Testosterone is often viewed through the lens of male sexual wellness; it bestows virility and is the reason why men are often in the mood, but a new sexual health study has turned our view of testosterone on its head. The research, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, has found that testosterone actually isn’t linked to sexual desire in healthy men at all. And, if you’re a woman, the hormone may be a dampener to your relationship, causing you to experience less interest in sex with a partner. Testosterone is, however, linked to greater interest in masturbation in healthy women.
According to study researcher Sari van Anders, a behavioural neuroendocrinologist at the University of Michigan, healthy individuals are rarely studied for sexual desire and hormones, which make the findings of this research so unique. Usually, such studies are based on animal subjects or people with abnormally low or high testosterone who come into clinics for treatment. ‘People have argued that sex research focuses too much on dysfunction and pharmaceutical treatment as opposed to questions like pleasure or relationships or stress,’ van Anders says. ‘There is a whole scope of factors that go unstudied.’
Even when factors such as stress and body image are studied with regards to how they affect people’s sexual wellbeing, researchers rarely, at the same time, look at hormonal influences, and this is where van Anders differed. For her study, 196 volunteers (105 men and 91 women) were asked to fill out questionnaires on their relationships, their stress and moods, and their own feelings about their bodies and sexuality. The participants also reported how frequently they had partnered sex and masturbated, and how frequently they had the desire to masturbate or to have sex with a partner.
van Anders comments that while you tend to think of desire as a single phenomenon, the desire to have sex may come from a different place than the desire to masturbate. ‘When you’re feeling sexual desire for a partner there might be other factors that play into that,’ she notes. ‘For example, how you felt about that partner that day, how attracted you feel to that partner, how attractive you feel to that partner, your relationship and things like that.’ The desire to masturbate, on the other hand, may be less influenced by social factors like relationship satisfaction, and more by internal reasons.
The study results revealed that women with higher testosterone reported less desire for partnered sex. van Anders surmised that partner desire relates to a need to be close and connected, whilst masturbation is simply a need for pleasure. Solitary sexual desire was higher in the higher-testosterone women, with 27 of the women involved in the study reporting they had no desire to masturbate at all – and these women had lower testosterone than the women who said they sometimes felt desire to masturbate.
When it came to gender differences – i.e. why men, on average, want sex more often than the average woman – again, testosterone was not the culprit. The only factor that did link to gender differences was masturbation. Women masturbated less often than men and correspondingly reported less desire. That said, this research does not give us a way to tell whether the desire or the masturbation comes first. However, van Anders points out that there are intriguing hints that perhaps the difference in masturbation habits could explain the desire gap. She explains, ‘The idea is that if women don’t feel comfortable with their genitals and masturbating, and if they don’t think it’s okay and refrain from doing it and don’t express their desires, after a while, the desire might change as well.’