Women’s sexual desire more likely linked to self-image, not hormones
November 16, 2005 by Andy Merrett
It has often been believed that women who begin losing their sex drive as they age are the victims of hormones.
However, a new study suggests that body image plays a much greater role in libido.
If a woman thinks that she is becoming less attractive, her sex drive reacts and drops.
Dr. Patricia Barthalow Koch [associate professor of biobehavioral health and women’s studies at Penn State University] and her team studied 307 mostly white, heterosexual women aged 35 to 55.
About 21 percent said they were pre-menopausal, 63.5 percent said they were undergoing some menopausal changes and 15.5 percent were past menopause.Nearly 21 percent of the women could not think of even one attractive feature and reported an overall sense of dissatisfaction with their bodies, Koch’s team reported in The Journal of Sex Research. The women especially disliked their stomachs or abdomens, hips, thighs and legs.
Two-thirds of the women said they either desired sex less than 10 years before or that they had sex less often.
Read the full article: Body image, not menopause, causes lack of desire
Why women? Its also same with men too. One thing is there. Nowadays with media and also because of conditioning over centuries the real role of sex has changed….from that of reproduction to pleasure. Added to that, now log on to web and you see thousands of pornography sites and hyped articles about penis and boobs that it leaves a normal person suffer from inferiority complex. Every person ask the same question and all doctors give the same mundane answer…yet the inferiority complex continues. I have just put forth my thought.
Hi Mahesh,
Yes I agree with you. The article looked at women presumably because that’s what they wanted to study on this occasion.
Perhaps it’s another stereotype that women can have a lower self-image than men, but sure, it affects both sexes.
I suppose here they were looking at what effect the menopause has - something men don’t really have to deal with (not in the same way, at least!)
The media has a big deal to do with our image.
I don’t think there’s ever been anything wrong with sex for pleasure - I believe that it was intended as much for that as for reproduction. However, it has been distorted to a great extent.