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Comment by tonguez | Hacker News Reader

"It may be true that heterosexual men want sex. But so do heterosexual women and homosexual men and women as well, as well as those who are somewhere in the vast spectrum between these identities. The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration?"

Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?

OK so now that we've settled that men have 1000x more sexual lust than women, let's ask ourselves, are there more gay men or straight men? Straight.

"The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration?" Probably because most sexual lust is male heterosexual lust.

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Just because a lot of people are responding to you with what I can only call low key trolling, a look at the scientific evidence[0] says

  A large body of scientific research documents four important gender differences in sexuality. First, on a wide variety of measures, men show greater sexual desire than do women. Second, compared with men, women place greater emphasis on committed relationships as a context for sexuality. Third, aggression is more strongly linked to sexuality for men than for women. Fourth, women's sexuality tends to be more malleable and capable of change over time. These male-female differences are pervasive, affecting thoughts and feelings as well as behavior, and they characterize not only hetero-sexuals but lesbians and gay men as well. Implications of these patterns are considered.

I've got to question the good faith of people who pretend to think that gay men and lesbians have similar amounts of sex.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20182831

The effect size -- even if I let you cherry pick citations (in a field experiencing a reproducibility crisis, no less) -- is several orders of magnitude smaller than the parent poster asserts (1000x).

According to your own sources it's an effect that is literally closer to "women are bad at math" than "men are taller than women". Literally. The comparison of effect sizes for those three things is right there on the first page. And for a proxy that your own source chose.

Again, parent asserted 1000x. 1000x. And you post an article with an effect size that's absolute garbage data in any field outside of psychology and assert "Science!". To defend a post claiming 1000x.

Or, in your words: stop arguing in bad faith, troll ;-)

> Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?

It depends the couple. Also depends on what you mean by "more" and what you mean by "sex". Is a once-a-week 4+ hour naked cuddle session with occasional touching/stimulation more or less sex than a multiple 10 minute BJs every day?

I would tend to say "obviously more". A longish session once a week is probably fairly common for lesbian couples and multiple short sessions -- but on the order of a few a week as opposed to a few a day -- is probably fairly common for gay men.

My genuine belief, having spent almost all of my life surrounded by lgbt folks, is that if you define "sex" in a way that isn't pathological, then lesbians probably spend more time on sex than gay men.

(I also STRONGLY suspect there's a heavy overlap between people who think "it's not sex unless my dick is wet the whole time" and people who have trouble finding consistent sexual partners.)

> OK so now that we've settled that men have 1000x

LOL where did we settle on that? I agree with OP. Women enjoy sex (gasp!).

If you call a massage a form of sex, who has more sex, gay men or lesbian women?

Gay men. A massage isn't sex, even if that's what you call it.

For what it's worth, I'm a bisexual man who's had multiple relationships with both men and women. I had more sex with the lowest-sex man than I did with the highest-sex woman, even when you do count cuddling as sex.

> A massage isn't sex

What is sex? What is lust? (The questions are rhetorical, but the point is that these terms tend to be defined in ways the exclude lots of queer foreplay.)

But, yes, a massage where both people understand the energy is building toward/from sexual stimulation is definitely part of sex. Foreplay is part of sex. I can't think of any definition of sex that excludes foreplay and that is, for the purposes of this conversation, useful.

If "women don't want sex", but we define sex as functionally equivalent to "someone's genitals are touching another person", well... idk. Maybe women just don't want really shitty no foreplay sex? Surprise, surprise, right?

> For what it's worth, I'm a bisexual man who's had multiple relationships with both men and women

Ditto and opposite experience. It's almost like people are different enough that gender-based generalizations are almost entirely unhelpful.

>> For what it's worth, I'm a bisexual man who's had multiple relationships with both men and women

> Ditto and opposite experience. It's almost like people are different enough that gender-based generalizations are almost entirely unhelpful.

Gonna call bullshit on that, considering you think the average gay man's sex life is a couple blowjobs per week.

My original post says a couple blowjobs "per day", not "per week". I'm confused. If anything, I'd expect you to call bullshit because that number is too high (it was meant to be hyperbolic).

But you also willfully misread my other comment, so shrugs.

> Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?

> OK so now that we've settled that men have 1000x more sexual lust than women...

I must be missing something, because I have absolutely no idea where we settled anything in this space of two sentences.

Yeah you're missing a lot!

I don't think men want sex substantially more than women. What causes an imbalance, IMO, is that women value casual sex substantially less than men for a variety of cultural and biological reasons and women's value in the casual sex marketplace have a much flatter distribution and is also front-loaded when you look across the age spectrum. This means most women either can pretty much get casual sex whenever they want or at least have lived through a phase where they could. Meanwhile, most men will never live through a period where casual sex is as easy to get as it is for the median woman at her prime, which may permanently alter the perspective of many of them and cause them to consider casual sex more valuable, regardless of their actual level of sexual desire.

The problem is that the framing of male lust as a fixed constraint to be satisfied screens off a lot of hypotheses. For example:

* Maybe societal beauty standards are causing people to have unrealistically high expectations, thus shrinking the dating pool and making it harder to satisfy everyone.

* Maybe the average male lust has been artificially increased by something (porn? waifu gacha games?) and needs to be brought back down.

* Maybe female lust has been artificially suppressed by something (I’ll refrain from speculating on what), and matching will work out if it’s brought back up.

Or maybe literally every human experiences sexually frustration soemtimes but certain types of men have been so coddled that they blow up their smallest discomforts into Big Societal Problems That Must Be Solved.

> they blow up their smallest discomforts into Big Societal Problems That Must Be Solved

aka a micro-agression?

> Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?

what is the answer to this question supposed to be? is there some stereotype that gay dudes have more sex than lesbians? i haven't found any clear trend here anecdotally.

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