It's hard to say, because you have to account for both gender and geography. I'll try to give a general overview. Upper class women, by and large were not very sexualized. Quite the reverse. Women had become the keepers of morality, and part of that was dismissing any feminine sex drive. Famously we have Queen Victoria saying "lie back and think of England" during sex (Note. It has been brought to my attention that she did not actually say this). Most marriages for the upper class were arranged anyway, and were not really companionate marriages like we have today, where husband and wife are expected to be in love and best friends. A husband and wife to-be might have only met on a handful of occasions before they married. To the contrary, women's most powerful emotional attachments were not to men but to other women, usually relatives and childhood friends. The upper class society was very homo-social, for both men and women and the language they use in letters with each other is filled with examples of love and longing for their touch and whatnot. Now, there has been some speculation that these relationships were occasionally sexual, but it's important to remember that they did not have an understanding of lesbianism like we do today. Furthermore, we just don't have a whole lot of evidence for it. While some of these were almost certainly sexual, we can't know how common that was.

On the other hand, while women were assumed to be pure and chaste, men were expected to have certain sexual needs. It was fairly common for men to have premarital sex. The pleasures of women were not particularly important, or even acknowledged in many cases, so men went wherever they could get some. Brothels and courtesans were not that uncommon, and in many cases they were legal, or at least quasi-legal. Furthermore, men sometimes engaged in homosexual release with each other. Again, they didn't think of this as "gay" simply because "gay" did not exist yet as a concept. As long as a man fulfilled his manly responsibilities to his wife and create children then it didn't really matter. James Henry Hammond, the famous southern planter, had sex with his roommate in college, for instance, and never thought of that as being particularly weird. Now, he was a pretty deviant character in many other ways, but that wasn't one of them.

Geography plays a pretty important role here, especially before the Civil War. Men from planter families often had sex with slave women. The notion that they had certain sexual needs was still true, and slaves were their property, so they frequently availed themselves of them. It wasn't necessarily talked about a whole lot, but some slave traders hiked up the price on particularly good looking slaves since they would be used explicitly for sexual purposes. Not to mention that in the South, there was a very strong connection between masculinity and sexual potency, so men would show off their manliness through sex and sexual exploits.

All of this is just about the upper and middle classes, however. The lower classes had very different ideas about sexuality, though there were some cultural similarities. Lower class men bought whores because they had needs and lower class women were still supposed to be chaste keepers of morality. This thinking was so common that rape cases on the streets were frequently dismissed, since everyone knew that men couldn't resist their desires and a woman walking alone should know better.

Sources: Kerber, The Republican Mother, Rosenberg, "Female World of Love and Ritual", Cott, "Passionless", Stansell, City of Women, Bleser, Secret and Sacred, Baptist, "'Cuffy, 'Fancy Maid,' and 'One-Eyed Men'", Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor. There's a bunch more, but these are the ones that spring immediately to mind.