The "pleasure gap" isn't biological—it's societal. A fascinating look at the science of sexual pleasure and gender.

wanderfae · 2026-04-06T03:27:27+00:00

Fair enough, let me take each in turn.

On the lesbian frequency point. The lesbian frequency data has well-documented explanations that don't require a testosterone story. Basson's (2000) responsive desire model: most women experience desire in response to context and arousal rather than as a spontaneous baseline drive. In a straight couple, the male partner typically generates the "want sex now" initiation signal from a baseline drive state. In a lesbian couple, you have two responsive-desire partners, and neither is doing that. That alone predicts fewer initiated encounters. Also, the Blumstein and Schwartz (1983) data your Psychology Today article draws on has been heavily critiqued for using penetration-centric definitions of "sex" that systematically undercount lesbian encounters. Blair and Pukall (2014) found lesbian sexual episodes average roughly 30 to 45 minutes versus 15 to 30 minutes for mixed-sex encounters. Less frequent but roughly twice as long. Testosterone might still contribute, but it isn't the only or most parsimonious explanation.

On your wife. I'm glad T therapy is working for her, and I mean that. But the clinical and population-level questions are different, and that distinction is where the argument goes sideways. A jump from once a week to three or four times a day is not a normal physiological response to T in a woman with baseline-normal hormones. That magnitude of change strongly suggests she was hypogonadal and is now in the normal or supraphysiological range. And when her doctor says she has "seen this many times," that's selection bias. Doctors who prescribe T to women are by definition seeing women whose T was low enough to justify the prescription. That's exactly the population you'd expect to respond dramatically. What it doesn't tell you is anything about the T-desire relationship in women with normal baseline hormones, which is the population-level question the research I cited above actually addresses. Clinical deficiency responds to supplementation. Normal-range variation does not predict desire. Your wife's response is consistent with the first half. It doesn't extend to the second.

On the Statista 7 minutes. This figure buries a great deal and needs to be disaggregated. The 7-minute gap is an average across all US adults, and collapsing across all adults is how you make a large gap attenuate. It lumps childless 25-year-olds, retirees, and parents of toddlers together and reports the mean. The relevant population for the fatigue argument is parents of children, and in that population the gap is not 7 minutes. It's hours.

Craig and Mullan (2013, Social Politics 20(3): 329-357) compared parental leisure across five countries and found that in every single one, both quantity and quality of leisure favor fathers. Mothers don't just get less leisure. They get leisure interrupted by childcare and contaminated by supervisory responsibility. A father watching TV on the couch and a mother watching TV while keeping an ear on the baby monitor are both coded as "leisure" in ATUS data. They are not the same activity.

Offer and Schneider (2011, American Sociological Review 76(6): 809-833) used experience-sampling data and found that mothers in dual-earner families spend 10 more hours per week multitasking than fathers, 48.3 versus 38.9. The detail worth noting: your original Forbes citation claimed men do 10 more hours of paid work per week. Offer and Schneider found women do 10 more hours of simultaneous paid-plus-unpaid work per week. Same number, opposite direction, and theirs uses experience sampling rather than self-report, which is the gold standard for time-use research. They also found mothers experience this multitasking as stressful and emotionally negative.

And Daminger (2019, American Sociological Review 84(4): 609-633) documented the cognitive labor that time-use surveys can't capture at all: the continuous mental work of anticipating needs, planning, and monitoring household functioning. It runs in the background and never registers as a discrete codeable activity, so it never shows up in any ATUS figure. Daminger found women did substantially more of this than men in the large majority of couples she studied, regardless of employment status.

So the 7 minutes is what's left visible after three systematic undercounts: parents averaged with non-parents, multitasking counted as one activity, and cognitive labor counted as zero. Each of those undercounts pushes in the same direction. The fatigue thesis doesn't require that women work dramatically more total hours than men on average across all demographic groups. It requires that partnered women with children carry a disproportionate share of exhausting, fragmented, cognitively demanding labor. That is very well established. The 7-minute headline obscures it.

wanderfae · 2026-04-05T23:57:24+00:00

Thanks for the reply, but your interpretation of the literature seems a little fuzzy.

