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I recently listened to Episode 16: What We Get Wrong About Men's Sexual Desire from Dr. Justin Lehmiller’s Sex and Psychology podcast.
Apparently it’s a myth that men in romantic relationships with women want more sex than women on average. Actually about a third of men want more, a third of women want more, and a third of men and women want the same amount of sex.
I actually found this episode on Spotify because of a clip Lehmiller shared on his Instagram. Which made me think about how the EARN IT Act, if passed, will further incentivize Instagram to censor sex education accounts like Lehmiller’s.
Due to sexual puritanism, scientists already know more about prairie vole mating habits than the basics of human sexuality. Whenever intrepid researchers are able to conduct such science, the powers that be (generally heterosexual men) crush, dismiss, censor, and attack it with everything they have.
As a result, Americans are stunningly ignorant about the basics of sex. This ignorance runs the gamut from preventing pregnancies to pleasure. For instance, how do you write an entire article about sexual assault and BDSM while having no idea that they’re not at all the same thing? Hint: The difference is consent.
This ignorance provides room for gender essentialist stereotypes to flourish.
(Gender essentialism is the view that gender differences are mostly if not entirely inborn and biologically based. Gender essentialism is often used to justify sexism. For example, people justify not hiring or promoting woman in their fertile years because they say women all naturally want to and are better at staying home and raising kids rather than acknowledging that women encounter lots of societal encouragement to spend the bulk of their time on domestic duties and men receive almost zero pressure to stay home with children to the point that when men are alone with their children many refer to this as “babysitting” while when women do it it’s “parenting.” Another example is not encouraging your daughter to study STEM because you think her brain isn’t configured for it. Some people explain the lack of women in fringe political groups by saying women are too emotional to think rationally about politics, rather than the fact that people socially punish women more than men for fringe and anti-social behavior and beliefs. More here.)
One thing that bothers me about the discourse that’s so ready to defend studies that prop up gender essentialism is that if we’re really dedicated to science and skepticism we should also look at the ways gender essentialism harms science.
For instance, previous studies showing that women were less horny than men often actually studied gender role performance. That is, men, when asked, will overstate their interest in sex and women will understate their interest in sex in order to correctly perform masculinity and femininity. It’s only when you ask follow-up questions that you get past the performance.
Obviously there are inborn, biological differences between men and women. But what the most recent science around gender is showing is that those differences are at least as often overestimated as underestimated.
Science isn’t perfect. It’s done by humans, after all. Humans are going to sometimes inadvertently, unconsciously insert their assumptions and biases into their work. We all grow up hearing from our first moments that men are this way and women are this way. It’s only recently that scientists have begun to attempt to account for their biases when studying whether our assumptions about gender are even true.
And just as we’ve only begun to even name gender essentialism, we’ve also just begun to talk about how damaging these narrow, incorrect assumptions can be.
As the partner who wants more sex (and more varied kinds of sex) in 90% of my relationships with men I’ve always felt like a freak. What a relief to learn the research and stereotypes are wrong. Turns out women are just as horny and more sexually flexible on average than men. These stereotypes don’t just make horny, flexible women feel like freaks. They also emasculate men who are partnered with women who have higher sex drives.
It’s incredibly alienating and disconcerting to be non-gender conforming in any way in a society that expects us to think, act, and feel in certain ways based on our sex and/or gender.
Gender essentialism that’s not rooted in good research gives people complexes about shit that’s actually totally normal, like being horny women or not-horny men.
So it’s obviously really important to study sex, name and take into account gender essentialist biases and assumptions, and create and maintain platforms where scientists, researchers, clinicians, and coaches can share the latest, best science on sex and gender.
"Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s social conditioning." (I came)
I view the conservative/puritanical bent of women in power over the last 100 years as an artifact of sexual determinism and a consequence of "trying to join the boys club". A lot easier for a woman to be taken seriously if her policy project is adjacent to the traditional values of family/caretaker (like opposing drugs and alcohol for example, or promoting religious viewpoints), and if she wants to achieve success is a broader arena (like legislatures) it's a lot easier if she seems at least as tough or tougher than her male opponents. Hard to seem very tough when you're championing nuanced, progressive positions. but it's easy if you double down on good old fashioned conservative values. I still wonder, is Hillary Clinton really the inhumane uber-hawk she appears to be, or was that all posturing to join the boys club? Was she willing to trade anonymous human lives for female achievement because she thought it was the only way? We'll likely never know.