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You think all he's got in his head is sex? He's not!
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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It was previously assumed that men think about sex more often than women, but a new study has shown that men are no less preoccupied with thoughts about other biological needs than the fair half of humanity.
The study discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which amounts to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex during the 16 hours they are awake.
"It's amazing how much people believe these bogus statistics, particularly that men think about sex almost constantly and much more often than women," said study author Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. "If a person thought about sex 8,000 times a day, you would think they had a sexual desire disorder."
The study by American scientists involved 163 female and 120 male college students aged 18 to 25. Of these, 59 were randomly assigned to track thoughts about food, 61 about sleep and 163 about sex. Most of the students were European and identified as heterosexual.
Before the thought recording phase began, participants answered a series of questions. These included a sexual questionnaire to measure positive or negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (erotophilia/erotophobia); a sociosexual measure of attitudes toward sex and tracking of sexual behavior and desire levels; and a questionnaire about food preferences and sleepiness. They were also asked to estimate how many times on an average day they would expect to think about sleep, food, and sex.
The scientists then gave each student a device to count thoughts about sex. They were asked to count thoughts about sex in any aspect, including sexual activity of any kind, fantasies and erotic images, sexual memories, and any stimuli for arousal.
The other two groups of students were instructed to use the device to record thoughts about food, which included food, hunger, snacking, or cooking; and thoughts about sleep, which included dreams of sleeping, napping, and relaxing.
"We found that not only were there sex differences in how people thought about sex, but also how they thought about sleep and food," Fisher said. "That means men may have more of these thoughts than women, or they may have more free time to identify these thoughts."
Male participants reported having between 1 and 388 daily thoughts about sex, compared to 1 and 140 times a day for women.
The average number of times young men thought about sex was nearly 19 times a day. Women in the study reported an average of 10 sexual thoughts a day.
Men also thought about food almost 18 times a day and about sleep 11 times, compared to women's thoughts: 15 and 8 times, respectively.
When all thoughts were taken into account in the statistical analysis, the difference between men and women in their average number of daily thoughts about sex was no greater than the gender differences between thoughts about sleep or food.