Do men really want sex more? It depends on how you measure desire
A huge 2022 review of more than 620,000 people found that men report higher sex drives than women on average, yet the two distributions overlapped by 80%. A 2024 review went further: when desire was measured by automatic bodily responses instead of questionnaires, the difference between the sexes consistently vanished.
The word libido comes from the Latin for lust or desire, and it owes its modern meaning to Sigmund Freud. He first used it for sexual needs alone, then widened it into a universal life energy stored in the unconscious id, driving everything from a mother's love to the pursuit of food and knowledge. In his account the libido moves through developmental stages in childhood and can get stuck along the way. Carl Jung broadened it further into psychic energy in general, expressed through hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection and creativity.
Neuroscience now points to a reward circuit deep in the brain, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, as the main regulator, with testosterone and oestrogen acting upon it. Yet one 2012 study found testosterone did not explain differences between men and women, and another that year found couples together for at least a year had drive levels more alike than different.
The measurement question is where it gets intriguing. In the 2022 review, roughly a third of women reported a stronger drive than the average man. The 2024 analysis, by Touraille and Ågmo, noted that in rodent experiments measuring willingness to approach a mate, no sex difference appeared, and that among chimpanzees and bonobos both sexes had similar rates of activity and numbers of partners. In one human experiment, gaps in self-reported behaviour became negligible when participants believed a lie detector could catch them.
The authors suggest questionnaire gaps may reflect social expectations, gender norms and the poorer quality of sexual experiences many women report, rather than inborn differences in wanting. Desire also rises and falls with circumstances: stress, fatigue, illness, lack of privacy and depression can all dampen it, and it tends to rise for many women in the days just before ovulation.
Source: Libido
