Sex Drive: How Do Men and Women Compare?
Experts say men score higher in libido, while women's sex drive is more "fluid."
(continued)
5. Women take a less direct route to sexual satisfaction.
Men and women travel slightly different paths to arrive at sexual desire. "I
hear women say in my office that desire originates much more between the
ears
than between the legs," says Esther Perel
, a New York City
psychotherapist and author of
Mating in Captivity. "For women there is a
need for a plot -- hence the
romance novel. It is more about the anticipation,
how you get there; it is the longing that is the fuel for desire," Perel
says.
Women's desire "is more contextual, more subjective, more layered on a
lattice of emotion," Perel adds. Men, by contrast, don't need to have nearly as
much imagination, Perel says, since sex is simpler and more straightforward for
them.
That does not mean that men do not seek intimacy, love, and connection in a
relationship, just as women do. They just view the role of sex differently.
"Women want to talk first, connect first, then have sex," Perel explains. "For
men, sex
is the connection. Sex is the language men use to express their
tender loving vulnerable side," Perel says. "It is their language of
intimacy."
6. Women experience orgasms differently than men.
While researchers find it tricky to try to quantify issues like the
differing quality of male vs. female orgasms, they do have data on how long it
takes men and women to get there. Men, on average, take four minutes from the
point of entry until ejaculation, according to Laumann. Women usually take
around 10 to 11 minutes to reach orgasm -- if they do.
That's another difference between the sexes: how often they have an orgasm
during sex. Among men who are part of a couple, 75% report that they always
have an orgasm, as opposed to 26% of the women. And not only is there a
difference in reality, there's one in perception, too. While the men's female
partners reported their rate of orgasm accurately, the women's male partners
reported that they believed their female partners had orgasms 45% of the
time.
7. Women's libidos seem to be less amenable to drugs.
With men's sex drives seemingly more directly tied to biology when compared
to women, it may be no surprise that low desire may be more easily treated
through
medication in men. Men have embraced drugs as a cure not only for
erectile dysfunction but also for a shrinking libido. With women, however, the
search for a drug to boost sex drive has proved more elusive.
Testosterone has been linked to sex drive in both men and women. But
testosterone works much faster in men with low libidos than women, says Glenn
Braunstein, MD an endocrinologist and chair of the department of medicine at
Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a leading researcher on
testosterone treatments in women. And while the treatments are effective, they
are not as effective in women as in men. "There is a hormonal factor in [sex
drive], but it is much more important in men than women," Braunstein
says.
A testosterone patch for women called Intrinsa has been approved in Europe
but was rejected by the FDA due to concerns about long-term safety. But the
drug has sparked a backlash from some medical and psychiatric professionals who
question whether low sex drive in women should even be considered a condition
best treated with drugs. They point to the results of a large survey published
in the journal
Obstetrics & Gynecology last year, in which about 40%
of women reported some sort of sexual problem -- most commonly low sexual
desire -- but only 12% report feeling distressed about it. With all the factors
that go into the stew that piques sexual desire in women, some doctors say that
a drug should be the last ingredient to consider, rather than the first.
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Reviewed on
July 06, 2011
© 2009 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.
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