When I was growing up, various people used to tell me, “A woman really hits her sexual peak during her 30s.” I have no idea why people thought that this was important information. I have no idea what the actual segue was that allowed it to come into any conversation at all. I just know that it was said and that lots of people believed it. A woman was sort of sexual in her 20s, but hotter than a whore in Houston once she hit her 30s.
Because of this, I was fascinated yesterday when a study came across my desk proving this very notion.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin studied 827 women and split them into three groups:
- Young women (age 18 to 26) who were in their peak fertility years
- Mature to Middle aged women (aged 27 to 45) whose fertility was starting to ebb
- Middle Aged to Senior women (age 46+) who had no eggs left
Then they asked these women a series of questions about their sexual attitudes and behaviors. As it turned out, it was the women in the middle group who were friskiest. They had more sexual fantasies, and their fantasies were more intense. They thought about sex more often. And they were more open to sex of any kind—they had more one-night stands and more casual sex than women who were younger or older.
The researchers suspect that this heightened sex drive was a direct result of the women’s dwindling fertility. Whether they wanted babies or not, their bodies were nudging them to, “Procreate, procreate, procreate” because “time is of the essence.”
