The most famous research on the subject is a 2001 meta-analysis by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, combining the results of 150 earlier studies. You can’t measure “sex drive” directly, so the study looked at a wide range of proxy measures. They found that men had more frequent sexual “thoughts, fantasies, and spontaneous arousal” – for instance, one study they looked at reported that “nearly all the men (91%) but only half the women (52%) experienced sexual desire several times a week or more”.
And men masturbated more frequently. The authors admit that this could be due to social disapproval of female masturbation. But they also argue that male masturbation is discouraged just as much as female – “it’ll make you go blind”, and so on – and point out that boys were more likely to have “discovered it themselves”, meaning it’s not that boys are being “taught” how to do it and girls aren’t. “Anyone who wants to masturbate can probably figure out how to do it,” they say. [...]
Men are more interested in a wider range of sexual practices. Men sacrificed more for sexual pleasure, whether in financial terms – they spent more on pornography – or in terms of risk – they were more willing to have extramarital sex. In general, men have more “favourable attitudes to sex”, being more permissive regarding casual sex and promiscuous sex. And overall, men are less likely to report low sexual desire and more likely to rate their level of sex drive highly. [...]
It also doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is innate, although the transgender androgen response (if it’s real) sort of hints that it is. There may well be socialisation or cultural effects as well – there is some evidence, for instance, that certain fetishes are affected by how many siblings you have and how old they are. But many of the differences in sex drive are large effects, and most research these days finds that even major events like schooling and parenting have only a modest impact on other aspects of personality, so I would be surprised if socialisation is the only driver.
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