It’s a stat that gets passed around as e-mail-forward wisdom: men think about sex every seven seconds. But it’s not true.
A new study out of Ohio State University tracked 163 female and 120 male college students as they used a handheld tally counter to record thoughts about food, sleep, and sex. Here’s what they found:
1. Every Seven Seconds
Everybody’s heard that men think about sex “every seven seconds.” But is it true? Does thinking about sex that much really help men reproduce? It would seem so, but the fact is that’s not what the research shows.
A new study published in the Journal of Sex Research debunks this myth. Researchers asked college-age participants to use clickers to tally thoughts they had about sex, sleep, food and other subjects. They also categorized each thought by its emotional intensity.
The researchers found that on average, men think about sex 19 times a day, which isn’t as many as the popular rumor suggests. They think about sex more often than women, but they also think about food and sleep proportionally more. A person’s comfort with sexuality was a strong predictor of how frequently they think about sex.
The results show that the Kinsey Institute’s oft-quoted statistic is a complete myth. While 54 percent of men say they think about sex several times a day, the vast majority of them prefer to limit these thoughts to a few times a week and less than once a month.
2 – These words are from the website’s editor https://xxxteenssex.com. 19 Times a Day
While the oft-quoted statistic that men think about sex every seven seconds can be put to rest, they do think about it a lot, a new study shows. Researchers from Ohio State University recruited 163 women and 120 men to monitor their thoughts for a week. They assigned each person a tally counter for food, sleep or sex, and asked them to hit a button whenever the thought came up. On average, male students tallied 19 sex thoughts a day. But the number varied wildly, with one man tallying 388 and a few women hitting 140 sexual thoughts.
Another thing the research showed is that people aren’t as good at estimating how often they think about these things, which may explain some of the skewed headline-grabbing results from previous studies. Also, the volunteers knew they were going to be asked about their thoughts, which could lead them to overestimate how often they think about sex. In the end, sex wasn’t on people’s minds as much as food or sleep. On average, they thought about the former 19 times a day and the latter 10 times.
3. Ten Times a Day
Men may think of sex more than women do, but not as much as you might have thought. The oft-cited stat that men think about sex every seven seconds has been largely debunked, according to new research published in the Journal of Sex Research.
The study tracked the thoughts of a group of college students over a week using clickers that asked them to hit a button whenever they thought of sex, food, or sleep. Among the 163 male and female participants ages 18 to 25, the median number of sex thoughts was 19 per day, with women not far behind with 10.
Of course, having to rely on a clicker to track sex thoughts might have introduced some bias into the results. Fortunately, researchers tried to control for this by giving some of the subjects smartphones that rang at random intervals to prompt them to record what they were thinking about. But even in this control condition, the researchers found that people think about sex less than they do about other topics like work or money, and far more often than about other physical desires such as hunger or thirst.
4. Three Times a Week
Despite the widespread myth that men think about sex every seven seconds, new research shows that most guys only think about it three times a week. A study by researchers at Ohio State University, published in January 2012 in the Journal of Sex Research, tracked 163 male and female unmarried heterosexual OSU students between 18 and 25 who wore clickers that they used to track their thoughts about food, sleep and sex each day for a week. Each time they thought about a topic, they clicked the button. On average, the men in the study clicked a total of 19 times per day when thinking about sex, while women thought about sex about 10 times each day.
However, individual results varied significantly. One male student clocked in 388 sexual thoughts per day, while another recorded only three thoughts. When the researchers analyzed questionnaire data, they found that the number of sex thoughts was related to participants’ levels of erotophilia and comfort with their own sexuality. Other factors, such as age, education and family background, did not appear to affect how often participants thought about sex.
5. Less Than Once a Month
The oft-repeated statistic that men think about sex every seven seconds can be put to bed, according to researchers in Ohio. They gave 283 college students clickers and asked them to hit one of three buttons—food, sleep or sex—every time they had one of those thoughts. (One of the male participants clicked 388 times, so that must be a lot of naughty thoughts.)
The results show that while men think about sex more often than women do, they’re not thinking of it nearly as much as we might have expected. The average man in the study tallied 19 sexual thoughts per day, which is less than a thought every seven seconds. But there was a wide range of responses—the lowest frequency was just one thought, and the highest was over 140.
The research also revealed that a person’s comfort with sexuality has some influence on how frequently they have sexy thoughts, but there isn’t a single factor that determines how often someone will think of sex. Having them infrequently is actually healthier than having them too frequently, since it means they’re in control of their impulses.