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LucasSloan comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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What does the word "nymphomaniacs" mean? How do you judge someone to be sufficiently obsessed with sex to be a nymphomaniac? I think a lot of your confusion might be coming from you tendency to label people with this word with such negative connotations.
Does the question "what is with women who want to have sex [five times a week*] and will undertake to get it?" resolve any of your confusion? You should expect that those women who have more sex to be more salient wrt people talking about them, so they would seem more prominent, even if only 2% of the population.
*not sure about this number, just picked one that seemed alright.
Five times a week wouldn't be remotely enough to diagnose. It has to be problematic and clinically significant.
I think that's kinda my point. I was attempting to point out that he's probably confusing the term "nymphomaniac" with its negative connotations, with "likes to have [vaguely defined 'a lot'] of sex."
"Nymphomaniac" hasn't been a clinical diagnosis for a long time. In my experience, the word is now most commonly used colloquially to mean "a woman who likes to have a lot of sex". Whether this has negative connotations depends on your attitude to sex, I suppose.
Picking a number for this seems like a really bad idea. For most modern clinical definitions of disorders what matters is whether it interferes with normal daily behavior. Even that is questionable since what constitutes interference is very hard to tell.
Societies have had very different notions of what is acceptable sexuality for both males and females. Until fairly recent homosexuality was considered a mental disorder in the US. And in the Victorian era, women were routinely diagnosed as nymphomaniacs for showing pretty minimal signs of sexuality.