I’m not making it up. It’s not just a stereotype. I don’t just “believe” it’s true – I’ve got a whole post about how I don’t believe stuff in the face of contrary evidence. And in general I try to be explicit about stuff I’m speculating about or don’t feel confident about.
But ya’ll don’t believe me.
Which – I’m being very honest here – makes me roll my eyes. I’m all for healthy skepticism, but rejecting something JUST because it sounds like the stereotype is unscholarly, irrational, and unhelpful. So let’s put a stop to it.
Fortunately it happens that this idea is one of the foundations of my dissertation, so I dug out the crusty old tome and got a pile of references. Then I dug out some of the references and got you a pile of statistics. What do they tell you? By every measure, by every methodology, this is a robust finding. Here we go:
In terms of number of partners
According to the big Chicago study, men are 3 times more likely to report having 5 or more partners in the past year (table 5.1A), almost 9 times more likely to report 21 or more partners in the past 5 years (table 5.1B), and about 5 times more likely to report having 21+ partners since age 18 (table 5.1C). Median number of partners since age 18 for men: 6. Median number of partners since age 18 for women: 2.
Indeed, in terms of the distribution of lifetime number sex partners, men have an order of magnitude more partners. (That’s a whole lot.)
Of course you’re not satisfied with that. You shouldn’t be. So here’s some more:
Masturbation
Less than 5% of women reported an overall “autoerotic score” of 5 or greater (out of 6), whereas about 20% of men did. This score has some problems, but the sheer scale of the difference minimizes the importance of those problems.
In the Chicago data, 26.7% of men reported masturbating once per week or more in the last year. Women? 7.6%. Are there cultural gender differences in acceptability of reporting masturbation? There are. Enough to cut women’s reporting by 70%? Taking into account all the other data I’m presenting?
In Kinsey’s original data, roughly 6% of men reported masturbating a maximum of 10 times in a week, while 2% of women did. Also, as an example, unmarried men between the ages of 21-24 reported masturbating on average about 1.5 times per week, while the parallel women reported masturbating .88 times per week. A bit more than half as often as the men.
In terms of reported desire
This one is a literature review that closely compared around a dozen studies to ask, Is there a gender difference in strength of sexual motivation. Their answer: “No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found.” By multiple measures, multiple methodologies. This is a nice, cautious paper.
Actual Mechanism
On a more basic level, “women scored lower on sexual excitation and higher on both sexual inhibition scales compared with men.”
In a 2006 survey, “Men reported experiencing sexual desire more often than did women and, when asked to estimate the actual frequency with which they experienced desire, men’s estimated frequency (37 times per week) was significantly higher than women’s (9 times per week).”
That’s a sample of the evidence. There’s too much to show all of it.
Now. The first strategy of a fundamentalist when faced with contrary evidence is the say that either science can’t measure these things or that THIS science can’t measure these things. I am reporting 60+ years of research with the same finding, replicated over and over and in multiple research methods.
Also, I’m relying on the same quality of evidence when I say that only about 1/4 to 1/3 of women are reliably orgasmic from intercourse. You believe me when I say that, right?
It’s not male bias in science, though male bias exists. It’s not just differences and problems in reporting, though that exists too. The results are too robust to doubt.
I must add that I don’t assign much importance to this difference because individual variability is more interesting and, under many circumstances, more relevant. In other words, I hardly give a shit about all this data. I wouldn’t even be doing a post on this if people hadn’t said they don’t believe me.
Why am I writing it then? Because it’s important to me, on a personal level, that I know that you know that I don’t just make shit up (without making it abundantly clear that that’s what I’m doing) or buy into cultural stereotypes on the basis of nothing more substantial than that I reckon it sounds about right.
Okay then. Can we move on now?
Certainly, let’s move on
Yes, let’s – your place or mine?
(Disclaimer: This in no way validates Emily’s sources)
They don’t need to be validated any more than they have been – they’re from peer-reviewed journals.
Uhh, that was not intended as a serious comment.
It was just my dick jerk reaction to a female commenter with an obvious setup line – your nerdiness is showing Emily!
I have no particular problem accepting the statement at the beginning of the page, but if we’re talking about evidence, let’s talk about evidence. I think you’re saying that the statement above is borne out by overwhelming evidence. Then you’re sharing a lot of evidence in support of that statement, all of which comes from self-reporting, as far as I understand it. You also seem to be saying that cultural gender differences aren’t enough to cut women’s reporting by 70%. But you don’t offer any evidence for that last point. Is there some?
Also, all the papers that I could access appeared to refer to American subjects, but I couldn’t be sure. The statement at the top of the page appears to apply to all men and women. The evidence you mention seems to apply only to America – personally I’d be surprised if British or Scandinavian surveys showed such large gaps between men’s and women’s responses. Is there similar evidence from other countries where people are willing to respond to questions about sex, or not?
