Out From Under

My drive, your drive, his drive, hers. Men have higher drives than women. Are you surprised by this news? Or are you rolling your eyes at the obvious?

Although society’s view of sexuality may change, there appears to be an underlying biological constant. Studies of human cultures around the world have shown that most men think about sex more often, are more easily aroundsed, want sex more frequently, desire more partners, and masturbate more often than most women.

(Robinson and Love, Hot Monogamy, via I’d Rather Eat Chocolate, by Joan Sewell)

Does it annoy you? Do you see that as old-fashioned? Belittling of women? Do you resist the notion that there’s something inadequate about the female sex drive? After all women are free now, empowered! Women can be all they want to be!

Only …

When you’re single, you take sex as it comes. Since it comes erratically, you’re usually pretty hot for it. But then you settle into a long-term relationship, where sex is readily available. And that’s great! No more dry spells! No more seeking it out or making do on your own. (Not that you don’t continue to play by yourself, too, because YOU are a vibrant, sexy woman!) (And it makes your man hot to know you play solo.)

And then you settle in some more, and you take on a huge, stressful project at work, and you notice he leaves his socky lying around in the living room, and doesn’t hurry home from work as quickly any more, and you do the grocery shopping AND the laundry, and he doesn’t just listen when you vent about an annoying co-worker and, and, and …

And now he’s complaining that you’re not having sex as often as you used to.

Dork. Of course not. You’re stressed at work, you’re feeling unsupported and taken for granted at home, he doesn’t listen to you the way he used to. Who wants sex in those circumstances?

Well, he does. Duh. When has any of that stuff ever made a man disinclined to have sex?

In a society of self-help books, you can find any number on male-female sex relations, on how to get him to understand that doing dishes is foreplay, that you won’t be in the mood if there is no non-sexual touching in the relationship, that the mood has to be right, that he needs to respect your emotions, that you need to feel secure and supported… Scan enough of these, and you get the clear impression that unless every emotional ‘i’ is dotted and every relational ‘t’ is crossed, the man is going to be SOL for sex.

Let me be clear here: an insensitive, disrespectful, selfish man doesn’t deserve the perks of a relationship — including, but not limited to, sex. But if you deny there’s an innate difference between the level of male-female drive, then you have to come up with reasons for not being interested. And lordy! There’s always something, isn’t there?

I think it’s blindingly obvious that there’s an innate difference in the sex drives of male and female.

Are you pissed off now? Is your heart full of darkest resistance? Is the very idea insulting? Why accept this definition of a lesser, inadequate female drive? Do you think I’ve bought into the prim and dated ideas of female sexuality from a previous generation?

Maybe it’s not me. Maybe you’ve bought in to the attitude and evaluation of human sexuality from … the other gender.

I like sex. I like talking about it, I like thinking about it (it’s just plain interesting!), I like writing about it, I like doing it. Some days, some weeks, I beat my man in the bedroom stakes; I initiate more, I pursue more. But overall? I do not do any of those things (except the writing!) as often as my husband; as much as any man I’ve ever been with.

I don’t see that as ‘inadequate’. Why would I? It would be a problem if our drives were so disparate that my husband was walking around in a constant and chronic state of need, but he’s not. And that would be a relational issue for the both of us to solve, anyway, not a personal self-esteem issue.

Why would I feel any more inadequate for having a lower drive than he should feel inadequate for having a higher one? Sewell turns this idea neatly on its head in her “Oprah Dream Sequence”, a fantasy in which a panel of husbands suffering from “testosterone neediness” meet on Opral to discuss how their ever-present drives are jeopardizing their marriages.

These men are using “sex as a substitute for love and self-esteem”; “sex is a form of avoidance behavior [to evade] on-the-job-stressors, family life, or intimacy with your partner”; sex is a way “to limit his vulnerability by turning affection into a purely physical response.”

This is all firmly tongue-in-cheek, but really: why is it sillier to view the man’s sexual response as the problem? When the problem arises within a relationship, it’s because of the disparity between the male and female drives. The problem is the gap between, not the drives at either side of the gap. Pretending the gap doesn’t exist is not helping matters.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under Ilona's Take. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.