Denying Sex Differences Doesn’t Actually Help People, Part One Million. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

9 - 11 minutes

The New York Times recently published an article by reporter Catherine Pearson headlined “When One Partner Wants Sex More Than the Other.” Subheadline: “Libido differences are a common part of relationships, sex therapists say. Here’s how to manage.” Seems helpful for couples in this situation!

It’s an interesting and touching article, to be sure, that features real-life stories. With an assist from sex therapist types and other experts, Pearson helps people better understand this phenomenon and what to do about it. She writes that “Many factors can influence libido: interpersonal dynamics, physical and mental health, the social messages around sexuality that people absorb during childhood and adolescence. The list goes on, and there are seldom easy fixes. But Dr. Fogel Mersy and other experts said more communication could help couples bridge gaps in sexual desire.” Another expert is paraphrased as saying that libidinal differences could be attributed to “anything from relationship concerns to work stress.”

I couldn’t help but notice a certain omission, though: the article contains no mention of sex differences. Absent are any of the terms men, women, male(s), female(s), or any discussion of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone.

I don’t want to risk falling into the “She didn’t write the article I wanted her to write!” critique trap, because that’s silly, but aren’t these strange concepts to leave out given the subject? After all, the vast majority of couples are heterosexual, and we have a ton of evidence to suggest men have higher sex drives than women.

No, this does not mean that every man wants sex more than every woman. I’m saying that at the level of averages, men want significantly sex than women.

The largest meta-analysis I could find on this question was published just last year, and included more than 620,000 American adults. Here’s how one of the authors, Malte Friese, later translated her team’s findings on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology website, arguing that we shouldn’t overstate the magnitude of the differences they found:

    The “how big” question can be looked at in comparison with other known gender differences. The difference we documented is in a similar range as the gender difference in weight for U.S. adults, but less than half the size of the gender difference in height for U.S. adults. Most researchers would label the sex drive difference as “moderate to large.” Looked at another way, our results mean that about three-quarters of men will have a somewhat stronger sex drive than the average sex drive among women. But our data also indicate that when a woman with an unknown sex drive walks down the street, her sex drive will on average exceed that of every third man she encounters. Thus, although a gender difference is clearly observable, there is still much variation between men and women.

Fair enough. But roughly speaking, and to oversimplify some of the work the team did to conceptualize these questions (you can read the meta-analysis if you want those details), they did find that if you’re a random straight man, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a higher sex drive than a random girlfriend/wife/partner, and if you’re a random straight woman, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a lower sex drive than a random boyfriend/husband/partner. 

Now, especially as the world moves toward greater and greater freedom of choice with regard to long-term romantic partners, it seems likely these average-level differences are somewhat mitigated by people selecting into relationships with folks with similar libidos. And even these rather significant average-level differences leave us with plenty of couples whose libidinal travails run contrary to stereotype, of course. Plus, we’re glossing over a huge amount of complexity, because (as Pearson’s article notes) mental and physical health problems, time, and other factors affect libido in complex ways. 

But we can nuance ourselves to infinity and back and it won’t really change the overall equation much. Given the average-level differences in libido and the sheer number of heterosexual couples, if we ask the questions “Who is most affected by libidinal differences, how, and why?,” it seems obvious that the answers are “Straight couples, where men want sex more than women, because men naturally have higher baseline libidos, on average, than women.”

I’m not sure why this is all absent from Pearson’s piece, which mentions biology only in the context of mental illness, but this is a long-standing issue among progressive ideas-types: there’s a lot of pushback to the idea that it’s okay to pin these differences on biological sex, or even that these differences exist in the first place. In my experience, subpar studies supposedly pushing back against these claims are taken much more seriously than the clear, consistent picture painted by meta-analyses taking the best published research into account.

There’s something similar going on when it comes to the (I think) even more contentious issue of the “people/things” divide. Supposedly, according to the best research we have, on average — again, I implore you to understand that I am saying on average and am not claiming a lack of any overlap between the sexes — men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. Last I checked, researchers like Richard Lippa had published some work showing that the magnitude of these differences isn’t really any smaller in nations with more gender equality. This is a pretty strong blow against the theory that these differences can be largely explained by culture. The average Swedish woman is much freer to pursue her intrinsic interests than the average Afghan one, for example, and receives far fewer cultural cues that she ‘must’ work in (say) caretaking roles. So if culture were driving these wedges, you’d expect the sexes to be a lot closer together, interests-wise, in the world’s Swedens than in its Afghanistans — but that isn’t what researchers have found.

That doesn’t dispositively prove, in some reductive way, that biology “explains” these differences, but it should certainly nudge us in that general direction. (Here’s some more recent research on this subject pointing in the same direction.)

In both instances, I think there’s really solid evidence to suggest that biology contributes meaningfully to baseline differences between men and women that social engineering is unlikely to be able to dispel. We’re probably stuck with a situation where men are more into sex and things than women, whereas women have less sex drive and more interest in people. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It isn’t right or wrong to be more or less into sex or people or things. 

But what we do with this knowledge — how we apply it to our understanding of society, our attempts to improve it, and our interpersonal relationships — is another question. If my read of the literature is correct and these differences are significantly rooted in biology, it means that it might be helpful for couples to know that it’s perfectly normal for the male partner to have a higher sex drive than the female one, or for parents to know that we shouldn’t expect elementary school–aged girls to be as interested in engineering as their male peers, or for boys to be as likely to pursue careers that involve the careful management and navigation of personnel and personal relationships. 

I totally understand why people are inherently skeptical of the scientific establishment to deliver clean answers on these sorts of questions. A lot of scientists have done shoddy work over the decades, often to support prevailing, wrongheaded types of thinking. A century ago, “progressives” were very much in favor of horrific eugenics practices, and they took a lot of cues from famous scientists spreading these ideas! So when science comes at us with a conclusion like “It turns out women might be more nurturing and people-oriented, on average,” we should approach it with some skepticism, because it does reinforce certain overblown stereotypes.

But, as I’ve tried to emphasize in my work whenever I can, “Bad people could use these findings for bad ends” is not, on its own, a sufficient reason to deny a scientific claim. Yes, social conservatives could take male-female differences and run with them to dangerous extremes. But the solution to that is to forcefully make the case for progressive values regarding gender, not to stifle science or suppress findings that make us feel icky. 

Questions? Comments? Differences between myself and a hypothetical female version of myself? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The lead image was generated by DALL-E in response to the prompt “a photorealistic image of a man and a woman having a disagreement” — I guess DALL-E ignored the ‘photorealistic’ part.