Male Sex Drive from Teenage Years to the Middle Age

I received an interesting question as part of a longer email the other day. The guy who wrote to me was curious about my view on how the age difference between you and your woman might influences your libido (i.e. are you better off with a younger woman), as well as how your libido changes in general throughout the years:

What is your view about age when dating and chasing girls who are interested in you but significantly younger than you? At what point people stop having sexual libido/desire or their desire decline as they age?

I'll cover the second question in this article, and the other in a follow-up.

Let me tackle the problem of declining libido in several steps. First, male sex drive declines as you get older, but I'll hypothesize that the change is largely due to lifestyle choices and constraints, and not so much due to biological factors. About teenage boys it is said that they would bang a hole in a tree just as well. This is certainly exaggerated, and just another example of the misandry of the mainstream media. Young girls are horny, too, yet no mainstream media buffoon ever wrote that they would shove anything in their vagina.


Regardless of whether teenagers really are hornier, I think it should be highlighted that sexual activity in teenagers seems more pronounced simply because many of them have more time to spare. They are exploring sexuality, and as an added benefit, having sex is a great way to overcome boredom. That kind of behavior is quite obvious among students who have no genuine academic interests, and it's pronounced at so-called party schools, too. Some days ago a commenter on the blog referred to the YouTube channel "I'm Shmacked", which offers OCD-friendly clips depicting the party life at US college campuses. Universities with a stronger academic reputation are conspicuously absent, but you'll find plenty of videos showing students at larger universities getting wasted.

Thus, it seems quite safe to assume that sexual activity among teenagers is not universally higher. It's well-known that a large fraction of incoming freshmen at elite technical universities like MIT are virgins. I doubt that many of those guys will turn into "players" later in their life, even though it's not hard to see how those people could fall for the empty promises of PUAs. In high school the geeks found different ways to occupy themselves.

The general theme is that the amount of spare time and opportunity determines your level of sexual activity. Sure, if you're a journalism freshman at OSU, and there are thousands of women around you could imagine banging, and if just to fill your time, your mind probably starts to wander on occasion. On the other hand, the diligent MIT student who tries wrapping his head around multivariate calculus and who calculates how much sleep he can afford to take the next few days, would view women as a mere distraction.

All those behavioral patterns will be evident later in life too. Even if your sex drive at age 30 was as high as at age 20, the mere fact that you now have to work a day job, commute two hours a day, and have to run errands in the evening will be enough to make you think that your libido has been plummeting. Instead, just like the hypothetical MIT student described above, you have too much to do and too little time. If you worked less, you probably would have more energy to fornicate. Of course, then the problem is that office environments are a pretty bad place to pick up women.

Looking at the situation of men in general, I don't want to dispute that libido decreases with age. However, it is an open question how much of this is due to inevitable hormonal changes, or simply a consequence of lifestyle choices. True, you don't have much of a choice since you'll have to pay your bills somehow, so it's more of a problem of how society is set up. If you're particularly hard-working, you might need a vacation to replenish your energy, before you can think about getting laid again.