Women's desire, a men's problem?

Research on over 67,000 people in Estonia has just overturned a belief that seemed untouchable: female sexual desire is not only lower than male sexual desire throughout life, but it also drops dramatically after the age of twenty, while for men the peak comes around the age of forty. And here comes the shocking part: society tends to tell women that if their libido drops, they are the ones who have to find a solution — as if they were "broken" or defective. But what if it were the other way around? What if the problem isn't the woman who desires less, but the expectation, almost always male, that her libido must necessarily be equal or constant? This is the thesis of journalist Maïa Mazaurette, who invites us to turn the question around: is the pressure on the female libido really a women's issue — or does it stem from the way men, and society more generally, conceive of desire? In the article, Mazaurette cites the results published in Nature: men and women are followed for decades, and the data is clearer than ever. But she doesn't limit herself to numbers. She also talks about personal experience: about how many women feel like they are wrong because they can't "keep up," and how the solution offered is always "you have to try harder," as if desire were an individual responsibility rather than a relational or social dynamic. There is one striking detail: the peak of the female libido comes twenty years before that of the male, yet all mainstream narratives continue to suggest that it is the woman who has to chase. A fact you can throw into any conversation: according to the survey, female desire drops dramatically after the age of twenty, yet the pressure to "catch up" is all on women's shoulders. One of the most powerful phrases in the article reads: “Il problème n'est pas que les femmes désirent moins, c'est qu'on leur demande de désirer autant.” Translated: the problem is not that women desire less, it is that they are asked to desire as much as men. This is precisely where the reversal lies: what if we were the ones who had to change the way we think about female desire, instead of pushing women to conform to a standard that does not represent them? But there is one aspect that almost no one addresses: what if, instead of seeing the decline in desire as a "disease" to be cured, we considered it a natural variation — and left room for more honest conversations, without blaming anyone? The sentence that sticks with you is simple: women's desire is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be respected. If this perspective has made you see the topic in a new light, you can press I'm In on Lara Notes: it's not a like, it's a way of saying that this idea is now yours. And if you find yourself talking about it with someone — maybe when the classic joke about the female libido comes up at dinner — you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline, so it stays in your important stories on Lara Notes. This Note comes from Le Monde and saved you 1 minute.