Sex is between the ears as well as between the legs. – H.L. Newbold
There was a big discussion recently in the comments following my July 24th column about male sexuality vs. female; though I insisted that it’s a difference of kind rooted in brain architecture, regular reader Asehpe wondered whether it might not simply be a difference of degree deriving from men’s much higher testosterone levels. I’m sure all my readers realize that men’s testosterone levels are much higher than women’s, but some of you may not realize just how much higher: the normal male level ranges from 300-600 nanograms/milliliter of blood (ng/mL) while the normal female level is only 10-30 ng/mL. In other words, the lowest normal male level is still ten times the highest normal female level. And since degree of sex drive is roughly related to testosterone levels in both sexes, it should come as no surprise that men tend to be such horny beasts in comparison with women. Because the ovaries produce most female testosterone (a small amount comes from the adrenal gland), women’s levels often drop dramatically after menopause and their sex drives often drop with the level. Some such women get positive results from a testosterone patch, but many others don’t, and some women don’t experience any noticeable dip in sex drive after menopause. And that brings us to this article by Dr. Ricki Pollycove which was published a week ago Wednesday (January 26th) on Huffington Post; she talks about the complexities of female sexuality and why testosterone isn’t always the answer, and in light of the previous discussion I thought my readers might be interested. IMHO, it tends to support my position that the male/female sex drive difference is one of brain-based kind rather than testosterone-based degree, but read the article and decide for yourself; here are a few highlights.
…There are many complexities to the science regarding testosterone and its androgen cousins…The actual science of measuring testosterone (T) in women is where a lot of our problems begin. The levels found naturally in women are less than a tenth of those produced by 30-something aged men. With such a small female range of “normal,” the individual difference between our cyclic high point (right around ovulation in menstruating women not using hormonal contraception) and the pre-menstrual period low is relatively small. And on top of this, the T levels between different women vary considerably. And to make it an even tougher puzzle to solve, a particular T level, as measured by the most accurate blood testing methods, does not correlate with better or worse sexual satisfaction when different women are compared to each other. So even if you get the best “gold standard” testosterone blood test and “know your numbers” it may not correlate with your personal experience one way or another…
In other words, some women with comparatively low testosterone levels have higher sex drive and better sexual satisfaction than other women with higher levels; there’s no direct correlation between different women. After my hysterectomy my endocrinologist monitored my hormone levels while we were trying to determine the best hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for me; upon discovering that my post-hysterectomy testosterone levels varied between about 2-5 ng/mL he asked if I had experienced any drop in sex drive and appeared surprised when I told him my desire had actually increased!
…Women who seek improved sexual function…are likely to get a blood test, often to find out that their levels of testosterone are considered “normal”…Depending on the T hormone study (often conducted by departments of psychiatry, where sexuality research is most at home in our culture), the strongest statement that stands up to rigorous science is that among women who complain of lackluster sexual functioning, added T can be of statistically significant benefit IF their blood levels…are below the middle third of the normal range.
What this means in English is that if a woman who complains of low sex drive has a low (10-16 ng/mL) testosterone level, giving her extra testosterone often (but not always) increases that drive, but if her levels are about 17 ng/mL or higher it doesn’t usually have any significant effect.
Part of the problem is how doctors research and measure sexual experience in women…Studies in women are more difficult as compared to men. Male measures of orgasm/ejaculation are clear cut end points of sexual satisfaction whereas women have a less defined description of what constitutes satisfying sex with a partner. With the mix of issues surrounding T measurement, absolute levels of T not correlating well with an individual woman’s sexual function and the placebo effect being very powerful with regard to sexual performance (30 to 40 percent improvement with the dummy pills or creams), it’s no wonder we are still stuck with a huge difference of opinion between professionals who take care of women’s hormonal balance…
It’s easy to tell if a man is aroused, and a healthy aroused man should be able to achieve orgasm, but it ain’t necessarily so with women. The article states that “the ability to achieve orgasm is not highly correlated with T levels” in women, yet women who only think they’re getting a “horniness booster” still show 30% improvement even though it’s all in their minds!
