I keep a list called “Ways Men Who’ve Had Sex With Me Before Have Passed On Having Sex With Me Again.” Every entry is deeply thrillingly humbling. Here are a few of the greatest hits:
“No thanks, I’m going to the Ikea in New Jersey.”
“Sorry—I am at my coworker’s barbecue and I don’t want to leave.”
“I need to get some sleep.”
“I want to be alone with my dog right now.”
It’s okay to turn down sex with anyone, at any time, no explanation needed. But until I saw it for myself, I was simply not aware of the concept of a man wanting sex at some times and not others. My assumptions about male sexuality were ignorant bordering on dumb, but not unique—there is a major mismatch between cultural beliefs about men and sex, and reality. Up until very recently, media taught audiences that men are insatiable perverts who, given the opportunity, would have sex with any remotely appealing human, tree, or porous material. This messed with our minds the same way that idealized, super-thin female bodies from the 2000s shaped how women diet today, even as those ideals have shifted.
Yes, now major creators like Mindy Kaling, Issa Rae, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson put women characters on screen who are hornier than their male love interests. But that’s a recent phenomenon. In early James Bond movies, director Cary Fukunaga pointed out, the character is “basically a rapist.” Molly Ringwald, showing her 10-year-old daughter The Breakfast Club, realized with horror that in one scene that is played for laughs, her character’s love interest assaults her. Consider the premise of Superbad: Uncool high school boys must find alcohol in order to get alcohol and get girls drunk enough to have sex with them. And the joke of American Pie is that teenage boys will use anything to get off, including baked goods.
So yes, I was confused when men passed on sex with me, an adult woman with no open sores or visible rashes. Comedies exaggerate for comic or dramatic effect—we know this. But plenty of people believe there is more than a grain of truth here. The general assumption is that male desire is straightforward and constant, while female desire is emotional and complicated, a hungry athlete versus an aloof house cat. How else can we conceptualize sex when our sources of data as children are onscreen portrayals of things that turn men on: the wind, women chewing, fruit, fast cars, certain animals, pillows, and bare feet. Or the magazines we read as teens that warned us to treat the male body delicately, like one of those children who is allergic to sunlight and air—anything, like eye contact, or a whisper, could cause them to ejaculate.
Though the modern-day conversation about desire has grown more inclusive and less taboo, we still promote these ideas through entertainment, teach them to children, and repeat them to each other. Our weirdo assumptions about gender and desire are propagated in schools—in only half of all states is sex education required to be accurate.
The fact is that deeply held cultural beliefs about male versus female sexuality just don’t bear out in scientific research. “The proposed ‘fact’ that men have higher desire than women is, well, a myth,” writes Sarah Hunter-Murray, Ph.D., a psychologist who specializes in family and marital therapy. In her book Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships, she debunks the idea that male desire is generally higher than women’s.
“What we’re seeing, study after study, is that in heterosexual partnered relationships, men and women are equally likely to be the partner with higher desire,” Dr. Hunter-Murray says. She cites three studies that asked heterosexual couples in romantic relationships to report on their sex lives. In each study, about a quarter of the couples said that the male partner had higher desire, about a quarter said that the female partner had higher desire, and about half said that they were evenly matched. It’s true that plenty of women have low desire and plenty of men have high desire, Hunter-Murray says. But we overfocus on them, forgetting the people who are on the other side of the bell curve of desire. Consider this 2011 study of 133 heterosexual couples: “Men and women were equally likely to be the member of the couple with lower sexual desire relative to their partner,” researchers found.
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In fact, some researchers have made the case that female desire is generally wilder than male desire. “It’s frustrating to hear it repeated over and over that men have stronger [libidos] than women do,” sex researcher Meredith Chivers told anthropologist Wednesday Martin, for Martin’s 2018 book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. Chivers added: “Let’s consider that maybe we’ve been measuring desire incorrectly.” Chivers pointed to a study that found that women respond sexually to a wider range of sexual images than men do. Women had sexual responses to images of various gender parings having sex, and even to bonobos having sex, while male response was more limited and predictable. “Women are, on some level, super freaks,” Martin writes.
What about all the studies that say that men think about sex more, look at porn more, and masturbate more? Men are rewarded for exaggerating their sex drives, while women are encouraged to understate theirs—researchers know this complicates reporting. Hunter-Murray cites a study that asked two groups of men and women to list their frequency of sexual activities. One group was told that their responses were going through a “lie detector” test. In the group that was not connected to the “lie detector,” men reported much higher levels of sexual activity, and women reported much lower levels. In the group that was connected to the “lie detector,” those differences almost totally disappeared.
I was taken aback the first time a man made it clear that he would rather fall asleep watching the “Fun Run” episode of The Office than have sex with me. Dark! But when I told this story to my female friends, most of them laughed and said they’d had a variation on this experience. Women who have sex with men get turned down, struggle with having a higher libido than their partner, and encounter erectile dysfunction, not to mention a male partner’s emotional volatility. Our culture is so committed to the idea that men are sex demons, so these normal relationship issues are dismissed as rare even though they’re far from it.
Why do men, who arguably have more power to rewrite the rules around sex, keep enforcing myths about the male sex drive that don’t always benefit them? Hunter-Murray says that the men she spoke to for her research told her again and again that they feel pressure to seem like they have high sex drives because “that’s what my friends, society, and the dudes on my sports team think is the standard for being a man.” Think of the implications for women who have sex with men—we’re taught to internalize the idea that men are animals. That they just can’t help themselves. This is the scaffolding of rape culture. It’s the pseudo-science behind the phrase Boys will be boys. It wouldn’t excuse violent behavior even if it was true, but it’s not. Men, as a group, do not have higher sexual needs than women.
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The strange silver lining is that stereotypes about male sexuality make men seem worse than they actually are. “When we talk about men’s sexuality, we tend to talk about the scary parts,” Hunter-Murray says. Debunking some myths around men and sex could “start to remove some of these really negative, sinister stereotypes that may not be applicable to our relationships.” Sexual assault is real, prevalent, and evil. We could never talk enough about consent. But our cultural belief that sex is something men want badly and women give gingerly is hurting everyone so much.
I thought that by the time I was on my second Mirena IUD I would have a more sophisticated understanding of gender and sexuality than the trickle-down of information from TV and old magazines. But I don’t, and I think many people don’t. Most of us imagine that we have graduated past binary thinking about gender and sex. But when we start talking about sex, we often revert to this grab bag of preschool-level beliefs. We go right back to blue and pink, strong and weak, desire and yielding.
Hunter-Murray says that our confusion around men and sex originates in the fact that we don’t allow men to be fully human. There are so many ways to fix this problem—funding science-based sex education in schools, supporting art that portrays nuanced human experience, refusing to enforce a rigid gender binary with the children in our lives. When you see a baby boy, you don’t have to say, “What a ladykiller!” That’s a weird thing to say about a baby. Think of this next time a guy tells you that instead of having sex with you, he is choosing to fall asleep, or to watch a YouTube video of a guy analyzing another YouTube video. Smile and remember that, in this moment, he is being fully human.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
