Busted! 6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond

Men Think About Sex More Than Women Do

The cliché that men think about sex every seven seconds is not true. And while it's true that men think about sex more often than women do, they also think about other bodily needs, such as food and sleep, more than women do. In a study published in 2011 in the Journal of Sex Research, psychologists asked research participants to record their thoughts throughout the day. They found that men pondered sex 18 times a day to a woman's 10 times a day, but men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more than women. That suggests sex doesn't hold as vaunted a position for men as you might expect.


Men Want More Sex Partners Than Women

Calculating an average does not always give you the clearest view of the data. (If, for example, researchers asked 10 men how many sex partners they wanted in the next year and nine said "one," while one said "20," the average would be 2.9, and you might expect that any given man wants about three sex partners in a year.) If you look instead at the "typical" response to the question of how many partners people want, you find that the majority of both men and women offer the same answer: one.

How about how many sexual partners men and women actually have? Studies generally find that men report more partners than women. But in 2003, researchers reported in the Journal of Sex Research that if you trick research participants into believing that they are hooked up to a lie-detector test, men report the same number of sexual partners as women.


Men Want 'Sexy' & Women Want 'Status'

An underpinning of evolutionary psychology is that men look for sexy women who are likely to provide them with attractive, healthy offspring, while women are more concerned than men about getting a high-status mate who can be a good provider. When psychologists ask research subjects (mostly college students) to imagine their ideal mate, that is indeed what they typically find. But when people in an actual speed-dating event rated the importance of attractiveness and status, these gender differences evaporated, according to a 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


Women Are Pickier Than Men

Evolutionary theory holds that men want to spread their seed, while women are choosy about whom they mate with. But this may not be universal, according to Conley and her colleagues. A 2009 study published in Psychological Science found that people are choosier when they're approached by a potential partner, and less choosy when they're doing the approaching. The experiment, conducted in a real-life speed-dating environment, showed that when men rotated through women who stayed seated in the same spot, the women were more selective about whom they chose to date. When the women did the rotating, it was the guys who were pickier. Because guys are traditionally the ones who make the first move, women may simply get more of a chance to be choosy. Perhaps, Conley and her colleagues wrote, women's pickiness is tied more to dating rules than to innate desires.

"Psychologists – including me – always have to be looking beyond their own biases. They need to avoid getting so attached to a particular theory or perspective that they go out of their way to protect the theory," Conley said. "Data should be the guide, and you have to look at data in every way you can think of to see if the story you are telling is really the best one."

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