Becoming a father linked to reduced testosterone in men – and less s ex
Lower levels of testosterone may help men focus more on family commitments and less on looking for new s exual partners
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Ian Sample, science correspondent, in Chicago
theguardian.com, Friday 14 February 2014 17.30 GMT
The connection between testosterone and s exual activity will take more work to tease out, but Gettler speculates that lower levels of the hormone might help men to focus on their family commitments. The men's decision to be actively involved in fathering seems to play a role, as men who have children unknowingly do not experience falls in their testosterone.
"If their testosterone goes down, the men might be more oriented towards their family's needs and not getting into conflicts with other men or looking for new mates," Gettler said.
An alternative explanation might be that wives found their husbands less s exually appealing when their testosterone levels dropped. Levels of the hormone began to return to normal around a year after men had children.
子供をもって親父になる決心をした男のテストロンは減少する、と。家族に集中して、他の野郎と喧嘩する必要がなくなるせいか、あるいは、テストロンが減少すると女性が魅力を感じなくなって、好都合なのであろう、と。
February 14, 2014 | 11:55 AM | Dr. Aline Zoldbrod
Some 70-Something Women Having ‘Best S ex Ever’? Really? (Yes.)
FILED UNDER: aging, s exuality
• The National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) interviewed a nationally representative group of 3005 individuals between the ages of 57 and 85 in 2005-6. Almost 84% of men and 62% of women ages 57-64 engaged in s exual activity over the past year. It is true that as the next decade approached, and the one after that, s exual activity diminished. But it by no means went down to a point where people in their seventies and eighties had no s ex.
• In 2009, AARP did a survey on s exual satisfaction in midlife and older adults. In answering the question,“How satisfied are you with your s ex life?,” among men 60-69 years of age, 13% answered extremely satisfied, and 39% answered “somewhat satisfied.”Among men age 70+, 5% answered “extremely satisfied”, and 21% answered “somewhat satisfied.”
• But check out the statistics for women. Among those age 60-69, 18% answered extremely satisfied and 23% answered somewhat satisfied. But among women aged 70 and up, 17% still answered “extremely satisfied,” with another 10% saying “somewhat satisfied.”
６０代のの女性では、１８％の女性はセックスに非常に満足している、といい、２３％の女性がそこそこ満足している、と。７０代の女性にいたっては、１７％が非常に満足している、といい、１０％はそこそこ満足している、と。
Does equality kill s ex?
There's a reason why opposites attract, says Lori Gottlieb. She argues that couples who are best friends and split the chores and childcare have far less s ex
The Guardian, Friday 14 February 2014 11.55 GMT
A study called Egalitarianism, Housework and S exual Frequency in Marriage, which appeared in the American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the s ex in these marriages will improve too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less s ex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterised as feminine chores such as folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming – the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do – then couples had s ex 1.5 fewer times a month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, such as taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn't just frequency that was affected, either – at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labour – meaning the greater the husband's share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones – the greater his wife's reported s exual satisfaction
Brines believes the quandary many couples find themselves in comes down to this: "The less gender differentiation, the less s exual desire." In other words, in an attempt to be gender-neutral, we may have become gender-neutered.
This isn't to say that egalitarian heteros exual couples aren't happy. Lynn Prince Cooke, professor of social policy at the University of Bath, found that American couples who share breadwinning and household duties are less likely to divorce. And Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, says that having a partner who does housework and childcare has become a bigger factor in women's marital satisfaction than many other factors that used to predict marital happiness, such as a man's level of income or shared religious beliefs.
The chores study seems to show that women do want their husbands to help out – just in gender-specific ways.
In fact, she continued, "Most of us get turned on at night by the very things that we'll demonstrate against during the day."
Power – and the act of balancing it – is a common topic with the couples I see in therapy. They are eager to talk about levelling the domestic playing field but tend to feel awkward about bringing the concept of power into conversations about s ex, mostly because it can feel so confusing.
One woman in her late 30s, for instance, who has been in a peer marriage for 10 years, said during couples therapy that when she asked her husband to be more forceful, "rougher" in bed, the result was comical.
"He was trying to do what I wanted," she explained, "but he was so … careful. I don't want him to ask, 'Are you OK?' I want him not to care if I'm OK, to just, you know, not be the good husband and take charge." And yet, she said, his caring and his concern that she's OK with what he's doing are what she loves so much about him in every other area of their marriage, ranging from which brand of toilet paper to buy to what to feed their children to where their money is spent and which nights each of them can stay late at work. "I don't want him to take charge like that with anything else!" she said.
男女平等で、男女区別なく家事をする夫婦は、月にセックする回数が伝統的な男女の役割分担する夫婦に比べて少なかった、と。
男女の役割分担をなくしてしまうことによって、性的な男女関係の意識も減少してしまうのではないか、と。
伝統的な女性がやる家事をやってくれる夫は感謝されるし、いい夫婦ではあるが、しかし、ある程度の男女差の区別をつけて、家事の公平な分担をしたほうが、夜の生活もうまくいうようである。
夜は野生の雄雌にもどらないと、燃えない、ということも関係するようだ。
