The Dirty Normal, which is a blog you should read, recently had an amazingly shiny chart about gender differences in libido!
Things you can notice about this chart: first, I really wish Emily Nagoski would have labelled the axes (according to the comments, “You can think of the Y axis as N and the Y axis is desired frequency or frequency of masturbation or whatever other measure of sexual interest you prefer. Left is high interest, right is low interest, and the size of the bubble indicates number of people.”).
Second, it’s totally wrong to say that there are no differences between women as a class and men as a class, in terms of libido. A randomly selected man will probably have a higher libido than a randomly selected woman; a person with extremely high libido is more likely to be male, a person with extremely low libido is more likely to be female. “There are absolutely no differences between men as a class and women as a class!” is something more straw-feminists believe than actual feminists (or maybe I just hang out with awesome feminists), but I would just like to clarify that that is absolutely wrong. Furthermore, this difference has an effect on overall social structures: for instance, the fact that most sex workers cater to men.
Third, the differences? They aren’t huge! There is more than enough space for women who can’t go a day without an orgasm, men who want sex once a year on their birthday, and millions of couples with a horny woman and an uninterested man. Somebody’s gender or sex provides you a little information about their libido, but your confidence interval on “what is Joe’s libido, given no information other than that he’s a cis man” is going to be fucking huge.
Fourth, both a simple essentialist and a simple social constructionist explanation of these differences would be totally inaccurate. Testosterone has known effects on libido: in general, a trans man who begins to take testosterone will find his libido increasing, while a trans woman who begins to take estrogen will find her libido diminishing. There are also more complex changes in sexuality, but those are more likely to differ from trans person to trans person. (See this article for a description of the changes from a trans man.)
On the other hand, social structures also have a huge effect on libido. Women who feel shame about their sexuality or have poor body image. Lack of education about female sexual anatomy. A model of “real sex” that privileges sex that men tend to find pleasurable over sex that women tend to find pleasurable. Porn that overwhelmingly caters to male viewers. Many women’s fear that men they have casual sex with will rapemurder them. Et cetera, et cetera, you’re reading a feminist blog, you can fill in the rest.
I think that most genuine gender differences we find will fit in the same model as libido: they definitely exist and have effects on society, but each group mostly overlaps with each other group, and they generally will be a product of both biology and gender socialization.
…I’m not actually sure how to take your second paragraph, because I personally believe there are (probably) no (biological) differences (in libido and generally psychological matters) between men as a class and women as a class. (As a note here: if your impulse here is to say “but I never said biological” then you can totally ignore the rest of my post; from the rest of your post and the general way these sorts of arguments go I assumed it.) And I still feel that paragraph is strawmanning me a bit because those parens are very important; in fact a better description of my actual position would be “we can’t actually know whether there’s a biological difference in libido but we do know there’s a really really strong sociocultural effect on libido so there’s little good reason to say anything about biology.”
(OH BUT I know for a fact that at least Noah Brand also agreed with me because I remember clearly an old post on the wordpress NSWATM about this exact subject.
It made the exact point I make every time this comes up that whose libido is supposed to be bigger has changed over time. According to the ancient Greeks, and continuing somewhat up to at least the Middle Ages, it was supposed to be women who had a higher libido. The idea that women have a lower libido traces directly to the Victorian era, probably noncoincidentally given its valuing of chastity in general and female chastity in particular.)
The primary reason most sex workers cater to men is that society in general caters to men. It’s not evidence for men’s greater libido at all, any more than the profusion of slash fic written by women across the ‘nets is evidence of women’s greater libido.
(None of this applies to Emily Nagoski’s article because she didn’t say anything about biological. She just talked about whether it is without mentioning the reason at all.)
I’m not sure that we even have a way to tell if there are genuine, immutable differences between men and women psychologically speaking, because cultural influence is so strong and there’s no way to remove its influence. However, I’d say that hormonal differences do make SOME difference, though there are arguments as to how much; I’ve seen people argue that the libido changes that female-to-male transsexuals talk about are purely psychosomatic, while others argue convincingly that they’re not.
