Testosterone is often cast as the manly hormone, the chemical bestower of virility and the reason for men's high sex drives. But new research turns this conventional wisdom on its head. In healthy men, it turns out, testosterone isn't linked to sexual desire at all. And in women, high testosterone is actually associated with less interest in sex with a partner.
Complicating the picture further, while high-testosterone women may be less interested in slipping between the sheets with a lover, high testosterone is linked to greater interest in masturbation in healthy women, according to research detailed online in May in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
The findings are unique because most studies of sexual desire and hormones use either animal subjects or focus on people with abnormally low or high testosterone who come into clinics for treatment, said study researcher Sari van Anders, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at the University of Michigan. Healthy individuals are rarely studied, van Anders told LiveScience.
"People have argued that sex research focuses too much on dysfunction and pharmaceutical treatment as opposed to questions like pleasure or relationships or stress," van Anders said. "There is a whole scope of factors that go unstudied." [Busted! 6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond]
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