Study: Men Think About Sex Far Less Than Every 7 Seconds
A new study out of Ohio State University has found that men think about sex more frequently than women do, but not nearly as much as popular cultural myths would indicate.
Some say that men think about sex every seven seconds, but a new study titled “Sex on the Brain?” has found that young men think about sex, on average, only about 19 times per day. In comparison, young women reported thinking about sex an average of only 10 times per day. The study is to appear in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Sex Research.
In addition to sex, researchers found that men also think about food and sleep more frequently than women do. On average, the male participants in the study thought of food about 18 times daily and sleep 11 times, while women thought of food only 15 times per day and nine times for sleep.
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Terri Fisher, lead author in the study and psychology professor at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus, told The Christian Post via email on Tuesday the study began with a discussion in her Human Sexuality class.
“All of the previous studies [about sexual thoughts] but one had relied on retrospective self-reports or estimates,” she said. She indicated to her class she would be interested in studying the issue further, and students Zachary T. Moore and Mary-Jo Pittenger volunteered their assistance.
The research was conducted with the participation of 163 female and 120 male college students, all between the ages of 18 and 25. At the beginning of the study, each participant was asked to fill out a questionnaire which addressed a number of factors – feelings about sex, sexual behavioral tendencies, level of sexual desire and more – in order to gauge their thoughts about sexuality and a number of other factors.
Each student was then given a “golf tally counter” device, and was assigned one topic to keep track of – either sex, food or sleep. Each time one of the 163 students who had been assigned to the sex category had any sort of sexual thoughts, for example, they were to add another tally to the device.
The food and sleep questions were designed to disguise the true focus of the study – sexual thoughts – but ultimately helped reveal that men think about biological needs other than sex more frequently than women do as well.
“The participants in the study are at the age at which gender differences in sexuality are likely to be greater than at any other age,” said Fisher. “The importance of this study is that it indicates that the sex differences are smaller than the general public has believed, and that men seem to give equal attention to various need-related thoughts, not just sex.”
The study also found that each man and woman can vary greatly in the number of times they think about sex in a day when compared to others of the same sex. The men in the study thought about sex anywhere from one time to 388 times per day, while women varied from one to 140 times.
“That certainly implies that men are not all alike when it comes to sex, and neither are women,” Fisher said. “When young men are exposed to the stereotype that all men think about is sex, they might feel less than normal if that is not true of them. The results of our study indicate that this is not really true of anyone! Even those who had the most frequent thoughts were not close to approaching every seven seconds.”
In the conclusion of the report, Fisher suggests that our culture's portrayal of men as almost always thinking about sex would be more accurate to also include thoughts of food, sleep and a number of other topics.
