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1
Gendering Desire

N
owhere in our intimate lives is there greater expression of gender dif-
ference than in our sexual relationships. “She” may make love “just
like a woman,” as Bob Dylan famously sang, but “he” would make love
just like a man. Though we often think that sexual orientation is the great
dividing line in our sexual expression—if one is gay or straight one knows all
one needs to know about their sexualities—the evidence points decidedly the
other way, toward an understanding that gender, not sexual orientation, is the
dividing line along which sexual expression, desire, and experience is organ-
ized. Gay men and straight men think and act sexually in similar ways, as do
lesbians and straight women. In that sense, sexually speaking, gay men and les-
bians are gender conformists.
There are, of course, some signs of change. Women are reconstructing the
traditional view of female sexuality as passive and receptive; the fertile combi-
nation of feminism, technological and medical breakthroughs, and general cul-
tural transition have ushered in an age of more casual female sexual expression,
of women increasingly claiming their own sexual agency, their own entitlement
to pleasure, an era in which Victoria’s “Secret” is now shopping mall fare, and in
which Sex in the City describes more than the lifestyles of four very silly and
seductive young women. In that sense, sexuality has become increasingly “mas-
culinized.” The “masculinization of sex”—including the pursuit of pleasure for its
own sake, the increased attention to orgasm, the multiplication of sexual part-
ners, the universal interest in sexual experimentation, and the separation of sex-
ual behavior from love—is partly a result of the technological transformation of
sexuality (from birth control to the Internet) and partly a result of the sexual
revolution’s promise of greater sexual freedom with fewer emotional and physi-
cal consequences.
Much of that sexual revolution was a rejection of the Victorian double
standard. According to writers of that era, women and men were different
species. As the celebrated French historian Jules Michelet put it in 1881:

This chapter is a revised version of “Gendered Sexualities,” chapter 10 of The Gendered Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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4 Gendering Desire

[Woman] does nothing as we [men] do. She thinks, speaks, and acts differ-
ently. Her tastes are different from our tastes. Her blood even does not
flow in her veins as ours does, at times it rushes through them like a foam-
ing mountain torrent . . . She does not eat like us—neither as much nor of
the same dishes. Why? Chiefly, because she does not digest as we do. Her
digestion is every moment troubled with one thing: She yearns with her
very bowels. The deep cup of love (which is called the pelvis) is a sea of
varying emotions, hindering the regularity of the nutritive function.
(cited in Gardetto, 1988, p. 18)

Sex was invariably seen as bad for women—unhealthy and immoral—while

it was tolerated or even encouraged for men. “The majority of women (happily
for them) are not much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind,” wrote one
physician (obviously male) in the 1890s (cited in Ehrenreich & English, 1974).
Even when Alfred Kinsey undertook his pioneering studies of sexual
behavior in the decade following the Second World War, this double standard
was still firmly in place. As he wrote in 1953:

[W]e have not understood how nearly alike females and males may be in
their sexual responses, and the extent to which they may differ. We have
perpetuated the age-old traditions concerning the slower responsiveness
of the female, the greater extent of the erogenous areas on the body of the
female, the earlier sexual development of the female, the idea that there
are basic differences in the nature of orgasm among females and males, the
greater emotional content of the female’s sexual response, and still other
ideas which are not based on scientifically accumulated data—and all of
which now appear to be incorrect. It now appears that the very techniques
which have been suggested in marriage manuals, both ancient and mod-
ern, have given rise to some of the differences that we have thought inher-
ent in females and males. (Kinsey, Pomeroy & Martin, p. 376)

Kinsey believed that males and females have basically the same physical
responses, though men are more influenced by psychological factors. Note in the
passage above how Kinsey suggests that the advice of experts actually creates much
of the difference between women and men. One study of gynecology textbooks
published between 1943 and 1972 bears this out. The authors found that many
textbooks asserted that women could not experience orgasm during intercourse.
One textbook writer observed, “sexual pleasure is entirely secondary or even
absent” in women; another described women’s “almost universal frigidity.” Given
such assumptions, it’s not surprising that women were counseled to fake orgasm;
after all, they weren’t capable of real ones. “It is good advice to recommend to the
women the advantage of innocent simulation of sex responsiveness; as a matter of
fact many women in their desire to please their husbands learned the advantage

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Gendering Desire 5

of such innocent deception,” was the way one text counseled gynecologists to raise
the issue with their female patients (cited in Bart, 1974, pp. 6–7).
The double standard persists today—perhaps less in what we actually do and
more in the way we think about sex. Men still stand to gain status and women to
lose it from sexual experience: he’s a stud who scores; she’s a slut who “gives it
up.” Boys are taught to try to get sex; girls are taught strategies to foil the boys’
attempts. “The whole game was to get a girl to give out,” one man told sociolo-
gist Lillian Rubin. “You expected her to resist; she had to if she wasn’t going to
ruin her reputation. But you kept pushing. Part of it was the thrill of touching and
being touched, but I’ve got to admit, part of it was the conquest, too, and what
you’d tell the guys at school the next day.” “I felt as if I should want to get it as
often as possible,” recalled another. “I guess that’s because if you’re a guy, you’re
supposed to want it” (1991, pp. 28, 42). The sexual double standard is more than
a case of separate but equal sexual scripting, more than a case of complementary
“his” and “her” sexualities, like a matching set of bathroom towels.
The sexual double standard is itself a product of gender inequality, of sex-
ism—the unequal distribution of power in our society based on gender. Gender
inequality is reinforced by the ways we have come to assume that men are more
sexual than women, that men will always try to escalate sexual encounters to
prove their manhood, and that women—or, rather, “ladies”—either do not have
strong sexual feelings, or that those who do must be constantly controlled lest
they fall into disrepute. With such a view, sex becomes a contest, not a means
of connection; when sexual pleasure happens, it’s often seen as his victory over
her resistance. Sexuality becomes, in the words of feminist lawyer Catharine
MacKinnon, “the linchpin of gender inequality” (1996, p. 185).
Women are raised to believe that to be sexually active or promiscuous is
to transgress the rules of femininity. These rules are enforced not just by men, of
course, but also by other women, and institutionalized by church, state, and
school. The pursuit of sex transforms good girls into bad girls, so most women
accept the cultural standard of sexual minimalism—few partners, fewer positions,
less pleasure, less sex without emotional commitment. Such an ideology keeps a
woman waiting for her Prince Charming to liberate her, to arouse her with his
tender kisses, and release the passion smoldering beneath her cooler surface.
Examples of these different scripts abound—from what we think about, what
we want, and what we actually do. For example, consider what “counts” as sex.
When they say the word “sex,” women and men often mean different things. In
one study, monogamous heterosexual couples in their mid-40s were asked, “How
many times did you make love last week?” Consistently, the researchers found, the
men reported slightly higher numbers than the women. What could this indicate—
better memories? masculine braggadocio? clandestine affairs? solitary pleasures?
When the researchers asked more questions, they found the difference was the
result of women and men counting different experiences as “making love.” The
women would count one sexual encounter once, while the men tallied up the

