April 4, 2008

Older women are not hornier -- do you really need data?

Perhaps 1 person out of 2500 is smart enough and tough-minded enough to tease an interesting signal out of the data of their own experiences. * Some patterns are not noteworthy, though, so that as long as you aren't a complete nimrod or swimming in self-deception, you can figure it out. The pattern of female sexual desire and activity across the lifespan is one such no-brainer. However, I hear enough nonsense on this topic -- "everyone knows that women reach their sexual peak during midlife" -- that it's worth quoting the medical literature just to settle the matter.

I have no interest here in what factors aside from age influence female sexual desire -- you can figure this out on your own too, but the literature does provide hard data that a female's personality, especially how prone she is to depression, affects her level of desire and activity. I'm only going to show that female desire and activity decrease with age -- so if you didn't just land here from Mars, feel free to go do something more productive with your time.

Sexual activity decreases with age

From this paper:

"In the over-40 category, the frequency of sex is much lower. Among older women the median amount of sex is once a month, while for males it is 2-3 times a month."

"A third of over-40s say they are celibate."

"Among the under-40s 84% of US women and 70% of US men had at most one sexual partner in the previous year"

But

"40% of American females over the age of 40 did not have sexual intercourse in the previous year. The figure for American males is 20%."

"As might be expected, Table 5 finds that aging reduces sexual activity."

Sexual desire decreases with age

Lest you make the mistake of thinking that a female's actual amount of sex and her desired amount of sex are outta-whack...

From this paper:

The evidence indicates that a woman's sexual function declines with age. This decline begins in a woman's late 20s to late 30s. Specifically, desire, frequency of orgasm, and frequency of sexual intercourse decrease with age. However, it is not clear whether arousal decreases or remains relatively constant. In longitudinal studies, decline in women's sexual function has also been detected, but patterns of stability and improved sexual function have also been observed for short periods of time.

And

"It is reasonable to conclude that for most women sexual function and activities decline gradually with age, making these changes difficult to detect over short periods of time."

And

"There is evidence that as women get older, the relative importance of sex may decrease."

From this paper:

The longest-duration population-based study, the Melbourne Women's Midlife Health Project, found a significant decrease of women's desire, arousal, orgasm and frequency of sexual activity and a significant increase in vaginal dryness/dyspareunia throughout the menopausal transition. Both age and declining estradiol levels had significant detrimental effects on sexual functioning, libido and sexual responsiveness (arousal, sexual pleasure and orgasm). Testosterone, which is already at a low level in middle-aged women in comparison with younger women, as well as dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, may play a role in psychosexual well-being, even though it is difficult to significantly correlate plasma levels to sexual function in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

And

It is, indeed, a matter of fact that bilateral ovariectomy (both premenopausally and postmenopausally) leads to a sudden 50% fall in circulating testosterone levels, and androgens have peculiar effect on central and peripheral circuitries involved in the physiology of sexual response.

And

"Desire difficulty is the most common sexual complaint experienced by women; the proportion of women with low desire increases with age."

You get the idea. I don't have anything to add, except an emphasis that testosterone in females tanks in middle age. It doesn't matter if feminizing hormones drop over the lifespan -- that per se doesn't make a woman more masculine. It would do so only if masculinizing hormone levels stayed the same, but they are also plummeting.

An interesting but separate question is why this folktale is so popular. It's obvious why it's popular among desperate adolescent males: it gives them hope that, some day, females will be horny enough that guys won't have to try that hard to get laid. I don't think most women buy into the folktale, but those who do are at or approaching middle age, when their bitterness towards men is at its peak. (In fact, I challenge you to find a college freshman who would be convinced by this folktale.) The folktale allows these women to try to take men down a peg -- "How does it feel to have your libido dropping while ours is rising?" Ha, if only it were true.

Women over 30, who are becoming or have become invisible to the male sex, should take consolation in knowing that at least during their invisible phase, they aren't fueled by boy-crazy hormones. The average male is most invisible during adolescence, when getting the opposite sex's attention is the only thing on his mind -- now that's fucked up. But we get over it, and bitter women should too.

* Assuming they are above the 98th percentile (or +2 standard deviations) for both IQ and tough-mindedness, which are independent.

16 comments:

  1. Thanks for this edition of debunking, agnostic.

    It's obvious why it's popular among desperate adolescent males: it gives them hope that, some day, females will be horny enough that guys won't have to try that hard to get laid.

