Science Uncovers What Makes Women Initiate Sex More Often
What are the traits that lead to women initiating sex more?
Sex stereotypes are unavoidable.
Each of us carries a sexual script that informs how we believe sex should be throughout our lives.
Our sexual scripts are influenced by everything from religion to Disney movies to porno movies. What we believe about how sex ought to be is influenced by our surrounding culture.
One of the most pervasive scripts, at least here in the West, is that the man does the pursuing, and the woman is the pursued.
The man chases, and the woman either affirms or rejects him.
But this rigid instance of sex roles often goes wrong when we grow up to become adults and get into romantic relationships. Over time, a man doing all the chasing can feel unwanted. A woman playing the pursued role might feel pestered or annoyed — even pressured to perform.
At first, we might find these roles cute. But like erosion, they can wear on us over time. You might have a favorite meal, but that doesn’t mean you want to eat only that meal indefinitely every night of your life.
These sex roles have measurable consequences as well.
Part of this is biological, as well. Evolution favored men who were more likely to pursue women aggressively and were more likely to produce offspring. In contrast, women who were conservative with their finite number of eggs wound up having kids who were more likely to survive.
While these roles are partially ingrained in us through biology, what we evolved to do and what makes our sex lives healthy and happy can sometimes be two very different things.
We might have evolved to love sugar, but eating nothing but candy is a sure way to wind up with a stomach ache.
Lesbian Bed Death
While there is some heated debate around the existence and nature of a phenomenon dubbed “lesbian bed death,” it’s a curiosity supposedly observed in lesbian relationships where the two women involved stop having sex.
To be clear: heterosexual couples experience dead bedrooms also. But, as tracks with evolutionary theory, the greater number of men in any given relationship, the more sex will occur.
Sure, every one of us is different, and every relationship is different. There are heterosexual couples who have far more sex than other gay couples, and lesbian couples who have more sex than heterosexual couples.
But on the whole, when you average it out, gay men have more sex than mixed-sex couples, and lesbians have less sex than everybody else.
After 5 years together, one study found that 42% of lesbians reported they were having sex either once per month or not at all; only 15% of women in heterosexual relationships reported the same.
This is partly because women in studies tend not to focus solely on genital stimulation as the sole defining characteristic of sex. Put two women together, and their sex lives will often transform from a male-centric one, hyperfocused on penetration, to a more diverse array of romantic activities.