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6 Gendering Desire

number of their orgasms. Thus, while a woman might say, “Hmm, we made love
three times last week,” her husband might say, “Hmm, let me see, we did it three
times, but one of those times we did it twice [meaning that he had two orgasms],
so I guess the answer is four.”
The differences in counting criteria reveal deeper differences in the
understanding of sexual expression. Women’s understanding that sex equals the
entire encounter gives them a somewhat broader range of sexual activities that
count as sex. Men’s focus on orgasm as the defining feature of sex parallels their
tendency to exclude all acts except intercourse from “having sex.” Oral or man-
ual stimulation are seen as “foreplay” for men, as “sex” for women. Men cannot
tally the encounter on their mental scorecard unless intercourse also occurs.
This often results in complex rules about what constitutes a “technical virgin.”
(The recent public seminar on what counts as “sexual relations” in the impeach-
ment trial of President Clinton bears this out. Since he and Monica Lewinsky
did not have sexual intercourse, and instead did what girls in my high school
used to call “everything but,” Clinton argued that he did not lie when he denied
having sex with Lewinsky. In his mind, as one of my pals in the locker room
explained it to me, “it only counts if you put it in.” And some recent medical
evidence bears this out; a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association reported that only intercourse “counted” as sex for nearly two-fifths
of those surveyed. Fifty-nine percent of respondents believed that oral-genital
contact did not constitute “having sex”) (Sanders & Reinisch, 1999, p. 281).
Intercourse and orgasm are more important forms of sexual expression for
men than they are for women. This leads to a greater emphasis on the genitals
as the single most important erogenous zone for men. If men’s sexuality is phal-
locentric—revolving around the glorification and gratification of the penis—then
it is not surprising that men often develop elaborate relationships with their
genitals. Some men name their penis—“Willie,” “John Thomas,” or “Peter”—or
give them cute nicknames taken from mass-produced goods like “Whopper” and
“Big Mac.” Men may come to believe that their penises have little personalities,
(or, perhaps, what feel like big personalities), threatening to refuse to behave the
way they are supposed to behave. If men do not personify the penis, they objec-
tify it; if it is not a little person, then it is supposed to act like a machine, an
instrument, a “tool.” A man projects “the coldness and hardness of metal” onto
his flesh, writes one French philosopher (Reynaud, 1983, p. 41).
Few women name their genitals; fewer still think of their genitals as
machines. Can you imagine if they called their clitorises “Shirley” or their labia
“Sally Ann”? In fact, women rarely refer to their genitals by their proper names
at all, generally describing vulva, labia, and clitoris with the generic “vagina” or
even the more euphemistic “down there” or “private parts.” And it would be rare
indeed to see a woman having a conversation with her labia (see Tavris, 1992
and Lerner, 1998).

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Gendering Desire 7

So when they think about sex, men and women are often thinking about
different things. Actually, thinking about sex at all seems to be a gendered activ-
ity. Men tend to think about sex more often than women. Over half of the men
surveyed (54 percent) in the most recent large-scale sex survey conducted by the
National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago
reported that they think about sex very frequently, compared with 19 percent of
the women. Two-thirds of the women report that they think about sex less fre-
quently, compared with 43 percent of the men. And 14 percent of the women
say they rarely or never think about sex, compared with only 4 percent of the
men (Laumann et al., 1994).
Forty years earlier, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues had found that 89 per-
cent of men who masturbated fantasized, while only 64 percent of women did.
And what they “use” for their fantasies differs. Today, nearly one-fourth (23 per-
cent of men and 11 percent of women) use X-rated movies or videos; 16 percent
of men and 4 percent of women use sexually explicit books or magazines (Lau-
mann et al., 1994, p. 135). And what they fantasize about differs dramatically.
A research assistant and I have collected over 1,000 sexual fantasies from stu-
dents over the past decade. In those fantasies, definite gender patterns emerged.
Men tend to fantasize about strangers, often more than one at a time, doing a
variety of well-scripted sexual acts; women tend to fantasize about setting the
right mood for lovemaking with their boyfriend or husband, but rarely visualize
specific behaviors (see chapter 3, of this volume).
Men’s fantasies are idealized renditions of masculine sexual scripts: geni-
tally focused, orgasm centered, and explicit in the spatial and temporal sequenc-
ing of sexual behaviors. We know exactly who does what to whom in what
precise order. Physical characteristics of the other participants are invariably
highly detailed; these are most often strangers (or famous models or actresses)
chosen for their physical attributes. Rarely do they include the physical setting
for the encounter. Women’s fantasies, on the other hand, are replete with
descriptions that set the scene—geographic and temporal settings, with elaborate
placement of props like candles, rugs, and wine glasses. They often involve pres-
ent or past partners. Explicitly sexual description is minimal and usually
involves vague references to lovemaking.
Thus we might say that women’s sexual imaginations are impoverished at
the expense of highly developed sensual imaginations; by contrast, men’s sensual
imaginations are impoverished by their highly developed sexual imaginations.
(These differences hold for both heterosexual and homosexual women and men,
a further indication that the basic component in our sexual scripts is gender, not
sexual orientation.) While there has been some evidence of shifts in women’s fan-
tasies toward more sexually explicit scenes, and increasing comfort with explicit
language, these fantasies do reveal both what we think and what we think we are
supposed to think about when we think about sex (see Hariton & Singer, 1974;

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8 Gendering Desire

Goleman, 1983; May, 1980; Chick & Gold, 1987–88; Mednick, 1977; Follingstad
& Kimbrell, 1986; Knafo & Jaffe, 1984).
Where do these dramatically different mental landscapes come from? One
place, of course, is sexual representation. Pornography occupies a special place
in the development of men’s sexuality. Nearly all men confess to having some
exposure to pornography, at least as adolescents; indeed, for many men, the first
naked women they see are in pornographic magazines. And pornography has
been the site of significant political protest—from an erotophobic right wing that
considers pornography to be as degrading to human dignity as birth control
information, homosexuality, and abortion, to radical feminist campaigns that
see pornography as a vicious expression of misogyny, on par with rape, spouse
abuse, and genital mutilation (see chapters 4–6 in this volume).
While the right wing’s efforts rehearsed America’s discomfort with all
things sexual, the radical feminist critique of pornography transformed the polit-
ical debate, arguing that when men looked at pornographic images of naked
women, they were actually participating in a culture-wide hatred and contempt
for women. Pornographic images are about the subordination of women;
pornography “makes sexism sexy,” in the words of one activist. Here is one
pornographic director and actor, commenting on his “craft”:

