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Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. give a pretty comprehensive answer to a very specific question about libido and gender assumptions.

[T]here are two kinds of desire when it comes to sex: there’s a physical desire to get naked, and then there’s an emotional desire to be close to your partner. You clearly have the emotional desire. And you know what? Maybe that’s all you’ll ever have. Or maybe you’ll feel emotional desire most of the time and once in a blue moon your physical desire will show up.

But that doesn’t mean you’re “broken inside.” To think that way is to take a very male-centric approach to libido. Just because your physical drive doesn’t match your boyfriend’s, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It just means you’re different.

They said it here.

Even better, they reprint a really excellent column they wrote for Red Magazine in 2007 that really drives home the point that defining libido only in stereotypical/gendered male terms isn’t just unfair it’s counterproductive. I can’t recommend the post enough since they really cover the bases in (even better) completely non-judgmental terms.

Here’s where it gets really interesting though. Ordinarily I’d just stop here but by complete coincidence when I opened Em & Lo’s post I happened to have in front of me a copy of Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz’s He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It The authors point out that in between 10% and 20% of long-term relationships it’s the man not the woman who’s got the “dysfunctional” (meaning “lower or non-existent”) libido…

Which means using men as the “gold standard” for libido (Joan Sewell’s term in Em & Lo’s repost) doesn’t even particularly suit men!

There are not, unfortunately, many texts out there recommending men boost their libidos through (as Em & Lo quip)

... “working on” their libido? [Lingering] in a bubble bath to awaken their nerve endings, [hitting] the treadmill to get their juices flowing, [insisting] on a backrub to help them warm up to the idea…

... or maybe fortunately since, as Joan Sewell documented so ably in I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, most of those methods aren’t particularly reliable for women either.

Throw in the inevitable quips/remarks/laments by women, e.g. “I must secretly be a man inside because I love…” and the probably-thought-but-won’t-ever-be-voiced-by-men corollary that men with less interest than their partners must therefore be “secretly women inside,” and mix all that up with the statistical “masking” effect of hetero couples with matching libidos… that might be twice a day or once every leap year… who with a slightly different roll of the relationship dice might be deemed terminally dysfunctional and…

You gotta ask yourself why, exactly, we think constructing gender is a better idea than saying, as Hamlet very aptly puts it “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (The problem not being philosophy, obviously, but Horatio’s stunting version of it.)