…It may indeed be valuable to learn if your T level is in the lowest third of women, as this group is significantly improved with some added T support. But the chances are that your blood levels are in the middle or upper third group of women. You can try DHEA (over the counter) as T support if your blood T level is mid-range or at the bottom third. You may risk getting more pimples, especially on chin, nose, forehead and areas around the mouth with rising T levels, even when in normal ranges. And too much T is NOT a good thing! Beyond skin and hair changes (like zits and balding at the temples) there is a higher risk for a variety of diseases, like cardiovascular disease risk, stroke and liver tumors with overdoing it with T…
…The good news is that behavior modification can be a big help for many women. Don’t take the laptop to bed. Don’t watch TV in bed, dozing off next to your partner once again without so much as a good cuddle…Are you actually allowing arousal/foreplay activities before you hit the annoyance level? So go ahead, take a combined approach of a medical and hormone evaluation plus enjoy the full spectrum of behavior modification activities…whatever suggests romance to you. If we are to enjoy living with our partner beyond acting like parallel parked cars in a garage, it requires intentional efforts long term.
Here’s the meat; though some women’s sexual problems are indeed hormonally based and can benefit from replacement therapy if the levels are unusually low, most women’s sexual problems derive not from what’s going on in their bodies but from what’s going on in their heads. Dr. Pollycove concludes the article with the statement “don’t just focus on testosterone as it may be less of a factor than we once thought,” and I heartily agree with her. She and I are both experts in different aspects of human sexuality, but our experiences have in this case led us to the same conclusion via two different routes. My low testosterone levels never affected my sex drive because I’ve always been open to sex; IMHO what’s going on in a woman’s bloodstream pales into insignificance beside what’s going on between her ears.
It’s also possible that women are more or less sensitive to testosterone than men are, just as some people are more sensitive to certain medications.
Possibly, but that certainly doesn’t explain why the placebo is actually more reliable in increasing sexual satisfaction in women than the real thing.
The placebo effect indicates that the medicinal approach is most beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry.
Why does Western culture mentally castrate little girls in the first place? In the case of physical castration, still practiced in some preindustrial cultures, cutting off the clitoris is believed to improve fertility.
Unlike the penis, the clitoris is mostly muscle tissue, which atrophies if not exercised, and if the relevant parts of the brain aren’t stimulated during early development. (The paradigm case is the eye.)
At one time doctors in the West believed hysteria was due to a lack of sexual satisfaction, so vibrators were invented to treat unhappy women. I think they were on the right track, but IMHO technological devices wouldn’t be necessary if little girls received pro-sex education.
The fact that Western society reserves its harshest condemnation for women who accept, understand and use our sexuality speaks volumes. 🙁
I agree with you, Frank. Even in this day and age, our society is full of anti-sex messages, and the Madonna-Whore dichotomy still has some force. Men are studs, women are sluts; bad girls are ‘whores’; having sex without the redeeming aura of love makes you dirty; etc. etc. etc.
I for one think that women should be better informed about their clitorides and how they work, and how to develop them. Their function in female sexuality and the need to control it is probably part of the reason why they end up being the target of (some kinds of) female circumcision, as you mention.
(I’ve read some people claim that the original idea was not that orgasms cure hysteria — apparently, the practitioners didn’t think of what they were doing as providing orgasms to hysterical women, but simply executing a massage that could calm down the ladies and take away their symptoms. I don’t know the details, though.)
Just a clarification: Physical castration of little girls isn’t merely a form of circumcision.
As documented by one of the victims, Khady, in the recent book “Mutilèe,” at age 7 or 8 little girls in some cultures are held down and their clitoris is cut off completely, sawing off and scrapping every bit of clitoral tissue, while the child screams bloody murder, and other little girls wait their turn in the hall.
There is no hospital and no anesthesia. Incredibly, it’s the mothers and other women who organize and carry out the gruesome operation. It is still performed in some immigrant communities in Europe, though there is an organization in Brussels that is attempting to stop it.
Here in the “civilized” West, only mental castration of little girls is allowed.