My whole reason for being in the [pornography] Industry is to satisfy the

desire of the men in the world who basically don’t much care for women and
want to see the men in my Industry getting even with the women they
couldn’t have when they were growing up . . . So when we come on a
woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually, we’re getting even for their
lost dreams. I believe this. I’ve heard audiences cheer me when I do some-
thing foul on screen. When I’ve strangled a person or sodomized a person or
brutalized a person, the audience is cheering my action, and then when I’ve
fulfilled my warped desire, the audience applauds. (Stoller, 1991, p. 31)

The claims of antipornography feminists—that pornography causes rape, or

that it numbs us to the real effect of real violence in women’s lives—have been
difficult to demonstrate empirically. Few studies have shown such an empirical
relationship, though several have documented some modest changes in men’s
attitudes immediately after exposure to violent pornography. Yet whether or not
there is any empirical evidence that the pornography alone causes rape or vio-
lence, there remains the shocking difference between us: On any given day in the
United States, there are men masturbating to images of women enduring sexual
torture, genital mutilation, rape, and violence. Surely, this points to a dramatic
difference between women’s and men’s sexualities—one can hardly imagine many
women masturbating to reenactments of Lorena Bobbitt’s ministrations to her
husband. Violence is rarely sexualized for women; that such images can be a rou-
tine and casual turn on for many men should at least give us pause.

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Pornography also exaggerates the masculinization of sex. In typical porn

video scenes, both women and men want sex—even when women don’t want it,
when they are forced or raped, it turns out that they wanted it after all. Both
women and men are always looking for opportunities to have sex, both are
immediately aroused and ready for penetration, and both have orgasms within
fifteen seconds of penetration. Which gender’s sexuality does that sound like?
As a result, as antipornography activist John Stoltenberg writes, pornography
“tells lies about women,” but it “tells the truth about men” (1990, p. 121).
Given men’s and women’s different sexual mentalities, it’s not surprising
that we develop different sexualities, as evidenced in our attitudes and behav-
iors. “For sex to really work for me, I need to feel an emotional something,” one
woman told Lillian Rubin. “Without that, it’s just another athletic activity, only
not as satisfying, because when I swim or run, I feel good afterward” (p. 102).
Women’s first sexual experiences are more likely to occur in the context of a
committed relationship (Tavris & Wade, 1984, p. 111). Since women tend to
connect sex and emotion, it makes sense that they would be less interested in
one-night stands, affairs and nonmonogamy. In one survey, women were about
20 percent more likely to agree that one-night stands are degrading (47 percent
of the men agreed; 68 percent of the women agreed). Men are more likely to be
unfaithful to their spouse, though that gender gap has closed considerably in the
past two decades. And, of course, the separation of sex and emotion means that
men are more likely to have had more sexual partners than women, although
this gender gap has also been narrowing over the past few decades (Blumstein &
Schwartz, 1983, p. 279; Schwartz & Rutter, 1998, pp. 60–61).1
Men’s wider sexual repertoire usually includes desiring oral sex, about
which women report being far less enthusiastic. As one woman explained:

I like going down on him. It makes him feel good, truly good. I don’t find
it unpleasant. I don’t say I wish I could do it all the time. I don’t equate it
with a sale at Bloomingdale’s. That I could do all the time. But it’s not like
going to the dentist either. It’s between two extremes. Closer to Bloom-
ingdale’s than to the dentist. (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983, p. 234)

But perhaps this has less to do with the intrinsic meaning of the act, and
more to do with the gender of the actor. For example, when men describe their
experiences with oral sex, it is nearly always from the position of power. Whether
fellatio—“I feel so powerful when I see her kneeling in front of me”—or cunnilin-
gus—“being able to get her off with my tongue makes me feel so powerful”—men
experience the giving and receiving of oral sex as an expression of their power.
By contrast, women perceive both giving and receiving oral sex from the position
of powerlessness—not necessarily because they are forced to do so, but because “it
makes him happy” for them to either do it, or let him do it. So oral sex, like inter-
course, allows him to feel “like a man,” regardless of who does what to whom.

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10 Gendering Desire

Where does the sexual gender gap come from? Though we are constantly
bombarded with sexual images in the media and receive lessons about sexual
morality from our parents, our teachers, and our religious institutions, most of
our sexual learning comes during adolescence, and most of our adolescent sex-
ual socialization is accomplished by our peers. We teach ourselves, and each
other, about what feels good and why, and then we practice performing those
activities until they do feel the way we’re told we’re supposed to feel.
Remember, for example, those junior high school “wrestling matches”—
two adolescents trying to negotiate, usually without words, the extent of their
sexual contact. Both the boy and the girl have goals, though they may be very dif-
ferent. “His” object, of course, is to score—and toward that end he has a variety of
maneuvers, arguments, and other strategies his friends have taught him. “Her”
object may be pleasure, but it is also to preserve and protect her reputation as a
“good girl,” which requires that she be seen as alluring but not “easy.” “Young
men come to sex with quite different expectations and desires than do young
women,” the NORC sex survey declared. “Young women often go along with
intercourse the first time, finding little physical pleasure in it, and a substantial
number report being forced to have intercourse” (Laumann et al., 1994, p. 347).
By the time we get to be adults, this socialized distance between women and
men can ossify into the different experiences we are said to have. Each gender is
seeking to express different feelings, for different reasons, with different repertoires,
and so it may appear that we are from different planets. In the British film Sammy
and Rosie Get Laid, a lesbian character suggests that heterosexuals are to be pitied.
“The women spend all their time trying to come, and they’re unsuccessful, and the
men spend all their time trying not to come, and they’re unsuccessful also.”
She has a point. Since many men believe that adequate sexual function-
ing is being able to delay ejaculation, some develop strategies to prevent what
they consider to be premature ejaculation—strategies that exaggerate emotional
distancing, phallocentrism, the focus on orgasm, and objectification. Here’s how
Woody Allen once put it in a stand-up comedy routine from the mid-1960s.
After describing himself as a “stud,” Allen says:

When making love, in an effort to [pause] to prolong [pause] the moment

of ecstasy, I think of baseball players. All right, now you know. So the two
of us are making love violently, and she’s digging it, so I figure I’d better
start thinking of baseball players pretty quickly. So I figure it’s one out, and
the Giants are up. Mays lines a single to right. He takes second on a wild
pitch. Now she’s digging her nails into my neck. I decide to pinch-hit for
McCovey. [pause for laughter] Alou pops out. Haller singles, Mays takes
third. Now I’ve got a first and third situation. Two outs and the Giants are
behind one run. I don’t know whether to squeeze or to steal. [pause for
laughter] She’s been in the shower for ten minutes already. [pause] I can’t
tell you anymore, this is too personal. [pause] The Giants won.

