Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System evaluated sexual activity and satisfaction as reported by 806 older women who are part of the Rancho Bernardo Study (RBS) cohort, a group of women who live in a planned community near San Diego and whose health has been tracked for medical research for 40 years. The study measured the prevalence of current sexual activity; the characteristics associated with sexual activity including demographics, health, and hormone use; frequency of arousal, lubrication, orgasm, and pain during sexual intercourse; and sexual desire and satisfaction in older women.

The median age in the study was 67 years and 63% were postmenopausal. Half the respondents who reported having a partner had been sexually active in the last 4 weeks. The likelihood of sexual activity declined with increasing age. The majority of the sexually active women, 67.1%, achieved orgasm most of the time or always. The youngest and oldest women in the study reported the highest frequency of orgasm satisfaction.

40% of all women stated that they never or almost never felt sexual desire, and one third of the sexually active women reported low sexual desire. Lead investigator Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD, Distinguished Professor and Chief, Division of Epidemiology, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, comments, “Despite a correlation between sexual desire and other sexual function domains, only 1 in 5 sexually active women reported high sexual desire. Approximately half of the women aged 80 years or more reported arousal, lubrication, and orgasm most of the time, but rarely reported sexual desire. In contrast with traditional linear model in which desire precedes sex, these results suggest that women engage in sexual activity for multiple reasons, which may include affirmation or sustenance of a relationship.

written by Reproductive System and Sexual Disorders

The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The research involved 96 male 103 female undergraduates, who were put through a “speed-meeting” exercise — talking for three minutes to each of five potential opposite-sex mates. Before the conversations, the participants rated themselves on their own attractiveness and were assessed for the level of their desire for a short-term sexual encounter. After each “meeting,” they rated the partner on a number of measures, including physical attractiveness and sexual interest in the participant. The model had the advantage of testing the participants in multiple interactions.

The results: Men looking for a quick hookup were more likely to overestimate the women’s desire for them. Men who thought they were hot also thought the women were hot for them — but men who were actually attractive, by the women’s ratings, did not make this mistake. The more attractive the woman was to the man, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest. And women tended to underestimate men’s desire.

A hopeless mess? Evolutionarily speaking, maybe not, say the psychologists. Over millennia, these errors may in fact have enhanced men’s reproductive success.

“There are two ways you can make an error as a man,” says Perilloux. “Either you think, ‘Oh, wow, that woman’s really interested in me’ — and it turns out she’s not. There’s some cost to that,” such as embarrassment or a blow to your reputation. The other error: “She’s interested, and he totally misses out. He misses out on a mating opportunity. That’s a huge cost in terms of reproductive success.” The researchers theorize that the kind of guy who went for it, even at the risk of being rebuffed, scored more often — and passed on his overperceiving tendency to his genetic heirs. The casual sex seekers “face slightly different adaptive problems,” says Perilloux. “They are limited mainly by the number of consenting sex partners — so overestimation is even more important.” Only the actually attractive men probably had no need for misperception.

The research contains some messages for daters of both sexes, says Perilloux: Women should know the risks and “be as communicative and clear as possible.” Men: “Know that the more attracted you are, the more likely you are to be wrong about her interest.” Again, that may not be as bad as it sounds, she says — “if warning them will prevent heartache later on.”

written by Reproductive System and Sexual Disorders

The full article will be published in the October issue of the Journal of Sex Research.

“A very consistent pattern was observed across all six countries we surveyed — as the number of decisions in which a women had the final say increased, the mean and median time since most recent sex also increased by three- to 100-fold,” said Michelle Hindin, PhD, MHS, lead author of the study and an associate professor at the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. “The more decisions a woman reported making on her own, as compared to joint decision making, the less likely she was to have sex and the longer it was since she last had sexual intercourse.”

Researchers analyzed nationally representative data from the Demographic and Health Surveys in Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe that asked survey participants to indicate the day, week, month and year they last had sexual intercourse. Survey participants were also asked to indicate the person in the household who typically had the final say on the following decisions: respondent’s health care, large household purchases, household purchases for daily needs and the respondent visiting family and friends. Researchers also examined socio-demographic and relationship factors such as age, wealth, parity, husband’s residence, and marital duration and found that most standard socio-demographic variables were not consistently associated with the timing of most recent sexual intercourse.

The majority of women participating in the survey reported sexual intercourse within the last month. Patterns of decision-making power varied by country, with husbands having the final say on more decisions in Malawi and Mali more than in other countries. Ghanaian and Rwandan women reported having the final say in more decisions than women in the other countries, whereas Zimbabwean women reported the most joint decision making. For men, making autonomous decisions

written by Reproductive System and Sexual Disorders