The Mercy Sex Study
> Women diagnosed with a complete lack of sexual desire were still logging multiple sexual events before receiving any medication. Guptan and Simon sought to quantify this baseline activity, which they termed mercy sex. [...] the baseline frequency of sexual events remained highly consistent. Across the different trial groups, the women reported an average of 2.5 to 2.9 sexually satisfying events per 28 days. This rate showed very little variation regardless of whether the women were naturally menopausal, surgically menopausal, or taking hormone therapies.
> Guptan and Simon suggest a biopsychosocial framework to explain why women with low desire consistently engage in sexual activity. From an evolutionary perspective, women may participate in sex to maintain stability and prevent their partners from seeking intimacy elsewhere.
> The authors hypothesize that women may have learned to keep their male partners monogamous by fulfilling their faster-paced reproductive desires.
> One qualitative study cited by the authors featured a patient who reported forcing herself to have sex to prevent her husband from satisfying his needs with someone else.
> The authors suggest that women might also use sex as a tool to fulfill a psychological need for emotional closeness
> The authors reference Rosemary Basson’s circular model of sexual response, a psychological framework suggesting that female sexual arousal is highly nuanced and often driven by a need for emotional connection rather than spontaneous physical hunger.
> Because men are socially conditioned to associate physical sex with emotional closeness, women may engage in sex simply to maintain that emotional bond.
> The analyzed data relies on samples limited to heterosexual women in monogamous relationships. The proposed explanations regarding partner dynamics and evolutionary pressures do not reflect the experiences of women in non-heterosexual relationships or those without regular partners.
Guptan, N., & Simon, J. A. (2026). Quantification of “Mercy Sex” in Heterosexual Women. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 52(5), 474–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2026.2651862
You’ve got researchers looking at hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) women who are having sex two or three times a month and calling that the baseline for no desire...while suggesting that HSDD women are having sex to keep their partners monogamous.