Sexy Time How Often Men and Women Think About the Deed
How often do YOU think about “gettin’ it on”? Don’t worry . . . we won’t tell anyone! It’ll be our little secret.
OK, hold the phone sex – wait, I mean hold the phone. We’re not trying to get kinky here! But it is a relevant question – one that you may think you know the answer to, but may be dead wrong.
Myth or Fact?
What you may have heard is that men think about sex all day long, every six or seven seconds, or every minute of the day. On the other hand, you may have heard that women rarely think about sex at all! While it may seem right on, if a study that was recently published in The Journal of Sex Research is to be believed, the statistics and beliefs regarding men and women and their frequency of sex-related thoughts is extremely wrong.
Details of the Study
The study’s lead author Terri Fisher is a psychology professor at Ohio State University in Mansfield. For the study, Professor Fisher and fellow colleagues from the University gathered together a large group of 283 college students, all between the ages of 18 and 25. It is important to note here that at these ages, raging hormones run rampant and urges surface more frequently than ever.
To keep track of how often the students thought about sex, each one was handed a golf-style score counter and was instructed to check off each time they thought about any of life’s three basic needs: food, sleep and sex. The experiments produced some interesting results. Curiously, the male college students thought about food and sleep just as often as they thought of sex. Isn’t that interesting!
What Do YOU Find Sexy?
Even with the instant recording of this type of test, there is still a chance for misinformation. How do you define “sex thoughts,” exactly? Would you include any of the times you wondered how ducks mate (don’t Google it, seriously!), or is it only the human sex thoughts like fantasies about your boss? Additionally, there is a chance that some people were either too self conscious or too confident and marked off more or less than was actually true, providing slightly exaggerated results.
What the results did show is that men thought about sex as little as once per day and as much as 388 times a day. Women, on the other hand, thought about the horizontal hula as infrequently as once a day just like the men, but as much as 140 times a day. While these extreme ranges can make accurate measurements difficult, averaging them out provides a more reliable median; on average, men thought about sex about 19 times a day, while women think about it around 10 times each day.
One thing to take into consideration is the fact that gender is not the major factor in frequent sex-related thoughts; rather it’s a person’s comfort with sexuality in general and their individual degree of promiscuity. Unfortunately for Dr. Fisher and colleagues, when a follow-up test was performed on older Americans, not enough people followed through with the entire study and only the women ended up recording results, which is an interesting note in itself.
