An analysis of Estonian Biobank data found that men report significantly higher sexual desire than women. Sexual desire declined with age, more rapidly for women, and was associated with bisexual or pansexual orientation, recent birth, and relationship satisfaction. The paper is scientific report.
Sexual desire is an essential part of human romantic relationships and is critical to overall well-being. It is the feeling of seeking sexual intimacy, sexual activity, or sexual pleasure. It may include thoughts, fantasies, physical sensations, emotions, attraction to others, or a general desire for sexual stimulation.
Sexual desire is influenced by hormones, brain activity, physical health, mood, relationship quality, past experiences, culture, and personal values. Some people feel sexual desire primarily after emotional intimacy, while others feel sexual desire in a broader range of situations and conditions. Stress, fatigue, depression, anxiety, medications, illness, conflict, and low self-esteem can all reduce sexual desire. In general, different people naturally have different baseline levels of sexual desire.
Study author Toivo Arvik, associate professor of psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and his colleagues investigated differences in sexual desire across different demographic groups and its association with characteristics of people’s romantic relationships. More specifically, they were interested in how sexual desire varies by age, gender, relationship status, sexual orientation, recent births, number of children, relationship satisfaction, education, and occupation.
“Many sexuality studies still rely on relatively small or highly specific samples, and many research findings about sexual desire are discussed as if they are almost settled fact, even though the evidence is often fragmentary or inconsistent,” Arvik explained. “We wanted to take a step back and ask a pretty basic question: To what extent can sexual desire actually be explained by simple demographic and relational variables when looking at very large population samples together? The Estonian Biobank gave us a unique opportunity to do this with over 67,000 participants.”
The Estonian Biobank is a large national research database that stores genetic, health, and lifestyle information from volunteer participants to support medical and population health research. This includes around 20% of adult residents or former residents of Estonia, known as ‘gene donors’.
The data used in this particular analysis came from 67,334 people, 70% of whom were women. The data included a rating of sexual desire based on two items: “I have a strong sexual urge” and “I don’t think much about sex.” The survey also looked at participants’ age, gender, education, marital status, sexual orientation, number of children, and whether they had children in the past year. Participants also answered questions about their occupation by choosing from 10 predefined categories.
They found that 74% of participants lived with a partner, 5% had given birth to a child in the past year, and 95% identified as heterosexual.
Men reported significantly greater sexual desire than women throughout most of their adult lives.
“The biggest lesson is probably that gender and age are much more important for sexual desire at the population level than many people expect,” Arvik told SciPost. “For most of adulthood, men report significantly higher sexual desire than women, and women’s sexual desire has been shown to decline sharply with age. At the same time, these are average differences. There is still wide variation within both sexes, with many women reporting higher sexual desire than many men.”
In fact, men’s sexual desire peaks around age 40, while women’s sexual desire gradually declines from early adulthood.
“What surprised us was that men’s sexual desire appears to peak around their late 30s to early 40s, rather than simply declining steadily with age,” Arvik said. “The pattern does not map neatly onto the trajectory of testosterone, suggesting that relational or social factors may also play an important role in maintaining desire.”
Bisexual and pansexual people tended to report higher sexual desire than heterosexual people, but, as expected, asexual people reported lower sexual desire. Participants who welcomed a child within the past year actually reported slightly higher sexual desire, which may be because new parents are generally younger.
This study reveals the complex interactions between gender and parent-child relationships. Male participants who had more children were more likely to report higher sexual desire. In contrast, women with more children tended to report slightly lower sexual desire.
Disparities between men and women were also seen in relationship status. Gender differences in sexual desire were larger for partnered individuals than for singles. People who were satisfied with their relationships were more likely to report higher sexual desire, but this association was stronger among women.
Interestingly, men who classified their occupation as sales were more likely to report a higher sex drive than male senior executives and managers, while female sales professionals were more likely to report a lower sex drive than female senior executives and managers. The situation was the same for male and female skilled workers and artisans, but this effect disappeared after including relationship satisfaction in the predictive model.
“These findings provide the most comprehensive explanation to date of how basic demographic and relational variables jointly shape sexual desire in the general population and provide a solid foundation for theory development and applied sexual health research,” the study authors concluded in their paper.
This study contributed to the scientific understanding of personal and relational characteristics associated with sexual desire and revealed that basic demographic factors account for nearly 30% of the variance in sexual desire between people.
“Another important point is that demographic variables alone explain almost 30% of the variation in sexual desire, which is actually a significant amount for a population-level psychological study,” Arvik said. “However, it is clear that sexual desire cannot simply be reduced to biology or demographics. Relationship dynamics, personality, mental health, culture, and personal experiences are also important.”
It should be noted that this study only included residents of Estonia, a small European country. Furthermore, the measurement of desire relied only on two self-report questions.
“Because this was part of a very large biobank study rather than a dedicated sexual study, our measure of sexual desire was intentionally simple. So we captured broad, general elements of desire, rather than distinguishing between solitary and dyadic desire, or partner-specific desire, etc.,” Arvik explained.
Furthermore, the reliance on self-reporting leaves room for bias.
“These are self-reported data, which means the responses may partially reflect how comfortable people are in admitting or labeling their sexual desires,” Arvik said. “For example, it is quite possible that some women underestimate or underreport their level of desire because of social expectations and norms regarding sexuality. Therefore, in our future research, we will examine the relationship between self-report and partner report and other external We need to combine assessments to get a more nuanced picture. Also, these are correlational data; we can explain population-level patterns and associations, but we cannot make strong causal claims about why these differences exist.”
In the future, the researchers hope to build on this basic data to explore the complex and changing nature of human intimacy.
“One of the important next steps is to integrate psychological variables, especially personality traits, relationship processes, and mental health, into the same model,” Arvik said. “Demographics explained a surprisingly large amount of variance, but clearly not all of it. I’m particularly interested in studying the ‘visibility’ of sexual desire, how accurately partners perceive each other’s level of desire (we already have this data), and how those perceptions shape relationship dynamics.” We also want to examine how personality traits and major life events influence desire over time, as sexual desire is clearly not a static trait. They change across life stages and relationship contexts, and we understand surprisingly little about these long-term dynamics. ”
This paper, “The association of sexual desire with demographic and relationship variables,” was authored by Toivo Aavik, Karin Täht, Uku Vainik, and René Mõttus.
