In summary, the constructs of sex and gender are quite complex, so keep this in mind as you read this chapter and ponder the differences between men and women, and consider how it all relates to asexuality. Also note that for the sake of simplicity, I use the phrase gender differences to refer to any behavioral differences that exist between men and women.
Not all men are alike and not all women are alike—indeed, there is a lot of variability within each—and so using people’s biological sex as the only piece of information to predict their sexuality can be misleading and cause numerous errors. Yet, as the black box pictures mentioned above suggest, there are fascinating gender differences in sexuality.
One of the main differences is that men have, on average, a higher sex drive than women (Baumeister et al., 2001). In other words, men are more “sexualized” than women. Examples include the fact that men masturbate and fantasize more than women do. In one national British survey, 73 percent of men and 37 percent of women reported masturbating in the previous month (Gerressu, Mercer, Graham, Wellings, & Johnson, 2008). Relatedly, there is evidence that men (particularly young men) think about sex on a more frequent basis than women. According to one national study of the United States, more than half of men (i.e., 54 percent) think about sex several times during the day, whereas about 20 percent of women do so at about the same frequency (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994).
Another difference is that women’s sexuality is more fluid or flexible, being more responsive to a variety of cultural and psychological factors, than men’s (Baumeister, 2000). One example is that women may have a period of several months of intense sexual activity (masturbation, intercourse) and then several months of no sexual activity. This pattern is less common in men, who maintain a more constant level of sexual activity (e.g., through masturbation, one-night stands) despite, say, the ending of a romantic/sexual relationship. As psychologist Roy Baumeister notes, Kinsey himself made this observation: “Discontinuities in total [sexual] outlet are practically unknown in the histories of males” (Baumeister, 2000, pp. 681–82; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953).
Gender differences in asexuality often seem to mirror gender differences in sexuality. In other words, the gender differences mentioned above also occur in some way between asexual men and asexual women. First, if a main gender difference is that women are less sexualized (i.e., they have lower sex drive and less sexual attraction) than men, one would expect women to be overrepresented on the extremely low end of the sexuality distribution—that is, one would expect to find more asexuality among women.
Is there evidence that women are more likely to be asexual than men? Yes, there is (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, in press-a; Brotto, Knudson, Inskip, Rhodes, & Erskine, 2010). For example, in my first study of asexuality, about 70 percent of the asexual people in NATSAL-I, a British national sample, were women (Bogaert, 2004). Interestingly, some indirect evidence that women are more likely than men to be asexual is that “asexual” partnerships (i.e., “Boston marriages”) have been identified as a relatively common pattern among women forming relationships with women (Rothblum & Brehony, 1993), but, to my knowledge, such partnerships have never been identified as a relatively common pattern among men forming relationships with men.
What is it from a psychological or developmental perspective that makes women less likely than men to form strong sexual attractions to others? One possibility relates to masturbation differences between men and women. As suggested in chapter 5, masturbation, particularly linked with fantasy, may afford “learning/conditioning” experiences leading to more permanent sexual attractions. For example, if partners of a specific gender routinely show up in the fantasies (or pornography) to which one masturbates, then those partners may become part of one’s permanent sexual attractions. If so, women who do not masturbate, or do so rarely, may not develop strong sexual attractions to others.
A biological explanation compatible with the masturbation explanation is hormones. Lower testosterone in women relative to men may create in women a less intense urge to masturbate, leading to fewer conditioning experiences and, ultimately, to fewer permanent sexual attractions to others.[25]
Another explanation relates to the flexibility in women’s sexuality (Baumeister, 2000). Women’s relatively flexible sexuality may make them, compared to men, more affected by social and cultural influences. Thus, if social or cultural influences are extreme, or at least atypical, women’s sexuality may vary from the norm, including in the development of asexuality. Underscoring this point is the fact that women can adopt celibate lifestyles, sometimes construed as a behavioral “asexuality,” for political purposes—for instance, as a protest against male-dominated society (Fahs, 2010).
Our conception of sexual orientation, or at least how it is traditionally measured, also may be relevant to gender differences in asexuality (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, 2006b; Bogaert, in press-a). Most sexual orientation measures imply that one’s orientation is always “targeted” toward others, either males or females (or both, if bisexual). For example, a sexual orientation question may be posed as follows: “Who are you sexually attracted to?” The phrase “attracted to” implies an object or a “target” for our sexual interests. Thus, in this target-oriented view, usually members of one group (e.g., females) are the objects of desire, drawing our attention and fancies, and impelling us to approach members of this group for sexual activity. Yet this view of sexual orientation is, arguably, based on a male model of sexuality and thus may not capture many women’s subjective experience of sexuality. This view may also affect how some women report being sexually attracted (or not being sexually attracted) to others.
At least three lines of theory and research support this target-oriented view of sexual orientation. First, there is evidence that proceptive desire—the urge to seek out and initiate sexual activity—may be more common in men than in women, whereas receptive desire—the capacity to become aroused upon encountering certain sexual circumstances—may characterize women’s sexuality more so than that of men (Baumeister, 2000; Diamond, 2003b). Proceptive desire relative to receptive desire may be more conducive to a target-oriented view of sexual arousal and thus may capture the traditional (and hence more male-oriented) conceptions of sexual attraction.
Second, Meredith Chivers’s recent work on men and women’s arousal patterns (e.g., genital responses to erotic pictures or films) suggests that men are more target oriented in their sexuality. Her research has found that men’s sexual arousal is usually directed toward one sex or another: women if they are heterosexual, men if they are gay. Women’s sexual arousal is much more diffuse, and not specific to a category of sex/gender. Overall, women will respond genitally somewhat less than men to various types of erotic imagery, and usually to both men and women actors in the stimuli, even when the women report being exclusively heterosexual or lesbian. In other words, men’s sexuality seems to have a specific category of gender as its target—a bull’s eye in their sights. This is less so for women’s sexuality—or at least women have multiple targets or bull’s eyes in their sights (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004; Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007).
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Note that biological and environmental/social explanations are not necessarily incompatible. As suggested in chapter 13, these two kinds of explanations can coexist because they offer different levels of analysis: micro (biological) versus macro (environment/social). Thus, they may represent different points along a causal stream or pathway. For example, a specific biological predisposition may make someone particularly sensitive to a certain environment, which ultimately has a large impact on this person, whereas a different biological predisposition may make another person especially sensitive to a completely different environment, which may also have a large (but different) impact on him or her.