Are Women “Just as Horny” as Men?
Ashley Madison has, for a long time, claimed their services are just as appealing to men as they are to women, but the infamous hack tells a different story. Out of the 35 million leaked records, only 5 million (just 15 per cent) of the profiles seem to belong to actual women. The rest were either fake or commissioned by Ashley Madison in order to lure male clientele.
The most recent statistics from the National Survey of Family Growth reveal that men will typically have a third more sexual partners in their lifetimes than women will. Even if we actively ignore heterosexuality and give a superfluous look to the queers in the room, we’ll see that there is no queer girl equivalent of Grindr, Adam4Adam, or Scruff — all of which seems to heed legitimacy to the ancient belief that girls “just don’t want it” as bad as boys.
But sex isn’t the same thing for women as it is for men, so comparing the two is tricky. For starters, 10 percent of women are reported to be anorgasmic — clinically incapable of achieving orgasm — and only about a third of women can achieve an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. It seems logical then, that women aren’t regularly forming swat teams to find three minutes of pure mediocrity with a strong risk of urinary tract infection.
Sociologically, we’re a few hundred years away from being able to truly compare the two — and that’s being optimistic. Women and men receive different sexual socializations throughout their lives, with men receiving positive messages associated with sex and women receiving negative ones. Nothing new here: If you’re a promiscuous man, you’re the boss; if you’re a promiscuous woman, you’re a whore or Amy Schumer (love you, Amy). Escaping the label of a slutty pariah is plenty of motivation to run from sex as if it were your mother coming over announced on a hungover Saturday morning.
Additionally, there are less nuanced dangers associated with promiscuous sex for women. We constantly hear stories of physical and sexual violence and the use of date rape drugs occurring at bars, clubs, music festivals, and even innocuous house parties. Rape culture had most of our mothers telling us not to stay out too long lest the frenzied male libido would hunt us and take us down. Women learn to associate sex with danger at a very young age, and whether they’re queer or straight, the subconscious, puritan instinct persists: Sex is dangerous, sex is bad, no need to take unnecessary risks when I have my brand new vibrator at home or the new Martha Stewart book!
We don’t make decisions in a vacuum, nor do we live in one. Social stigma and the threat of physical violence are responsible for discouraging women from exploring their sexuality and until that is fixed, we cannot make any definitive generalizations concerning genetically or evolutionary inherent differences of the sexes’ libidos.
