A more interesting elaboration was based on man's sexual propensities. In the papers of George Q. Cannon there is a memorandum that compares the principles of "amativeness" (what we would call the sex drive) to the appetite for food and sleep, noting that there are individual differences among people:

The principle is stronger in man than in woman, and sometimes when there is an excess of this passion it becomes almost uncontrollable and leads in many instances to those disgraceful and indecent developments that are so common among mankind... as it is not a crime in any man to possess this exuberance and unnatural desire for sexual association God provided a system of polygamy that where this excess prevailed it might be met on a legitimate principle, and thus while the demands of nature might be met, decency and propriety might be exhibited in all the relations of life.

Although modern sexologists would certainly regard this view of male-female differences as oversimplified, to see the sexual drive as natural and healthy was in some ways quite advanced for the time.