Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is the libido gap myth and where does it come from?
For years, we've been told men are just naturally more interested in intimacy than women, that there's a libido gap. Men just want more sex. But what if that isn't biologically true at all? What if it's the result of some pretty bad lessons that people are taught at an early age? Well, let's talk about it here with someone who's done research in this area.
She's a psychology and brain science researcher and instructor at the University of Toronto. Her name is Diana Paragene. Diana, welcome to the program.
Happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
For decades, this myth of men having high libidos and women not, this not biologically true at all. Like how big of a myth are we talking about here? And why do people still pretend that this is true?
Right. I mean, well, we're really talking about when it comes to this gap in particular, I think the myth is really centered on, again, where it comes from than really the size of the gap, right? You know, this libido gap between genders, it's been a staple of punchlines, headlines, party conversations for decades, right?
We're talking about a gender gap that's pretty large, about as large as the gender difference in weight, and one that's pretty reliable. It's been replicated across 500 or more studies in the past 25 years alone. And across that, you know, long and sort of girthy body of research, three or four women do report less interest in sex than men.
The question is, or I think the controversy is more about where that gap is coming from. Right. Is it a natural one or is it something that, you know, we acquire over time?
Ah, is it learned or is it just somehow innate in, you know, we were born with it for whatever reason, I guess.
Exactly.
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Chapter 3: How has research challenged the belief in a libido gap between genders?
Right. I mean, it is a good question. I mean, the traditional or the sort of classical view, right, has kind of been that, you know, this is something that we can chalk up to biological differences that are kind of programmed before birth, like hormonal ones, for example, right?
Or, you know, some have actually more recently kind of chalked it up to experiential differences or learned differences that we acquire as adults, right? You know, I mean, gender differences and sexual enjoyment are among the largest documented in psychology, right?
And the orgasm gap is actually increasingly discussed as, you know, one of the possible explanations for women's lower interest in sex.
But, you know, what we don't discuss quite as much or even acknowledge, really, is the largest orgasm gap or the largest sexual enjoyment gap on record, which is the one between adolescence, actually, the one that lands the very start of sexual life and actually may land during a critical period for learning about sex and whether sex is worth desiring. Yeah.
When I learned about sex as a young kid, like in school, it was about pregnancy and STIs and consent and like human body parts. We didn't really focus on pleasure. Is that lack of conversation for kids who are learning about sex? Like, is that where this stems from?
I would say that's definitely a part of it. I mean, but I think a common misconception as well is that pleasure is missing from the curriculum entirely. It's actually something that is included in even the most conservative curricula, but only for a privileged few. Right. I mean, you know, lessons on puberty, those touch on wet dreams, erections, ejaculations for boys.
But for girls, they center on menstruation. Likewise, lessons on procreation. Those necessarily include the role of the male sexual pleasure organ in orgasm, but instead of the female one, they spotlight the birth canal, right?
So it shouldn't really be all that surprising that young people, you know, prioritize vaginas versus vulvas during sex when sex educators do the same during lessons, right? Right. How my young people ask about pleasure, you know, maybe learn a question, its absence, if they, you know, never learn about its importance for female people or that, you know, its lack precludes healthy sex. Right.
Is is the premise here that if we change the way we talked about sex and learned about sex, that there wouldn't be this kind of like desire gap showing up in older ages? Is that kind of what we're getting at here?
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Chapter 4: What role do early lessons about sex play in shaping libido perceptions?
I was in high school in the 90s. I was around when the narratives weren't great. They were very different for each gender. And maybe that is the problem. Maybe how could we intervene to make sure that people are enjoying sex into their adulthood, men and women equally?
Right. I think that's a great question. And I think that to kind of get at the answer to that, we kind of maybe have to break down how different sex is for young people relative across genders and across sort of life stages, relatively speaking, right? I mean, when we say a lot that women, we tend to say that women get worse sex than men, right?
And maybe there is some contribution this makes to that libido gap, but they actually get the worst sex to start with, right? As I mentioned, the orgasm gap at women's first exposure to sex, that's about, it's the five times larger than the orgasm gap between adults that makes headlines, right?
And that pleasure gap at first intercourse, that's remained stable over three decades, even as women's adult sort of sexual experiences have improved, right? And that gender gap has narrowed in pleasure at that time in life. Also, gender gap and stimulation of the primary sexual pleasure organ, that's penile glands for men, clitoral glands for women.
That pleasure gap, sure, it's large during heterosexual sex in adulthood, but it's twice as large at those first sexual experiences that women have. Painful sex, rough sex, forced sex, those are all more likely to occur the younger women are, whereas that trend doesn't really hold for younger men.
Women also tend to lose friendships as they gain sexual experience, whereas men don't suffer similar losses. In fact, quite the reverse. And obviously, you can top all of that off with
greater odds or greater risk of unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, obstetric complications for women at those younger ages that don't carry over to younger men that really make the costs and benefits of sex really probably the most imbalanced across the entire lifespan for young women during this period of time. It's
So there's like all this social stuff. There's the education stuff. There's, I guess, like body self-consciousness stuff that where I think young women experience more than men. It sounds like a confluence of all these things, like a perfect storm, I think you call it, existing. And what it ends up being is a pleasure gap at young age that just extends into old age. How do we fix it?
Like, I have a good understanding of the problem now. How do we fix it?
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