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Readers may be struck by several things—the imputation of violence, how

her pleasure leads to his decision to think of baseball players, the requirement of
victory in the game, and the sexual innuendo contained in the sports language.
The text also supplies a startling revelation of male sexual distancing. Here’s a
device that is so successful at delaying ejaculation (or any sexual connection)
that the narrator is rendered utterly unaware of his partner’s experience. “She’s
been in the shower for ten minutes already,” Allen remarks, as if he’s just
noticed. Other men describe elaborate mental scripting of sports scenes, recit-
ing multiplication tables, or, in the case of one of my students, a chemistry
major, reciting, in order, the periodic table of the elements. No wonder women
often wonder what men are thinking about during sex!
When it goes “right,” we clearly observe the gendered qualities of sex.
Another illustration of the genderedness of sex comes from research on what
happens when things go wrong. For example, when men seek therapeutic evalu-
ation for sexual problems, they rarely describe not experiencing enough pleasure.
One man who experienced premature ejaculation reported that he felt like he
“isn’t a real man” because he “can’t satisfy a woman.” Another, with erectile
problems, told a therapist that “a real man never has to ask his wife for anything
sexually” and he “should be able to please her whenever he wants.” Each of these
men thus expressed a sexual problem in gender terms; each fears that his sexual
problem damages his masculinity, makes him less of a real man. For these men,
sexuality is less about mutual pleasuring and more about hydraulic functioning.
Is it any wonder that men use the language of the workplace (in addition to using
metaphors from sports and war) to describe sexual experiences. We use the “tool”
to “get the job done,” which is, of course, to “achieve” orgasm, or else we experi-
ence “performance anxiety.” Men with sexual problems are rarely gender non-
conformists, unable or unwilling to follow the rules of masculine sexual adequacy.
If anything, they are overconformists to norms that define sexual adequacy by the
ability to function like a well-oiled machine (see chapter 8 in this volume).

Closing the Sexual Gender Gap

Despite the persistence of gender differences in sexual attitudes and behaviors,

the sexual gender gap has been closing in recent years, as women’s and men’s
sexual experiences come to more closely resemble one another’s. Or, rather,
women’s experiences have come to resemble men’s. As I argued earlier, our
experience of love has been feminized and our sexuality has been increasingly
“masculinized.” While men’s sexual behavior has hardly changed, women’s sex-
uality has changed dramatically, moving increasingly closer to the behavior of
men. (This probably both thrills and terrifies men.)
Part of this transformation has been the result of the technological break-
throughs and ideological shifts that have come to be known as the sexual revolution.

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12 Gendering Desire

Since the 1960s, the pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake has been increas-
ingly available to women, as adequate and relatively safe birth control and legal
abortion have made it possible to separate fully sexual activity from reproduction.
(Men, of course, always were able to pursue sexual pleasure for its own sake; thus,
in this sense, women’s sexuality has come to more closely resemble men’s.) “I guess
sex was originally to produce another body; then I guess it was for love; nowadays
it’s just for feeling good,” was the way one 15-year-old boy summed up the shift
(Rubin, 1991, p. 13). In addition, widespread sex education has made people more
sexually aware—but not necessarily more sexually active. In one recent literature
review of 53 studies that examined the effects of sex education and HIV education
on sexual activity, 27 found no changes in rates of sexual activity, and 22 observed
marked decreases, delayed onset of activity, and reduced number of sexual partners.
Only three studies found any increase in sexual activity associated with sex educa-
tion. It would appear that sex education enables people to make better sexual deci-
sions, and encourages more responsibility, not less (Grunseit et al., 1997).
Ideologically, feminism made the pursuit of sexual pleasure, the expression
of women’s sexual autonomy, a political goal. No longer would women believe
that they were sexually disinterested, passive and virtuous asexual angels.
Women were as entitled to pleasure as men were. And, practically, they knew
how to get it, once feminists exposed what one feminist called “the myth of the
vaginal orgasm.” Feminism was thus, in part, a political resistance to what we
might call the “socialized asexuality” of feminine sexuality. “Part of my attrac-
tion to feminism involved the right to be a sexual person,” recalls one woman.
Another envisioned a feminism that “validates the right for a woman to say yes
instead of no” (Hollibaugh, 1996). In the past three decades, then, it’s been
women’s sexuality that has been transformed, as women have sought to express
their own sexual agency. Consider, for example, the transformation of the idea
of sexual experience in the first place. While it used to be that men were
expected to have some sexual experience prior to marriage, many women and
men placed a premium on women’s virginity. Not anymore. As Lillian Rubin
writes, “in the brief span of one generation—from the 1940s to the 1960s—we
went from mothers who believed their virginity was their most prized possession
to daughters for whom it was a burden.” Virginity was no longer “a treasure to
be safeguarded”; now, it was “a problem to be solved” (pp. 5, 46).
Rates and motivations for masturbation have also begun to converge.
What, after all, is masturbation but self-pleasuring—surely, an expression of sex-
ual agency. The most recent large-scale national sex survey found that men’s and
women’s motivations for masturbation were roughly similar (Laumann, 1994, p.
86; Schwartz & Rutter, 1998, p. 39). As are sexual attitudes. In the NORC sex
survey, 36 percent of men and 53 percent of women born between 1933 and
1942 believed that premarital sex was almost always wrong. These numbers
declined for both groups, but declined far more sharply for women, so that for
those born between 1963 and 1974, only 16 percent of men and 22 percent of

