Maybe Women Don’t Want Less Sex

Maybe They’re Just Getting Worse Sex

Let’s stop asking why women "want sex less" than men. That’s the wrong question.

What if the answer isn’t rooted in desire at all, but in the quality of the sex itself?

This is the (long overdue) premise of Drs. Conley and Klein’s paper: Women Get Worse Sex. Not metaphorically, not emotionally, but systematically, measurably worse.

Here’s the reality: Much of the research on gender and sexuality has assumed that “sex” is a uniform experience across genders. It isn’t. And that assumption has distorted everything from sex education to clinical practice to psychological research.

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We’ve Been Comparing Ravioli and Chef Boyardee

The paper opens with a metaphor I can’t stop thinking about: imagine two groups of people are introduced to ravioli. One group gets hand-crafted pasta from an Italian chef. The other? Canned Chef Boyardee.

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

When asked, “Do you like ravioli?”—should we be surprised if the second group gives a lukewarm review?

That’s sex. One group (often men) is having fulfilling, orgasmic, relatively pain-free sex. The other group (usually women) is more likely to experience pain, shame, low arousal, lack of pleasure, and social stigma. But we keep asking both groups, “So, how’s your sex drive?” as if they’ve had the same thing. “You want some pasta?” It means very different things based on your experience with pasta.

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Four Reasons Women Get the Short End of the (Sexual) Stick

The authors outline four domains where women’s sexual experience diverges dramatically from men’s: