While researching my book, Sluts: The Truth About Slutshaming And What We Can Do To Fight It, I discovered something ironic (and frustrating) about all of this. It turns out sex drives aren’t even real. The idea of libido or ‘sex drive’ is not scientifically backed, which is something that has long been known by sexologists and was extensively covered by Dr Emily Nagoski in her book Come As You Are and Dr Karen Gurney in her book Mind The Gap. Here’s why: in science, ‘drive’ is a word used to describe the motivational system we have that helps us navigate life or death situations, such as the drive to find food, warmth or shelter. Something within us pushes us to search for the things that we most need to stay alive – and we don’t need sex for survival.

Instead of drive, what we really have is a desire for sex, and that desire to have sex exists on a moving spectrum rather than a scale where it can be ‘low’ or ‘high’. One singular person is unlikely to have a high sex drive their entire life. Instead, it moves up and down constantly, both for men and for women. I describe myself as having a high sex drive (because that’s the language we’re all the most used to) but I know that, in reality, my desire comes in waves as it does for everyone. Today, I have no desire for sex at all because I’m tired. I’ve gone days without thinking about sex because it’s not my priority. Next week, I might be back to my horny-every-hour self. And most people are the same way – up and down.

These misconceptions about drive and desire punish women; we allow men to behave ‘promiscuously’ and wave it off with phrases like ‘boys will be boys’, while women are called sluts. That said, it does punish men and many can feel forced to live up to these extremely high expectations in their sex lives and feel emasculated when that’s not their reality. If a man is in a period of low sexual desire, for example, he might feel abnormal, while a woman might read less into it because of the ways we’ve been socialised to interact with our sexuality.

Understanding how desire works is the first step to freeing ourselves from arbitrary ‘measurement systems’ like sex drives and moralising sexual behaviour. My hope, in the not-too-distant future, is that the idea of a ‘sex drive’ and the idea of one being ‘too high’ or ‘too low’ will seem outdated. In the meantime, the more that people of all genders and levels of sexual desire talk about sex openly, the closer we get to that reality.

Sluts: The Truth About Slutshaming And What We Can Do To Fight It (Penguin; £14.99) is out now.

“I’m a woman with a high ‘sex drive’ – here’s how it has affected my relationships”