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Gendering Desire 13

women believed that premarital sex was almost always wrong (Laumann et al.,
1994, p. 507).
Sexual behaviors, too, have grown increasingly similar. Among teenage
boys, sexual experience has remained virtually the same since the mid-1940s,
with about 70 percent of all high school aged boys having had sexual intercourse
(the rates were about 50 percent for those who went to high school in the late
1920s). But the rates for high school girls have changed dramatically, up from 5
percent in the 1920s to 20 percent in the late 1940s, to 55 percent in 1982, and
60 percent in 1991. And the age of first intercourse has steadily declined for
both boys and girls. Similarly, although the rates of teenage virgins have
declined for both girls and boys, they have declined more rapidly for girls. The
number of teenagers who have had more than five different sexual partners by
their eighteenth birthday has increased for both sexes, the rate of increase is also
greater for girls as well (Laumann et al., 1994; Schwartz & Rutter, 1998, p. 165).
For adults, rates of premarital sex and the number of sex partners seem to
be moving closer. In another survey, 99 percent of male college graduates and 90
percent of female college graduates said that they had had sex before marriage.
Researchers in one survey of sexual behavior from the 1970s, found far greater
sexual activity and greater variety among married women in the 1970s than
Kinsey had found in the late 1940s. Ninety percent of all married women
claimed to be happy with their sex lives; three-quarters were content with its fre-
quency, while 25 percent wanted more. A study in the 1980s echoed this trend.
Women and men displayed similar sexual desires—both wanted frequent sex,
were happiest when initiating and refusing sex in equal amounts, and became
discontent when sex was infrequent (see Laumann et al., 1994; Schwartz & Rut-
ter, 1998; Janus, 1993; Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Segal, 1997).
What turns us on sexually is also similar. In the 1970s, psychologist Julia
Heiman developed a way to measure women’s sexual arousal. Samples of college
women listened to two sorts of tapes—romantic and explicitly sexual—while
wearing a tamponlike device that measured blood flow to the vagina. Like men,
women were far more sexually aroused by explicit sex talk than they were by
romance (Kolata, 1998, p. 3). And interest in sexual variety also appears to be
converging. Experiences of oral sex have increased dramatically for both women
and for men. And, if one 20-year-old college woman is to be believed, the mean-
ings attached to oral sex seem to be shifting as well. “‘I was about 16 and I had
this friend—not a boyfriend, a boy friend—and I didn’t know what to give him for
his birthday, so I gave him a blow job. I wanted to know what it was like; it was
just for kicks,’” is what she told an interviewer, “without a trace of embarrass-
ment or self-consciousness” (Rubin, 1991, p. 14).
It would appear that women are having more sex and enjoying it more than
ever in our history. And so women are far less likely, now, to fake orgasm. When
Lillian Rubin interviewed white working-class women in the mid-1970s for her
study Worlds of Pain, she found that over 70 percent of the women said they faked

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14 Gendering Desire

orgasm at least some of the time. Now, she finds that the same percentage says
that they never fake it (Rubin, 1991, p. 120).
The evidence of gender conversion does not mean that there are no dif-
ferences between women and men in their sexual expression. It still means dif-
ferent things to be sexual, but the rules are not enforced with the ferocity and
consistency that they were in the past. “It’s different from what it used to be
when women were supposed to hold out until they got married. There’s pressure
now on both men and women to lose their virginity,” is how one 29-year-old
man put it. “But for a man it’s a sign of manhood, and for a woman there’s still
some loss of value” (Rubin, 1991, p. 58). Moreover, though both men and
women feel entitled to pleasure, and both have their first sexual experience
because they wanted to, men still seem to believe that that entitlement also cov-
ers acting on it—even when the woman doesn’t want to. “I paid for a wonderful
evening,” commented one college man, “and I was entitled to sex for my effort.”
As a result of attitudes like these, cases of date and acquaintance rape continue
to skyrocket on our campuses (Koss et al., 1988).
About 15 percent of college women report having been sexually assaulted;
more than half of these assaults were by a person whom the woman was dating. Some
studies have estimated the rates to be significantly higher, nearly double (27%) that
of the study undertaken by Mary Koss and her colleagues (1988). And, while some
pundits have expressed outrage that feminists have transformed college-aged women
into “victims,” it is more accurate to express outrage that predatory males have
turned college women into victims of sexual assault. Any number of rapes is unac-
ceptable. But that significant numbers of college women are forced to change their
behaviors because of the behaviors of these men—where they study, how late they
stay in the library, which parties they go to, whom they date—is the outrage.
Among adults, women and men report quite different rates of forced sex.
While 96.1 percent of men and 77.2 percent of women say they have never been
forced to have sex against their will, those who have been forced display dra-
matic differences. Just slightly more than 1 percent of men (1.3%), but over
one-fifth of all women (21.6%) were forced to have sex by the opposite sex; only
about 2 percent of men (1.9%) and just .3% of women were forced by someone
of the same sex. Men continue to be the principal sexual predators. Several stud-
ies estimate the likelihood that a woman will be the victim of a completed rape
to be about one in five. The figure for an attempted rape is nearly double that
(Laumann et al., 1994, p. 336; Koss et al., 1994).
Women’s increase in sexual agency, revolutionary as it is, has not been
accompanied by a decrease in male sexual entitlement, nor by a sharp increase
in men’s capacity for intimacy and emotional connectedness. Thus, just as some
feminist women have celebrated women’s claim to sexual autonomy, others—
therapists and activists—have deplored men’s adherence to a “non-relational”
model of sexual behavior. As with friendship and with love, it’s men who have
the problem, and psychologists like Ronald Levant seek to replace “irresponsible,

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Gendering Desire 15

detached, compulsive, and alienated sexuality with a type of sexuality that is

ethically responsible, compassionate for the well-being of participants, and sex-
ually empowering of men” (1997, p. 270).
The notion of nonrelational sex means that sex is, to men, central to their
lives; isolated from other aspects of life and relationships; often coupled with
aggression; conceptualized socially within a framework of success and achieve-
ment; and pursued despite possible negative emotional and moral consequences.
Sexual inexperience is viewed as stigmatizing. Examples of male nonrelational
sexuality abound according to the critics. Men think about sex more often than
women; have more explicit sexual fantasies; masturbate more often than
women; buy more porn; have more sex partners; and, have more varied sexual
experiences than women (Billy et al., 1993; Laumann et al., 1994).
In a recent edited volume on this problem, psychologist Gary Brooks
(1995) pathologizes male sexual problems as a “centerfold syndrome.” Symp-
toms include: voyeurism, objectification, sex as a validation of masculinity, tro-
phyism, and fear of intimacy. Ron Levant contributes a medical neologism,
alexithymia, to describe the socially conditioned “inability to feel or express feel-
ings” (1997, p. 19). This problem must be serious; after all, it has a Greek name.
Some authors also note the danger to women by men who have this type of
“masculine” sex, who “deny the humanity of their partners, and . . . objectify and
even violate the partner who is actually treated more as a prop.” Others warn of
“the damage ultimately done to men when they are socialized in a way that lim-
its their ability to experience intimacy” (Johnston, 1997, pp. 79, 101).
Not all the studies of male nonrelationality are so critical. Psychologists
Glenn Good and Nancy Sherrod argue that for many men nonrelational sex is
a stage of development, not necessarily a way of being:

Men progress through the NS [nonrelational sexuality] stage by mastering the

developmental tasks associated with this stage . . . [which] includes gaining
experience as a sexual being, gaining experience with interpersonal aspects of
sexuality, developing identity, and developing comfort with intimacy. Men
following this route develop internally directed senses of their behavior that
allow them to form and sustain intimate, caring relationships with others.

