Now it can be told: When it comes to sex, men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. They are from the same planet – the “Lust” planet.
Hmm. The facial expressions of these two youngsters in bed seem to show that what they did was “quite cool.”
An exhaustive recent study made at the University of Texas has debunked the stereotypes that men only want sex for the physical pleasure while women want love.
The study compiled a list of 237 reasons why people have sex. Researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations. It’s more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.
College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex — they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and “it feels good,” according to the study. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.
Expressing love and showing affection were in the top 10 for both men and women, but they did take a back seat to the clear No. 1: “I was attracted to the person.”
Researchers at the University of Texas spent five years and their own money to study the overlooked “why” behind sex while others were spending their time on the how.
“It’s refuted a lot of gender stereotypes … that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love,” said University of Texas clinical psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study’s co-author. “That’s not what I came up with in my findings.”
Forget thinking that men are from Mars and women from Venus, “the more we look, the more we find similarity,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego. Goldstein, who wasn’t part of Meston’s study, said the Texas research made a lot of sense and adds to growing evidence that the vaunted differences in the genders may only be among people with sexual problems.
“We found that people are having sex for lots of other reasons” beyond sheer arousal or a drive for procreation, said Meston.
Alongside predictable claims such as “I was ‘horny’,” “I was drunk,” and “I was in love,” was a catalogue of other “infrequent” justifications, from the sublime to the shocking. Among them: “I wanted to get closer to God,” “I felt sorry for the person,” “I wanted to punish myself,” and “I was slumming.”
Both men and women reported doing it to get a job or promotion, or because they wanted to be “used or degraded.”
Another response stated: “I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease.”
Some claimed it was an aid to good sleep or a headache cure.
Others even said they had done it because they wanted to have children.
Hmm, wonder what the writers here at froodee would say when they’re asked the question. Me? I would simply say, “It feels good!”
On the Net:
University of Texas study “Why Humans Have Sex”: http://tinyurl.com/ypzwvr
Cindy Meston’s Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory: http://www.mestonlab.com/