Do men and women both desire sex just as much?

Often lamented in our modern society is the ongoing collapse of the standard family unit. The notion of a father, mother and two, three, four or more kids living harmoniously under one roof, so essential to the '50s era America dream, is becoming just as elusive as its name suggests - a dream.

We don't have to rely on anecdotal evidence to prove this, just a quick look at the statistics will do. In 1900 the average Australian household contained 4.5 people. By 1960 that number had declined to 3.5, and is now down past 2.5 today, and still dropping.

There are two predominate causes of this, firstly, smaller family sizes. Australia's average fertility rate (the number of babies born per woman) has fallen from a high of 3.5 in 1960 to around 1.9 now. Even that figure has only crept up in recent years due to higher birth rates among newly arrived immigrants.

The second cause however, is how much the divorce rate has skyrocketed in recent years. 43% of marriages in Australia now end in divorce. As high as this figure is, in many countries the rate is even higher, including 53% in the US, 55% in France, 61% in Spain and, apparently, 71% in Belgium. Historically, the divorce rate was virtually zero up until the 1940s, then shot up from the '70s onwards. This had contributed to over 20% of households in Australia now being 'single-person' households, quite a waste given that figure comes out to over 2 million extra inhabited houses. That's two million extra fridges running all the time, two million extra dishwashers, washing machines and microwaves, probably well over two million TV's, and so on. All needlessly draining electricity from our power grid, not to mention the added costs of manufacturing and importing them all. The economic costs of such a spiraling divorce rate are no doubt enormous.

But anyway, why has this change occurred?

First off, we should acknowledge the nature of marriage as a historical institution. Up until well into the 20th century most marriages were, lets not sugarcoat it, tantamount to a form of slavery. Women served as the child-rearers and servants of their husbands. Women had few political rights, rarely were financially independent, and were expected to remain loyal to their husbands and cover up their bodies in public. European women in 1900 were in many ways similar to Middle Eastern women today.

Evidence backing up this comparison also comes in the form of divorce rates in many Islamic countries shooting up in recent years. The divorce rate is now 14% in Iran, and 17% in Egypt. Concurrently, women were finally granted the right to vote in Kuwait in 2006, and plans are now afoot to allow women to legally drive in Saudi Arabia from 2015 onward. Conservative attitudes to women are quickly dying out worldwide, although 'quickly' on the scale of the entire world still means this is happening over a period of several generations.

So what does this have to do with sexual desire? Well looking at British figures when it comes to the divorce rate -

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons

We can see that 65% of divorces are initiated by women rather than men. Of those, over 50% cite 'behavior' as the main reason.

When I first saw these figures a while ago, I was quite surprised. Surely men, given they are still most often the income-earners in any partnership, would be more likely to divorce their wives then the other way round? In the vast majority of divorce cases it is the women who receive custody of the children and require alimony payments from their former partners. Given that this isn't the case, then from these figures we can come to the conclusion that women are getting sick of being 'wives' much more often and more quickly than men are getting sick of being 'husbands'. Even given their financial disadvantage, far more women then men are willing to divorce their partners and once more contend with single-hood.

So why is this?

Well here we come to today's topic.

While it is a hotly debated one, liable to make tempers flare and maybe even provoke accusations of sexism, one has to end up confronting the question of what role sexual desire plays in relationships. The old stereotype is, of course, that men overwhelmingly desire sex more than women. Personally I think this is very likely true. In the vast majority of cases, I don't think its even close.

We shall return to this in a moment however, for even if it isn't true there are a number of other statistics we can look at to discern whether an imbalance in sexual desire is a key factor in destabilizing so many relationships.

First off, there's people's preference when it comes to how they best achieve sexual satisfaction, most commonly involving orgasms. You'd think sex would easily triumph over all other methods, but according to a recent survey, a whopping 41% of women say they actually prefer masturbation over sex -

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/celebrity/news/female-masturbation-infographic

Despite spending quite a while searching online, I couldn't find a comparable figure for men. Since I'd be willing to bet it is nowhere near that high I'll submit a figure of 10%, and even that's probably being generous. If anybody gets ahold of any better figures I'd be happy to use them. In essence, this means that even if women desire sex just as much as men, far more often they are willing to go and take care of business at home, by themselves. This would obviously cause a corresponding lack of desire for actual, physical contact with other people.

A second factor to be taken into account, and in which there also seems to be a significant difference, is the frequency of homosexual behavior when it comes to men and women. Surveys differ, but according to this article -

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sax-sex/201004/why-are-so-many-girls-lesbian-or-bisexual

Around 15% of women now identify as lesbian or bisexual, compared to just 5% of men who identify as being gay. Many other surveys back up this reality. While I struggle to think of a scientific reason for this discrepancy, it very much seems to exist, and so is one we shouldn't just ignore.

A third figure we could throw into the mix is the uneven ratio of men to women in our society. In many third world countries this ratio is seriously skewed in favour of males due to the frequent use of sex-selective abortion. By mid-century China could have somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million more men than women, and India around 50 million. In Australia the overall gender ratio is slightly in favour of women, but this is largely due to women's longer life expectancy. While they may make up 54% of the population over 65, they make up only 49% of the population under 55.

So in determining how great a gender-based imbalance in sexual desire there may be in our society, before we even start talking about people's inherent desires, we get the following formula -

Portion of women who prefer sex to masturbation (59%) X portion who are heterosexual (85%) X portion of the population (under age 55 - 49%) = 0.246

We then divide this by the respective figures for men -

Portion of men who prefer sex to masturbation (90%) X portion who are heterosexual (95%) X portion of the population (under age 55 - 51%) = 0.436

0.246/0.436 = 0.56

So to summarize, even if we assumed that women are just as virile as men, their overall demand for heterosexual, physical contact comes out at just 56% that of men.

This is before we even get into the actual figures concerning sexual desire. In a 2007 national British survey, 95% of men and 71% of women reported masturbating at some point in their lives. Probably more useful however are the results as to who had masturbated within a recent time-frame, implying a greater frequency. 53% of men and just 18% of women reported masturbating in the four weeks before the survey. Another study carried out by the university of Chicago in the US found that 61% of men and just 38% of women admitted to masturbating in the past year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masturbation#Frequency.2C_age.2C_and_sex
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200903/how-common-is-masturbation-really

There are other surveys we could look at, but the overall trend is that men tend to masturbate at least twice as often as women. Even this estimate is probably conservative. If we plug such a result back into our earlier formula, we get this.

Women - 0.59X0.85X0.49X0.5 = 0.123
Men - 0.9X0.95X0.51X1 = 0.436

0.123X0.436 = 0.28

So ultimately, if we accept the accuracy of all these statistics, women's overall desire to be sexually intimate with men in our society is just 28% that of men's respective desire to be intimate with women. That's a ratio of nearly 4:1.

I've gotta say, this would seem to explain a lot. Is it any wonder then, that looking back at the above divorce statistics, women cited 'adultery' as a reason for breaking up with partner almost twice as often as men did? Is it any wonder that the vast majority, somewhere in the vicinity of 99%, of all prostitution is carried out with men as the clients? Is it any wonder that men's sexual desire is discussed and focused on in our society to a much greater extent than women's?

Since this is such a hot-button issue, I shall say no more on it. I urge people to make of this analysis what you will. If you can find better figures, then feel free to come to your own conclusions, or even send them to me and I might update this post.

Peace out