In fact, Good and Sherrod argue, experience with nonrelational sexuality

may be a positive experience, allowing adolescents “to reduce sexual tensions”
and “gain sexual experiences, refine skills associated with sexual activities, and
experience different partners and behaviors, thereby reducing curiosity about
different partners in the future” (Good & Sherrod, 1997, pp. 189, 190).
The idea of nonrelational sex as a “problem” for men is relatively recent,
and is part of a general cultural discomfort with the excesses of the sexual rev-
olution. In the 1970s, as Martin Levine and Richard Troiden point out, the
significant sexual problems were problems stemming from too little sexual

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16 Gendering Desire

experience—anorgasmia (the inability to achieve orgasm), especially for women,

ejaculatory and erectile problems for men. Now the problem is sex “addiction,”
a relatively new term that makes having a lot of sex a problem, and “nonrela-
tional sex,” which makes pursuing sexual pleasure for its own sake also a prob-
lem. While it may be true that nonrelational sexuality may be a problem for
some men, especially for those for whom it is the only form of sexual expression,
it is not necessarily the only way men express themselves sexually. Many men
are capable of both relational and nonrelational sexuality. Some men don’t ever
practice nonrelational sexuality because they live in a subculture in which it is
not normative; other men develop values that oppose it (Good & Sherrod,
1997, p. 186). One possibly worthy goal might be to enlarge our sexual reper-
toires to enable both women and men to experience a wide variety of permuta-
tions and combinations of love and lust, without entirely reducing one to the
other—as long as all these experiences are mutually negotiated, safe, and equal.

Homosexuality as Gender Conformity

Thus far, I’ve been describing the ways in which men and women are socialized
toward “his” and “her” sexualities. I’ve deliberately avoided the obvious dis-
claimer that I was speaking about heterosexuality and not homosexuality,
because this gendering of sexuality is as applicable to homosexuals as it is to het-
erosexuals. In fact, it may even be more obvious among gay men and lesbians,
because in homosexual encounters there are two gendered men or two gendered
women. That is, you have masculinity or femininity multiplied by two! Gender
differences may even be exaggerated by sexual orientation.
This is, of course, contrary to our commonsense understandings of homo-
sexuality, as well as those biological studies that suggest that gay men have some
biological affinity to women, as opposed to heterosexual men. Indeed, our com-
monsense assumption is that gay men and lesbians are gender nonconformists—
lesbians are “masculine” women; gay men are “feminine” men. But such
commonsense thinking has one deep logical flaw—it assumes that the gender of
your partner is more important, and more decisive in your life, than your own
gender. But our own gender—the collections of behaviors, attitudes, attributes,
and assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman—is far more
important than the gender of the people with whom we interact, sexually or
otherwise. Sexual behavior, gay or straight, confirms gender identity.
That doesn’t mean that these commonsense assumptions haven’t com-
pletely saturated popular discussions of homosexuality, especially in those advice
books designed to help parents make sure that their children did not turn out
“wrong.” For example Peter and Barbara Wyden’s book Growing Up Straight: What
Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know About Homosexuality, argued that “pre-homo-
sexual” boys were identifiable by their lack of early childhood masculinity, which

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could be thwarted by an overly “masculine” mother, that is, one who had a job out-
side the home and subscribed to feminist ideas (Wyden & Wyden, 1968).
A few empirical studies have also made such claims. For example, psychi-
atrist Richard Green tracked a small group of boys (about 55) from preschool to
young adulthood. All the boys were chosen for patterns of frequent cross-dress-
ing at home. They liked to play with girls at school, enjoyed playing with dolls,
and followed their mothers around the house doing housework. Their parents
were supportive of this behavior. These “sissy boys,” as Green called them, were
four times more likely to have homosexual experiences than nonfeminine boys.
But this research has also been widely criticized: Such gender nonconformity is
extremely rare (there was great difficulty in finding even 55 boys), and thus can-
not be the source of the great majority of homosexual behavior. Extreme pat-
terns of nonconformity are not equivalent to milder measures, such as not liking
sports, preferring music or reading, and indifference to rough-and-tumble play.
The homosexual experience may be a result of the social reactions to their con-
duct (persecution by other boys, or the therapy to which they were often
exposed), which thwarted their ability to establish conventional heterosocial
patterns of behavior. It may have been the ostracism itself, and not the offend-
ing behavior, that led to the sexual experiences. When milder forms of gender
nonconformity are examined, most boys who report such behavior turn out to
be heterosexual. Finally, when studies by Green and his colleagues were
extended to “tomboys,” it was found that there was no difference in eventual
sexual preference between girls who reported tomboy behavior and those who
did not. What I think Green found is that being a sissy is a far more serious
offense to the gender order than being a tomboy (Green, 1986).
The evidence points overwhelmingly the other way, that homosexuality
is deeply gendered, and that gay men and lesbians are true gender conformists.
To accept such a proposition leads to some unlikely alliances, with gay-affirma-
tive writers and feminists lining up on the same side as an ultraconservative
writer like George Gilder, who, in his unwavering critique of masculinity—both
gay and straight—writes that lesbianism “has nothing whatever to do with male
homosexuality. Just as male homosexuals, with their compulsive lust and
promiscuous impulses, offer a kind of caricature of typical male sexuality, les-
bians closely resemble other women in their desire for intimate and monoga-
mous coupling” (Gilder, 1985).
Since the birth of the gay liberation movement in the Stonewall riots of
1969—when gay men fought back against the police who were raiding a New York
City gay bar—gay men have been particularly eager to demonstrate that they were
not “failed” men, as earlier popular images portrayed them. In fact, many gay men
became extremely successful as “real” men, enacting a hypermasculine code of
anonymous sex, masculine clothing, and physical appearance, including body-
building. The “clone” as he was called, comprising about 35 percent of all gay men,
was perhaps even more successful at masculinity than were straight men. By the

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18 Gendering Desire

early 1980s, this notion had produced some curious inversions of traditional
stereotypes. In one popular song from 1983, Joe Jackson commented on this:

See the nice boys, dancing in pairs

Golden earring, golden tan, blow wave in their hair
Sure they’re all straight, straight as a line
All the gays are macho, can’t you see their leather shine?2

By contrast, the sexual lives of lesbians were quite different. For many les-
bians, gay liberation did not mean sexual liberation. In the lesbian community,
there was more discussion of “the tyranny of the relationship” than of various
sexual practices; lesbian couples in therapy complained of “lesbian bed death,”
the virtual cessation of sexual activity for the couple after a few years. One
woman told an interviewer:

As women we have not been socialized to be initiators in the sexual act.

