BUSTED: Myths About Testosterone And Its Link To Sexual Desire In Men And Women

Testosterone is often cast as the manly hormone, the chemical bestower of virility and the reason for men's high sex drives. But new research turns this conventional wisdom on its head. In healthy men, it turns out, testosterone isn't linked to sexual desire at all. And in women, high testosterone is actually associated with less interest in sex with a partner.

Complicating the picture further, while high-testosterone women may be less interested in slipping between the sheets with a lover, high testosterone is linked to greaterinterest in masturbationin healthy women, according to research detailed online in May in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings are unique because most studies of sexual desire and hormones use either animal subjects or focus on people with abnormally low or high testosterone who come into clinics for treatment, said study researcher Sari van Anders, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at the University of Michigan. Healthy individuals are rarely studied, van Anders told LiveScience.

"People have argued that sex research focuses too much on dysfunction and pharmaceutical treatment as opposed to questions like pleasure orrelationshipsor stress," van Anders said. "There is a whole scope of factors that go unstudied." [Busted! 6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond]

Delving into desire

When people do study factors such as stress and body image regarding people's sex lives, they rarely look at hormonal influences at the same time. That's what van Anders did differently. She recruited volunteers from university classes and community fliers to fill out questionnaires on their relationships, their stress and moods, and their own feelings about their bodies and sexuality. These questions were designed to get at factors that influence people's sex lives: How happy are you, generally? How stressed? Are you self-conscious about your body during sex?

The 196 volunteers (105 men and 91 women) also answered questions about how frequently they had partnered sex and masturbated, and how frequently they had the desire to masturbate or to have sex with a partner.

People tend to think of desire as a single phenomenon, but thedesire to have sexmay come from a different place than the desire to masturbate, van Anders said.

"When you're feeling sexual desire for a partner there might be other factors that play into that, for example, how you felt about that partner that day, how attracted you feel to that partner, how attractive you feel to that partner, your relationship and things like that," van Anders said. [6 Great Things Sex Can Do For You]

Solitary desire, on the other hand, may be more internal and less influenced by social factors like relationship satisfaction, she said.

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BUSTED: Myths About Testosterone And Its Link To Sexual Desire In Men And Women

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