It’s faintly amusing to cast our minds back to a year ago, when the big nudge nudge, wink wink “and finally” joke to cheer us up after a lot of talk of a terrifying global pandemic was about bracing for a baby boom. Ha! In fact, one of the reasons for our flaccid and further drooping birth rate is confirmed by a study in The Journal of Sex Research on desire between couples. Of course it now seems obvious: being able to identify the stains on your partner’s fleece by name, birth order and substance, in fact considering them new friends in your diminished social life, is not the kinky “oh là là” of erotica the word “lockdown” conjured up at the start. But here is the twist: lockdown only did for the libidos of women, not men.
“I was expecting to see drops in sexual desire for both women and men,” the study’s author, Liam Wignall, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Bournemouth, told me after polling nearly 600 young British adults. “I was somewhat surprised we only saw statistically significant reductions for women.”
If you look at it one way, this is a big cheer for the resilience of male desire, even when “Shades of Grey” is just the palette to describe the state of his partner’s lockdown knickers, hair and face. Men are not the focus of investigations in what has been a doomed “mating pandas in captivity” lockdown experiment.
For this we have to look at some of the most fascinatingly counter-cultural advances in sexual research of the past few years. “Familiarity breeds contempt — and children,” wrote Mark Twain, who was half-right. Of all the scientific progress lockdown has brought us, this is perhaps the most challenging: another confirmation that women don’t lack desire, it is that their desire is uniquely vulnerable to exposure to their menfolk. To simplify: duration of relationship does not affect sexual satisfaction for men. Their libido is UHT longlife. But for women it generally goes off pretty fast and revives with a new partner. Our romantic culture has a central fallacy: the belief that monogamy is harder for men than for women. In fact, the opposite could be the case.
“And you know, one of the reasons that women lose interest in sex,” says Cynthia Graham, one of Britain’s leading academic researchers in this subject, “is because the sex isn’t very good.”
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We both laugh. This comes at the end of a conversation that is already feeling refreshingly taboo. The research of Graham and other mainly female academics shows an utterly different reality from the male-directed scripts of pornography, film and TV that infuse how we perceive female longing.
For much of British history women were thought to have uncontrollable sexual appetites; their bodies ran hot; they were more vulnerable to devilish lust. Marriage to the cooler, more rational male was the only way to control their wantonness. Then came the Victorians with their extreme pivot: women simply weren’t interested, and marital conjugations were just another wearisome tick on the patriotic to-do list (this despite Queen Victoria’s diaries proving that she fell hard in lust: “How handsome Albert looks in his white cashmere breaches with nothing on underneath.”). This theme has perpetuated throughout the 20th century, with the slightly Victoria Wood comedy trope of an unfaithful man chafing under matrimony and his wife’s flannel nightdress.
In fact, some of those ancient stereotypes of men fit more closely to the women emerging from new studies. Wednesday Martin, the anthropologist and author, wrote a book, Untrue, on this theme, in which she goes to meet Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, the author of the book Sexual Dysfunction in Women and a leading researcher in this field. Meana tells Martin: “We have plenty of data telling us that long-term relationships are particularly tough on female desire.” Martin finds this hard to take on board. She responds: “Meana’s work contradicted just about everything I had been taught since childhood about relationships between men and women.”
Those studies have been racking up. In 2012 academics at the University of Guelph in Canada interviewed 170 young people who had been in a relationship for between one month and nine years. Women reported lower levels of desire depending on the length of their relationship, which was a precise dose response: for each extra month they spent together their desire decreased by 0.02 on the standard female sexual function scale. Relationship duration was a better predictor of sexual desire in women than relationship and sexual satisfaction. By contrast, men’s desire “held steady” over time.
In 2016 a study by Annika Gunst published in Psychological Medicine looked at more than 2,000 Finnish women over seven years. Those in long-term relationships had a loss of desire for each year that went by; their single friends had no such decline. Those with a couple of partners were somewhere in between. Then came the big landmark study, the British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which happens roughly every decade and is among the largest and most detailed research of sexual behaviour anywhere in the world.
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This leads me to Graham, who is a psychology professor at the University of Southampton and the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Sex Research, mentioned at the beginning of this piece. She was one of the authors of the study published in BMJ Open in 2017 using data from the latest survey that questioned nearly 7,000 women and 5,000 men. Both start their relationship with similar honeymoonish levels of desire. But a year on and women are already disengaging. The fall in interest drops off several cliffs at the five and ten-year marks. Women are twice as likely as men to lose desire in long-term relationships. Of particular relevance to lockdown: those women living with their partners were more likely to lose interest than those in distanced long-term relationships.
Graham is keen to emphasise that men’s interest in sex did ebb and flow, especially with well-known “unsexy” life events, such as the arrival of children and problems with money and mental or physical health. But length of relationship was not an issue, not the kryptonite for desire in the same way as it was for women. Therefore, I say, lockdown, with its ultra-domesticity, may have accelerated this effect for women by a few years.
“I agree,” Graham says. “Lockdown is very different.”
There are several ways to interpret these findings. One is that women have a limited amount of sexual drive, that they spend early on in any relationship and then the cupboard is bare. The other is that women crave sexual variety, a view that is supported by recent evolutionary theory that early human females, while pair-bonded, were frequently unfaithful in ways that maximised their offspring’s genetic advantage.
“I definitely think the first one is too simplistic and I wouldn’t agree with that at all,” Graham says. “There is a really interesting finding to do with masturbation that I think supports that second idea a little bit more, about wanting a greater repertoire. That comes from the National Surveys before the last one. We found that when men were in a relationship with a woman they were much less likely to report masturbation. It was completely the reverse for women, who masturbated more when in a relationship with a man. The whole idea about masturbation being a substitute for partner sex, which has been around a long time, seems to be supportive for men, but for women not at all.”
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Graham says that they are not really sure why women masturbate more in heterosexual relationships, and also why they often do this in secret. Which leads us to the “good sex” question. I had earlier interviewed the psychotherapist Ian Kerner, famed for his bestselling book She Comes First. Kerner told me that couples in long-term relationships often arrive at sex from the kind of “cold start” that men can tolerate. A “strong sample” of his patients said that the time that elapses between initiation and intercourse is between two and seven minutes, “which if you look at the science of sexual response in women just isn’t enough”, Kerner said. “They may have their minds elsewhere. It’s not pleasurable, or even painful. Hence women live with the orgasm gap. And orgasm as a reward is an important incentive.”
Graham too mentions the “orgasm gap”, the fact that men nearly always orgasm during sex, but in heterosexual relationships only 65 per cent of women do. In homosexual relationships women fare better, at 86 per cent. Adding a man to the mix significantly decreases a woman’s chance of “happy endings”.
To test whether this is part of the problem of waning desire in heterosexual women, I say, we would have to study whether homosexual women lose interest in sex to the same degree, whether the idea of “bed death” among lesbians is true.
“That’s an interesting question,” Graham says. “Certainly I think later research shows that is a myth.” She points me to a study in The Journal of Sex Research in 2013 that showed lesbians on average have sex that lasts three times as long as heterosexual couples and, once in for the long haul of a decade-plus relationship, are doing it more frequently than the equivalent heterosexual couples too.
You would never know any of this from our cultural menu, which defaults to a lack of interest in women’s lack of interest. The end of lockdown may be the time we realise that home schooling isn’t just for kids.
