Lynn Gassis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has been standing up for the “no-sex” class theory recently. She has a killer post that I think does a wonderful job of explaining how even if it was true that women across the board really have lower libidos than men it still wouldn’t be enough to justify the near-timeless assertion that women put up with sex only so they can get pregnant and, preferably, then sue for child support! (Note: Lynn’s responding to a proposal by Jacqueline Passey that development of a male pill would decrease quality of sex because while men desire sex women desire — with equal intensity — children and that they’ll manipulate and like to get pregnant like men lie and manipulate to get sex…! Which, as Lynn notes, is “the ‘no-sex’ class on steroids.”)

Now, how many low sex drive people are actually abstaining from sex? Let’s first look at the phenomenon of the sexless marriage.

A sexless marriage is a marriage in which little or no sex occurs between the two partners. The US National Health and Social Life Survey in 1994 (Laumann et al. 1994) found that 2 percent of the married respondents reported no sexual intimacy in the past year. The definition of a nonsexual marriage is often broadened to include those where sexual intimacy occurs less than ten times per year, in which case 20 percent of the couples in the NHSLS would be in the category.

The proportion of married couples having sex less than ten times a year actually looks reasonably in line with the sexual dysfunction statistics given earlier (considering that most of the men and women reporting some sort of sexual dysfunction are probably still having sex, but that, say, many of the 5-15% of women who have serious ongoing low sexual desire may not be, along with some corresponding set of men).

Now, how about single women? The Guttmacher Institute reports that

One-third of American women aged 20–44 are single, and nine in 10 of these women are sexually experienced, according to “Sexual Behavior of Single Adult American Women,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg et al., published in the March 2008 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Hey! It looks as if the percentage of single women who are not sexually experienced is right in line with the proportion of women who report being chronically uninterested in sex! It’s almost as if women, like men, had sex out of actual sexual desire! Whodda thunk it?

Read the quote in context here.

Whodda thunk it indeed?