GuidoWorld

Asymmetric Sex Drives

August 20, 2007 on 6:45 pm | In General |

If you were to line up all the adults on the planet by sexual interest and desired frequency to engage in sexual intercourse it would be highly gender biased. The top half demonstrating elevated sexual interest would be dominated by males and the bottom half with a relatively low sex drive would be dominated by women.

This tendency for the male sex drive to be predominant in the species is found throughout the animal kingdom. Yet, despite this obvious fact, most adolescent boys are led to believe that the sexual desire and interest of girls is very similar to their own. Yet, they conclude, girls for the most part are just better at managing their sex drive.

Other than human beings it is rare to find interspecies violence or murder. The bulk of violence and murder amongst members of the same species almost always involve males and almost always involve mating issues. In the animal kingdom interspecies fights occur for two reasons to defend one’s territory and to acquire a female in heat. If one looks close enough the battles over territorial rights often involve mating privileges and rights.

While most animals have limited mating seasons, the human species is a sexual being all year round. In most of the animal world the male sex drive culminates during mating season and seems to subside during the remainder of the year. In humans, there is no off season, and the male sex drive is a relatively constant force. This means that in humans the male is rutting the bulk of his adult life. It is not unusual for men to find their sex drive wane as they get older, but many men are preoccupied with sexual desire for decades.

A number of studies have indicated that adolescent and young adult males think about sex every minute of every waking hour. This is in itself amazing, but sex also plays a dominating role in the dreams of males. Not many would argue that the sex drive dominates the typical life of male human beings.

With this in mind it is odd how little we talk about the role the male sex drive plays in the emotional and intellectual development of males. I’ll talk a little about how my sex drive affected my emotional development and then based on this I’ll offer a couple of theories on men in general.

The first thing I should say is that though I had serious doubts that women desired sex as much as I did, I still interacted with and reacted to females as if they had a similar sex drive as myself. This view was reinforced by the unanimity by which my girl friends told me that they wanted “it” too, but………

I think it’s safe to say that from the age of 13 till at least 19 I was the typical adolescent boy whose life revolved around the desire to have sex. This meant that I also figured that this was also the number one issue for all the girls I knew. The fact that all of my conversations with girlfriends and girl friends revolved around the topic of relationships and sex only confirmed this suspicion.

What this meant is that every social interaction I had with females was rife with sexual meaning. Every word, every gesture held with in it a sexual victory or defeat. If a girl smiled at me, it was a signal to proceed a head. A laugh was almost as good as the girl saying I want you now. If she flirted or played with her hair, it was a sign that she was losing the battle of sexual restraint and that she soon would be as willing as I to get this relationship sexualized.

The fact that every social moment was either a sexual victory or defeat meant that the potential for rejection was pervasive. Sexual rejection was the most pervasive experience of my adolescence. I, and I believe most male adolescents do not separate sexual rejection from a rejection of their entire self. Therefore hardly a minute goes by in the life of an adolescent boy in which he doesn’t feel rejected of disliked.

Women often complain that men are emotionally unavailable, crippled or distant. I think it is hard for men to stay emotionally invested after a number of years of perpetual rejection. If women want sex as much or near as much as men do, then personal rejection is the only logical conclusion to the fact that we aren’t having sex multiple times each day during our adolescence.

I’m not quite sure how I survived my adolescence without becoming an emotional invalid or becoming detached and cruel. Maybe I had a high pain threshold or didn’t think I deserved better than what I had. Maybe my doubts about the truth of female sexual interest helped me not take it too personally. Maybe I was able to dwell on my successes, or maybe I was just so hardwired to be emotional and intimate that nothing could deter me.

Whatever the reason is that I came out the other end of adolescence relatively open and emotionally healthy, I fully understand how it is possible that most men’s emotional self-esteem never got out alive.

This brings us to another of the great gender conflicts and that is the area of cuddling. Many of my early girlfriends thought that we should be content with cuddling and not need to have sex. They standardly felt that my sexual desire was a sign that I didn’t really love them, and that I could only prove my love by being content just holding them.

Even the girlfriends who I had sexual intercourse with would routinely complain about my reluctance to just hold them, and view that as an indication of my only wanting them for sex.

These attitudes and their expectations demonstrated how poorly females understand the biological imperative involved in the male sex drive. The biological imperative is to have sexual intercourse, and that imperative may arise numerous times throughout the day. In other words a males sexual urges may be sated and satisfied for a brief time before the biological imperative reasserts itself.

Now as I get older I find it easier to spend an increased amount of time cuddling, yet in my youth one had to earn that time with me by a considerable amount of sexual activity. Asking me to cuddle before my sex drive was sated was not an easy task, and did not solidify my feelings of attachment.

This again shows the significant difference in sex drive between the genders. Asking a adolescent male to cuddle instead of having sexual intercourse is tantamount to asking a runner who completed a marathon to just put their hand in the water, or of a starving person to just sit back and smell the food, or just touch it and put it in their mouth but not to eat it.

This is not to say that young men or men in general are not capable of enjoying sensual moments or just view it as foreplay, but it is to point out a need to be sensitive to the male needs in terms of the sexual imperative. Even at my sexual peak I was able to enjoy holding and lying with my partner, but first I needed to be sexually sated. Forcing me to cuddle without having sex was something I could do on occasion, but was not something I could do consistently without feeling frustrated and undesirable.

The themes began here will be addressed again in the following posts.

I will end with the lyrics to one of my songs which deals with this sexual dynamic and the destructive effects it can have on a relationship.

Just Talking

Brad was a man with mighty big plans that never got off the ground
He wanted love more than anything but ended up fooling around…..just chasing tail
She’s just talking……..Shut your mouth and open your mind

He thought she smiled at him
She wore that sweater again
She had her friends talk to him
The next day at school she didn’t even look at him

All those years he felt rejected, humiliated and confused
Took a toll on his emotions, his true feelings he withdrew……felt like a tool

She’s just talking

Paints her face, eggs him on
Giggles at his jokes and then flirts with Ron
Telephones but says goodbye
She gets his heart then screws his mind

By the time he got to college he gave up being real
He found he got more action when he played to seal the deal

Now he’s just talking……..shut your mouth and open your mind

Got them eating out of his hand, such a stud, plays to his fans
With a buzz on he seems like the man, so romantic says I love you on demand
Whispers I love you as he takes her hand

Got a job, got a wife, tried to settle down
After the birth of their first child her sex drive just wore down……life’s her child

She says he doesn’t share, she says he doesn’t care, complains he’s never there
…….soon they have an affair

She keeps talking he keeps walking …..further away

Any disclosure she attacks with shame, any tenderness she treats as a game

When he offers solution she says he doesn’t listen
When he says what he needs, she asks for more distance…..is it just resistance?

She’s just talking, he keeps walking
She keeps talking, he’s just walking away

Jim Guido

PS To listen to Just Talking go to Priorities Album