Is there Anything Good About Men? It seems that women’s magazines ask this question almost every month, along with advice about reconciling sexual preferences between men and women. In the excerpt below, Roy F. Baumeister reveals the “reality of the male sex drive.”
The problem of recognizing the reality of the male sex drive was brought home to me in a rather amusing experience I had some years ago. I was writing a paper weighing the relative influence of cultural and social factors on sexual behavior, and the influence consistently turned out to be stronger on women than on men. In any scientific field, observing a significant difference raises the question of why it happens. We had to consider several possible explanations, and one was that the sex drive is milder in women than in men. Women might be more willing to adapt their sexuality to local norms and contexts and different situations, because they aren’t quite so driven by strong urges and cravings as men are.
When I brought this up in the paper as one possible theory, reviewers reacted rather negatively. They thought the idea that men have a stronger sex drive than women was probably some obsolete, wrong, and possibly offensive stereotype. I wasn’t permitted to make such a statement without proof, which they doubted could be found. And when I consulted the leading textbooks on sexuality, none of them said that women had a generally milder desire for sex than men. Some textbooks explicitly said that idea was wrong. One, by Janet Hyde and Richard DeLamater, openly speculated that women actually had a stronger sex drive than men, contrary to what I thought.
Two colleagues and I decided to see what information could be gleaned from all the published research studies we could find. This meant a long process of slogging through hundreds of scientific journal articles reporting scientific studies of sexual behavior. One colleague, Kathleen Catanese (now a professor of psychology at a Midwestern college) started out as a strong feminist with the party-line belief that there was no difference in sex drive. The other, Kathleen Vohs (now a professor of marketing), was undecided. My hunch was that men had the stronger sex drive. Thus, at the outset, we held an assortment of views, but we all decided we would just follow the data and revise our opinions as the evidence came in.
The task was considerable, and I at least was nagged by the fear that this point was so obvious that no one would want to publish our research. One colleague heard we were reviewing the literature to see whether men wanted sex more than women, and she commented acidly, “Of course they do. Everybody who’s ever had sex knows that!” Well, everybody, apparently, except the expert researchers on sexuality and authors of textbooks.
There is no single, clear measure of sex drive. So we approached the problem like this. Imagine two women (or two men for that matter), such that one of them has truly a stronger sex drive than the other. What differences in preferences and behavior would you expect to see between the two of them? For example, the one with the stronger sex drive would presumably think about sex more often; have more fantasies