Another factor is that we don’t have to make excuses if we don’t want to
do it. We don’t say we have a headache. We just say no. We also do a lot
more cuddling and touching than heterosexuals, and we get fulfilled by
that rather than just the act of intercourse . . . Another thing is that such
a sisterly bond develops that the relationship almost seems incestuous
after a while. The intimacy is so great. We know each other so well.
(Chapple & Talbot, 1989, p. 356)

While some lesbians did embrace a sexual liberationist ethic and sought
arenas for sexual variety, most remained gender conformists.
This was underscored by the fact that feminism also played a large role in
the social organization of lesbian life. During the early waves of the women’s
movement, lesbianism was seen as a political alternative, a decision not to give aid
and comfort to the enemy (men). How could a woman be truly feminist, they
asked, if she shared her life and bed with a man? The “political lesbian” repre-
sented a particular fusion of sexual and gender politics, an active choice that
matched one’s political commitment. “For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-
supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture,” wrote
one woman, “is an act of resistance.” While of course not all lesbians are feminists,
even this construct of political lesbianism is a form of gender conformity. If one
resists gender inequality, political lesbians argue, then one must opt out of sexual
relationships with men, and choose to be sexual only with women because they are
women. Gender remains the organizing principle of sexuality—even a sexuality
that is understood as a form of resistance to gender politics (Clarke, 1996, p. 155).
The weight of evidence from research on homosexuality bears out this argu-
ment that gay men and lesbians are gender conformists. Take, for example, the
number of sexual partners. In one study, sex researchers found that most lesbians

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Gendering Desire 19

reported having had fewer than 10 sexual partners, and almost half said they had
never had a one-night stand. A 1982 survey of unmarried women between the
ages of 20 and 29 found an average of 4.5 sexual partners over the course of their
lives. But the average gay male in the same study had had hundreds of partners,
many one-night stands, and more than a quarter of them reported a thousand or
more partners. Masters and Johnson found that 84 percent of males and 7 percent
of females had had between 50 and 1,000 or more sexual partners in their life-
times; and that 97 percent of men and 33 percent of women had had seven or
more relationships that had lasted four months or less. While 11 percent of hus-
bands and 9 percent of wives in another study described themselves as promiscu-
ous, 79 percent of gay men and 19 percent of lesbians made such a claim. Among
heterosexual cohabitors, though, 25 percent of the men and 22 percent of the
women described themselves as promiscuous. Gay men have the lowest rates of
long-term committed relationships, while lesbian have the highest, and lesbians
place much greater emphasis on emotional relationships than gay men. Thus, it
appears that men—gay and straight—place sexuality at the center of their lives,
and that women—straight or lesbian—are more interested in affection and caring
in the context of a love relationship (Bell & Weinberg, 1978; Masters, Johnson,
& Kolodny, 1978; Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983, p. 317).
Research on frequency of sexual activity bears this out. In one study,
among heterosexual married couples, 45 percent reported having sex three or
more times per week during the first two years of their marriage, and 27 percent
of those married between two and ten years reported such rates. By contrast, 67
percent of gay men together up to two years, and 32 percent of those together
two to ten years had sex three or more times per week. One-third of lesbians had
sex three or more times per week in the first two years of their relationship; but
only 7 percent did after two years. After 10 years, the percentages reporting sex
more than three times per week were 18 percent for married couples, 11 percent
for gay men, and 1 percent for lesbians. Nearly half the lesbians (47%) reported
having sex less than once a month after ten years together (Blumstein &
Schwartz, 1983). One interviewer described a lesbian couple:

She and her roommate were obviously very much in love. Like most peo-
ple who have a good, stable, five year relationship, they seemed comfort-
able together, sort of part of one another, able to joke, obviously fulfilled
in their relationship. They work together, have the same times off from
work, do most of their leisure activities together. They sent me off with a
plate of cookies, a good symbolic gesture of the kind of welcome and
warmth I felt in their home. (Bell & Weinberg, 1978, p. 220)

If heterosexuality and homosexuality are so similar, in that men and women

express and confirm their gendered identities through sexual behavior, what then
are the big differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals—aside, of course,

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20 Gendering Desire

from the gender of the partner? One difference is that gay relationships are more
egalitarian. When we ask, for example, who intiates sex, gay men and lesbians
report identical rates, which are far more egalitarian than the rates for married
or cohabiting couples. Because homosexuals’ identities are defined by their sex-
uality, and because their sexuality is not procreative, gay men and lesbians have
also been more sexually experimental, especially with nonpenetrative sex. As
one sex therapist writes, “gay men have more ways of sexually relating than do
heterosexual men” (see Nichols, 1987). And Masters and Johnson found that
gay couples have longer lovemaking sessions than heterosexual couples.
One other way that heterosexuality and homosexuality are similar, actu-
ally, is in the impact of homophobia on sexual behavior. Obviously, for gay peo-
ple homophobia saturates all their interactions. The systematic devaluation of
homosexuality, the stigma attached to being homosexual, becomes a crucial ele-
ment in one’s identity. As sociologist Ken Plummer writes (1975, p. 102):

the perceived hostility of the societal reactions that surround . . . homo-

sexuality . . . renders the business of becoming a homosexual a process that
is characterized by problems of access, problems of guilt, and problems of
identity. It leads to the emergence of a subculture of homosexuality. It
leads to a series of interaction problems involved with concealing the dis-
creditable stigma. And it inhibits the development of stable relationships
among homosexuals to a considerable degree.

We know how homophobia constructs gay experience, but we are less

aware of the power of homophobia to structure the experiences and identities of
heterosexuals. Homophobia is more than the fear or hatred of homosexuals; it is
also, for men, the fear of being perceived as unmanly, effeminate, or, worst of all,
gay. These fears seem less keen among heterosexual women, though many worry
about the dangers of homosexuals (nearly always men) to their children. Male
heterosexuals often spend a significant amount of time and energy in masculine
display so that no one could possibly get the “wrong” impression about them. In
one study, many heterosexual men said they had sex in order to prove they weren’t
gay (Muelenhard, 1988). Since our popular misperceptions about homosexuality
usually center on gender inversion, compensatory behaviors by heterosexuals
often involve exaggerated versions of gender stereotypic behaviors. In this way,
homophobia reinforces the gender of sex, keeping men acting hypermasculine
and women acting ultrafeminine. “Heterosexuality as currently construed and
enacted (the erotic preference for the other gender) requires homophobia,” write
sex researchers John Gagnon and Stuart Michaels (1989, p. 2).3
With the onset of the HIV epidemic, major changes occurred in the sexual
patterns of gay men, including fewer partners, less anonymous sex, and increases
in the practice of safer sex and the number of gay male couples. The emphasis on
“safer sex” was seen by many as an effort to “feminize” sexuality, to return it to the