Asehpe: One can’t entirely blame “society” for developments which arose due to biology. The fact that it is women who get pregnant and not men is an inviolable fact of Nature, and societies developed the slut-stigma to protect girls from getting pregnant without men to care for the children. Tribal societies had no such stigma, nor did the lowest classes in Europe; they were limited to the middle and upper classes and only extended to the lower classes starting in the Renaissance and especially from the mid-19th century on by the Social Purity movement. Before the advent of dependable birth control the taboo was necessary, just as the Madonna-whore duality developed from the incest taboo (which was also necessary). People don’t realize how much dependable birth control changed everything, nor how long societies take to adjust to such changes. If government would stop interfering in people’s private sexual business, the situation would take care of itself in about three generations (of which most of my readers belong to the first and second).
Frank: Mutilation of children is one of the few exceptions I make to the “no government interference” rule; some societies have developed in such a sick manner that civilized people cannot allow such barbaric practices to continue among immigrants from those societies in Western countries. I don’t know how people ever started applying the word “circumcision” to this procedure; it’s like referring to amputation of the fingers as “nail-trimming”.
I would like to say that the following is my original quote, but alas it isn’t. Saw it somewhere and felt that it was something that I needed to remember:
“For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-Spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.”
It has been pointed out that women’s sexual response to auditory stimuli is not unlike men’s response to visual stimuli, which is why singers have always been among the most popular male sex symbols.
The written word also seems to be peculiarly effective, given the popularity of “romance novels” among women, with such novels becoming steadily more explicit in their sexual descriptions.
I don’t know how sexually functional prostitutes are in general (being a professional doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re orgasmic), but if you are then your insightful writing is proof that being sexually uninhibited doesn’t necessarily mean you must be stupid or lazy – as traditionalists suppose.
I hope you don’t mind me adding to my politically incorrect comment above that the topic of sex being “between the ears” is also discussed in my politically incorrect blog: http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/premature-sexualization/ Thanks.
Thank you, both for the kind words and the link; I was actually looking for a good article on “premature sexualization” hysteria when I wrote my columns of September 30th and October 20th, but all the Google results were either pro-hysteria or else unquestioningly accepted that “premature sexualization” exists and is bad. Now I’ll have an article to link next time the subject arises!
A direct connection between testosterone and high sex drive has been challenged even for men; it seems that, for both sexes, there are different things that work to produce what is felt as a “sex drive” (probably not a scalar quantity). And the brain’s fame as the most important sexual organ of men and women certainly lends support to the theory that sex happens ‘between the ears’ (the placebo effect felt, not only by women, but also by men who participated in studies on drugs about impotence does underline the mental component).
That mental concerns can affect men, too, is clear from how their performance anxiety can lead to incidents of impotence (younger and younger men are taking ED helpers like Viagra or Cialis these days). The higher visibility of their arousal also makes any failures more difficult to hide, which can lead to vicious circles.
Humans are such intricate combinations of culture, nature, and personal history (psychology) that it would indeed be surprising if sex didn’t show itself as being strongly dependent on these three aspects. The debate has always been whether one of them is more important than the other. Personally I think that’s the wrong question, since the importance any of these three aspects has always depends on the importance of the other two.
Ah, but here’s the thing. A “sex drive” is not the same as “being open to sex”: men (and women) who are not at all open to sex (priests, monks, anti-sex religious crusaders) may very well have to struggle with strong sex drives. (Think of someone talking about his/her feeling of hunger as “being open to food.”) Maybe I’m mistaken — I’ll let sexologists correct me if need be — but a “sex drive” would imply an internal need for sex, which (unless I misunderstand you Maggie) is precisely what you claimed not to have.
For women it’s largely hair-splitting. Most men I know would be plenty worried if they felt no desire for sex, but most women I know only care if it affects their relationships. No, I don’t really ever feel the need to seek out sex, but I’m nearly always ready for it when my partner wants it, and for the past 15 years I’ve never really had any problems with satisfaction, either. I was more often sexually dissatisfied before my hysterectomy, when my T-levels were presumably about five times as high. And if a woman’s sexual satisfaction and that of her partner aren’t the most important criteria by which to judge a woman’s sex life, I certainly don’t know what is.
but most women I know only care if it affects their relationships.