I sound pedantic – I’m being pedantic – but I do think that if you’re going to try to get acceptance for important ideas on the basis of evidence, you should be clear what the evidence does and doesn’t say, so that you carry your point more credibly.
This sounds like a moan but I very much like your blog and think it is great.
Yes it is a pedantic moan, and what’s worse is that it’s a pedantic moan to which the answer is, “I addressed that, you need to read more carefully.” It’s exactly the eye-roll inducing sort of thing that is the reason I wrote the thing in the first place.
But let’s beat a dead horse. That’s why we’re here. The evidence I provided is high quality and I won’t let slip the implication that it’s not.
(1) I’ve cited at least 4 different forms of self-report (if you had read the papers carefully you’d have spotted that) – it’s not a monolithic methodology. Are you telling me that there’s no difference between results from daily diary v. retrospective? Because there are big important differences. That said, as I mentioned, there is evidence from a wide range of methodologies.
(2) If you access all the PDFs I linked to, then you CAN access non-American data (if you had read the papers carefully you’d have spotted that); but also see, for example, table 5.4A in the Chicago study.
(3) I did NOT say that cultural differences can’t make up the 70%; I ASKED if, in the context of all the other evidence, one is inclined to think so (if you had read the paragraph carefully, you’d have spotted that). Still let’s get a rough idea of the differences in how men and women report in the Chicago study:
26.6% married men and 24.5% of married women report having sex 3-6 times a week; same question, unmarried cohabiting men 37.7%, unmarried cohabiting women 40.4%. Overall mean frequency of sex per month: men 6.5 times, women 6.3 times (married men 6.9 times, married women 6.5 times).
These are not gigantic differences, you see. In the vicinity of 10%.
On the other hand, among those who report masturbating, 16% of men and only 6% of women say they masturbate because their partner doesn’t want sex. A 37.5% difference. Other reasons like partner unavailable (32%, 32%), physical pleasure (40%, 42%), and to go to sleep (16%, 12%) are not so different as the differential desire reason.
So in fact I do feel quite comfortable asserting that culture can’t possibly account for a 70% – but I didn’t say it before, I wondered out loud, which is what question marks are for.
I’m happy you like the blog, really I am, but I’d be happier if it sounded like you were reading more carefully.
If you’re talking about heterosexual encounters, it’s mathematically impossible for the mean number of partners to be different for men as a group vs. women as a group. So the numbers you cite above might say something about the skewness of the two distributions, but it doesn’t support the general conclusion that men tend to have more sexual partners.
Of course, there are other good reasons for believing that men are on the short side of this particular market.
I’m not talking about heterosexual encounters, so yes it does support the general conclusion.
Are the differences in the means driven solely by differences between gay men and lesbians? Or is there a significant group of guys who are having (a lot of) sex with both men and women?
The latter possibility seems a lot more interesting and relevant to me.
Hmm.. the article you linked cites Laumann et al. The Social Organization of Sexuality in support of the observation that men have more sexual partners than women. But Laumann et al. themselves recognize that this discrepancy is problematic and suggest (p. 185) that either exaggeration by men or understatement by women probably accounts for most of the difference.
The doubt comes from the fact that studies like these ignore how culture effects sexual desire and sexual motivation. If I’m told as a woman to feel shame about pleasure, of course I’m not going to score high on sexual inhibition. When I’m told that my sexual availability is tied to my worth as a human being, I’m going to have less desire. When my personal pleasure is both shamed and objectified and I’m denied sexual autonomy, I’m certainly not going to masturbate at a high rate.
None of this changes the end result of the studies, but it does change their meaning. I often see people using studies like this to encourage talking MORE about male sex and putting it as priority, to condoning rape and objectification, instead of seeing it as an end result of lack or representation of female pleasure.
This leads to the question of what constitutes a statistically valid group if cultural effects are to be removed from the equation. Kids before 1 1/2? When do sexual inhibitions really set in?
You can never have a culturally unaffected group. We are imprinted with gender binaries from the moment of conception when we are wrapped in pink or blue. That doesn’t mean the studies are flawed, they just need a deeper analysis because I know that when I read these stats I think – “these are not a true representation of me.” We have to explore the outside influences.
It’s not that I think there *isn’t* a difference in motivation, just that I think the difference is one of gender (socially constructed), rather than sex differences (biological).
Women may be underreporting masturbation because of cultural factors, but they may also be genuinely masturbating less because of cultural factors.
A cursory look at the Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen R. Catanese, and Kathleen D. Vohs, 2001 article brings me to a couple conclusions. I did not read the full article of course (this is the same behavior that resulted in me NOT getting my PHD) but I did look at the tables of data.