It would be fair to say that men and women overlap a heck of a lot more than society generally seems to think, though.
(by the way, nice seeing you here, Black Humor! Morven from TVT here.)
while a trans woman who begins to take estrogen will find her libido diminishing.
I’m not sure this is a true statement in general. I’ll agree that testosterone boosts libido, but I’ve seen too much anecdata of women who get on estrogen and find a boosted libido because it’s the right thing for them and their bodies. Whether that’s a psychological effect layered on top of the biological or not, I don’t know.
This post (and the last paragraph) in particular remind me of a study discussed on the most recent Skeptic’s Guide where they looked at gender differences in personality and found a broadly similar pattern* to that seen here for libido. That is, there were some differences, but the overlap was so huge as to render them effectively meaningless. The interesting thing there was the way they analysed the data: rather than saying “does the average man have a different personality to the average woman?”, they looked at whether you can use someone’s personality to predict their gender. Applying the same analysis to these data would be equivalent to asking not “what is Joe’s libido, given no information other than that he’s a cis man?” but “what is Joe’s gender, given no information other than ze has high libido?” Going purely on the basis of the diagram you posted, I’d say you wouldn’t be able to tell with any degree of confidence. Can’t remember what my point was here other than mentioning a neat bit of data I heard about that seems to agree with the spirit of this post.
*Disclaimer: I’ve not read the original study, only listened to the discussion on the podcast.
I have horrible intuition about statistics and probabilities, but I just like to point out to people that there is more of a possible difference between individual women or individual men than there is between men and women in general, which oftentimes takes the wind out of the sails of whatever essentialist argument somebody is making…
Yeah I have to agree with BlackHumor here about that second paragraph sorry I just don’t think that’s true especially after just reading this newest peace of research on gender difference http://www.themarysue.com/gender-dichotomy-study/ (link to the studie is in post)
Also have to get this off my chest not really a fan of Emily Nagoski her writing style or her positions on gender.
“Testosterone has known effects on libido: in general, a trans man who begins to take testosterone will find his libido increasing, while a trans woman who begins to take estrogen will find her libido diminishing.”
This might be true for some people. But its more complex than higher testosterone equals higher sex drive and higher estrogen equals lower sex drive. The first problem is there’s a placebo effect that comes from taking hormonal drugs that needs to be taken account:
http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2010/04/30/emily-can-has-pink-viagra/
The second is that Pharmaceutical companies have been trying for years to create a testosterone based drug that increases women’s sex drive and they’ve failed miserably because testosterone and hormones in general don’t have a reliable effect on most women’s sex drive.
http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2012/11/16/again-with-the-pink-viagra/
The main reason is it’s primarily the environment and circumstances that influence why some women experience high or low sexual desire.
http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2012/11/15/laan-and-both-2008/
Emily Nagoski couldn’t have labeled the axes, though, because labeling them fully would require units, and I really doubt this is actual data being displayed here. It’s just an opinion in graph form.
(Also it’s bugging me that the graph apparently shows a total number of women greater than the number of men. Unless she means women are more widely distributed libido-wise, in which case she needs to be using bell curves here, not bubbles.)
I’m looking at that, and I see it more as an informal Ven Diagram.
I think the prostitution being mostly female professional / male client trend comes more from the nature of the way the various traditional gender roles tend to treat sex. For women it is supposed to be seen as something to be offered in exchange for protection / financial stability / intimacy / relative power etc. For men it is more a pleasurable ends in itself and a way of showing status over other men.
Not saying these are the way real people think all the time, but they seem to be the ideals we are expected to aspire to or agree to socially, across at least a few cultures if not all. Prostitution is just a pragmatic distillation of that kind of oppositional gender dynamic. Seems like gendered power structures > “men have higher libido” to me.
Yeah, the “more women exist than men” thing weirds me out.
Then again, Emily Nagoski (who I <3 FTH), is a sexyland* writer, and sexyland is a subculture with a lot more women than me, so maybe she's just drawing from her subjective experience.
* Cliff coined this term I think and I love it and use it every day.
(Oh hey Morven! Haiiiii!)
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