Sex Drive: How Do Men and Women Compare?

The simplest way to capture the differences between men’s and women’s sex drives is to consider how you’d answer this test: create a sentence using the words "sex" and "love." 

If you’re a woman, odds are your sentence goes something like this: “When two people understand each other, trust each other, and love each other, then the sex is the best.” If you’re a man, chances are your sentence more closely resembles this: “I love sex.”

It’s a stereotype, it’s a cliché, and more often than not, it’s true. “We like to think of men having the higher sex drive -- it’s not always true, but more often, it is,” says Eva Ritvo, MD, vice chairman in the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami.

“Each person’s sex drive is like an appetite: Some people spend their whole life in the kitchen and think about food all the time; some people can skip lunch,” says Ritvo, who is also chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Florida.

As a rule, men don’t like to skip lunch. But that’s only the beginning of the story.

What Is Sex Drive?

Sex drive -- the way men and women think about sex and engage in sex -- is a slippery concept. Researchers have a hard time quantifying it: Is it how often we think about sex? How often we want sex? How often we become aroused or actually have sex? Sex drive is all that, and more.

“Sex drive, which scientists now call sexual desire, is one of the most difficult to define,” says Patricia Koch, PhD, associate professor of Biobehavioral Health & Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University and adjunct professor of human sexuality at Widener University.  Sexual arousal is easily identifiable -- for men it shows up as an erection, in women, lubrication (and enlargement of the clitoris). “But desire is not just about arousal or frequency -- how often you have sex can depend on so many other circumstances and opportunities: whether you have a partner or not, whether you like your partner,” says Koch.

Some researchers have begun to question how we define sex drive -- insisting that we have only looked at it from a male model, so of course women come up short. The male sex drive model resembles a straight line: It is a “linear model of sexual response, where first they have desire, then arousal, then orgasm,” says Koch. For women, sexual interest follows a more meandering model. “Their drive is for emotional bonding and caring -- once they feel that, then they get aroused and interested,” Koch says. “Women want and enjoy a lot more sex play than men want.  It takes them longer to be stimulated through sex play than men,” says Koch. What’s more pleasurable to women may be affectionate physical contact that may or may not end in orgasm, and this indirectness is not a sign of a lack of sex drive.