Nineties Korn anthems be damned, it turns out that men aren’t only thinking about sex all day. According to Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State, college-age men indeed do think about sex more often than women do. But they also happen to think about food and sleeping as well—so there.In a study set to be published in the January issue of the Journal of Sex Research, Fisher had OSU students carry around golf counters—little clickers designed to help keep track of strokes—and record every time they thought about sex, food, or sleeping. To keep it simple, each participant only kept track of one type of thought.The biggest disparity between males and females came in the sex category, with young men thinking about getting frisky an average of 19 times a day versus 10 times for young women. The men thought about food nearly equally as much, at 18 times a day, while they thought about sleeping an average of 11 times. Women thought of food and sleep an average of 15 times and 8.5 times each, respectively. While the food and sleep groups acted as a sort of control, they do suggest men either spend more time thinking about their needs or are better at identifying those thoughts.“Since we looked at those other types of need-related thoughts, we found that it appears that there’s not just a sex difference with regard to thoughts about sex, but also with regard to thoughts about sleep and food,” Fisher said. “That’s very significant. This suggests males might be having more of these thoughts than women are or they have an easier time identifying the thoughts. It’s difficult to know, but what is clear is it’s not uniquely sex that they’re spending more time thinking about, but other issues related to their biological needs, as well.”What’s interesting about the sexual aspect of the study is it found that, while there is definitely a difference between genders, a good predictor of how much someone thought about sex is how comfortable they are with sex in general.“If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you’d be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female,” Fisher said. “Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one’s biological sex.”But there’s a twist: the study didn’t find one single indicator that was directly correlated with more sexual thoughts. Neither a high erotophilia score (someone most comfortable with their sexuality), unrestricted sexual attitudes, nor a lack of worry about what’s socially acceptable specifically indicated a person would think more about sex. What’s particularly interesting is that participants’ perception of what’s socially acceptable seemed to affect their responses.“People who always give socially desirable responses to questions are perhaps holding back and trying to manage the impression they make on others,” Fisher said. “In this case, we’re seeing that women who are more concerned with the impression they’re making tend to report fewer sexual thoughts, and that’s because thinking about sexuality is not consistent with typical expectations for women.”As far as the spreads are concerned, men recorded between one and 388 daily thoughts about sex, while women notched a range of one to 140. That means not a single of the 163 participants tasked with recording their sexual thoughts went a day without thinking about sex. While it’s unclear if that trend persists throughout the entire young adult population, it’s yet another reason to stay in school.
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