I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?
Part of why there could be disagreement is that the question is very hard to answer. How does one determine that one group of people has a greater libido than another group?
It would be easy if the two groups were presented with the same choices, and one group consistently chose sex more often than the other. But this historically has not been the case with men and women. Choosing sex typically involved very different consequences and opportunity costs for the different groups.
The next best thing would be to have an empirically verified robust theory that lets you play out counterfactuals. Then you could say, “Yes, in reality the members of groups A and B confront different choices. But, using our robust theory, we can see that were an individual in group A to confront the choices faced by members of B, that individual would choose to do X, in contrast to the members of B, who choose to do Y.” Unfortunately, no such robust theory of the libido was available in historical times.
Libido is a part of personal experience. But answering the question “Who has a stronger libido, men or women?” requires much more than personal experience. Personal experience doesn’t tell me whether I would choose sex more or less often than women do if I were faced with the same choices that they have.
Answering such questions amounts to evaluating counterfactuals. But, historically, people evaluated these counterfactuals without the help of a theory that could be expected to correlate strongly with the truth of the matter. This meant that people gave answers based on intuition and religion and other considerations that track the truth very poorly. It is therefore unsurprising that their answers differed so much from one another.
Part of why there could be disagreement is that the question is very hard to answer. How does one determine that one group of people has a greater libido than another group?
It would be easy if the two groups were presented with the same choices, and one group consistently chose sex more often than the other. But this historically has not been the case with men and women. Choosing sex typically involved very different consequences and opportunity costs for the different groups.
The next best thing would be to have an empirically verified robust theory that lets you play out counterfactuals. Then you could say, “Yes, in reality the members of groups A and B confront different choices. But, using our robust theory, we can see that were an individual in group A to confront the choices faced by members of B, that individual would choose to do X, in contrast to the members of B, who choose to do Y.” Unfortunately, no such robust theory of the libido was available in historical times.
Libido is a part of personal experience. But answering the question “Who has a stronger libido, men or women?” requires much more than personal experience. Personal experience doesn’t tell me whether I would choose sex more or less often than women do if I were faced with the same choices that they have.
Answering such questions amounts to evaluating counterfactuals. But, historically, people evaluated these counterfactuals without the help of a theory that could be expected to correlate strongly with the truth of the matter. This meant that people gave answers based on intuition and religion and other considerations that track the truth very poorly. It is therefore unsurprising that their answers differed so much from one another.