How awful. Of all the women I’m friends with (perhaps it’s an age thing, they’re all in their mid-20s), only two seem unworried about their lack of sexual desire. One seems to have chronic fatigue syndrome (sleeps more than 12 hours a day) and the other was mentally attacked by her brother as a child every time she did something remotely sexual (like wear shorts, and she’s from Houston).
I would be terribly worried if I started to lack the desire to have sex–what an awful feeling!
I think it’s less age per se and more changing expectations. Women used to be more pragmatic, and if something like that didn’t upset them or hurt their marriages they didn’t have time or energy to waste on fretting about it (men and women are very different creatures!) But young girls, especially those who read magazines, have been bombarded with the idea that it’s a problem so of course they worry. The pharmaceutical lobby has been trying to have “Female Sexual Dysfunction” declared a medical disorder for about 15 years now so they can market a “cure” for it as they did with Viagra for men. So as the linked article explains, young women are now being induced to worry about yet one more thing that really isn’t cause for worry. 🙁
Still it’s a different thing. Think about the difference between “hunger” and “being open to food.”
A lot of it, at least for men, is social, I think; men often consider themselves more “manly” because of their sexual desire, so if you don’t have it you feel inferior, even if by other criteria (physical strength, career achievement, etc.) you’re quite “manly.” The cuckold husband is the eternal target of jokes in my native Brazil (there’s a whole genre of ‘cuckold jokes’ there), portraying him as a little idiot having low sex drive and thus “deserving” to be cuckolded (by a more manly guy). The ideal is that a manly guy by other criteria would also be strongly sexual (hence the dissonance when the features don’t align, as, e.g., when body builders who take steroids get reduced libidos or smaller penises).
Sure. Testosterone is not the alpha-and-omega of sexual intensity (in fact, it has been debunked as its source even for males, I think). Intensity has other sources than testosterone, obviously. The difference of intensity between men and women is not a simple consequence of one hormone; the underlying causes are more complicated.
When I talked about intensity I didn’t mean testosterone. The kind of fact that militates against simple intensity as the difference between men and women’s sex drives is rather of a different kind (the often mentioned ‘fluidity’ of women’s sexual impulses, for instance, that makes it easier for women to become — and cease to be — lesbians than it is for men to become and/or cease to be gays — though the existence of true male bisexuals does make this also less clear-cut).
They certainly are the most important criteria to judge anyone’s sex life, male or female. But that is different from sex drive. Many men (and quite a few women) are actually quite unhappy because their sex drive is too high (sex addicts do exist, and their plight is very real) and wish it were lower.
Yes, this agrees with what you’ve written before. It sounds as if your sex drive is mostly heteronomous (other-centered, i.e. you’re ready to satisfy him, and his satisfaction has a direct impact on — is a direct source of — yours). I imagine your autonomous desires basically go to other things: life achievements, activism, etc. Despite what some feminists may say, this is not bad: it’s a perfectly good way of existing as a sexual being. It’s just not the only one, even for women.
(Tendency towards heteronomy vs. tendency towards autonomy, by the way, would in principle be another category independent of intensity in sex.)
“Sex addiction” is a pop-psychology term; it is not possible to be “addicted” to sex because it is a natural function. One might as well speak of being “addicted to food”, “addicted to oxygen” or “addicted to companionship”. One can certainly be obsessed with sex, and there is the disorder now called “hypersexuality”, but this is very different from an “addiction”.
Save any arguments you might have about this for my column of the 11th, though. 😉
OK. Basically, it’s all word play. One does indeed speak of being addicted to food (I’ve heard references to eating disorders worded exactly like that) or to companionship (though not to oxygen, I must admit). Whether there are better names for the phenomenon or not doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But let’s leave it for the 11th! I’ll be looking forward to it.
Ah Maggie. I wished there were more people writing as well as you do out there (including even in my own field). Life would be less boring.
😉
I’ve never been able to break my oxygen addiction. I’ve really given up on ever beating it. The withdrawal is a killer.
agree that testosterone plays only a small role in women’s libido. Mostly her libido is generated by the behavior, teasing, voice, stance, appearance, smell, and all ’round sexiness of her partner. Polarity pulls her to him.
This is why sexual attraction dims with long-term marriage. The couple become overly familiar with each other. With less of the testosterone component, wives can lose sexual attraction to their husbands. It’s not a choice.
