal on some things, generally women are more critical of promiscuity, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and various other sexual activities...

The main exception to the greater permissiveness of males is in attitudes toward homosexuality... Whitley (1988) found that both men and women were more permissive toward homosexuality of the other gender but more opposed to their own gender's homosexuality...

A highly specific and relevant set of attitudes concerns liking for sex organs. One would predict that a person with a high sex drive would have more favorable attitudes toward sex organs than a person with lower sex drive.

Attitudes toward sex organs were assessed by Reinholtz and Muehlenhard (1995). They found that men held more favorable opinions of their own sex organs (i.e., their penises) than women held toward theirs (i.e., their vaginas). One might object that these judgments are confounded by the physical nature of the organs themselves, such as if the penis were inherently more lovable than the vagina, but this interpretation is contradicted by additional findings: Men rated their girlfriends' vaginas more favorably than the women rated their boyfriends' penises...

Low sexual motivation was related to marital adjustment problems. Beck (1995) also reported that hyposexuality is strongly related to poor dyadic adjustment (e.g., Stuart, Hammond, & Pett, 1987; Trudel, Boulos, & Matte, 1993). A study of sexuality and relationship indexes found that sexual desire discrepancies (the difference between each partner's level of sexual desire) predicted overall relationship satisfaction (Davies, Katz, & Jackson, 1999). A discrepancy in which the woman has lower sexual desire than the man appeared to be especially problematic, with these women reporting lower relationship and sexual satisfaction than women who matched or exceeded their partner's level of sexual desire...

Far more women (19%) than men (2%) claimed that they never felt that they wanted or needed sex. Moreover, even when sexual tension or desire was felt, it was apparently less intense among the women. Most of the men (80%) but only 25% of the women said they preferred to have sex as a way of releasing sexual tension when they did feel it. Instead, women said they preferred to engage in vigorous physical activity (50%) or even just watch television (20%)...

By virtue of the very biological structure of the sex organs, women have superior capacity to men. Women can copulate with more consecutive partners than men, can copulate for a longer period of time, and can achieve more orgasms during a single session than men can. We can think of no aspect of sex in which men's capacity for sexual performance matches or exceeds women's, other than the reliable incidence of orgasm... Women clearly have a greater overall capacity for sex than men...

Given the current state of knowledge, we regard the question of which gender enjoys sex more as unanswerable...

We have surveyed a broad range of available evidence on the relative strength of sex drive, defined in terms of sexual motivation. The evidence was extensive, methodologically diverse, and consistent. By all measures, men have a stronger sex drive than women. Men think about sex more often, experience more frequent sexual arousal, have more frequent and varied fantasies, desire sex more often, desire more partners, masturbate more, want sex sooner, are less able or willing to live without sexual gratification, initiate more and refuse less sex, expend more resources and make more sacrifices for sex, desire and enjoy a broader variety of sexual practices, have more favorable and permissive attitudes toward most sexual activities, have fewer complaints about low sex drive in themselves (but more about their partners), and rate their sex drives as stronger than women. There were no measures that showed women having stronger drives than men...

Any conception of sexual desire or drive that does not recognize frequency of feelings of desire, range and frequency of fantasy, preferred number of partners, ease of arousal, preferred frequency of sex, time and money invested, masturbation, desire for variety of activities, and the rest of the variables covered previously would have to be so peculiarly constructed as to be almost incoherent.

We do not wish this conclusion to be misunderstood or to be misused for ideological purposes...

Research by Byers and Lewis (1988) on disagreements about sex has found that almost half of all heterosexual couples disagree about sex, and every single disagreement involved the man desiring some sexual activity that his female partner did not...

Differences in naturally occurring testosterone levels distinguish between two subtypes of lesbians, "butch" versus "femme" (Singh, Vidaurri, Zambarano, & Dabbs, 1999). Lesbians classify a butch lesbian (as opposed to being a femme lesbian) by body build and weight, gait, style of dress, and attitude, with butches being bigger in size, more active, and less pretty than femmes (Loulan, 1990). Degree of self-rated butchness was predicted by testosterone level (β = .51; see similar findings by Pearcey, Dochert, & Dabbs, 1996), a relation that was statistically significant even after controlling for related factors such as body weight and age. Additional data from this study revealed that butch lesbians were involved in more sexual relationships in the past 2 years, reported less desire to give birth but reported more desire to raise children relative to femme lesbians, and were less likely to adopt a submissive style of sexual participation. Butch lesbians also reported greater enjoyment of erotica relative to heterosexual women. In discussing their findings, Singh et al. (1999) related the style of butch lesbians to sexual behaviors typical of men; their findings regarding higher testosterone levels among these women corroborates our conclusion that testosterone is an important determinant of sexual drive...

There may also exist a biological basis for gender differences in sex drive through differences in genital size, a factor hypothesized to subsequently influence sexual motivation through learning experiences...

We noted in our review of the evidence that a study from the Netherlands (Vanwesenbeeck et al., 1998) also supports our conclusion of a weaker sex drive among women... Given the highly permissive attitudes about sex in the Netherlands, which would allow women to freely express their sexual desires, these data argue against a confirmation of the null hypothesis of no differences in sex drive as a function of gender...

A review of passionate love and, specifically, sexual desire (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993) concluded that there exists much more similarity than differences in patterns of sexual desire among major cultural groups... the available anthropological and cross-cultural evidence suggests that men have a stronger sex drive than women...

The best bet is therefore probably that society's influence may have at various times tried to increase or reduce the gender difference in sex drive, but it did not likely reverse the natural order of things, nor did it create the difference out of nothing. Probably gender differences in sex drive reflect a combination of natural and cultural influences...

Cultural influences have sought to stifle some aspects of female sexuality, but we found the difference in sex drive even in sexual spheres (such as marital sex) where culture has supported and encouraged female sexual desire, so stifling should not be relevant...

Many male-female romantic interactions will take the form of the man offering the woman some resources (commitment, flattery, food, entertainment, money, companionship) to induce her to commence a sexual relationship...

Some authors have hinted that there has been pressure to assume men and women have equal sexual motivations (e.g., Leigh, 1989). The assumption of equality would have steered theory in certain directions, such as forcing theorists to invoke ulterior (e.g., political) explanations for men's greater interest in pornography, prostitution, and the like. Even analyses of marriage may have had to regard men's sexual demands on their wives as rooted in nonsexual motives, to explain the differential sexual behavior without violating the (false) principle of equal sex drive. Although political factors can certainly influence sexual behavior, we suggest that the political motives are likely to interact with and develop around the basic gender difference in sexual motivation. More generally, the point that men want sex more than women is likely to become a focal issue in how most couples negotiate their sex lives, from first dates to losing virginity to multidecade marriages. An accurate, empirically grounded appreciation of the gender difference in sex drive should be a helpful part of the foundation for advancing theory about human sexuality and relationships...

All the evidence we have reviewed points toward the conclusion that men desire sex more than women. Although some of the findings were more methodologically rigorous than others, the unanimous convergence across all measures and findings increases confidence. We did not find a single study, on any of nearly a dozen different measures, that found women had a stronger sex drive than men. We think that the combined quantity, quality, diversity, and convergence of the evidence render the conclusion indisputable."


Very strangely, in response to this I was told that is "pathetically outdated" and that:

"in the social science field... a decade old literature is never reliable. It increases the chances of error to at least 10% and social science fields allow up to 5% error in statistical calculation"

Which flies against everything I know and have read.

My enquiry about which discipline the person was from went unanswered, sadly.


Keywords: less horny, women sex drive, conclusive proof that men are more horny than women, men want sex more than women