I'm currently having a hard time finding the study, but I distinctly recall reading an article that tried to address the question of relative sex drives by looking at the sex drives of people who took hormones as part of the gender reassignment process. Female->male sex changes reported greatly increased libido when they began taking testosterone.

I can see why one might be reluctant to generalize to the population as a whole, but it is at least weak evidence that the current conventional wisdom correctly reflects the difference in sex drives today.

I wouldn't trust the quoted article very much. It sounds like a narrative constructed around a few datapoints that are not necessarily representative (or even authentic), and certainly not like the writing of someone with in-depth knowledge of the subject. In particular, the concluding claim about ideas "made up by the church 400 years ago" is completely absurd -- by that time, there had been no such thing as "the church" in the West for almost a century.

The subject is certainly interesting, but in order to come up with any sensible theories, it would be necessary to do a far broader and in-depth study of all kinds of extant sources that offer relevant information. The fact that some people published various crackpot theories that gained some following doesn't mean that the prevailing opinion was the same, even among the intellectual classes, let alone in the general population. Just think what an absurdly distorted view of the prevailing 20th century opinion on any subject could be created by focusing selectively on various fringe ideas that gained some traction at a certain point in time.

I don't remember the exact source, but I've done Web searches for relevant scientific literature, and today, when psychologists survey people (admittedly, mostly WEIRD people), they do indeed confirm the conventional wisdom: the statistically average man has more interest in sex than the statistically average woman.

I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?

Perhaps because women weren't allowed much say in the writing of medical books at that time? I may be wrong, but there weren't many women doctors around to begin with before the 20th century.

An acquaintance of mine said about this thread: "no-one seems to be raising the idea that there may be strong cultural factors related to gendered expressions of libido".

To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with "natural" sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.

Right now (I haven't researched the subject in too much depth), I'm inclined to believe that women's libido has never been considered more powerful than men's, and that the "evidence" presented here was cherry-picked or over-interpreted.

Does anybody have a link to a more thorough research?

It should be noted that if you try to fit two multidimensional quantities over a single dimension, one is greater than the other depending on which axis you do the projection. In the case of a married couple in which the woman wants to have sex with her husband every single day, while he is bored and avoids her because of the lack of variety, who has more sex drive?

Besides, making studies without understanding the generation of female attraction is rather moot: the experiment where moderately attractive men simply ask women for sex makes my inner seducer smirk. In my experience, healthy women experience a sharp surge in sex drive, both in frequence and in variety, when they feel they are in safe environment, both from physical injuries and from social stigmatization.

Has anyone considered the idea that many people judge how sex crazed the opposite sex is by the interest the opposite sex gives them? All stereotypes are true after all, what if most are starved for attention but the few who are getting lots and lots of attention aren't socially celebrated or perhaps even accepted? What stereotypes will form about the genders in such conditions? I mean X, Y and everyone I know that I've asked say they aren't getting any. Gee I guess the opposite sex just generally isn't interested in it.

Couldn't changing perceptions of female or male horniness be partially due to changes in the balance of the sexual marketplace?

The evidence in the article is pretty scant. I'm not sure I'd read much into "horny ladies" abounding in fiction (or joke books). My guess is that the ancients, the Victorians and we moderns are all wrong when it comes to sexual desire, male and female. Sexual desire is a sort of appetite (like hunger and thirst) but it's the only appetite we suffer no consequences from not satiating. It's subject to tremendous variability. People have different levels of sexual desire at different times throughout the day, from one week or month to another, it changes as we get older, it varies between individuals and I don't doubt that the prevailing sexual culture changes it immensely (we have to eat and yet food culture has a tremendous influence on how we satiate hunger including some cultures systematically under-eating). It's possible (although unlikely) that for many women sexual desire was a sign of a disorder in the context of the prevailing sexual culture of the Victorian era.

Its an interesting pattern that the people who are most inclined to claim women are uninterested in sex are the same groups as those who most restrict womens sexual choices and punish those deviating from the norm.

If it were true that women had lower sex drives there would be no need for repressive cultures to have mechanisms to limit them, any more than they have mechanisms to limit flying.

However, if ones goal, for whatever reason is to restrict female sexual choice then propagating a belief that sexual desire among women is abnormal is instrumentally useful for that goal.

It's pretty easy to see why the Victorians were wrong. The social norms (especially middle class) cherished female chastity, since chastity is an important virtue for monogamous societies. This is because men are more reluctant to form long-term mating commitments to women with a reputation for strong sex desire (this increases paternal uncertainty). So over centuries, the parochial assumption that women were genuinely chaste would have become common among men. Now that female chastity is out, marriage rates are declining, and we seem to be evolving to a more "forager" sexual style (this trend is currently incomplete).

I've also read anti-porn radical feminists who argue that women only pretend to accept male use of porn (or bondage/discipline in the bedroom) to seem "cool", when really they find it disgusting/evil.

I'd already seen the evidence for this, but your link is broken, and was apparently less than rigorous. You may wish to replace it.