Personally, I find myself more attracted by my husband now than I did when we met; perhaps it’s a whore’s perspective, but all that “sexy” stuff does nothing for me. What I find appealing is our emotional connection, not ephemera.
I can tell you for a fact that testosterone levels played a hugely significant role in my fluctuating sex drive, as I had my levels tested 4 times over the past 10 years with significant changes in T levels correlating EXACTLY to the the changes in my libido.
When my levels were highest (higher than the average man and more than 10 x’s higher than the average woman) I was in a constant state of arousal and multi-orgasmic to the point of Nth degree. When my testosterone tanked in perimenopause it became an effort to work up enough interest to bother with one orgasm, much less the ‘dozen at a time’ I’d become used to. And I could go on and on about the other major as well as more subtle differences but mainly I’d like to say that your un-researched personal opinion/blanket statement here is misleading at best.
And since bio-identical hormone can make a HUGE difference to women suffering from a sudden drop in libido, your uninformed opinion is dangerous at worst, esp if someone who would benefit as I have were to take it to heart.
Plenty of us women aren’t in relationships, by the way, and yet we still LOVE our sex drive so no, my issue is not in having satisfying “relationship sex” but IS partly in having a passion for new (personal) encounters as well as for my patrons (as a professional companion). Frankly I found this post and most of these comments to be ill-informed and kind of offensive. There are other factors of course but physiology is a huge factor and minimizing it does no favors for any of the women suffering from decreased libido due to T levels (and if it happens around the age of 40 when perimenopause often hits, odds are very high it’s a major factor).
Kacy, nobody’s denying that T-levels do play a major role for SOME women; the article I quoted said so and so did I. You must realize that a woman like yourself with a level 10x that of a normal woman is NOT, by definition, typical and cannot be taken as such. The existence of exceptions does not disprove general rules.
BTB, my opinion is neither unresearched nor blanket, which you would have known had you read the column more carefully. I welcome your input, but please in the future try to read more thoroughly before reacting angrily.
Have you been married more or less than 5-7 years ?
Camille Paglia wrote ( I can’t find it now) a thought about our lifestyles now with androgynous sexual personae, men and women being overly familiar with each other , lack of mystery. … resulting in less sustained libido, esp. for women.
That resonated with me.
10 years now. 🙂
You should also consider that most research on testosterone (all hormones) is lacking since bio-identicals can’t be patented, meaning Big Pharma can’t make big money on them. Most research on them is incomplete and/or flawed.
“What this means in English is that if a woman who complains of low sex drive has a low (10-16 ng/mL) testosterone level, giving her extra testosterone often (but not always) increases that drive, but if her levels are about 17 ng/mL or higher it doesn’t usually have any significant effect.” <–and this is utter bullsh*t.
I've read 6 books on female hormones in the past 2 months and about 3 times that many articles. Did you read more than this 1?
Are dozens of journal articles supplied by my endocrinologist for about four years, and about a dozen more articles in the past decade enough for you? No, it isn’t bullshit, and the fact that such-and-such therapy worked for YOU does not mean it will work for everyone.
Kacy, you are beginning to sound like one of those women who say “I smoked all through my pregnancy and my baby was just fine.” Anecdotal evidence does NOT make a rule, and since you continue to insist that it does and attack views to the contrary with unnecessary rudeness, I won’t accept any more input from you on this particular subject. I have commenters who disagree with me all the time, but I don’t accept impolite hostility. 🙁
You read through here, you’ll see that I’ve both agreed and disagreed with Maggie on a number of issues, some of them pretty important to her. But I try not to be an ass about it, and she seems to accept that we won’t always agree. She thinks I’m wrong and I think she’s wrong and oh well.
Hi everybody. I’m back.
I can’t speak to female sex drive – I’m a man – it’s a mystery to me.
