The Famously Flaccid Female Libido
The female… with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male….
CHARLES DARWIN
Women have little interest in sex, right? Despite Tiresias’s observations, until very recently, that’s been the near-universal consensus in Western popular culture, medicine, and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, popular culture has begun to question women’s relative lack of interest, but as far as the standard model is concerned, not much has changed since Dr. William Acton published his famous thoughts on the matter in 1875, assuring his readers, “The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences…. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”6
More recently, in his now classic work The Evolution of Human Sexuality, psychologist Donald Symons confidently proclaimed that “among all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to males.”7 In a foundational paper published in 1948, geneticist A. J. Bateman wasn’t hesitant to extrapolate his findings concerning fruit fly behavior to humans, commenting that natural selection encourages “an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females.”8
The sheer volume of evidence amassed to convince us that women are not particularly sexual beings is quite impressive.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have claimed to confirm the flaccidity of the female libido. One of the most cited studies in all of evolutionary psychology, published by 1989, is typical of the genre.9 An attractive undergraduate student volunteer walked up to an unsuspecting student of the opposite sex (who was alone) on the campus of Florida State University and said, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I find you very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About 75 percent of the young men said yes. Many of those who didn’t asked for a “rain check.” But not one of the women approached by these attractive strangers accepted the offer. Case closed.
Seriously, this study really is one of the best known in all of EP. Researchers reference it to establish that women aren’t interested in casual sex, which is important if your theory posits that women instinctively barter sex to get things from men. After all, if they’re giving it away for free, the bottom falls out of the market, and other women are going to have a harder time exchanging sex for anything of value.