First. There seems to be some indication that females are the guardians of the gates, and the males the soldiers rushing the gates. Driscoll and Gates, 1971 shows that 39 males and only 1 female attributed their lack of intercourse in their present relationship was due to not being able to talk their partner into sex. Similarly, Sprechner and Reagan, 1996 found that males endorsed an item at a higher level than females when asked whether virginity was due to partner’s unwillingness (M = 2.24, F = 1.65 on a 5 point Lichert scale —- don’t get me started on why you should NEVER use a 5-point scale instead of a 7-point scale).
It is at least conceivable that a lot of the difference in Male v. Female in heterosexual responses is due to the roles of defenders of the gate vs. conquering hero. What soldier will not exaggerate his conquests and what defender is going to admit their failure to put up a proper defense? The Nature article suggests as much (yeah well that article was pretty short so I read MOST of it). What differences there are here seem to be relatively small in comparison to the differences between gay males and lesbians.
Belle and Weinberg, 1978 report 43% of gay males and 0% of lesbians report 500 or more lifetime partners (no real trick when the gates are not only left undefended, but to the contrary a welcome mat is outside the door). Bell and Weinberg also report 47% of white gay couples and only 32% of lesbian couples endorse having sex more than once per week after two years in a relationship (numbers for black couples were 65% and 16% respectively). Interestingly enough, Blumstein and Schwartz, 1983 find that 33% of gay males would prefer more sex while that number is 47% among lesbians. Not surprising that we have two “defenders” not initiating sex as much as either might like.
My sense is that what differences I was able to see in sexual motivation was due in large part to gay men having enormous numbers of partners. My hypothesis being that when there are no barriers to initiating sex that males are more than happy to initiate. Meanwhile, not only do lesbian couples have to deal with their own social pressures to withhold sex but with that same social pressure on their partners.
The Nature paper also seems to suggest that among heterosexuals, there is still a bias in favor of women under reporting and men over reporting the number of partners.
I am happy to be shown to be wrong about all of this, but I thought I would put my two cents in, in the hope that Emily with find me irresistibly hot.
BTW. Did we ever officially agree to that marriage pact if both of us are still single in 15 years? I’ll have a decent pension by then and could take care of the house and the cooking. And you could take care of, well, me. I know. I know. I need to go back and re-read the post about sex researchers talk of sex not being an invitation but I DO cook a mean Beef Stroganoff among other things.
The gatekeeper thing is a whole post in itself. It’s a likely source of the putative ‘lesbian bed death.’ I’ll write about it eventually.
The difficulty you’re describing is that how often you can GET sex is not necessarily related to how often you WANT sex, and WANTING is a better measure of motivation than GETTING. Saying a starving person must not be very interested in food doesn’t work, right?
But you’ve inspired a tiny unscientific research project! Stay tuned.
And Bill, there are few things I WOULDN’T do for your rice pudding with cherries, but moving to Alaska is one of them. You wanna come to MA, we got a deal.
It’s a deal. June 9th, 2025 if we neither of us are married, I will come to MA to make you rice puddin’ with cherry sauce until death do us part. (which might happen sooner than otherwise due to the rice pudding … but you gotta die of something, right?).
In terms of the getting vs. wanting problem. I am presently on a binge. Of chocolate, not sex sadly. I am finding that the more I eat chocolate, the more I want it as well. I think this is probably true of sex as well (well good sex anyway). Any saucy evidence for this?
I would also think that a powerful driver of motivation would be availablity of orgasm. What studies of motivation have been done in orgasmic vs. non-orgasmic women? Do women who experience orgasm during sex (whether during intercourse or otherwise) have sexual motivation similar to men AND what about women who are multi-orgasmic. I can imagine never leaving the house if I was multi-orgasmic.
Death by bathtub full of warm rice pudding DEFINITELY what I’d choose if I got to pick how I died.
And yes, there actually is evidence that the more sex you have, the more you want. Or, more specifically, the more sexually relevant stimuli you notice, the more you want sex. Which is actually pretty self-evident when I put it like that.
The question of orgasm and motivation in women is extremely complicated. There’s evidence that orgasm difficulties are associated with higher SIS proneness – see the nice table on page 6 of http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/publications/PDF/Sandersetal2007.pdf – but it will never be so straightforward as “orgasmic v. non-orgasmic women” because whether or not a woman is orgasmic is highly context dependent. With the right partner, at the right phase in her cycle, when her stress is low and her mood is up and she feels good about her body and etc etc…
I know a read thing once about SIS/SES and penetrative orgasms, but I forget now. I’ll investigate. Don’t know about multiple orgasm women.
Huh. I don’t think I doubted your assertion of sexual differences, but alright. Moving on! =)
Oh, and I think greater female sexual inhibition accounts for a lot! Explains me better at least, lol.
I’m all for moving on. In fact I’m about to contribute to the “sleep (16%, 12%).” Thanks Emily. hah
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