Coitus musings of the sexes

An urban myth goes that men think about sex every seven seconds. That makes it approximately 8,000 times in a day in the waking hours, and we’re not factoring in wet dreams here. Blame this myth on the F1 levels of testosterone careening through the blood stream. Or on Alfred Kinsey, who was probably misquoted from his 1948 study on male sexual behaviour and the improbable statistic, like one of those urban myths, stayed put in the collective consciousness.

I put this to test with my in-house, all-purpose respondent for surveys concerning the male species, namely, the spouse. “Do men think about sex every seven seconds?” I ask. The spouse snorts derisively. Yes. I married a keeper.

Even early man, with his genetic predisposition to spread his seed indiscriminately, could not have possibly been thinking about sex every seven seconds, given he needed to get out of the cave and find himself a convenient beast to kill in order to keep the Mrs and the mewling offspring fed and sated. In modern times, we have social media to keep us even more distracted rather than do prosaic stuff like think about sex every few seconds. That is, if men really thought that often about sex. Probably the only ones who really do think about sex every seven seconds are hormonal adolescent boys.

Research done by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in USA found that while 54 per cent of men said they think about sex many times a day; as high as 43 per cent said they thought about sex just a few times in a week or a month, and whoa, four per cent responded that they thought about sex less than once a month. That’s a long, long way off from the once every seven seconds premise we began with. As for the women, their research found that while women thought about sex every day, several times a day; as high as 67 per cent of women replied that they thought about sex a few times a week or a month, with 14 per cent saying less than once a month. Psst, this study included men and women across ages. The broad conclusion here is that women definitely think about sex much less than men do.

In 2010, UK based Shape Smart conducted a study of 5,000 men and women which found that 36 per cent of men think about sex every half-an-hour, while almost 25 per cent of the women thought about food at least once every half-an-hour. But the survey also found that 10 per cent of women thought about sex every half-an-hour. Ergo, most women think about food with a fervour equaling that with which men think about sex, if one is to believe this survey. I’m sure many women would raise their hands in agreement with that one. After all, I’ve spent many an illicit moments myself with nothing between me and a jar of Nutella.

As for me, I’m getting right back to thinking that one sexy thought for the day, just after I’m done with this x-rated fantasy about a seven course zero calorie meal, which includes dessert. Now that’s orgasmic!

Kiran Manral is the author of six published books across genres. She is also a recovering Nutella addict

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