Men don't think of sex every seven seconds and women think about it more than you'd expect! Illustration: Uttam Ghosh
For decades, there have been preconceived notions regarding men and women's attitude toward sex.
It has been taken for granted that men are more oriented towards sex while women are more commitment driven, or men look for attractive mates and women go after social status.
However, a new study, while defying all these notions has revealed that not all psychologists comply with these gender-essentialist statements.
Psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues from the University of Michigan have asserted that it's not true men think about sex every seven seconds.
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, Live Science reported.
For the study, 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.
Studies also suggest that men do experience more orgasms than women, but Conley and her colleagues add a large caveat: The differences are largest in one-night stands and hookup relationships. Things look rosier for women in long-term relationships.
In a study researchers asked more than 12,925 people about their sexual experiences. They found that women reached orgasm only about a third as much as men during first-time hookups, and only half as often as men during repeated hookups. But in committed relationships, women had orgasms 79 percent as often as 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 study 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.
