When Thoughts Turn to Sex, or Not

The Source “Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability,” by Terri D. Fisher, Zachary T. Moore and Mary-Jo Pittenger, The Journal of Sex Research.

IF you believe men think about sex all day long, you’re wrong. According to a study to be published in the January issue of The Journal of Sex Research, the statistic oft-cited by the sex-obsessed or those critical of the sex-obsessed — that men think about sex every seven seconds — is way off.

“The story about this paper that’s been reported in the press has been ‘Men think about sex 19 times a day!’ ” said Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State University at Mansfield, and the study’s lead author. But that isn’t all that much when you consider the study’s participants were college students, those repositories of raging hormones and unfettered urges.

The more interesting finding is that male college students think just as much about food and sleep as they do about sex,” Dr. Fisher said.

To determine how much time people devoted to such thoughts, the researchers asked 283 students age 18 to 25 to use clickers (golf score counters), whenever they contemplated one of life’s three basic needs. Previous studies on the subject were overwhelming retroactively self-reported; researchers asked people after the fact to recollect how often they thought about sex, a method fraught with error.

Of course, all kinds of caveats still apply. Did they worry about clicking too often, or too infrequently, and self-adjust accordingly? What kind of thoughts were they having? Was it, “I’d really like to sleep with my boss’s new assistant” or “I wonder whether squirrels mate in the spring?”

Moreover, people lie, even to themselves, about more than just sex: Did women undercount their thoughts about food, so as not to appear anorexic on the one hand or a gourmand on the other? In what other ways did personal or societal expectations affect the participants’ accuracy?

But the study yielded some interesting insights. The number of thoughts men had about sex each day varied from as few as 1 to as many as 388. Women’s thoughts about sex were in a range of 1 to 140 times a day. These ranges make averages particularly unreliable, with the median number more informative: for men, 19 thoughts about sex daily; for women, 10. (Women thought about food and sleep less frequently as well.)