    I think one reason the these desperate adolescent males may believe this notion is that others are trying to console them with it: it's one of those platitudes like "just be yourself," or "someday you will find the one," that makes the giver feel helpful and superior without actually being useful for the receiver. I commented on this sort of platitude-foisting in this post on being shy around women and low-status. Thankfully, those days are over now that I have passable "game" (I don't like that term, but it will suffice).

    Assuming they are above the 98th percentile (or +2 standard deviations) for both IQ and tough-mindedness, which are independent.

    I am high in tough-mindedness, but almost as high in Agreeableness. This leads me to the strange task of saying politically incorrect things in a very nice way.

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  2. Have you seen the report the Journal of Sex Research published on the results of a Franco-American research project titled something like A Comparative Study of the Social Organization of Sexuality in France and the United States?

    According to them, older French women are apparently considerably more sexually active than their American counterparts. I'd be interested to see if that's true for other European women.

    So for those men who are still hopeful for this to be true, move to France. Of course, French women old & young were also found to be considerably more unfaithful than their American counterparts, but every rose has its thorn as they say.

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  3. you are a smart cookie. but i pubmed like crazy, too.
    i'm writing my master's thesis right now (woohoo!) on social phobia and alcohol dependence and their various confounders.

    now, it's tough, because when i'm writing my super convincing intro and citing other papers, i have to do something about the ones that go against my hypothesis. and because of the nature of science, an individual study may actually prove nothing. you know this.

    what i'm trying to say is that - much like matt said on my comments section- results are oh so inconclusive on this horny older lady topic. it's tough for me to agree or disagree with you, since that's what's science is for...but you do see that you're heavily biased on this issue? in ten-twenty years after significant follow up and peer review, i will come back to this blog and concede/go 'ha ha'.

    As for my personal anecdotal evidence, which i have little of, since most of my lady friends are under 25:

    women learn what pleases them in bed a little later in life, after 30 or so. they do, however, remain attracted to the same male qualities they did when they were younger. so basically, they may want more sex but who are they gonna get it from besides their low T overweight husbands? i guess cougars figure out a way, but like you said, do not represent the mean of all women their age. or perhaps the women who become cougars are highly sexual? a lot of women, though, at a certain age never want sex again. my boyfriend's mom has been divorced for 20 years. not a single boyfriend since and zero desire. she's a slav- i think slavic women lose their sexy too soon. jewish ladies, though, oh man... totally different story.

    additionally, it's important to consider a woman's parity. a woman who has had no kids, a woman who had 2 kids in her late twenties, and a woman who is still rearing elementary schoolers i would imagine not only have different sexual priorities but also have different hormonal balances.

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  4. in ten-twenty years after significant follow up and peer review, i will come back to this blog and concede/go 'ha ha'.

    Concede now. ;)

    The two papers I quoted on decreased desire are literature reviews -- summaries of the entire existing literature on the topic.

    Some things remain unclear if few studies looked at it, but everyone looks at how sheer age affects desire, arousal, activity, etc. It's so easy to measure and is one of the first things you'd think of when you thought "What could possibly affect desire, arousal, etc.?"

    I'll edit the post later to emphasize that the papers in the desire section are literature reviews, not single studies.

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  5. she's a slav- i think slavic women lose their sexy too soon. jewish ladies, though, oh man... totally different story.

    Does this play a role in roots of Slavic anti-Semitism? In a society with more traditional sexual mores, women who are more libidinous, especially during middle age, would likely have been perceived as possessed by the devil, as witches, etc.

    If what you say is true, Jewish women would be much more likely than their Slavic host population to be branded witches -- not because of some lame reason, but because their women really were more likely to have higher libidos.

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  6. Interesting. A lot of older women state that they are hornier than in their youth, but I presume it's just a way to compensate for highly dimished attractiveness. What is true, however, is that with increased age women become less choosier about the man they sleep with, probably also just related to their dimished worth.
    However, I remember reading one study that women in their 30's had higher testosterone levels and were horneir than in their thirties, and the logic behind it was that for women in the 29-37 years age range it was their last chance to generate offspring so nature made them hornier and less selective. But, it's definitively clear that women beyond 37 or so aren't very interested in sex anymore, which is probably because their role in nature is the one of a grandmother helping to raise the grandchildren, whereas a man's destiny is to compete until he drops dead or is displaced by a younger male. Biologically and emotionally speaking, women over 35are grandmothers.