All I know … is I am a bodybuilder and, about once per year for three weeks – I do a little cycle of a very mild steroid called “Epistane”. It’s a wonderful compound, it doesn’t cause me to “shutdown” test production for only a three week cycle. It produces a very nice overall sense of well being and helps me build about 10 pounds of muscle. It doesn’t convert to estrogen, doesn’t cause my balls to shrink (in only 3 weeks), and has very few side effects …
It really doesn’t boost testosterone, but it is an exogenous androgen in my system … and it DOES cause me to become very “Alpha Male”. Not violently aggressive – I’m the nicest person in the world when I’m using it but …
My sex drive goes through the roof. Every single female I see – fat, skinny, old, young – I’m eyeballing her. I can control it but … when I’m in the bed with my wife – it’s barbarian rock and roll … aggressive sex … like a freakin Visigoth. My wife loves this as she’s normally a submissive woman and seems to feel more comfortable in that roll. Sometimes that aggravates me when I’m my “normal” self – but not when I’m on this compound – it’s like … “I’m the Viking baby – I can handle all this – you just HOLD ON TIGHT for the ride!”
So … I know first hand that hormones can indeed boost male sex drive – and my test levels are already high normal.
I’ve never had my testosterone levels measured, so I have no idea how I compare to the average male. But I’ve had Addison’s disease since I was fourteen, and my adrenal glands atrophied to the point that doctors were unable to find them on a CAT-scan. I know that adrenal testerone is pretty insignificant in a male, but corticoid levels do affect how other endocrine glands function, so I’ve long been warned that I might suffer sexual difficulties because of it.
I’m forty-five now, and I still haven’t had any real problems. I guess my libido has declined a little in recent years, but I still jerk off nearly every day, so I guess I’m not too bad off.
I’ve read, though, that Addison’s disease is twice as common in females, but I’ve never heard anything about how it may or may not affect their sexual desires.
I don’t really have anything important to say here, but anytime the topic of adrenal glands comes up, I always feel the need to say something.
Every situation is different, but what’s going on inside a woman’s head is crucial in my experience. I attribute much of my SO’s lack of sex drive to the following:
-She is passionate about obtaining an excellent education for our children
-Our state is near the bottom of the US for public education, and righftully so
-She spends most of her free time (when she’s not taking care of the children) studying neighborhoods, schools, curricula, etc., in the area of the US to which we plan to move in the next 18-24 months – it’s nearly an obsession
It is not a lack of passion, but just a lack of SEXUAL passion. Before the kids, she had plenty of sexual passion, but afterwards her focus has changed. Not that it is all bad, mind you, as I’m happy have her be devoted to parenting our children. Her lack of sexual desire affects me, though. I’m a proponent of living a balanced life, and her life is unbalanced now, IMHO.
As an addendum to this discussion, it is clear that we still have a lot to learn about the production and brain functions of the sex hormones in both sexes:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/how-testosterone-may-alter-the-brain-after-exercise/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22807478
[…] occurs or how long it lasts, and it can’t be cured by improving blood flow to the genitals or raising the testosterone level. Yet there are those who bemoan the fact that female sexual desire has not yet been fully […]
Across time, cultures, differing levels of education, religious observance and peer influence, adult women’s sexual drive & interest are more flexible and variable than adult men’s. Women, more than men, for example, prefer to alternate periods of high sexual activity with periods of almost none and are more likely than men to feel somewhat bisexual attractions (Mosher et al, 2005).
When shown images of heterosexual couples in both erotic & non-erotic contexts, heterosexual men gaze mostly at the women while heterosexual women gaze equally at both men & women.(Lykins et al, 2008)
Regarding sexual arousal when shown sexually explicit film clips, men’s genital and subjective arousal is mostly to preferred sexual stimuli (for heterosexual viewers, depictions of women). Women respond more nonspecifically to depictions of sexual activity involving either males or females (Chivers et al, 2007).
Also, in 1991, Simon LeVay did a blind study using sections of the human hypothalamus taken from deceased men and women, both homo- & heterosexual. He had no idea which samples belonged to whom. In the course of the study, he found that a specific cell cluster was reliably larger in heterosexual males than it was in homosexual males and females of both orientations.
Everything psychological is also simultaneously biological. Eberything psychological is highly subjective and varies a lot between individuals. Thus, conversely, everything biological is also subjective & highly variable between individuals. What works for you, won’t necessarily work for me. Any blanket statements, and sorry you shall be.
Everything*