Discover more from Overcoming Bias
My last post said teen males want more sex than teen females. Older men also often complain of women withholding sex, while women complain of men demanding too much sex. From a typical top ten complaints list:
[Women About Men:] 3. They are not affectionate enough. 4. They tend to bypass sexual foreplay.
[Men About Women:] 1. Women complain, criticize and nag too much. … 4. They tend to withhold sex as a punishment or blackmail.
This is often explained in part via women just caring less about sex than men. Men often see the entire dating/mating process a sport where they pay costs, jump hurdles, pass tests, etc. in the hopes of gaining sex. In that view, women seem more interested in the costs men pay and the hurdles they jump than in the sex itself. But consider:
A multi-year study look[ed] at the relationship satisfaction of men and women from five countries who’ve been married more than 20 years. In men … a number of factors could predict relationship satisfaction, including health, sexual functioning and intimacies like kissing and cuddling. In women, only sexual functioning — level of desire, frequency of arousal and orgasm — seemed to predict satisfaction.
This suggests that older women care more about sex than men. Perhaps this result is just wrong, but if not the hypergamy hypothesis offers a resolution: unhappy men could be satisfied by more sex from their partner, but unhappy women mainly want sex from other better men. So while it makes sense for men to ask their partner for more sex, there’s little point in women requesting access to other men. So women instead complain about everything else.
Hypergamy Hypothesis
It could just be economics. If you recall the old "supply and demand curves" from high school economics, as demand goes down the "price" of the good goes down too. THis guy actually took the time to make a chart;
http://captaincapitalism.bl...
Too much of a leap with that other better men statement.
There's just so much involved in that, that needs to be unwound.
What occurs to me first is that older women are more secure, and the study you cited was looking at those who had been married for 20 or more years. So much of the hormonal fluctuations, along with parenting and the uncertainties that always accompany the first years of marriage, and other such facets too numerous to cover - those are gone in the later years, and we're left with a secure woman who is of course familiar and comfortable with her mate.
So this mature, confident woman has been married at least 20 years to the same man, and she equates intimacy with good sex while the man and his decreasing testosterone levels is more apt to hope she will be satisfied with less, because he knows he's not performing as he did in the past. As far he knows though it's okay since the younger wife he's been married to wasn't always this sexually confident, and now he thinks he's just on her level.