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  7. most witches i believe were just neighbors of their accusers, and the accusers were women. it was like a 'she's a stupid bitch' gone terribly wrong. jews and christians didn't really live in the same neighborhoods, not even the same towns. and i believe most witches were christians.

    did slavs even have a witch craze? i thought it was just the west.

    slavs hate jews for a simple reason: slavs were and largely remain poor peasants. when you're poor and have nothing, it's easy to hate others. especially those who seem to have more money. even if jews had more money, which they rarely did, its because they drew it from the noble class. and the serfs weren't fans of those people either. (see: 1917) this became ingrained in the culture. slavs also hate: blacks, tatars, gypsies, cossacks, afghanis, turks, etc.

    but as far as jewish women being more libidinous, i'd say it might be true. jewish women i think are generally more hormonal (umm and crazy), it's like on average we have more of every kind of hormone in our systems than waspy people for sure. just look at an average fertile jewish girl: huge breasts! our lax sexual morality may have originated from our biology, just as christian morality may have originated from white people biology.

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  8. Posted this study on backchannel a year ago. (haha, link will only work for Agro)

    Not only do almost half of women over the age of 40 opt out of sex, about a third of young women report no desire for or dislike of sex:

    "According to my article in JAMA (1999) based on the US national sex survey, women between the ages of 18 and 29, 32% lacked interest in sex, 26% were unable to achieve orgasm, 21% experienced pain during sex, 27% reported sex was not pleasurable. . ."

    I'm going to look into the data from that survey again (the largest and most representative of its kind) specifically to see how those same numbers change after age 29. (and see how those same numbers differ for men)

    Obviously those numbers increase with age, but as a peace offering to the WOMEN GET MORE SEXUAL cult, it might be instructive to look how frequencies change across age too. Certainly, we can assume that, some women increase in sex drive in the years leading up to or even past middle age. (Perhaps women who shed sexually abusive, restrictive or traumatic memories or remove themselves from situations which perpetuate this) The question is, is how small is this number of women compared to those who succumb to the psychological and physiological effects of natural aging?

    It's possible this relative number is much larger or much smaller than some people (on both sides) might suspected.

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  9. I don't know if they called them "witches," but you know what I mean -- making up stories about how abnormal / unhealthy / possessed such women must have been.

    Definitely the main reason the Ashkenazim are hated wherever they go is due to being smarter and harder-working, hence richer, than the local average.

    But that's mostly Jewish men -- does anti-Semitism have any roots in the locals' feelings about Jewish women?

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  10. "According to my article in JAMA (1999) based on the US national sex survey, women between the ages of 18 and 29, 32% lacked interest in sex, 26% were unable to achieve orgasm, 21% experienced pain during sex, 27% reported sex was not pleasurable. . ."

    jason, might this have something to do with rising obesity rates?

    because i can tell you the growing legions of fat women definitely has an effect on the dynamics of the sexual marketplace.

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  11. because i can tell you the growing legions of fat women definitely has an effect on the dynamics of the sexual marketplace

    As I've pointed out, however, it's not just women who are getting fat.

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  12. As I've pointed out, however, it's not just women who are getting fat.

    true, but the widening girth of women has a more direct impact on dating market structure since men do not pay as large (heh) a penalty from bloating up.

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  13. -Definitely the main reason the Ashkenazim are hated wherever they go is due to being smarter and harder-working, hence richer, than the local average.-

    As someone from a mixed Jewish/Christian household, you left one of the main reasons Jews are hated: their different ethical orientation. In my experience, the Jewish desire for money is greater than for the gentile. This can be spun either bad or good, but this difference is apparent in my experience.

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  15. My wife is 44 and she still has no sex drive! She's content having sex once a month! I masturbate 4-5 times a week I don't think she does at all. I love her but the lack of sex sucks! I always have to initiate the sex and its usually the standard answer "tired" or a "headache". So I laugh when I read this shit that older women are hornier cause thats not the case in my wife.

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  16. count your blessings 'anony' Once a month ? heavenly ! I have to be real lucky to get it once a year from my formerly passionate mid 50's wife ! this is a big subject with my friends and I. Our anecdotal collective opinion is that women are at there horniest between 30 and 37. After that the frequency starts to taper off but the kinkyness actually increases , with a spike just before menopause kicks in. Then they dry up and die down there . Hopefully they are good for something else , mine isn't

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