What Men Want: Sex, Food and Sleep

COLUMBUS, OhioIts no surprise that when it comes to sex, men think about it more than women, but a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research also found men think about food and sleep more frequently than women.

Researchers at Ohio State University conducted a study to investigate stereotypes around sex, food and sleep. 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. Participants carried a golf tally counter to track their thoughts about either eating, sleep or sex every day for a week. Each was assigned to just one type of thought to record. Before receiving the tally counter, they had completed a number of questionnaires and were asked to estimate how often they had daily thoughts about eating, sleeping and sex.

The found the median number of young mens 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 womens median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8.5 times, respectively.

Since we looked at those other types of need-related thoughts, we found that it appears that theres not just a sex difference with regard to thoughts about sex, but also with regard to thoughts about sleep and food," she said. Thats very significant. This suggests males might be having more of these thoughts than women are or they have an easier time identifying the thoughts. Its difficult to know, but what is clear is its not uniquely sex that theyre spending more time thinking about, but other issues related to their biological needs, as well."