Good News—Everything You Knew About a Woman’s Sexual Peak Is Probably Wrong

What are people even talking about when they use the term “sexual peak”? Essentially, the phrase refers to the point in your life when you’re feeling the most sexually confident and interested in sex. These two parts might not necessarily coincide, of course — just because you want to have sex doesn’t mean you feel awesome about your body, which has a lot to do with the fact that our traditional ideas about when (and if) someone’s sexual peak arrives are probably inaccurate.

Some of the early research on the sexual peak, or prime, was done by Dr. Alfred Kinsey—you may have heard of his work in the form of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (published in 1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (published in 1953) or references to the Kinsey scale. Kinsey extrapolated that a cis man’s sexual peak occurs around the age of 18, and for cis women in their mid- to late 20s/early 30s. In Kinsey’s version of prime sexuality, though, we’re only talking about when hormone levels—estrogen and testosterone—are highest.

Now, of course, we know sexual desire isn’t just about hormones, and therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that folks who are older than 18 or 25 or 30 are into sex and that some folks never reach what could be considered a sexual peak at all.

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We have truly and deeply bought into and perpetuated the idea that people, particularly women of a certain age, no longer have sexual desire (or are desirable). “For a long time, the general assumption has been that people’s desire decreases as they age,” says Kinkly contributor Tara Struyk. “That in turn may have affected their behavior and feelings toward sex. However, we are increasingly discovering that the body remains capable of pleasure well into old age.”

Asking more and different questions about women, sexuality and culture has led to the formation of new ideas around the sexual peak. It might also simply be that some folks have consistently higher sex drives throughout their lives than other people. There are many reasons sex drives can vary over the course of a lifetime—that is, become higher and lower—including pregnancy, having kids, taking antidepressants, anxiety and the experience of being a woman in a society where misogyny is an active and unrelenting force.

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Is there a bottom line when it comes to a woman’s sexual peak? “Now, it is believed that for a woman, there is no such a age limit,” says Dr. Mashfika N. Alam, a family physician with iCliniq. “It can happen early like men or it can happen later, depending on when she feels confident and comfortable with respect to her sexuality.”

Maybe not surprisingly, both the concept and the reality of the sexual peak is more complicated than Kinsey would have had us believe. Says Struyk,”Libido can be impacted by so many external factors, including general health, stress, life events and your sexual partners. When it comes to sex, everyone has their own story.”

So worry less, then, at least sex-wise, about your best days being behind you.

By Chanel Dubofsky

 

Originally posted on SheKnows.