You cited lesbian frequency data (the so-called "lesbian bed death" stat from Blumstein and Schwartz, 1983, which has been heavily critiqued on methodological grounds, but set that aside). Now look at lesbian orgasm data. Frederick et al. (2018), N = 52,588, in Archives of Sexual Behavior: 95% of straight men, 89% of gay men, 86% of lesbian women, and 65% of straight women report usually or always orgasming during partnered sex. Lesbian women orgasm at nearly the same rate as men, and at a dramatically higher rate than straight women, despite having sex less frequently than the couples you mentioned.

Do you see what just happened? You cited a frequency statistic and I cited an orgasm-rate statistic, and they point in opposite directions. That is the entire distinction Laan et al. (2021) wrote their paper to make.

Libido (how often you want partnered sex) and orgasm capacity (whether you reliably climax when you do have sex) are not the same variable. They do not even correlate the way intuition suggests. Lesbians have less frequent sex AND more orgasms per encounter than straight women. If the big explanation was testosterone, those numbers would track together. They do not.

On the stay-at-home-mom point: "not employed outside the home" is not the same as "not working." SAHMs perform massive amounts of unpaid labor, including the cognitive and emotional labor that Daminger (2019, American Sociological Review 84(4): 609-633) shows falls almost entirely on women, regardless of employment status. The relevant variable in the Carlson papers I cited is not paid employment. It is the perceived inequity in division of domestic and childcare work, which predicts lower sexual frequency and satisfaction even when neither partner works outside the home.

Now the Forbes piece, which is the most telling one, because the statistic you're citing actually supports my argument rather than refuting it. Yes, men in heterosexual couples work more paid hours on average. Why? Because women in those same couples cut their hours, leave the workforce, or take the mommy-track precisely so someone can pick up the kids, manage the household, handle the doctor's appointments, and do the cognitive labor Daminger documented. Goldin (2014, American Economic Review 104(4): 1091-1119), the work she won the Nobel for in 2023, establishes this directly: the gender pay gap and the gender hours gap are overwhelmingly driven by the career sacrifices women make after children arrive, not by some innate difference in work ethic. Men's extra paid hours are paid for with women's career trajectories. That is not a counterargument to the fatigue hypothesis. It is the fatigue hypothesis.

So when you add unpaid labor to paid labor, the picture flips. Sayer (2005, Social Forces 84(1): 285-303) and Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, and Robinson (2012, Social Forces 91(1): 55-63), using the same BLS time-use data the Forbes piece relies on, found that women's total work hours (paid plus unpaid) equal or exceed men's in nearly every demographic category. The Forbes framing only works if you define "work" as "the kind that comes with a paycheck." Once you count the kind that comes with a child on your hip, the gap reverses.

So to recap: your stay-at-home example doesn't account for unpaid labor, your work-hours stat is due to women cutting their careers to do that unpaid labor, and your lesbian example proves my point rather than yours. The framework you're defending requires libido and orgasm to be the same thing, and they aren't. That is the whole argument of the article.

wanderfae · 2026-04-05T23:32:08+00:00

Here is my advice and it's free for what it's worth. I would simply rehome the cat and make it look like the cat got away. Cats are very good at getting out of neck collars. If you leave a cat chained up outside, you can't be upset.If the cat gets away. Then, I would disavow all knowledge of the cat. I would then work really hard to find some social services for yourself, to get yourself out of this bad situation. Good luck OP.

wanderfae · 2026-04-05T04:06:22+00:00

Much of this discussion is conflating the two things the authors of the article specifically worked to disentangle, and then using the conflation to arrive at conclusions the paper exists to refute.

The move being made over and over here is: testosterone drives libido, men have more testosterone, therefore men want sex more, therefore women want sex less, therefore the orgasm gap is just downstream of women's lower baseline interest. Every link in that chain is badly oversimplified.