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Gendering Desire 21

context of emotional and monogamous relationships, thus abandoning the earlier

gay liberationist ethic of sexual freedom. To men, the very phrase “safe sex” was
experienced as an oxymoron: what’s sexy—heat, passion, excitement, spontane-
ity—was the exact opposite of what’s safe—soft, warm, cuddly. Many men feared
that practicing safe sex would mean no longer having sex like men, and that pro-
grams encouraging such gender nonconformity would be doomed to failure. This
is not simply an issue for gay men, of course. Heterosexual women have been try-
ing to get heterosexual men to practice a form of safe sex for decades, finding that
their own sexual expressivity is less encumbered when both partners take respon-
sibility for birth control. Fear of pregnancy and fear of HIV transmission both
require that one fuse sexual pleasure with sexual responsibility (Levine, 1998).
Critics needn’t have worried. Much of the work to minimize the risk for
HIV among gay men has been to reaffirm masculine sexuality, to develop ways
that men could still have “manly” sex while they also practiced safe sex. Gay
organizations promoted safe sex clubs, pornographic videos, and techniques. As
a result, gay men did begin to practice safe sex, without disconfirming their mas-
culinity, though there is some evidence of recent backsliding by younger gay
men, especially since HIV treatments now seem to augur longer and healthier
lives for HIV-positive people than they previously enjoyed.
Nonetheless, AIDS remains a highly “gendered” disease. Although
women and men are both able to contract the virus that causes AIDS—in fact,
women are actually more likely to contract the disease from unprotected hetero-
sexual intercourse than are men—and despite the fact that rates of new infection
among women are increasing faster than among men, the overwhelming major-
ity (over 80%) of all AIDS patients in the United States are men. AIDS is the
most highly gendered disease in American history—a disease that both women
and men could get, but one that overwhelmingly disproportionately affects one
gender and not the other. It would be useful to understand masculinity—risk-tak-
ing, avoidance of responsibility, pursuit of sex above all other ends—as a risk fac-
tor in the spread of the disease in the same way that we understand it to be a risk
factor in drunk driving accidents (Kimmel & Levine, 1991).4

What Else Affects Sexuality?

While gender remains one of the organizing principles of sexuality, other aspects of
our lives also profoundly influence our sexual behaviors and expectations. For one
thing, sexual behavior, as we’ve seen, varies widely among different cultures. Mar-
garet Mead found that in some cultures, the idea of spontaneous sex is not encour-
aged for either women or men. Among the Arapesh, she writes, the exceptions are
believed to occur in women. “Parents warn their sons even more than they warn
their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which some-
one can make love to them” (Mead, 1935, p. 161). Another anthropologist

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22 Gendering Desire

reported that in one southwest Pacific society, sexual intercourse is seen as

highly pleasurable and deprivation as harmful to both sexes. And Bronislaw
Malinowski saw significant convergence between women and men in the Tro-
briand Islands, where women initiate sex as often as men, and where couples
avoid the “missionary” position because the woman’s movements are hampered
by the weight of the man so that she cannot be fully active.
In the contemporary United States, several variables other than gender affect
sexuality, such as class, age, education, marital status, religion, race, and ethnicity.
Take class, for example. Kinsey found that, contrary to the American ideology that
holds that working-class people are more sensual because they are closer to their
“animal natures,” lower class position did not mean hotter sex. In fact, he found
that upper- and middle-class people were more sophisticated in the “arts of love,”
demonstrating wider variety of activities and greater emphasis on foreplay, while
lower-class people dispensed with preliminaries and did not even kiss very much.
There is evidence that race and ethnicity also produce some variations in
sexual behavior. For example, blacks seem to hold somewhat more sexually liberal
attitudes than whites and have slightly more sex partners, but they also masturbate
less frequently, have less oral sex, and are slightly more likely to have same-sex con-
tacts. Hispanics are also more sexually liberal than whites, and masturbate more
frequently than blacks or whites; but they also have less oral sex than whites (yet
more than blacks) and have fewer sex partners, either of the same or opposite sex,
than whites or blacks (Laumann et al., pp. 518–29, 177, 192, 82–84, 98, 302–09).
Age also affects sexuality. What turns us on at 50 will probably not be
what turned us on at 15. Not only are there significant physiological changes
that augur a decline in sexual energy and interest, but age is also related to mar-
ital status and family obligations. As Lillian Rubin writes,

On the most mundane level, the constant negotiation about everyday

tasks leaves people harassed, weary, irritated, and feeling more like traffic
cops than lovers. Who’s going to do the shopping, pay the bills, take care
of the laundry, wash the dishes, take out the garbage, clean the bathroom,
get the washing machine fixed, decide what to eat for dinner, return the
phone calls from friends and parents? When there are children, the
demands, complications and exhaustion increase expontentially. (p. 165)

Ah, children. By far one of the greatest anaphrodesiacs—sexual turn-offs—

in our society is having children. Couples—gay and straight—with children
report far less sexual activity than couples without children. There’s less time,
less freedom, less privacy—and less interest.
You’ve probably heard reports that women hit their sexual peak in the late
30s and early 40s, while men peak before they turn 20, after which they are
increasingly likely to appreciate softer, more sensual activities. And you’ve prob-
ably heard that such differences reveal biological differences in male and female

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Gendering Desire 23

sexual anatomy. But that ignores the ways in which women’s and men’s sexual-
ities are related to each other. That “his” sexuality shifts toward the more sen-
sual just as “her” sexuality takes a sharp turn toward the explicitly sexual
indicates more than a simple divergence in biological patterns, especially since
it is not the case in other cultures when men and women biologically age “dif-
ferently.” What these reports suggest is that marriage has a pronounced effect on
sexual expression, domesticating sex, bringing it into the domain historically
reserved for women: the home. When men feel that sex is no longer dangerous
and risky (which is, to them, exciting), their sexual repertoire may soften to
include a wider range of sensual pleasures. When women feel that sex is no
longer dangerous and risky (which they interpret as threatening), they feel safe
enough to explore more explicitly sexual pleasures. Such an interpretation sug-
gests, of course, that the differences we observe between women and men may
have more to do with the social organization of marriage than with any inher-
ent differences between males and females.
Yet despite this, the longer range historical trend over the past several
centuries has been to sexualize marriage, to link the emotions of love and nur-
turing to erotic pleasure within the reproductive relationship. Thus sexual com-
patibility and expression have become increasingly important in our married
lives, as the increased amount of time before marriage (prolonged adolescence),
the availability of birth control and divorce, and an ethic of individual self-ful-
fillment have combined to increase the importance of sexual expression
throughout the course of our lives.
Gender differences persist in our sexual expression and our sexual experi-
ences, but they are far less significant than they used to be, and the signs point
to continued convergence. It may come as a relief to realize that our lovers are
not from other planets, but are capable of the same joys and pleasures that we
enjoy. True, differences remain between women and men—to which we might
say, “Vive les differences”—however modest and however much their signifi-
cance is declining!

© 2005 State University of New York Press, Albany