Who is more satisfied with their sex lives: men or women?
Ask ten of your friends that question, and most—perhaps all—will answer “women.” But would they be correct? Or is this one of the many instances where our lay assumptions about psychology clash with the findings of scientific research?
As the authors of a new article published in Archives of Sexual Behavior acknowledge, research on this topic has yielded inconsistent results. Some studies suggest that men are more sexually satisfied than women, while others suggest the opposite. Others still suggest that there is little to no difference between the genders.
Ashlyn Brady of Sweet Briar College in Virginia and her large team of collaborators from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe decided to pool their resources in an attempt to answer the question. They combined data from 37 studies of sexual satisfaction in romantic couples—data representing 7,520 men and women. This was worthwhile because more data imbues an analysis with greater power to detect real effects. To take a metaphor from astronomy, think ditching your pocket binoculars for the James Webb Space Telescope.
What did Brady and co. find with this potent method? Contrary to lay assumptions, partnered women were slightly more sexually satisfied than partnered men. When asked to rate their enjoyment of sex and their satisfaction with their sex life, women, compared with men, tended to give higher scores. Men, meanwhile, reported greater sexual arousal as well as greater sexual inhibition.
The next step was to investigate why women were more sexually satisfied. The scientists recognised that prior research has shown that sexual satisfaction is not only a measure of physical pleasure but of a person’s feelings about how their sex life benefits their relationship in general. Because of this, and because women are known to place greater value than men on the relational benefits of sex, a plausible explanation for these new findings is that they are being driven by relationship satisfaction. Fortunately, the participants in the 37 studies were also asked about their relationship satisfaction. Statistically controlling for relationship satisfaction did not affect the results of the analysis: women were still slightly more sexually satisfied than men, regardless of whether they were more or less satisfied with their relationships.
The scientists also controlled for partners’ sexual satisfaction, because it has been previously shown that women tend to take into account their partner’s sexual satisfaction when estimating their own (to put it another way, women care more than men about whether their partner is having a good time in bed). Again, controlling for partner’s sexual satisfaction left the main result intact: women were slightly more sexually satisfied than men, no matter how satisfied their partners were.
One possible explanation for the results is that men, on average, value sexual novelty more than women do. This could mean that men’s sexual satisfaction decreases during a relationship at a greater speed or to a greater degree than does women’s. This possibility is supported by a further analysis of the mammoth dataset, which revealed that the gender difference was present in couples who had been together for a longer rather than a shorter time, although the authors caution that the effect is small.
Brady and colleagues also observe that, even though the participants in the studies responded to questions about their sex life in confidence, “it is possible that women may… simply be less willing to disclose a lack of sexual satisfaction than men due to being socialized to avoid discussing sexual problems.”
That is, women and men may be equally sexually satisfied, but women are more motivated than men to exaggerate their satisfaction.