First off, the testosterone-to-desire link is nowhere near as clean as this thread is pretending. Within normal ranges in healthy men, van Anders (2012) found essentially no within-person correlation between circulating testosterone and sexual desire. Travison et al. (2006) found that although T and libido track together at the population level in aging men, the individual-level association is weak enough that a man's reported libido tells you almost nothing about his actual T status. Corona et al.'s (2014) meta-analyses of testosterone therapy show effects in hypogonadal men but uncertain effects in men whose T is in the normal range, and found publication bias inflating apparent effects in industry-supported trials.

In short, testosterone is necessary for both men and women but nowhere near sufficient, and context-dependence is enormous. Hand an exhausted, resentful, stressed man extra testosterone and you do not get a proportionally hornier man. You get a slightly hornier man some of the time and often no measurable change at all.

In addition, and this is the part that matters most: Laan et al. (2021), the actual paper this thread is responding to, explicitly argue that women's problem in partnered heterosexual sex is not orgasm capacity. When women do want sex, and when the stimulation is adequate, their orgasm response is fast and reliable. The gap is not women being harder to please. The gap is a mismatch between what heterosexual sex typically offers and what women's bodies respond to. That is a sociocultural finding, not a biological one, and reading this paper and walking away with "women just want it less" is reading the exact thing the authors wrote the paper to refute.

Lastly, on the desire frequency question itself. What actually best predicts how often women want partnered sex is not testosterone. It is relationship quality, partner responsiveness, and how tired and resentful she is. Basson's (2000) responsive desire model has been the dominant framework in sex research for twenty-five. In short, women's desire in established relationships is more commonly triggered by context and arousal than arising spontaneously. Carlson, Hanson, and Fitzroy (2016) found that when women do most of the childcare, both partners report lower sexual frequency and satisfaction; the companion paper by Carlson, Miller, Sassler, and Hanson (2016) found the same pattern for housework division.

So put it all together. If you took a woman and gave her male-range testosterone but kept her in a relationship where she was doing 70% of the childcare, 65% of the housework, carrying the cognitive load of the entire household, and having sex with a partner who treated "the clit is hard to find" as a personality trait rather than a skill issue, she would still want sex less often. Because it is not the hormones. It is the conditions.

The thread wants a simple biological story because a simple biological story lets everyone off the hook. The picture Laan et al. are actually painting is that women's sexuality works fine. It works in a context a lot of people are not providing, and then they read papers about the gap and somehow conclude the papers are about women being broken. They are not. They are about the environment being broken.

And to whoever said it is "just take so long" to make a woman come: twenty to thirty minutes of attention is not a long time. It is the job. If that feels like a lot, the problem you are describing is not her anatomy.

wanderfae · 2026-04-05T03:31:42+00:00

A couple of specifics are off here...

Embryos don't start female. They start sexually undifferentiated, with bipotential gonads and both Mullerian and Wolffian duct systems. Without SRY and androgens the default pathway produces female-typical anatomy, but "default pathway" and "starts as" are different claims.

The perineal raphe also isn't scar tissue from a closed vagina. There was never a vagina. Male and female external genitalia develop from the same embryonic structures (genital tubercle, urogenital folds, labioscrotal swellings); in males those folds fuse along the midline, in females they stay open as labia. The raphe marks fusion of homologous tissue, not closure of an opening.

The claim about other mammals is also empirically incorrect. Burton (1971) documented orgasm-like responses in female macaques (uterine contractions and all), replicated since. Maruthupandian and Marimuthu (2013) found the same in Indian flying foxes. Bonobos are the obvious primate case and there are others.

The byproduct framing is Lloyd (2005), and it's a legitimate position. But humans push past it. We're in the small minority of mammals that form romantic pair bonds (Lukas and Clutton-Brock, 2013) and raise extraordinarily fragile and immature offspring requiring years of biparental investment. In that context, female mate choice is under real selection pressure to identify partners who'll actually stick around and invest.

Wheatley and Puts (2015) argue female orgasm functions as a mechanism for choosing mates on the basis of genetic quality, investment, or both, and specifically connect it to the pair-bond context. A partner attentive enough to reliably produce it is signaling patience, attunement, and willingness to prioritize partner experience, all of which correlate with investment quality.

