Sexual urges in women

Menstrual and menopausal changes, for example, are a normal part of development. Hormone levels fluctuate throughout our cycles. The lowest level of libido is often prior to menstruation, although there is much variation from this pattern. Postmenopausal women, and many women using hormonal birth control methods, have less variation in sexual desire.

Daniel Bergner, a journalist and contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine , knows what women want--and it's not monogamy. His new book, which chronicles his "adventures in the science of female desire," has made quite a splash for apparently exploding the myth that female sexual desire is any less ravenous than male sexual desire. The book, What Do Women Want , is based on a article, which received a lot of buzz for detailing, among other things, that women get turned on when they watch monkeys having sex and gay men having sex, a pattern of arousal not seen in otherwise lusty heterosexual men. That women can be turned on by such a variety of sexual scenes indicates, Bergner argues, how truly libidinous they are. This apparently puts the lie to our socially manufactured assumption that women are inherently more sexually restrained than men--and therefore better suited to monogamy. Detailing the results of a study about sexual arousal, Bergner says : "No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, [women] showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly--and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man--as they watched the apes.

Here today, gone tomorrow—your libido can be puzzling, to say the least. But that ebb and flow is completely natural, says Lauren Streicher, MD, clinical associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago: "All women go through periods when they feel especially frisky, as well as times when they just seem to have lost their mojo. Curious about aphrodisiacs?

Sexual desire is typically higher in men than in women, with testosterone T thought to account for this difference as well as within-sex variation in desire in both women and men. However, few studies have incorporated both hormonal and social or psychological factors in studies of sexual desire. The present study addressed how three psychological domains sexual-relational, stress-mood, body-embodiment were related to links between T and sexual desire in healthy adults and whether dyadic and solitary desire showed associations with T. T was positively linked to solitary desire in women, with masturbation frequency influencing this link. In contrast, T was negatively correlated with dyadic desire in women, but only when cortisol and perceived social stress were controlled.