The research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours.
Men do not think about sex the whole day as they also think about other biological needs like sleeping and eating, a new study has suggested.
The research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours.
In the study, led by Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus, the median number of young men’s thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.
As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and sleep almost 11 times per day, compared to women’s median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 and a half times, respectively.
The study involved 163 female and 120 male college students between the ages of 18 and 25 who were enrolled in a psychology research participation program.
Of those, 59 were randomly assigned to track thoughts about food, 61 about sleep and 163 about sex.
Researchers then gave each student a tally counter device and told those assigned to the sexual thoughts condition to click the device to maintain a count their of thoughts about sex. They were told to count a thought about any aspect of sex: sexual activity of any kind, fantasies and erotic images, sexual memories and any arousing stimuli.
Others were instructed to use the device to record thoughts about eating that included food, hunger, cravings, snacking or cooking, and thoughts about sleep that included dreaming, sleeping, napping, going to bed or needing rest.
In raw numbers, male participants recorded between one and 388 daily thoughts about sex, compared to the range of female thoughts about sex of between one and 140 times per day.
Fisher said previous research about sexual thoughts might differ from her study, which involved actual tallies of thought, while older research was based on participants’ retrospective estimates in a questionnaire.
The study will be published in the Journal of Sex Research.
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