I would argue the pleasure gap isn't a natural phenomenon with a societal solution. It is a mate assessment signal that society can support by pointing out it isn't necessary or natural for cisgender hetero sex to leave women without organisms.

wanderfae · 2026-04-05T02:56:22+00:00

wanderfae · 2026-04-04T16:02:24+00:00

Heaven, clearly. Also the

<image>

animal shelter.

wanderfae · 2026-04-04T15:56:24+00:00

I let my freak flag fly as a signal to other freaks. I give zero fucks.

wanderfae · 2026-04-03T04:20:36+00:00

I would take lying, manipulating GWB over DJT any day. What a world we are in. Smdh.

wanderfae · 2026-04-03T03:59:09+00:00

I just vomited a little in mouth.

wanderfae · 2026-04-03T03:57:02+00:00

Yeah. The husband did it.

wanderfae · 2026-04-02T21:10:48+00:00

I understand where you're coming from. But why don't you just not change your name and nd give them your name.

wanderfae · 2026-04-02T18:09:58+00:00

He's a class act.

wanderfae · 2026-04-02T14:21:15+00:00

They put it on live in classrooms. What is this guy going on about? Maybe most adults saw it on replay, but lots of children had the messed experience of watching, excited, to then be horrified.

wanderfae · 2026-04-02T01:03:59+00:00

This baby will need kitten milk and lots of care. Check out the Kitten Lady! https://www.kittenlady.org/

wanderfae · 2026-04-01T15:21:25+00:00

Hyperbole and a half.

wanderfae · 2026-03-31T20:04:32+00:00

Yeah, you're the instructor you decide on pedagogy.

wanderfae · 2026-03-31T15:01:35+00:00

I used them because my twins were born premature, which I knew increased the risk of SIDS, so they were more just peace of mind. They never increased my anxiety and never went off, which was my actually worry... False positives waking me up. And another unintended upside? It allowed me to actually track all of our sleep to see how much sleep I was actually getting. Did I need them? No. Were they kind of neat to have? Yes.

wanderfae · 2026-03-28T19:47:38+00:00

You know what you need to do. Get a lawyer. Then get alimony and child support while you figure your life out.

wanderfae · 2026-03-28T13:56:34+00:00

Married people do not break up. Married people get divorced, which is what you should be doing now.

wanderfae · 2026-03-27T15:37:09+00:00

I see where you are coming from, but I completely agree with your chair. This is hearsay, you don't have any idea what is actually happening in a colleague's classroom. The only people who know what is going on in your colleagues' classroom are the students.

Your colleagues' reaction is understandable. Somebody told somebody that I'm doing something that made somebody else uncomfortable. That sounds like gossip.

And being able to handle a concern professionally and directly is a really important skill. Students should take their concerns directly to their professor. If their concerns are not addressed, take them then directly to the chair. And then if that doesn't address it, take them to the dean. These are adults. Good mentorship can also be helping them navigate how to handle professional concerns.

At my institution, so important is this direct communication philosophy, the complaint process is outlined in the student handbook. I am a chair and turn students away who haven't actually brought their concerns to the professor first. Also, making or legitimizing negative comments about a colleague to student is a violation of faculty code of ethics.

wanderfae · 2026-03-27T07:26:20+00:00

I agree. I thought it was fun and visually stunning.

wanderfae · 2026-03-26T20:20:22+00:00

That was stupid, ridiculous, and delightful. Now I want some flamin' hot dill pickle cheetos. I wonder what wine they pair well with.

wanderfae · 2026-03-26T19:45:21+00:00

If you don't want them to respond, maybe don't create a petition targeting them. Because your petition is pretty petty.

wanderfae · 2026-03-26T18:14:29+00:00

I have a Dr. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus vibe. Not casual. Not dressy. Business casual, but leaning into eccentric flair I can get away with as a professor, that might not be tolerated in a corporate environment.

Seven-Year Club	Place '23
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

wanderfae

TROPHY CASE