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2007-08-01 08:02:49
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science WriterTue Jul 31, 10:59 PM ET
After exhaustively compiling a list of the 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 a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of
Archives of Sexual Behavior. 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.
Meston and colleague David Buss first questioned 444 men and women ranging in
age from 17 to 52 to come up with a list of 237 distinct reasons people have
sex. They ranged from "It's fun" which men ranked fourth and women ranked
eighth to "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease" which
ranked on the bottom by women.
Once they came up with that long list, Meston and Buss asked 1,549 college
students taking psychology classes to rank the reasons on a one-to-five scale
on how they applied to their experiences.
"None of the gender differences are all that great," Meston said. "Men were
more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and
available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women. Women were more
likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner."
But this is among college students, when Meston conceded "hormones run
rampant." She predicted huge differences when older groups of people are
studied.
Since her study came out Tuesday, people are coming up with new reasons to have
sex.
"Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found
that there should be some added," Meston said.