Do women like sex?

I wrote about this the other day, but obviously this issue isn't going away any time soon, especially considering how quickly evidence that a) men and women have the same number of sex partners but just claim different numers when asked and b) it's mathematically unlikely that straight men can be having as much more sex than straight women as they claim. When you point out that claims that women have a lower sex drive or less promiscious desires or whatever the scientific theory of the day is about women's lesser interests in sex might have more to do with culture than biology, you are buried in a pile of studies where men and women who apparently have never been influenced by culture claim to have differing sex drives. So I thought a little historical perspective might be interesting, mostly because I saw a couple examples in the past few days of Victorian scientists demonstrating that women don't really have a sex drive at all.

The first example I read the other day in a book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool. The quote that jumped out at me:

"The majority of women (happily for them)," wrote the eminent Dr. William Acton in the mid-1860's, "are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.... No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by an exagerrated notion of the duties required from him." Indeed. "The married woman," continued the good doctor, "has no wish to be treated on the footing of a mistress."

But even more fun, in my highly nerdy reading of academic essays on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", I found this essay comparing depictions of vampires on the show with Victorian vampires. In it, the writer discusses the influence of the widely regarded (at the time) writings of Caesar Lombroso on depictions of female vampirism.

From Lombroso, we learn that not only do women not suffer from sexual desire usually, but that if they do it's a sure sign that they are sick. In fact, it's a sign they suffer from anemia. It makes perfect sense if you think about it--women bleed once a month, which leaves us anemic and somewhat short-tempered. In order to replenish that precious blood, we have to turn to the next best thing--semen. Voila! Sexual desire in women is just diverted blood-thirstiness.

(For more fun reading on Lombroso, read The Mismeasure of Man, where you can bone up on his theories that we can tell what men will become criminals by the slope of their foreheads. Nowadays we know that's bunk--you can tell who will become a criminal by whether or not his parents were divorced. Science marches on.)

Of course, we now know that women aren't deviants if they enjoy sex with a few commited partners. Luckily, we modern people have divested ourselves of all the sexist messages that would cause women to suppress their natural sexuality for fear of being taken for slatterns, meaning that scientists can safely assume that whatever women tell them about their sexual desires is the unvarnished truth. Also, unlike doctors and scientists of old, our scientists work free from preconceived notions of what proper male and female behavior is. And in this enviroment we have found that the Victorians, while extreme in their views, were not completely off--women don't like sex as much as men, and they are more nuturing and prefer love to lust! But they did overstate the case a little bit.