21st century social scientist reveals deeper secrets of relationships
Analysing the data from more than 30 rigorous, nationally representative, scientific sex surveys which carried out around the world, some interesting things have been revealed.
Social scientist Dr Catherine Hakim, author of ‘The New Rules’ – a book about the changing relationship between the sexes, argues that the male sex-surplus is set to grow in the 21st century.
Three main reasons for tension between partners has emerged from her analysis. These include identify a decline in the frequency of sexual intercourse, women’s increasing economic independence and thrirdly the absence of major wars that traditionally eliminated the 6 per cent surplus of male births.
Men are four times more likely than women always gladly to agree to sexual approaches from their partner and when asked about the ideal frequency of sexual activity, one-quarter of men but only eight per cent of women say they prefer sex at least once a day or more.
Other findings by Dr Hakim from the aggregated data shows two-thirds of men accept, and two-thirds of women reject, the idea of sexuality without love.
A cross-cultural study of 29 countries shows that sex differences in desire and sexual interest are universal, but the gap between men and women is larger in male-dominated cultures than in liberal Western societies.
The broad results of the national surveys on sex differences in sexuality around the globe are corroborated by studies of the sex drive by social psychologists.
They show that differences between men and women are not due to socialisation, the repression of female sexuality, or women’s lesser sexual enjoyment, and may be due to the female sex drive being more plastic, malleable, and responsive to social influences, whereas the male sex drive is less compliant.
Men express two to ten times more enthusiasm than women for trying every variation in sexual activity.
When asked about their ideal sexual lifestyle, men are three times more likely to prefer several concurrent lovers – 27 per cent versus 6 per cent for women.
Perhaps surprisingly to women, men opt for regular “self-pleasure” and is three times more common among men, even among married men.
Men are three times more likely to have frequent sexual fantasies, and to use erotica of all kinds. In Finland, a four-fifths majority of men find pornography very arousing compared with half of women.
Two-fifths of men versus one-fifth of women have an additional non-marital sex partner.
Men report extramarital affairs twice as often as women, even when they condemn affairs as morally wrong. This pattern is observed both in villages and cities in Asia, where between one-quarter to half of divorces are now due to adultery.
Casual sex was regarded as acceptable by a two-thirds majority of men versus a one-third minority of women in Britain in 1990.
One-third of women versus one in ten men have never had an erotic fantasy; one-third of men but only one in ten women have regular erotic fantasies.
The most commonly reported sexual problem is lack of interest in having sex. In all countries, the rate for women is at least double the rate for men, at all ages.
The British, American, Finnish and Italian surveys all report a minority of men and a larger group of women aged over 35 years saying they were celibate – no sex at all in the last month or the last year.
At all ages, the majority of women regard love as a precondition for sex, while a majority of men reject the idea.
